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Michael Still
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Wed, 30 Apr 2008



Blathering for Wednesday, 30 April 2008

posted at: 14:39 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry


Tue, 29 Apr 2008



Blathering for Tuesday, 29 April 2008

posted at: 17:20 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry


Mon, 28 Apr 2008



Blathering for Monday, 28 April 2008

    17:11: Pray for lower gas prices!
    17:11: "Twyman - a community organizer, church choir director and public relations consultant from the Washington, D.C., suburbs - staged a pray-in at a San Francisco Chevron station on Friday, asking God for cheaper gas. He did the same thing in the nation's Capitol on Wednesday, with volunteers from a soup kitchen joining in. Today he will lead members of an Oakland church in prayer."
    17:12: Jury in Hans Reiser trial: Oakland mother's killing deliberate even if she's missing
    17:13: "A jury this afternoon convicted computer programmer Hans Reiser of first-degree murder for killing his estranged wife, concluding that her slaying in 2006 was deliberate and premeditated even though her body was never found."


    Tags for this post: blather(S)

posted at: 17:13 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry


Sun, 27 Apr 2008



Blathering for Sunday, 27 April 2008

    Wow, supershuttle sucks. The driver has argued with two passengers so far, and a 20 minute drive has taken an hour.

    Tags for this post: blather(S)

posted at: 23:58 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry


Fri, 25 Apr 2008



Blathering for Friday, 25 April 2008

    06:44: On the DC metro to the Smithsonian. The DC metro was the first US metro system I used, and I still think its one of the best.
    08:23: A lot of the exhibitions at the Smithsonian Air and Space museum are starting to look a bit dated. For example, one sign said that as soon as a plane had finished its test flights in 1989 they hope to redo the display. Time for a refresh me thinks.
    08:25: Bugger. The gallery with the Apollo stuff like Armstrong's space suit is closed as it needs to be fixed to meet fire code. Oh well.
    08:32: I wonder if there are plans for a Smithsonian for microelectronis?
    18:09: Martinis in Georgetown. Its a lot like a preppy Newtown.
    18:09: We didn't make the Capitol Steps in the end... We'll try again tomorrow.


    Tags for this post: blather(S)

posted at: 18:09 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry


Wed, 23 Apr 2008



Blathering for Wednesday, 23 April 2008

    07:10: Staying with my brother in Arlington, Virginia
    07:10: I've always wondered if comcast internet is any good
    07:11: The short answer... It sucks. ssh connections keep getting dropped, its sluggish, and feels really unreliable
    09:32: Crucial.com just put my order into fraud hold because they can't handle an Australian billing address
    09:32: Order cancelled
    09:32: Oh, and I had to spend 30 minutes on hold in order to cancel the order... Because there is no cancel order button on the website.
    13:04: We did a walking tour of DC memorials yesterday. We figure we did about 10 miles... Just enough for my left knee to stop working.
    13:05: So instead of walking today we drove to Gettysburg, PA
    14:50: The Gettysburg National Military Museum is really good


    Tags for this post: blather(S)

posted at: 14:50 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry


Mon, 21 Apr 2008



Blathering for Monday, 21 April 2008

    10:21: Travelling yet again. This time to Washington DC... First flight with virgin america.
    18:13: In DC
    18:14: Virgin America is great
    18:14: The seat back entertainment system is better than anything else I have seen in the US


    Tags for this post: blather(S)

posted at: 18:14 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry


Sat, 19 Apr 2008



Blathering for Saturday, 19 April 2008

    17:34: I just got joe jobbed. How annoying.


    Tags for this post: blather(S)

posted at: 17:34 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry


Thu, 17 Apr 2008



Blathering for Thursday, 17 April 2008

    10:26: A nice tutorial for python's asyncore asynchronous socket library.
    10:26: I wonder how many file descriptors I can consume on a PlanetLab node before I get hate mail?
    16:27: Given that teenaged sons seem to tell "your mom" jokes, does that mean that mothers of teenaged males tell "your son" jokes to each other?
    22:02: asyncore rocks just as much as I had hoped it would. Its turned my test program with five threads that consumes too much memory into something which is doing 1,000 connections simultaneously, without using much memory at all. So cool.


    Tags for this post: blather(S)

posted at: 22:02 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry


Wed, 16 Apr 2008



Blathering for Wednesday, 16 April 2008

    09:14: In the US, online chat systems on corporate web sites are really common. Recently Consumerist covered a story in which one of these chat sessions resulted in the chat agent asking a customer if they were "Nucking Futs". Interestingly, the outsourced company that provides the live chat people noticed the consumerist post and fired the person responsible. That's interesting for two reasons -- lots of companies now appear to be reading consumerist; and all the employees of the outsourcer appear in chat as Jessica. In this case "Jessica" was a man!


    Tags for this post: blather(S)

posted at: 09:14 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry


Mon, 14 Apr 2008



Taiwan

    I just got back from a quick trip to Taiwan. So much fun!

                                           

    See more thumbnails

    Tags for this post: events(S) pictures(S) 20080411-taiwan(S)

posted at: 09:44 | path: /events/pictures/20080411-taiwan | permanent link to this entry


Sat, 12 Apr 2008



init script

    Jake Graft pointed out in a comment that I had forgotten to put the init script from the MythTV book online. My apologies.
    #! /bin/sh
    #
    # mythbackend
    #
    
    PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
    
    BACKEND=/usr/local/bin/mythbackend
    BACKEND_NAME=mythbackend
    
    MYTHUSER="myth"
    
    test -x $BACKEND || exit 0
    
    set -e
    
    case "$1" in
      start)
            echo -n "Starting MythTV: $BACKEND_NAME"
            su ${MYTHUSER} -c "$BACKEND -v all -d -l ${MBE_LOGFILE}" &
            echo "."
            ;;
      stop)
            echo -n "Stopping MythTV: $BACKEND_NAME"
            killall $BACKEND
            echo "."
            ;;
      *)
            echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop}" >&2
            exit 1
            ;;
    esac
    
    exit 0
    


    Tags for this post: mythtv(S) book(S)

posted at: 17:53 | path: /mythtv/book | permanent link to this entry


Fri, 11 Apr 2008



Blathering for Friday, 11 April 2008

posted at: 03:07 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry


Wed, 09 Apr 2008



Blathering for Wednesday, 09 April 2008

    00:33: Signs that you've lived in the US too long: A4 paper looks wierd


    Tags for this post: blather(S)

posted at: 00:33 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry


Mon, 07 Apr 2008



Blathering for Monday, 07 April 2008

posted at: 19:38 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry


Sun, 06 Apr 2008



Blathering for Sunday, 06 April 2008

    18:13: I'm in Taiwan for a little under a week for a work trip. I arrived a few hours ago at 6:30am local time, on a China Airlines flight.
    18:15: The flight was quite log -- a little over 13 hours. Mostly because the flight went up and over (flying along the edge of Alaska)
    18:15: The plane was the oldest on a laug haul route that I've seen in a long time... No in seat video, let along on demand. Also, a wierd bathroom configuration and just generally old.
    18:15: I got here ok though...
    18:16: Anyways, the hotel network doesn't allow VPN connections out, so I guess its going to be all blather blogging for a little while
    18:16: My lift to the office has just arrived, so more later


    Tags for this post: blather(S)

posted at: 18:16 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry


Thu, 03 Apr 2008



Blathering for Thursday, 03 April 2008

    19:13: Silicon valley is an interesting place
    19:13: There I was buying my dinner burrito, and I end up explaining how to install ubuntu on laptops to some random dude
    19:13: Fun


    Tags for this post: blather(S)

posted at: 19:13 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry


Tue, 01 Apr 2008



The web is probably parkier than it seems

    I've been reading academic papers again (it tends to happen in batches) -- this time I've been focusing on the papers from the Usenix Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) last year. One of the more immediately interesting papers presented was The Web is Smaller than it Seems (bibtex).

    The paper discusses a measurement of the size of "the web" based on a scan of domain names listed in either the DMOZ open directory or the .com and .net TLD zone files. You'll note that is a very similar technique to one of those that I use to acquire domain names for my survey of Internet mail servers, which is what originally interested me in this paper. The domains had their www hostname looked up, and then the number of domain names per IP address was used to create an estimate of the total number of web servers present on the Internet. It is of course a little bit more complicated than that, but you can read the paper for more details if you really want.

    The paper's findings are interesting:

    We find that as much as 60% of the Web servers are co-hosted with 10, 000 or more other Web servers, indicating that the Internet contains many small co-hosted Web servers. Likewise, more than 95% of Web servers share their AS with 1000 or more other Web servers. We additionally find that heavily co-hosted Web servers contribute much less traffic than Web servers that are not co-hosted, confirming that popular servers are not co-located, while less popular servers co-locate more frequently. When considering block lists, we find the vast majority of blocked Web servers are hosted on IPs hosting 100 Web servers or more. This indicates there may be a great deal of collateral damage with IP blocking. Finally, when looking at authoritative DNS servers, we see a high degree of co-location on a very small number of DNS servers, which may result in the Web being fragile from a DNS perspective.


    That's a pretty interesting result. Unfortunately, I think that the researchers missed an opportunity here. While they determined that a small number of IP addresses host a large number of web sites, they didn't attempt to determine how many of those domains are just parked content. Now that would have been something interesting to know. Specifically, I've poked around a little with the parking behaviour of domains via the result of MX record look ups, which leads me to suspect that a large number of those heavily co-located domain names are simply parked, and not adding any interesting content to the Internet.

    Tags for this post: research(S)

posted at: 20:08 | path: /research | permanent link to this entry


Blathering for Tuesday, 01 April 2008

posted at: 11:27 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry