Steve's picture

Finished my "last search" plugins

A while ago, I had an idea about search. What if a search engine recorded the last hit that you went to off the search results page and used those urls as the most popular results from that page? The theory is that once you find what you're searching for, you stop searching for it, aka - you don't go back to the search engine anymore. So, the last link that you click on from the search page should be the one you wanted. If enough people click on the same link, that link should be the most popular and should be at the top of the page.

I wrote two greasemonkey plugins. One that allows a user to submit results to the study and one that queries the study database for results. They can be found here:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/31639
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/64039

You'll need to be running firefox and install the greasemonkey plugin https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748 first in order to install the above scripts. Once everything's installed, you're part of the project!



Steve's picture

Amazon needs a mysql replication/snapshot service

Amazon has EC2, S3, their key/value database, their mysql service and about a jillion other great services and tools, but what I think would be awesome and not hard for them to do is to just have a replication/snapshotting service for mysql - a backup.

In mysql, it's very easy to just point a slave at a master mysql server. Just give it an IP, name, password and a pointer into the transaction log. How nice would it be to just point your mysql server at an Amazon IP and know that it's now being replicated, backed up and snapshotted at regular intervals? Instant Mysql backups! A one-liner on your side configuration-wise and your whole database is being backed up? How awesome is that!?!?!? It would be pretty simple for Amazon to put together, just another EC2 instance and they could charge the normal rates and get some more business. Making this easy would inspire many people to use it and could bring in some instant revenue to 'the Zon' in my opinion.

Steve's picture

Why git is faster than jgit

The author of jgit shows why C is so much faster than Java when comparing his version of jgit to the original C version.
http://marc.info/?l=git&m=124111702609723&w=2

Steve's picture

2009 Christmas Stream is up

The annual Christmas stream is working again! Let the holiday season begin!

The url: http://badcheese.com:8000/stream

This year I'm using an icecast streamer from my new web host in Florida.

Compatible clients:

itunes (ctrl-U, then type in the url)
fstream (free for the iphone)
foobar2000 http://www.foobar2000.org
winamp http://www.winamp.com
XMMS http://www.xmms.org
Zinf http://zinf.sourceforge.net
MPlayer http://www.mplayerhq.hu
Xine http://www.xinehq.de
VLC http://www.videolan.org

- Steve

Steve's picture

System Administrators: who we are, what we do, how to manage us & why we look at you that way when you come to us for something

This is my response to this blog entry: http://gibsonandlily.com/blogs/48

This is an open letter from us, that is, the system administrators, to you, management, users, and everybody that has to deal with us and our sometimes very bizarre behavior.

I'm 41 years old and I've been a linux/unix system administrator for about 11 years. Before that I was a unix programmer for about 5 years. One day when I was only a few years out of my C.S. degree, I shared an office with our solaris sysadmin. We became good friends and got along great, except for when I asked him to install something on a system for me, he'd give me this look that said to me, "Dude, we're great friends, why do you want to spoil that and have me do some work for you?". I never really understood that look. I figured that it was his job to support me and to do what I ask him to do. If I need something done to do my job, he should do it without any attitude and just let me know when it's done. We continued to be great friends throughout the company's existence and still contact him from time to time, but I could never get over or understand that look ... until now.

Many people treat me and my fellow system administrators as an angry god when they want us to do some work for them. They offer a peace offering and apologize 5-10 times for interrupting us and then explain the problem hoping that we won't get angry. Or perhaps they see the same look that I used to get from my friend when I asked him to do work.

Being a system administrator for 11 years taught me a few things. I now understand the sysadmin attitude. It's not that we're assholes. It's not that we are lazy and don't like to work. It's not that we hate or think less of a certain type of employee. It's very simple.

The cardinal rule: Don't make us do any unnecessary work

That's it. Keep that in mind and you'll never feel weird when approaching your local sysadmin and asking him/her to do something for you.

Steve's picture

How to enter the grub 2.0 boot menu - hold down the shift key

The secret is holding down the shift key during the boot.

The new grub 2.0 is coming as default in all of the major linux distros now. The focus is on fast boot times. Grub 2.0 offers a very pretty boot screen and very speedy boot time, but the problem is that the old way of getting into the boot menu doesn't work anymore. The key is to hold down the shift key to get the boot menu and you're in. :)

Searches: How do I get into the grub 2.0 boot menu? Ubuntu 9.10 grub menu? Ubuntu 9.10 different kernel?

- Steve

Steve's picture

linux w/ reiserfs 3.x vs a SUN SAN 7410 running solaris and ZFS

We used to serve up the images for http://pronto.com from a couple of linux machines running reiserfs 3.6 with 6x 750GB SATA harddrives in them. We began to run out of room and decided to go to a SAN. We got a good deal on a SUN 7410 SAN through our corporate deals (22TB, 14TB usable) and it had all kinds of great stuff in it so we said what the heck.

Now, the problem. Our storage platform holds 366M 5-8 kilobyte files. This is a LOT of little files. At the top directory, we have a 256 directories (00-FF) and under each of those, we have another 256 directories, so we have 65,536 directories total. This means that we have about 5000-6000 images in each directory.

This is where we start to notice differences. Reiserfs does an "ls" in a directory with 6000 files in it in about 3-5 seconds. The SUN SAN does it in about 1-2 minutes. Serious problems here.

Our only option is to add a third level of hashed directories. This will give us about 16.7M directories and will solve our performance problem, but to all of you people out there that think that ZFS is hot shit, I say to you, "It depends on your situation".

Steve's picture

There's no way that balloon could've lifted a 50 lb boy

Regarding the story yesterday (Oct 15th) about a 50 lb boy being lifted by a home-made helium balloon: Ok, here's my math: The volume of an oblate spheroid that's approx 20'x3' = 17.79 cubic meters ( http://bit.ly/2cv4Ac ). According to How Stuff Works, one liter of helium can lift one gram. Which converts to 22,650 liters of helium to lift a 50 lb boy. Wolfram alpha says that 22,650 liters = 22.65 m^3 (cubic meters), meaning that the balloon could've only lifted about 39.27 lbs *IF* it was: Fully inflated (which it didn't seem to be), at sea-level (which it wasn't) and we disregard everything about air density and the temperature of the air (which was warm yesterday in Ft. Collins around the time of launch). Just for fun, I did the calculation in regular balloons, and not including the weight of the balloons or the string, it would take approx 1600 balloons to lift the 50 lb boy at sea-level. and about 1800 balloons in Colorado. :)

Now, can you calculate the amount of money that would've been saved if this calculation has been performed before the huge rescue effort started? I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader. :)

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