Friday, October 30, 2009

Links, 2009-10-30


Thursday, October 29, 2009

Blackadder in iTunes

I reinstalled Firefox today and hadn’t gotten to installing the AdBlock extension yet, when I stumbled across an ad for Black Adder on the BBC website. For those that don’t know what I’m talking about, Blackadder was a 4-season show on the BBC One network, which was re-broadcast by PBS usually on Saturday nights around 11pm here in the US. The series stars Rowan Atkinson and Tony Robinson as Edmund and Baldrick Blackadder, respectively. (You may alternatively know Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean from the British series that also spawned several movies.) Anyway, each season of Blackadder is set in a different historical period , with Blackadder and Baldrick as the main characters. With Atkinson, anything can and is made funny

Thanks, PBS, for airing this in the States and introducing me to outside comedy including Blackadder, Red Dwarf, Fawlty Towers, and The Red Green Show!

Links, 2009-10-28


  • Obama Signs $680 Billion Military Bill, a Victory Over Lobbyists – Now if only we weren’t spending $130 billion dollars on two wars and $550 billion for defense…
  • Screaming Monkey with Woot Cape – because everyone wants it!
  • Verizon, Motorola unveil the Droid – I think if I were to buy a phone that actually cost me money, this would definitely be one of the top choices. It has an actual built-in keyboard, camera phone (standard now, I guess), but also has a GPS, 550MHz processor and a nice 1400mAh battery for plenty of talk time. At least for me the physical keyboard would be a reason to buy it right there, but on top of that they add the Android operating system which is much more open than the one Apple provides on the iPhone (since this is the “iPhone killer”, you know?).

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Science Fiction for All

I saw an article from the Technology Review published by MIT about the collection of science fiction material in the MIT Student Center earlier today. What must stem from years of collecting, there are roughly 60,000 books and thousands of magazines on the 4th floor of the building. The article is linked here, and if you’re interested in the ways people have saved documents over the years, it’s worth a look. Also if you like science fiction in general.

Monday, October 26, 2009

XKCD Geocities Tribute

In tribute of the end of Geocities, the XKCD website has been re-written to look like a typical Geocities page. While this will not last forever, I have made an archival backup of the page here. Major props to Randall for doing this! :)

P.S. Check out the page’s source code for some laughs

Sunday, October 25, 2009

RIP Geocities

As we enter the final hours of October 26th, 2009, we celebrate and mourn the life and soon-to-be death of Geocities, one of the web’s top three most-visited websites at it’s heyday. It went public in 1998, and its IPO price started at $17. It rose quickly to over $100 by 1999 in the dot com era, showing its dominance. Bought in January of 1999 by Yahoo for $3.57 billion, it was wildly popular. Now fifteen years after it’s inception and launch, it is finally closing, signaling the end of an era on the Internet where you could create something wildly popular, and not worry about making money from it. Yet still, the content on Geocities is far from being obsolete; the website has received over 11.5 million hits/month even within the past few. I remember Geocities as my first website, providing a space for free hosting, even if I had no skills or knowledge of what a proper website should look like. :)

The closing of Geocities has been a call to action for some groups on the Internet. The content hosted on it is estimated between 8 and 12 1-2 terabytes of data (an accurate number is not known), and with Yahoo not backing up data after Geocities’ closing, it is a race to index and cache everything, The Internet Archive, Internet Archaeology, and the Archive Team are three of the groups that are looking to cache as much from Geocities as they can before the closing tonight.

Before the end, a look at the internals of the Geocities empire is warranted, especially due to storage and equipment used. A tour of one of (or the only) Geocities datacenter in 1999 turns up racks and racks of equipment, which has been dwarfed by current technology. The article linked here is a fun read back in time to how the “cloud” before the term became known was created, and the ways of hosting content on the Internet. I have to congratulate the network administrators at this Exodus Communications facility, though. The cabling shown lower on the page is masterfully done, and is what every datacenter should look like.

Geocities: Your contributions to the Internet are greatly appreciated, and we will miss you dearly. Rest well.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Solaris 10: Removing Solaris Data Management WBEM/CIM API

A while back I saw a discussion about the usefulness of WBEM/CIM – Web Based Enterprise Management  - on Solaris 10 servers, and I finally got around this summer to start doing some testing with these packages removed. It would seem that these packages are not needed at TJ due to the lack of use of even SNMP, which is really only used for UPS monitoring, and that these packages take up space in our ‘distribution’, which is approximately 14GB for our ‘frontend’ machines – those that users directly interact with. The packages that I was interested in started with SUNWdmgtr and SUNWdmgtu, and all associated with these. Assuming my calculations are correct, removing these packages (starting with mostly a full Solaris install, so removing the software packages of all languages), gets rid of about 70 from our system. With 2090 packages in our frontend distribution, this makes a small – but noticeable – dent. I hope to do some more testing with all these removed to make sure that nothing of ours breaks, but it seems that this just makes Solaris a bit more lean, and probably a bit faster.