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Interesting Reading

I’ve been proving it for years, and the New York Daily News has finally decided to back me up: Nerds Make Better Lovers.


The Colbinator has comments on AC/DC’s Back in Black (which I wrote about in this entry) here and here.

In his first entry on the topic, Colby states that no AC/DC album has

any “chick flick” parts the way Led Zep albums do. My DJing and AC/DC

accordioning experiences suggest otherwise. I must agree with his

friend Jason, who says the the chick flick part of Back in Black is in fact the booty anthem You Shook Me All Night Long. Think of it this way, Colby: the chick flick parts of Zep albums are analogous to Gilmore Girls; the chick flick parts of AC/DC albums are analogous to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.


I wish to throw my support behind my friend Suw Charman’s campaign for publicly-accessible power points.


I also wish to throw my support behind my friend Ben Hammersley’s call for a new Tatler [1.2MB, PDF].


[via BoingBoing] Downing Street Memo site. Read and learn!


Remember that site I pointed out — the one that lists the ten most

harmful books of the past 200 years? The Flea has compiled what he

considers to be the ten most helpful. Interestingly enough, Charles

Darwin’s The Origin of Species appears on both lists.

Worth repeating is the original list’s critique of Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money:

The book is a recipe for ever-expanding government. When the business

cycle threatens a contraction of industry, and thus of jobs, he argued,

the government should run up deficits, borrowing and spending money to

spur economic activity. FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the

U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an

$8-trillion dollar debt.

To which The Flea adroitly responds:

Though one could also say, “FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and

the U.S. government now administers the largest economy and highest

standards of living in human history” or, following the non sequitur to

its logical conclusion, “FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and I

like lappi cheese”. It seems to me a more germane observation is the

irony of how those governments adopting policies from the Nazi or

Communist representatives on the reading list would share Human Events’

disapproval for the work of Sigmund Freud, Betty Friedan or Alfred

Kinsey. But that is the tricky thing about arguments advocating greater

individual responsibility, choice or liberty: we are always going to be

stuck with the problem of other people disagreeing with us or, heaven

forbid, having fun while we sit at home typing grumpy articles and not

getting laid.

That last sentence reminds me of just about everyone with posting privileges over at The Shotgun.


Linux is a great and wonderful server operating system. However, it

leaves much to be desired as a desktop OS, even to guys who eat, sleep

and breathe computers like me. I’m not alone, either. I’ve seen lots of

alpha geeks of all stripes — programmers, systems architects,

sysadmins and people who generally tweak computers for money and/or fun

— simply switch to an operating system which combines Unixy goodness,

a great UI and the “it just works” mantra: Mac OS X.

The latest

convert is Jamie Zawinski, Netscape/Mozilla developer turned club

owner, who’s just had enough of Linux’ primitve support for sound cards. There’s much carping going on in the comments to his entry as well as in Slashdot from the Linux zealot crowd, to whom I say: turn off the computer, get out of the basement, and go help Mom do the dishes.


[via MetaFilter] This sounds even worse (in the so-bad-it’s good way) than the Star Wars Holiday Special: Legends of the Superheroes, a live-action show featuring your favourite DC Comics heroes and villains. And Ed McMahon. Kareeeeeeem!


Jeffrey Rowland is funny because he’s true:

Comic: Panel from 'Overcompensating', Tuesday, June 7th, 2005.

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Will Apple Go With Intel? (Hint: Yes)

I

posted this to The Farm, but I thought it bore

repeating here…

Graphic: Apple and 'Intel Inside' logos.

That’s the

question

on

the

tech

industry’s

collective

mind

at

the

moment.

My counterpart at Microsoft, Robert Scoble, writes:

…the

entire industry is shaking because of Steve Jobs’ decision. It’s

impossible to know all the details until the shaking subsides a bit.

It will be one of the most interesting weeks in technology

since I started blogging, that’s for sure.

Although the keynote isn’t being webcast,

the

tech blog Engadget

has been keeping everyone apprised of Steve Jobs’ announcements at

WWDC

2005 by live-blogging the event, and it’s official: Apple is

switching to Intel chips!

The way he’s been doing it is quite dramatic — the keynote

slides,

which were presented on Mac OS X using Apple’s Keynote app was running

on a P4 3.6GHz!

Some quick notes, based on the available info thus

far:

  • Two years ago, Jobs promised a

    3.0GHz

    PowerMac, and hasn’t been able to deliver since the PowerPC still

    hasn’t hit those speeds.

  • The

    Intel architecture also offers more processing power for less

    electrical power: 70 integer performance units/watt versus PowerPC’s

    15.

  • A personal obersavtion: You may want to keep

    an eye on this page,

    which shows PowerPC G5 configurations outperforming Intel

    configurations. I expect that it will disappear from Apple’s

    site shortly.

  • The

    rumours about the “Just in Case” scenario — the ones that mentioned

    that a team within Apple has been making sure that OS X compiles on

    Intel — are true! According to Jobs, for the past 5 years,”Mac OS X

    has been

    living a secret double life.”

  • The lowdown for

    Mac developers:

    • Widgets, scripts and

      Java should just work from the get-go.

    • Cocoa/Xcode apps should need “just a small tweak” and a

      recompile.

    • Carbon/Xcode apps will need “a few

      weeks of tweaking” and a recompile.

    • Carbon/Metrowerks apps should be moved to XCode.
  • A new technology,

    Rosetta, will run existing PowerPC apps on

    Intel. 

This may be all the

tech

publications and sites talk about for the next little while…

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Update on the Tucows Service Outages

I’m posting this here (as well as the forums on Tucows Discuss) since I know that some of our customers read this blog from time to time.

Here’s what I know — a more official notice should be coming your way shortly.

The actual applications, for the most part, continued to work.

Folks

with Blogware accounts could post to their blogs, Email Defense

continued scanning for spam and viruses, Certs kept working, Email was

queued for a little while and began processing again in the early

evening, and no mail was lost.

What stopped working during the outage: Provisioning and Management.

The

specifics are a little different for each service, but in general, it

was the ability to sell new instances of services or manage existing

ones. Blogware, being located in a different facility, was unaffected.

It’s very unusual for a redundant power system to fail like this.

The

“redundant” in “redundant power system” makes this sort of thing very

unlikely. For example, if you have two systems with a 1% probability of

failing, the probability that both will fail is one one-hundredth of 1%.

The

cause for the failure is as of yet unknown. We’re working with IBM to

identify it. Once we know, we will take steps to prevent this from

happening again and let you know what we will be doing in the future.

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Official Notice of the Tucows Systems Outage

If you’re a Tucows reseller, this will be of interest to you:

Greetings,

Please read the following important information concerning OpenSRS.

1. Problem at Hosting Facility Impacting Service Availability

At approximately 20:14 UTC or 4:14PM EST today, Tucows redundant power

supply at the IBM data center failed. As a result, the majority of the

services have been impacted to some degree.

  • Domain Names: provisioning, management, renewal, and transfers

    offline. This includes WHOIS.

  • Email and Email Defense: No mail is lost. Mail delivery may be delayed. Provisioning and management are offline.
  • Digital Certificates: Certificates operating normally.

    Provisioning and management are offline.

  • Website Builder: Website Builder is operating normally for

    end-users. Provisioning and management are offline.

  • Blogware: The service is UNAFFECTED.

Tucows is working closely with IBM to resolve the power problem. At this moment, there is no available restore time.

Tucows will provide regular updates as they are received. Tucows

will also update the Systems Status tool as information is received.

The Systems Status tool is available at:

http://status.tucows.com/.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Thank you for your continued support of Tucows.

Sincerely,

Ed Gray

Director, Operations

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Tucows Outage (or: A Disturbance in the Source…)

If you’re a Tucows reseller and felt a great disturbance in the source

(“as if millions of packets suddenly cried out in terror and then were

suddenly silenced”), it’s because the redundant power system at our

co-location itself became redundant.

All services save Blogware have been affected, and crews are on the scene working on the problem. More details as I get them.

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"Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries"

Human Events Online, the companion site for an American conservative weekly maagzine, has published what they consider to be the ten most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries.

I’ll agree with their picking the communist ones and Mein Kampf and say that some of Kinsey was silly, but Feminine Mystique? Keynes? John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty? Darwin? No wonder they’ve earned the moniker “wingnuts”.

There’s a bonus list at the bottom of the page: it’s the 15 biggest douchebags of the 21st century.

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What My Friends are Sayin’

  • The Pixies’ song Here Comes Your Man is the bomb. Literally.
    This

    one’s from Stacy — she links to a lyrics site where one of the

    commenters says that the lyrics to the Pixies’ oddly Beatles-esque and poppiest tune is about Nagasaki.

    Here are the lyrics:

    outside there’s a box car waiting

    outside the family stew

    out by the fire breathing

    outside we wait ’til face turns blue

    i know the nervous walking

    i know the dirty beard hangs

    out by the box car waiting

    take me away to nowhere plains

    there is a wait so long

    here comes your man

    big shake on the box car moving

    big shake to the land that’s falling down

    is a wind makes a palm stop blowing

    a big, big stone fall and break my crown

    there is a wait so long

    you’ll never wait so long

    here comes your man

    there is a wait so long

    you’ll never wait so long

    here comes your man

    The commenter’s theory that the song is about Nagasaki is based on the fact that the delivery vehicle for the A-bomb — named Fat Man — was a B-29 bomber named the Bockscar, which will have flown the mission 60 years ago this August 9th. Given lead vocalist Black Francis

    (a.k.a. Frank Black, a.k.a. Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV)

    predilection for odd topics and science in his lyrics, I’d say that

    this commenter could be right.

  • Three Men, Three Views

    Lisa lives in Tel Aviv and writes very fascinating pieces about life there. In this entry, she talks to three men

    • An Orthodox settlement leader who lives in Gush Katif
    • An artist who curates exhibitions devoted to Israeli/Palestinian coexistence
    • A foreign art curator

    You’d be surprised what each of them has to say.

  • Min Jung Writes About the 14 Stages of Blogging

    Nobody does the funny quite like Min Jung, who’s figured out and documented the lifecycle of bloggers:

    1. “Start reading blogs.”
    2. “You start a blog.”
    3. “You become a stats whore.”
    4. “You become really personal on your site as the online and real-life worlds start confusing you.”
    5. “You faux “retire” from blogging.”
    6. “You cave back into blogging in less than 72 hours.”
    7. “You decide to “get serious” about blogging.”
    8. “You have a pseudo flirty im/blogging/flickr flirting relationship with another blogger whom you have never met.”
    9. “You decide that you must meet other bloggers.”
    10. “You take a step back and metablog about blogging and what blogging has done about your blogging.”
    11. “See step 5.”
    12. “You

      decide that as a result of step 10 and having repeated step 5 more than

      3 times in the course of your lifecycle as a blogger, that you need to

      sanitize or reinvent your blog.”

    13. “You

      either lose your job because of blogging, are afraid of losing your job

      for blogging, or join a company that builds blogging tools.”

    14. “You decide to start an anonymous livejournal blog.”