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• Doug 10:17 pm on August 31, 2006 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Books, computing, Work

  “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth - Jim Baen’s Universe”:http://www.baens-universe.com/articles/sysadmins?PHPSESSID=d21e96938322fbb41589a24f44fed88c

  bq. “I had two hundred days of uptime on Greedo,” Van said. Greedo was the oldest server in the rack, from the days when they’d named the boxes after Star Wars characters. Now they were all named after Smurfs, and they were running out of Smurfs and had started in on McDonaldland characters, starting with Van’s laptop, Mayor McCheese.

  bq. “Greedo will rise again,” Felix said. “I’ve got a 486 downstairs with over five years of uptime. It’s going to break my heart to reboot it.”

  bq. “What the everlasting shit do you use a 486 for?”

  bq. “Nothing. But who shuts down a machine with five years uptime? That’s like euthanizing your grandmother.”

  “Alwin”:http://alwinism.org though highly enough of Cory’s latest to email me with a recommendation and I concur. If you are a sysadmin, want to know a little about what makes sysadmins tick, or just like good SF, spend the time to read this one. This is a damn good story.

  Technorati Tags:
  alwin+hawkins, SF, science+fiction, cory+doctorow

   

• Doug 8:32 pm on August 28, 2006 | 0 | # |
  Tags: art and architecture, religion and spirituality, Whackos

  “Christian zealots destroy ancient Arctic petroglyphs”:http://www.canada.com/reginaleaderpost/news/story.html?id=8abe338f-f3f6-4a2e-a701-082e61411817

  bq. Canada’s only major Arctic petroglyph site — a 1,500-year-old gallery of mysterious faces carved into a soapstone ridge on a tiny island off of Quebec’s northern coast — has been ransacked by vandals in what the region’s top archeologist suspects was a religiously motivated attack by devout Christians from a nearby Inuit community.

  This is just sick. Seriously, is there anything the “believers” won’t ruin in their quest to avoid accepting responsibility for their own actions? A sane society would quarantine and treat people with this degree of transmissable mental illness if it were termed anything but “religion.”

  Via “Hal.”:http://halrager.org/WordPress/?p=3456

   

• Doug 7:30 pm on August 27, 2006 | 0 | # |
  Tags: del.icio.us

  Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user demiller on 2006-08-27

  • A Gentle Introduction to SQL –
    Interactive SQL tutorial, learn about: SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, DB2, Mimer, PostgreSQL, SQLite and Access Tagged as: database mysql programming reference software sql tips tutorial work
  • Geek to Live: Mastering Wget - Lifehacker –
    HOWTO article on using the wget utility. Tagged as: article CLI howto linux software reference tips tools tutorial Unix wget
  • EnterpriseDB –
    Open source based relational database, PostgreSQL based database management software. Oracle compatible. Tagged as: cluster freeware linux opensource software enterprise oracle sql postgresql database
   

• Doug 4:06 pm on August 27, 2006 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Environment, Family, Personal, Space

  For those of you reading this who are minded to do something potentially world changing today, you may be interested in the following:

  First, for Space enthusiasts and those concerned about Earth Approaching Asteroids, take a look at the “Apophis Mission Design Competition:”:http://www.planetary.org/programs/projects/apophis_competition/

  bq. A mountain of rock and iron is hurtling towards us from space. Apophis — a 300-meter diameter asteroid — is still millions of kilometers distant. But in 2029, it will make a spectacularly close passage by our planet. When it does, its orbit around the Sun will be affected.

  bq. A shift of just a few hundred kilometers, and Apophis could return in 2036 to slam into Earth, creating widespread devastation.

  bq. A mission to tag an asteroid has never been studied. The Planetary Society’s Apophis Mission Design Competition will inspire people to come up with practical, do-able plans — not only for the ideas people have already bandied about, but for those yet to be thought of.

  bq. We’re going to back this contest with a $50,000 cash reward, along with the alluring possibility that NASA or another space agency will actually transform the design into a real mission.

  Consider joining the “Planetary Society,”:http://www.planetary.org and/or donating to this project to fund the competition prize.

  Alternately, if you are concerned about Global Climate Change, take a look at “NativeEnergy.”:http://www.nativeenergy.com/ “Calculate your carbon impact”:http://www.climatecrisis.net/takeaction/carboncalculator/ and, for not a great deal of money at all, offset that impact through one of NativeEnergy’s numerous offset program options. What NativeEnergy is doing is of special significance to Terri and I, since one of their initial projects is helping “fund a wind farm”:http://www.nativeenergy.com/Rosebud_Turbine.htm on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, near where we met and worked 20 years ago.

  If you don’t chose to do either of these that’s cool, but do _something_. The only way the world becomes a better place is through action.

  Technorati Tags:
  nasa, nativeenergy, climate+change, apophis, asteroid, planetary+society

   

• Doug 12:38 pm on August 27, 2006 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Books, Movies

  Well, the “2006 Hugo winners”:http://locusmag.com/2006/News/08_HugoCampbellWinners.html are out, and while some great stories and authors won, the slate I would have voted for (had I gone to L.A. Con IV) generally didn’t. “Charlie Stross,”:http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/index.html “Ken MacLeod”:http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/ and “Ian McDonald”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/ianmcdonald/ were all “nominees”:http://www.laconiv.org/2006/hugos/nominees.htm this year and my favorites — though I would have had to select between Stross and MacLeod for Best Novel. MacDonald’s novella “The Little Goddess” is set in the same future India as his novel ” _River of Gods_; “:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591024366/sr=8-1/qid=1156695921/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-7414418-3044847?ie=UTF8 the novella didn’t win, but the novel certainly ought to be a nominee next year.

