Archive for the ‘Funny Stuff’ Category

All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one.

30 May

Posted in Business, CLI, Excuses, Funny Stuff, Linux, Personal, Random Thoughts, Software Development, Uncategorized, Web Stuff | 3 Comments »

Occam’s razor strikes again!

Tonight we ran into an interesting problem. A web service – with a very simple time-elapsed check – started reporting negatives… Racking our brain, pouring over the code, produced nothing. It was as if the clock were jumping around randomly! No! On a whim Barry checked it and the clock was, indeed, jumping around…

# while [ 1 ]; do date; sleep 1; done
Wed May 30 04:37:52 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:37:53 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:37:54 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:37:55 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:37:56 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:37:57 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:37:58 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:37:59 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:00 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:01 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:02 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:19 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:21 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:22 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:23 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:24 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:08 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:09 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:10 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:28 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:12 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:30 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:31 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:32 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:33 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:34 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:35 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:19 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:20 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:21 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:22 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:40 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:41 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:42 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:43 UTC 2007
Wed May 30 04:38:44 UTC 2007

This cold of mine just WILL NOT quit…

09 Feb

Posted in Funny Stuff, In The News, Random Thoughts, Security, Windows | No Comments »

It’s still hanging in there like a monkey on my back. Speaking of colds… Vista is off to a cold start, security wise, isn’t it? Already a privilege escalation vulnerability letting local restricted users become local admins. “UNBREAKABLE ~~ORACLE~~ VISTA!”

It was only a matter of time

23 Jan

Posted in Business, Funny Stuff, Random Thoughts | 2 Comments »

Until somebody figured “hey, lets make a hooters for coffee!“. I mean, really, just a matter of time…

I couldn’t have put it better myself

11 Jan

Posted in Excuses, Funny Stuff, Personal, Random Thoughts | No Comments »

Yesterdays penny arcade hit it on the nose. Osx IS more convenient. It IS worth changing your opinions and telling everybody that all that Mac trash talking was about OS9, but OSX radically altered the very fabric of the universe and that you now have to take it all back: the Mac is now a truly reformed beast using its nefarious powers only for the purpose of good and justice (and the occasional profit margin)! Think Ghost Rider meets BSD .

All geeky references aside. I was once a mac hater. Now I’m a mac lover. And you know what. I’m okay with that!

I Dont Know Whether To Be Amused, Enthrawled, Or Very Very Frightened

09 Jan

Posted in Funny Stuff, Linux, Random Thoughts | 2 Comments »

http://openskills.info/release/i-xen/

so I’ll let you judge for yourselves

I really loathe windows sometimes

07 Nov

Posted in Business, Excuses, Funny Stuff, Random Thoughts, Windows | No Comments »

So, click on the wrong thing on accident and *POOF* your windows XP machine goes totally wonky. Major haywire. SNAFU to say the least. even with spybot’s teatimer and antivirus SW installed and updated. hundreds of registry access requests, and hundreds of stupid little exe processes launch. even with denying everything as quick as possible via teatimer something got through… and right now teatimer is fighting an automated war with some process which is trying to change my OS shell (presumably to install more spyware)… thousands of automatic deny notifications… I cant get to the process doing this in any normal way because “The system administrator has disabled access to the task manager”

The hell I have. So I do the obligatory update of adaware and spybot, reboot into safe mode (that’ll fix the little buggers, right?) well after manually setting permissions on locked portions of the registry both apps pronounce my system clean

wrong

reboot and the entire process starts all over again. I finally get the thing “clean” (quotes because it was STABLE not clean… like saying someone who’s got hepatitis is clean because there arent any symptoms today) So this morning I need to test a UI in IE. And WHAM

World War 3

I think to myself “here we go again” and I stop. I’m not going to clean this thnig… the sad truth of the matter is that windows xp is such a vulnerable piece of garbage that it will literally be both easier, and take less time (!) to copy all my 100GB of stuff needing to be saved off onto a samba share, and wipe and reload… And thats counting reinstalling all my apps and drivers, etc! Truly a sad thing to have to say about your OS (easier to just trash the thing than fix it?! GO MICROSOFT!)

WOW! I’m 17 again at a LAN gaming party preforming the nights obligatory “system nuke” (there was always one wasnt there?!)

so, who wants to argue TCO today?

BWUahahahahaha

19 Oct

Posted in Business, Funny Stuff, In The News, Security, Software Development, Web Stuff | No Comments »

Downloading a new browser: $0

Loosing your old standby browser: $0

Hoping you can use your machine after the next reboot: $0

Getting to be the QA engineer for one of the richest companies ever: PRICELESS

Random Musing: Bluring the Line Between Storage and Database?

10 Oct

Posted in Amazon AWS, Business, Funny Stuff, Linux, MySQL, Personal, Random Thoughts, Software Development, Web Stuff | 4 Comments »

As food for thought…

If you had a table `items`

itemId char(40),
itemName varchar(128),

Another table `tags`

tagId char(40),
tagName char(40),

And a third table `owners`

ownerId char(40),
ownerUsername char(40),
ownerPassword varchar(128),

It would theoretically be possible to have an S3 bucket ItemsToTags inside which you put empty objects named (ownerId)-(itemId)-(tagId). And a TagsToItems S3 bucket inside which you put empty objects named (ownerIf)-(tagId)-(itemId), it would then be possible to use the Listing Keys Hierarchically using Prefix and Delimiter method of accessing your S3 buckets to quickly determine what items belong to a tag for an owner, and what tags belong to an tag for an owner. You would be taking advantage of the fact that that There is no limit to the number of objects that one bucket can hold, and no impact on performance when using many buckets versus just a few buckets. You could reasonably store all of your objects in a single bucket, or organize them across several different buckets. (both the above links are to quotes taken directly from the S3 API docs provided by amazon themselves)

Using this method it would be possible, I think, to use the S3 datastore in a VERY cheap manner and avoid having to deal with the massive cost of maintaining these kinds of indexes in a RDBMS or on your own filesystems… Interesting. And since the data could be *anything* and you have, by default you have a many to many relationship here you could theoretically store *anything* and sort by tags…

Granted to find a tag related to multiple items you would have to make multiple requests, and weed out the diffs. but. if you’re only talking on the order of 2 or 3 tages per piece of data… it might just be feasible..

Now… Throw in an EC2 front end, and a SQS interface… interesting…

Makes me wonder what the cost and speed would be (if it would be an acceptable tradeoff for not having to maintain a massive database cluster)

Disclaimer: this is a random musing. I’m not advising that anybody actually do this…