Published November 4th, 2005

  • exxoff.com has launched. I tend to avoid all political topics on my journal, but I believe the insane profits of the oil companies is at least partially taking advantage of the suffering of people in the Gulf Region. I really wanted to write more about this, but this week has been very busy.
  • I deleted all comments on my blog during a Typo Upgrade. Opps. I am too lazy to restore from backups right now. Maybe this weekend.
  • Played Bocce for the first time ever today. We had more than 70 people from $work at Campo Di Bocce in Los Gatos. Team Bloglines didn’t do so well. 3 wins and 4 losses was our final record. Even though we didn’t win the championship, it was a fun afternoon.
  • I got Programing Lua, off my Amazon Wishlist. Thanks to Jason (can I publish your full name?) for sending it to me. The reward, as promised is ready, please help test Apache HTTPD 2.1.9-beta.
  • I got a new 19 inch LCD. Damn. The grays and blacks are a billion times better than my 3 year old 19 inch LCD, and this one cost half as much. No motion blur at all. Very good for playing Quake 4.
  • I can only play Quake 4 at 800x600 with my GeForce FX 5700 Ultra. My LCDs both have a native resolution of 1280x1024. Not Good. I guess I need a new video card. But, to get a new video card I should get a new motherboard for PCI-Express instead of AGP, and if I am getting a new motherboard, I might as well go AMD64… Anyways, I guess I should just build a new desktop. Maybe next month. Maybe I should just play old games instead.
  • Work has been busy. yum and parallel shell are life savers for handling hundreds of servers.
  • On Disk Data corruption is scary. Maybe someday the mythical ZFS will solve all of these problems. Maybe not.
  • I love the deadline IO scheduler. Change your linux servers now. It is amazing.
  • Also at work, we moved to new offices in Campbell on Monday. Very nice. Air Conditioning doesn’t work right, and the coffee machine broke on the 2nd day. We have covered the Bloglines area in camo. Some of the other areas have a ping pong and a pool table. Huge improvement over our old location.
  • Traffic is weird. If I leave any time between 7:30 and 9:15, it takes about 17 minutes to get to work. I think over time, everyone in this area has optimized to spread the load out evenly over this period. Also figured out how to take the side streets instead of Interstate 280 and Highway 17 to get from work to my apartment. Unfortunately, it takes exactly the same amount of time.
  • ApacheCon is in San Diego in December. I will be there. Will you?
  • Been reading the Chronicles of Narnia. I haven’t read it before, and I figure I might was well before the upcoming movie ruins it. Yes, they are children’s books, but it is more fun than listening to the real news.
  • Spreaking of real news, a new fake news show has launched. The Colbert Report is hilarious. I love the computer generated Bald Eagle that they use all over.
  • As a reminder, don’t use Bind. And, as a second reminder, always separate your Caching and Authoritative Name Servers.
  • Bloglines is hiring. We currently have 3 positions open. Think you could fit in? e-mail me.

Written by Paul Querna, CTO @ ScaleFT. @pquerna