cowmixtoo

@40K up until this fall (and 35K now), I would hardly say that is "being given away" prices.

When I taught Python to my kid and a few other kids that live around my house a coupl of years ago, Guido was gracious enough to sign these head-shots for me to give to each kids as their graduation present.

https://plus.google.com/photos/108306457281321389001/albums/...

Up until now Gitlab has been very unstable. 5.X promises to be much better on that front because they are replacing gitolite. The Gitlab <-> gitolite synchronization is the cause of most of my grief.

That's it!

Whatever.

I haven't been a 'coder' since 1994 yet I'm defiantly "technical". The teams I lead, AFAIK, don't question my contributions because I don't code. Nor are my designs less valid.

In fact, my years of involvement on the operations side of the house sometimes make my choice 'technical' choices more informed than what straight coders cook up.

Again, phooey.

It seems like Google's DNS servers are always MANY hops away from me, no matter where I am. The ping times range from 8ms to 45ms.

How is that faster than using a local DNS server?

I have TONS of VHS tapes that I have been slowly digitizing over the pass 25 years. The issue I have ran up against is it is harder and harder to get VHS players. New models are almost non-existent so you have to troll Craigslist or eBay for used equipment.

Also, the market for good digitizing hardware is drying up too.

The moral, hurry up and digitize now before the equipment use for this purpose drys up.

GoDaddy supports the bill because they love taking a contrary positions on an given issue. They see most of the industry taking X position on SOPA and so they take Y position. Corporate wise, they just seem to get off on it.

Awesome explanation.

Still, an SSD makes this all better. When I was using virtual memory on a Ubuntu server and put the swap partition on an SSD, everything worked great. On a rotating platter, not so much.

Hmm... I still think its valid to interchangeably use "Virtual memory" and swap space. Swap space is just where your "virtual memory" lives, right?

I have a lot of friends using 'consumer grade' SSD for their DB workloads and the difference is night and day.

This might be a horrible example but my one friend had a installation of FileMaker Pro running on a completely tricked out XServer (RAID with 15K SAS drives). With 250 concurrent users he was completely max out on CPU and many queries took minutes to complete.

When he moved to a 256GB SSD his CPU load now never goes above 20% and not one query takes more than five seconds, period.

Also, please reference my old HN post from over a year ago.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1584998

My point was that my application needed 166% more phyical memory than what I had at the time.

Paging out to a normal "disk" was not even an option, the performance ranged incredibly horrible to completely unusable.

Paging out to SSD was not only usable, it was only a percentage slower than 'real' RAM.

I think that's amazing. Having the option to use SSD as memory in a pinch is a great 'win'.

I don't understand why SSD are not deployed in EVERY RMDBS server right now. They benefits are truly out of this world.

I have a lot of personal success stories with SSDs but here's my current favorite.

A few months ago I had to help one of our scientists (the company is called 5AM Solutions.. they the awesome) run a bioinformatic job written in Perl and R. As it turned out, for long stretches of the processing the job required around 20 GB of memory. The one server that had all the required dependencies installed had only 8 GB at the time.

When I let the job run the first time, it started to page out memory to hard disk. The job ran for about four days, was only about 25% complete and during that time frame the server was un-useable for any other functions. Pretty much everything came to grinding halt.

Between that first run and the time our new RAM would be installed, just for grins, I gave the system 30 GB of swap space on the locally attached SSD. With that configuration the job finished in 19 hours and during that time the server was still responsive of other tasks.

When we finally added the appropriate amount of physical RAM the job took only 15 hours to complete.

It is the first time I have ever seen virtual memory be useful.

Anyone who uses "netcat" should give "socat" a look. It's been around a lot time and it is pretty much netcat on crack. I use it daily.

Since I posted this link last year: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1584998 .... I've put a few DBs on SSD (Postgresql and Filemaker Pro). The real-world performance on extreme concurrent usage was been insane, ie something like a order of magnitude faster. For instance, a query on FileMaker Pro that would take up to 10 minutes on a heavily used instance (100 people accessing at one time) now takes seconds.

I don't want to pile on here but as Linux desktop / server user since '92 I'll add my two cents:

My main Linux workstations are a three year old QUAD core Shuttle XPC and a Dell business workstation. I religiously upgrade to each Ubuntu distro release every six months. Some things have gotten a lot better (like sound), then other stuff breaks. In particular, the Intel graphics drivers (like mentioned in this article) still are not quite right.

It's a little depressing how the fundamentals still are still not solid.

ZOMG, I forgot about my ASUS 1000 netbook.. The wireless get WORSE and WORSE every release. The wireless driver with 9.10 were awesome and now I can barely connect anywhere.

DE-PRESS-ING..

Google will not allow it to be installed on my hacked Color Nook running CM7.

Arg.

The problem is how Virgin Mobile implemented data with Android, not the phone itself. People who have the Samsung Android phone have the same issue.

Search #vmdd (Virgin Mobile Data Down) on Twitter and follow the fun.

If you want to get more use out of the raw data 23andMe produces from your DNA sequencing I encourage everyone to check out this free / GPL'd Firefox plugin my company created.

http://www.snptips.com/

Oh no.. universally, everyone thinks Skype 5 is a total cluster f.

Unfortunately, I echo many of the reservations of working at my local public library: can't make calls, horrible hours of operation, etc.

I'll add one more thing: horrible network filtering.

"The Day the Universe Changed" is online too!

Awesome.

I'm going to sound like a broken record but I don't understand why bcfg2 isn't more popular.

If anything, I'm going to 'port' this post to an bcfg2 example.

I don't understand why more people don't use bcfg2. Its awesome for this purpose (and I think better than puppet or chef.)

My wife and I just finished getting rid of two file cabinets worth of papers using this MFP: http://www.okidata.com/mkt/html/nf/MFP.php?sku=b4545series

The pdf's it created were pretty small and the result of the project fits into a very small chunk of my Dropbox account (50GB). Its great having all my files for the past 20 years available everywhere I go.

mattblalock: My business mentor / great friend died a little over a year ago and its been very hard to adjust. There really isn't anything to say that will help except for it will take time to adjust and move on. In my case I was "lucky" because my associate died of cancer so I was able to say final "goodbyes", etc. In fact, he final gift to me was being able to describe the process of dying and how he felt at each stage.

BTW, it turns out there ARE atheists in foxholes.

Previously..

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1865249

I hope the standard version of Python is upgraded beyond 2.4.X.

No. Some of my 'worst' ideas have succeeded to my amazement. OTOH, some of my best ideas failed despite how 'awesome' they were.

When I look back, everything succeeded or failed based on timing and execution.