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for October, 2008.
By cormander
I have a ‘98 Dodge Caravan that I got almost 3 years ago. It was given to us by my wife’s parents in exchange for our Nissan.
When we had to move away from Hawaii and didn’t have the money for it, I took out a loan on it for $6,725 (the then value of it).
Today I have concluded that since we bought it, I have paid around $5,000 in maintenance costs. Half of that was a brand new transmission, the rest were odds and ends. Today I have to drop another $700+ to replace an axle, two tires, fix an oil leak, among other things. The last time I had it in the shop was about 2 or three months ago where I had the electrical system fixed, and the oil changed.
It seems like every few months I have to drop a load of money to keep it going. It all adds up to the point where you know you really need a new car when the upkeep for it has tallied up to be almost what you paid for it in the first place.
I sure hope I get a good bonus after the Holidays. This Van will last us a lot longer and cost us much less if I didn’t have to drive it to and from work every single day.
By cormander
If you ask me, “working” the stock market is no different then rolling dice in a casino. Sure, there are real world strategies on when to buy/sell, but it all boils down to (and you can quote me on this):
“Gambling is legal in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and New York City”
Truthfully I’m a little freaked out by the whole recent economic down-turn, but feel no guilt. I’m angry, actually, especially when you read about the market getting inflated with phantom stock via naked short selling (see http://www.deepcapture.com/)
Please, please outlaw that nonsense.
In regards to the failing bank industry:
Shame on the lenders. They got too greedy and tried to stretch the dollar far greater then it would ever go. I’ve never taken out a loan I couldn’t afford. I’ve been offered many, but turned them all down. But I’m not everyone, people fall for it and it finally bit them in the ass. Well, its biting the rest of us in the ass now too.
Shame on the people who took those loans. Now I know that some bankruptcy is legit, you might have lost your job, you might be a victim of our bad bad bad health care industry, but I’ve known far too many people who’s defaulted on credit cards and other types of loans who were simply living beyond their means.
But, since I have no control over what is happening in the world, I’ll just continue my normal routine. No sense in getting all riled up over something you can’t change. Just have to hope for the best.
By cormander
Here is my proposed architecture for Xen being incorporated into RavenCore:
* Everything is based on a resource, eg; CPU, memory, disk, IP addresses, etc
* Resources are “detected” when you add a dom0 (xen host) to the cluster
* The total number of resources in the cluster are put into the “Administrative Resource Pool”
* The admin user create clients, and can assign them resources. The total number of client resources cannot exceed the amount in the admin pool (for obvious reasons)
* The clients can then use those resources to allocate as many virtual machines as they like – one big virtual machine using it all, or many small ones using a small portion each.
* A virtual machine, if desired, can be defined as a “shared host” and that client then has administrative rights to the provisioning of domains, email, etc on that virtual host. Basically, they get RavenCore as it is today on that VM
* If you add a server to the cluster that is not a dom0, it can still be defined as a “shared host” and either assigned to a client (who will become the admin of it) or just create clients on it directly.
What I want to stay away from in this design, for now, is hardware dependency. In particular, dependency on storage. To start with anyway, I’m not going to build in logic in the interface for things like a SAN. If you have one – great – you will be able to use it, but disk configuration is manual. Basically, when you install the control panel, you tell it what disk(s) you’d like to put into the admin pool. You have to manually create them (either fs files with dd, or a physical disk itself, or LVM logical volumes) and then point to them from the interface.
By cormander
I get back to work after lunch today, sit down, and find that a coworker is in the middle of talking to someone from another department:
“He called me at 2am, panicked that he couldn’t get it up.”
By cormander
Yesterday my daughter turned 4, so we let her decide what she wanted to eat for dinner. Like any little kid, she gets a big bright smile and says, “Pizza!”
Not having been to a “sit down” pizza place since we got to Utah over two years ago, I packed up the family in the Van and we went looking for one. My wife thought she remembered seeing one that is on the way to Wal-Mart so we headed in that direction. When we finally located it, I started to pull off the road into the parking lot. I made the turn a little too soon, and my wife says;
“That’s the sidewalk, stupid!”
Instantly, the boy (who recently turned 3) repeats it. My wife covers her eyes with shame while I’m laughing. He just loves repeating things, and seems to know when it’s something he shouldn’t say. I admit with some embarrassment that he’s repeated swear words, and they aren’t all words that my wife says.
But, nonetheless, I found it very funny.
By cormander
This has probably already been said by someone else, but I thought of it the other day:
“Document it? What? It’s called ‘code’ for a reason.”
By cormander
Sometimes you want something to run at boot, but you can’t use chkconfig because you haven’t written a full blown sysvinit-sytle script to facilitate the operation. You’d probably just want to add it to rc.local, but perhaps you want it to run before a certian sysviinit-style script, for example, before the network starts or before apache starts? The rc.local can’t do this, since it’s ran last.
Well here is a quick way to add a custom script to the boot process w/o too much work. Since I have to do this on occasion, I thought I’d post about it.
First you cd into your rc.d directory:
[root@localhost ~]# cd /etc/rc.d/
Now create your script in your favorite editor (or just copy it here):
[root@localhost rc.d]# vi rc.myscript
Don’t forget to make it executable!
[root@localhost rc.d]# chmod +x rc.myscript
Now create a link to it in /etc
[root@localhost rc.d]# cd ..
[root@localhost etc]# ln -s rc.d/rc.myscript ./
Now add it to each runlevel you want it to run in. You probably care most about runlevel 3 and 5:
[root@localhost etc]# cd rc3.d/
[root@localhost rc3.d]# ln -s ../rc.myscript S00myscript
[root@localhost rc3.d]# cd ..
[root@localhost etc]# cd rc5.d/
[root@localhost rc5.d]# ln -s ../rc.myscript S00myscript
The S00 portion of the link is important. S stands for “on startup” (or more correctly, on runlevel change where this would start). The K stands for “on shutdown” (or more correctly, on runlevel change where it needs to be turned off). Don’t worry about creating a link for the K as this isn’t a init script with “start/stop” commands.
The number is two digits, and determines when it is run, in numerical order, staring from 00. For example, network on my system is S10network which means it starts pretty early in the boot process. Apache is S85httpd which means it starts pretty late in the boot process.
Have a look to see when things boot up, and number yours accordingly.
By cormander
2.6.27.1 came out today, with only one patch:
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-2.6.27.y.git;a=commitdiff;h=d23d43386311fde5f11e06c16d4185e94a8d6d06
It’s quite small, see below:
diff --git a/kernel/trace/Kconfig b/kernel/trace/Kconfig
index 263e9e6..aa53fdd 100644
--- a/kernel/trace/Kconfig
+++ b/kernel/trace/Kconfig
@@ -103,7 +103,8 @@ config CONTEXT_SWITCH_TRACER
all switching of tasks.
config DYNAMIC_FTRACE
- bool "enable/disable ftrace tracepoints dynamically"
+ bool "enable/disable ftrace tracepoints dynamically (BROKEN)"
+ depends on BROKEN
depends on FTRACE
depends on HAVE_DYNAMIC_FTRACE
default y
As I recall this was supposed to be fixed for 2.6.27. Now they’re just turning it off again?
Well, glad they did come out and turn it off. But still, this is a big fail!
By cormander
The Director of Architecture where I work said as he left the NOC room:
“If you find anything incredibly stupid in the world, blame an architect.”
By cormander
I’m a big star wars fan. My wife loves me despite this. Too bad I’m not lucky enough to have a spouse who shares this obsession^H^H^H hobby (or, at the very least, fakes it).
Came up with a quote today; Yoda, if he lived in the corporate world, would say:
“Always two, there are. A manager, and an assistant.”
