Links: 4th Apr
My, when would they finally invent a direct connection interface from a brain to computer? Can’t wait, really.
Technology
- Outlook is freaking evil: if you open a plain text email, it would happily ignore some of the new-line breaks. Crumbs! Appears that is a ‘feature’! If you need to make sure your email with command’s output will have new-lines preserved, the rule of thumb is either to have 2 spaces in front or 3 spaces at the end of each line. Stackoverflow rulez.
- You might know I’m passionate about Solaris. Have just got more reasons for my passion. Reason one: sed can’t replace a character with
\n. Seriously, you need to actually type in Enter to get it working. As if that was not enough, Solaris’s mail tool doesn’t have an option to specify subject line (yes, I know about mailx, but that complicates writing cross platform code). - Google cancelled underlining of links, what’s the world coming to?!
- And a response to “Let Nagios die peacefully” — “I’ll be letting Nagios live on“, which I back.
- systemd development culture seems to have a detrimental effect on the mental health of people being involved. Have heard many times a range of complaints about Linus’s harsh management manners, but I’m inclined to think that Linux became possible in its current form in many ways thanks to such streaks in Linus’s character.
- LXC v1.0.2 is released and a nice series of blog posts on LXC.
- For horror fans — two zero-days vulnerabilities turn Avaya’s IP phones into radio transmitters.
- Something to drool over, if you haven’t seen it yet:
And to finish up on a cheerful note: How it feels to be an Engineer in the Corporate World:
I’m happy I don’t feel like that, but it does ring some bells, doesn’t it? See ya.
VIM cheatsheet
Putting my favourite vim cheat sheet here, so that I don’t have to plough through google results next time I need to recall how to use named registers.
Basic .vimrc
syntax on
set nocp hid ru showcmd vb wmnu noeb et is si nu
set ts=4 sts=4 sw=4
set bs=2 ls=2
set modeline modelines=5
set list listchars=tab:»·,trail:·
set viminfo=%,'50,<1000,:100
Quick reference
| command | notes |
|---|---|
set tw=80 |
enable word wrap |
set fo+=n |
format numbered lists with indent |
Maidan: 23rd of February
No links today. The only thoughts are with those on the Maindan who gave their lives to the future of Ukraine.
I am happy that we have managed to overthrow the criminal regime that had been built over recent years. With the evidence transpiring from the documents found at Mezhyhirya and firms affiliated with the clan, the scale of corruption and law abuse is plainly incomprehensible.
As with everything in our life, the lessons we should draw from the situation we’ve been through, are of the equal importance as the feat that has just been accomplished. The change is not over yet. If people stop now, it would bring the same profound disappointment and disenchantment as Yushchenko brought us after his election. There is no other way except sweeping lustration. Police, prosecutors, judges, and corrupt MPs are the first on the list.
Life is rough and often concealed by decoration. As the events unfolded over the past 3 months, I clearly remember thinking many times: “It can’t be worse, he will not dare to exacerbate situation further, it’s against his own good”. And every time I thought it, situation turned even worse, and every time he dared to take that step to aggravate events further.
This is a great lesson about moral values some people have, their desire to desperately cling to power, how dwarfish their thoughts are, and how midget their desires are. Clearly, there’s no quick solution to the problems we face, just look at the following map, the map of where the people died were from:
Does this need an explanation? We are divided, and refusing this is a delusion. Delusion is always a mistake, it’s a wilful ignorance. I bet most of people’s thoughts about Yanukovich were delusions. Like that he would stop, he would hold an election in 2015, etc. Believing in a black-and-white world is also a delusion, world has infinite shades of grey, and virtually no white and no black objects.
We have to aspire to better understanding and boarding horizons of our world-views. This is a foundation for solid civil society. We need to strive for (and learn, and teach) critical thinking. We need to learn to live with people who don’t share our beliefs without hatred. People will be manipulated again and again, and the only way to fight this is proper education.
The history tells us: “Revolutions are made by romantics, but their fruits are reaped by scoundrels”. Will this time be different? I really hope it will.
Glory to Ukraine.
Links: 29th Sept
Acronyms are new words formed from the initial letters (or parts) of a series of words, such as RAM from random access memory, and radar from radio detecting and ranging. Initialisms are a similar sort of abbreviation but are pronounced by saying each letter separately, for example BBC, VHS, and the FYI of this post’s title. The distinction, BTW, is not always strictly observed – initialisms are often loosely called acronyms. This imprecision is rarely problematic, but it’s good to know the difference. HTH.
Technology
- Real Terminal, All Chrome — No Nonsense
- Common MySQL queries
- Free Graph Databases e-book
- Surge conference 2012 videos
- Collectd3 is a modern visualization of collectd system performance statistics. See the live demo.
- Load testing: an unexpected journey — getting ready for Paper launch
English
Other
Better later than never, spent the night reading this book, because could not have torn myself away from it. Absolute must-read for SAs, gives a perspective of IT role in modern firms, shows challenges management faces, and also vividly depicts how fast one can get IT working given right approaches. Excellent.
Very interesting Paula Scher’s TED talk where she looks back at a life in design (she’s done album covers, books, the Citibank logo …) and pinpoints the moment when she started really having fun.
Crikey, I know this feeling:
Links: 20th Sep
This week: technology links and some other interesting articles.
Technology
- Regex101 — create, test and have your regular expressions explained.
- I think I already mentioned this article on regular expressions speed, but missed to mention even more interesting papers on regexes.
- My favourite world-clock tool: http://www.worldtimebuddy.com
- Released! Red Hat Software Collections now GA! Ruby 1.9.3, Python 2.7, Python 3.3, PHP 5.4, Perl 5.16.3, Technology Preview of node.js 0.10, MariaDB 5.5, MySQL 5.5, PostgreSQL 9.2.
- Bash bits: color output, debug messages, and other neat snippets
- iOS7 supports multipath TCP
- Don’t program for a phone like for a server
- From conversation on log processing:
- if you have money, use Splunk
- if you have little money, use Splunk Storm
- if you’re short on money, use Logstash + ElasticSearch + Kibana
- Just a peek at web interfaces to think — StackExchange’s DevOps tools
- Restore single database from full mysql backup:
mysql -u root -p --one-database destdbname < alldatabases.sqlor just cut the relevant part with
sed
Other
-
New Yorker’s The Ancient Roots of Punctuation
-
Amusing and witty airplane analogy for OOM mechanism in Linux kernel:
How about a sysctl that does “for the love of kbaek, don’t ever kill these processes when OOM. If nothing else can be killed, I’d rather you panic”?
An aircraft company discovered that it was cheaper to fly its planes with less fuel on board. The planes would be lighter and use less fuel and money was saved. On rare occasions however the amount of fuel was insufficient, and the plane would crash. This problem was solved by the engineers of the company by the development of a special OOF (out-of-fuel) mechanism. In emergency cases a passenger was selected and thrown out of the plane. (When necessary, the procedure was repeated.) A large body of theory was developed and many publications were devoted to the problem of properly selecting the victim to be ejected. Should the victim be chosen at random? Or should one choose the heaviest person? Or the oldest? Should passengers pay in order not to be ejected, so that the victim would be the poorest on board? And if for example the heaviest person was chosen, should there be a special exception in case that was the pilot? Should first class passengers be exempted? Now that the OOF mechanism existed, it would be activated every now and then, and eject passengers even when there was no fuel shortage. The engineers are still studying precisely how this malfunction is caused.
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The religious rights anti vaccine hysteria is reviving dead diseases:
Remember measles? That old-timey disease we officially eliminated in the United States 13 years ago? Thanks to the wonder of inoculation, measles should be entirely nonexistent in this country, but yesterday the Center for Disease Control reported 159 cases from January through August of this year.
What’s unique about this year’s outbreak is that the CDC has finally admitted the spread of this “eliminated” disease is based on religious communities’ philosophical aversion to vaccines and reliance on divine healing through the Word of God. According to the report, 91 percent of the reported cases were in people who were unvaccinated, or didn’t know their vaccination status, and “of those who were unvaccinated, 79 percent had philosophical objections to vaccination.”
London Heathrow’s glissade timelapse: