Month: August 2002

256 bit memory?  That would be wicked.

Researchers from the University of Southern California School of Engineering have developed a new type of memory that actually puts a processor on the DRAM chip, allowing for significantly faster memory performance and eliminating the gap between CPU and memory performance.

In contrast to standard memory chips that can process 32 bits of information, each PIM chip can process up to 256 bits. With the four reduced instruction-set computing (RISC) processors per chip, the memory has the ability to perform four operations simultaneously, instead of one at a time like traditional memory.

Clear Channel Sucks: A Wired News article that no doubt Doc will be pointing to.  I hate them.

“Any company has the same rights to do what we have done,” he said. “We are simply maximizing our position like any good business would try to do.”

Linux Journal: Using OpenLDAP, an introduction.

And some people Mac their hair:

However, he failed to get Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ attention last week at the opening of the new Apple store in Manhattan. “I was practically doing backflips,” Cohen said.

But Phil Schiller, head of Apple’s marketing, noticed. “That’s pretty hard-core,” he told Cohen. “I would never do anything like that.”

Professors like tattoos too:

“I always wanted a tattoo and I really love the Mac,” Koch said. “There are very few artifacts that are so perfectly suited to their environment, that blend form and function. The Mac is like a perfectly designed organism.”

Mac people and their tattoos:

Doctorow, the Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s outreach coordinator and an editor of Boing Boing, has a “Sad Mac” tattooed on his right biceps. It was inked after a marathon data recovery session when he was 18.

“I felt the need to commemorate the event with an appropriately nerd-tough memento,” Doctorow wrote in an e-mail.

Doctorow’s 27-pixel-square tattoo is based on the Sad Mac screen icon that is displayed when old all-in-one Macs have catastrophic hardware problems. The Sad Mac is a perversion of the happy, smiling Mac shown when a Mac boots up. Instead of a smiley face, the Sad Mac has a pout and crosses for eyes.

You know you’re hooked on information when you think, “It’s been a slow news hour (for RSS feeds)”

A Contrarian View of Open Source:

You know, I don’t write code. I don’t think I’m ever going to write any code. It just amazes me how often people who know absolutely nothing about code want to tell software people their business. “Why don’t they just,” that’s the standard phraseology. “Why don’t they just” code-up something-or-other. Whenever I hear that, frankly, I just want to slap the living shit out of those people.

That’s like people whose fingers are covered with diamonds complaining about the easy lives of diamond miners.

You’re, like, seven miles down in this diamond mine, and these cats are laboring, laboring with these pickaxes and blasting caps and giant grinding machines. And it’s like: “Why don’t you people just put in a tomato garden down here? Don’t you like fresh air in this diamond mine? How about some zinnias and daisies? You over there, with the carpal tunnel wristbands – you sure look pale, fella! Don’t you like the sunshine?”

It just gets better.  Read it.

I just finished Web Services Essentials.  I found it extremely informative, but the last few chapters reminded me of a man page dump on WSDL.  I was a little dissapointed, but overall the book was excellent.  I’m not sure if I should wait for the book on XML-RPC to show up or just dive into SOAP, but whatever happens this book has psyched me up.  I might even be productive at some point in the near future, imagine that!

I added my blogtree entry earlier today.  Only here can I be grouped in the same category with Doc, Paolo, Don Strickland and others.

OpenMosix 2.4.19: Moshe Bar and the team have released another version of the popular clustering tool.  From the announcement:

This is a significant release. We included Robert Love’s memory over-commit protection patch and ported it to openMosix. We also make the OOM killer optional. The load balancer is now significantly faster and kernel latencies have been reduced, as well.

Some bugs of 2.4.18-rel 2 have been fixed and DFSA now behaves correctly.

Enjoy!

Moshe Bar

MySQL, Linux, FreeBSD, and Swap Space: Good stuff from Jeremy Zawodny about tuning linux for MySQL and 2.4 virtual memory fun:

I spent a fair amount of time of Friday trying figure out why our FreeBSD servers running MySQL 4.0.2 were doing so much better than our Linux servers running MySQL 4.0.2. They’re all slaves of the same 3.23.51 master and get roughly equal query loads, thanks to our Alteon load-balancers (yes, the ones that occasionally stop working right).

Ghetto SOAP: Tiberius ties together Java and C# in a slick way without lots of overhead.  What is that, pseudo services?

Spend A Day With .NET: Sells Brothers has a contest and a cool idea for something to do with August 30th.  The rules are simple:

1. Thou shall submit only .NET code that you wrote in the 24-hour period on August 30th. To prove this, please send along the email of someone the judges can check with that will vouch for you.
2. Thou may use existing unmanaged code via MC++ “IJW” (It Just Works) technology or via Win32 or COM interop, but the lines of unmanaged code may consist of no more than 49% of the total lines of code in the submission.
3. Thou may use 3rd party libraries.
4. Thou may work in teams, but prizes may need to be split between submitters.
5. Thou shall include instructions for building and exercising your submission simple enough that even our judges can follow them. A description of why your code is cool is highly recommended.
6. Thou shall check these rules again before making your submission in case I think of any more (engineers are tricky).

I’ve finally signed up for metafilter!  Thanks, Xian, for the heads up!

Publishing Privately: how to publish a selected category “behind the firewall.”

Linux kernel 2.4.19 is out!  Grab it here.

Python resources:

• Metakit: Embedded database library
• Medusa: server library for http

The new Daemon News eZine is out, with a very good article about backing up using Samba.

Bloodhag:

BlöödHag is a band from Seattle, WA. They are dedicated to the promotion of literacy in a Heavy Metal format. All their songs are short speed metal bios of some of the greatest science fiction writers of all time. With songs such as “J.R.R. Tolkein and “Michael Moorcock” they will blow your illiterate ass right back to the library.

[via the shifted librarian]