  John Scalzi did win the “John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer”:http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004415.html which I was glad to see. I like Scalzi, not the least because he lives where I grew up. He’s also a good writer, and while I thought ” _Old Man’s War_ “:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0765315246/sr=8-1/qid=1156696149/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-7414418-3044847?ie=UTF8 was a bit out of its depth as a nominee for Best Novel, it was a good read and a great entry for John.

  ” _Serenity_ “:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000BW7QWW/sr=8-1/qid=1156696280/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-7414418-3044847?ie=UTF8 won for “Dramatic Presentation: Long Form” which was cool.

  The good news is that I haven’t yet read ” _Spin_, “:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0765309386/sr=8-2/qid=1156696425/ref=pd_bbs_2/002-7414418-3044847?ie=UTF8 Robert Charles Wilson’s novel that did win, so I have that to look forward to. I’m kicking myself for not taking the plunge and going to L.A. Con this year since the 2007 WorldCon will be in Japan, and there’s really no chance I’ll make it there. If the 2008 WorldCon is anywhere reasonably close I’m going to be sure to make it there.

  Technorati Tags:
  SF, science+fiction, charlie+stross, ken+macleod, ian+mcdonald, robert+charles+wilson

   

• Doug 10:15 am on August 27, 2006 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Linux/Unix, Open Source, Work

  “New Open-Source Database Touts Oracle Compatibility - News by InformationWeek”:http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=192300280&subSection=All+Stories

  bq. An open-source competitor is zeroing in on Oracle’s customer base–and it’s not the popular and well-known MySQL open-source database. It’s a relative newcomer called EnterpriseDB Advanced Server.

  bq. Unlike other open-source offerings, EnterpriseDB Advanced Server is designed to be Oracle-compatible and run Oracle database applications unchanged, says EnterpriseDB CEO Andy Astor. At LinuxWorld recently, the company introduced a migration tool called EnterpriseDB Replication Server to move data out of Oracle and into EnterpriseDB Advanced Server. It’s the capability represented by Replication Server as much as anything that has attracted an early $28 million in venture capital to the young firm.

  bq. “We don’t tell Oracle users to convert from Oracle databases to us. We urge them to get some leverage with Oracle by converting just 5% of their databases to us,” says Astor.

  I love this approach of using an Open Source tool to create leverage with a software vendor. We’re looking into doing something very similar using other Open Source products at work. While I’d love to convert just about everything to Open Source, that just isn’t possible, yet. In the mean time, it makes sense to leverage.

  Technorati Tags:
  oracle, database, SQL

   

• Doug 7:30 pm on August 26, 2006 | 0 | # |
  Tags: del.icio.us

  Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user demiller on 2006-08-26

  • Oak Ridge lab supercomputer doubles performance –
    The Cray XT3 supercomputer at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory can now perform up to 54 trillion calculations per secondTagged as: supercomputing AI openscience hardware
  • LDAP Authentication In Linux | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials –
    This howto will show you howto store your users in LDAP and authenticate some of the services against it. Tagged as: authentication howto linux security tips tutorial work
   

• Doug 3:40 pm on August 26, 2006 | 0 | # |
  Tags: AI-IA, computing, Economics, Linux/Unix, Singularity, Technology, Work

  “Amazon.com Amazon Web Services Store: Amazon EC2 / Amazon Web Services”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=201590011

  bq. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

  bq. Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables “compute” in the cloud. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use.

  Utility scale computing. One wonders if this isn’t the eventual future of Amazon, now that the “selling books online” part of their business has leveled off in terms of revenue generation. It isn’t too tough to imagine an environment where there are several utility-type computing and storage providers providing SOA access like this to businesses who no longer have any sort of IT operation or data center at all.

  Technorati Tags:
  cloud+computing, web+services, SOA, amazon

   

• Doug 3:22 pm on August 26, 2006 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Books, Commonplace Book, computing, definitions, Singularity

  “Can We Avoid a Hard Takeoff: Speculations on Issues in AI and IA”:http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/ac2005/

  h2. Soft takeoffs versus hard takeoffs

  h3. How long will the transition through the Singularity take?

  * Soft takeoff — the complete transition takes years, perhaps even with the exact beginning and end points a matter of debate.
  ** Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
  ** Hans Moravec, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind
  ** Charles Stross, Accelerando
  * Hard takeoff — the transition takes place in a very short period of time, perhaps less than 100 hours, and without obvious precursors.
  ** Greg Bear, “Blood Music”
  ** Reasons for granting plausibility — even likelihood — to the hard takeoff scenario

  Also note Stross short-story “Antibodies.”

   

• Doug 7:30 pm on August 25, 2006 | 0 | # |
  Tags: del.icio.us

  Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user demiller on 2006-08-25

  • freenigma –
    freenigma adds privacy technology (with strong e-mail encryption) to your favourite webmail service. Requires Firefox Tagged as: ajax crypto email extension firefox GMail opensource privacy security software web2.0
   

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