| Today's random thought: do certain projects attract crazies? |
[Jun. 26th, 2009|11:02 pm] |
Thinking about all the things right and wrong in this whole concept of the "United States of America"[1], one thing that I keep coming back to is this notion of "bearing arms.." ".. as part of a well regulated militia."
Is there actually any example(s) of well-regulated militias in the United States of America which aren't championed by crazies? Does it attract crazies like management attracts sociopaths? Ie, is the very nature of being involved in a militia today, considering the lack of real, tangible short-term threats to the day to day lives of citizens (contrast to say, people in "militias" throwing everything they can against the influx of illegal immigrants from Mexico) only keeping people who are slightly .. uhm, crazy?
In the same way that say, open source projects attract and keep certain classes of people[2] ?
Etc, etc.
Discuss.
[1] - Just for the record, the more I read about what was attempted, the more I find myself identifying with a lot of the ideals that seem to be related to the political writings of that era. Anyway..
[2] - Eg, Adrian Chadd and all of the damned doomed open source projects I seem to be attracted to. Like Squid. |
|
|
| Random friends' job searching project |
[Jun. 22nd, 2009|01:54 pm] |
This shameless plug is brought to you by Caffeine, nature's metabolic enhancer.
A friend of mine has been working on a search engine to run through various IT job lists and link candidates to jobs. It cutely lets you cut/paste in a text resume for it to search on.
The site is here - http://www.oztechninja.com/ - and yes, in Google-esque tradition it is in beta. He would absolutely appreciate any and all feedback from people. Especially feedback relating to how relevant the search results are. |
|
|
| Random thought of the day.. |
[Jun. 21st, 2009|06:15 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | randomthought | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  curious | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | trance | ] |
Today's random question: what effects do the current biological and sociological environments have on the pre-natal and post-natal development of children; and in the context of this, what effects would some of these environments (eg growing levels of obesity) have on a population over time?
Hm, how would one design a study, or a meta-study, to try and disprove this?
The seed of this was wondering what kinds of local environment adaptations get passed to the pre/post-natal infant as there's been some studies showing that there -is- some of this going on - eg http://ajpregu.physiology.org/cgi/content/abstract/285/1/R271 . |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Apr. 27th, 2009|09:31 pm] |
|
Gah, I'm falling back into bad habits and I'm not sure what to do about it. |
|
|
| UCC happenings today - screenings and such |
[Apr. 25th, 2009|12:59 pm] |
I've brought some DVDs with me to (ab)use the very large plasma TV thats here with.
I'm currently watching Titan AE; I've got some Astroboy; Serenity/Firefly; and George Lucas' THX-1138.
Beetle Sashimi! |
|
|
| UCC tonight - PS2 hackery |
[Apr. 24th, 2009|01:55 pm] |
G'day,
I'll be popping by UCC tonight with my PS2, PS2 Linux and related hackery stuff.
I'm going to try and setup a PS2 cross development environment on something (which isn't hard, ps2dev.org has that all sorted out (and it works under macosx 10.4 PPC! eww! :) and try to get some very basic software blitting working on it. This is my excuse for re-learning linear algebra after 15 odd years.
I'll probably be at UCC around 7pm. |
|
|
| Cacheboy! |
[Mar. 20th, 2009|06:52 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | accomplished | ] |
The Cacheboy CDN is now ~ 6 nodes, pushing out a total of 250mbit/sec at peak.
I'm currently responsible for around 2% of mozilla downloads and I think around 50% of videolan downloads. I'll have to verify that.
I'm going to leave it where it is until I get back to Perth (~ April 7); at which point I'm going to implement my replacement traffic distribution stuff and start better using the available bandwidth. I've got ~ 1gbit capacity available; I'm going to aim to run it at ~ 500mbit at peak until I get more donated mirror nodes. |
|
|
| Firefox-3.0.7 release! |
[Mar. 4th, 2009|07:02 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  anxious | ] |
Firefox 3.0.7 has been released. There's a ~ 1% chance at the moment that you'll be pulling down you updates from my little CDN.
The big question is how much traffic it'll actually generate on the CDN. So far I'm pushing out around 105ish mbit across four boxes. That is quite a small amount of traffic compared to what I -could- be pushing, but I'm playing it (slightly) safe.
Tomorrow morning should be interesting - Europe wakes up in a few hours, followed by the United States. Hm! |
|
|
| cacheboy reborn! |
[Feb. 28th, 2009|09:15 pm] |
I'm now mirroring Videolan and Mozilla downloads on my little CDN. Transfers so far, ~ 350gigabytes a day. A drop in the pond (only around 50-70mbit average during 24 hours) but quite good for testing out Lusca/Cacheboy and traffic routing algorithms.
I know I can push about 1000 times that, given enough hardware and connectivity.
Phase two - figuring out where the traffic is flowing to and organising equipment closer to those people. |
|
|
| Open Source CDN hackery |
[Feb. 10th, 2009|11:42 pm] |
I've spent the last week or so building out the basic tools to run a CDN for free/open source software.
I'm currently serving a few megabits (~15mbit) of Videolan mirror traffic for testing. Hopefully that'll get up to around 150 megabits in a week or so. Whee!
I'll hopefully get the Australian mirror online in the next few days, so people on WAIX will be able to download videolan from my mirror.
I'm looking for a few more projects to mirror during the sort-of closed alpha test. Small projects, a few megabits (say, up to 100mbit), a few gigabytes of files. This precludes obvious targets such as mozilla, debian, ubuntu, freebsd. I would like to mirror them later, but this will probably require slightly more equipment. :)
Suggestions? I'm open to anything! |
|
|
| "I believe" |
[Jan. 24th, 2009|01:55 pm] |
I Believe
"I believe in the supreme worth of the individual and in his right to
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every
opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.
I believe that the law was made for man and not man for the law; that
government is the servant of the people and not their master.
I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the
world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity
to make a living.
I believe that thrift is essential to well ordered living and that
economy is a prime requisite of a sound financial structure, whether
in government, business or personal affairs.
I believe that truth and justice are fundamental to an enduring social
order.
I believe in the sacredness of a promise, that a man’s word should be
as good as his bond; that character -- not wealth or power or position
-- is of supreme worth.
I believe that the rendering of useful service is the common duty of
mankind and that only in the purifying fire of sacrifice is the dross
of selfishness consumed and the greatness of the human soul set free.
I believe in an all-wise and all-loving God, named by whatever name,
and that the individual’s highest fulfillment, greatest happiness, and
widest usefulness are to be found in living in harmony with His will.
I believe that love is the greatest thing in the world; that it alone
can overcome hate; that right can and will triumph over might." |
|
|
| losing weight. |
[Jan. 20th, 2009|10:24 am] |
So I now weigh around 97.5kg; down from 110-115kg when I left Perth in October.
On the plus side, I'm (mostly) eating right thanks to how much it costs here, how much Corn Syrup I'm trying to avoid in food, and having calories printed on restaurant/fast food menus. I'm also doing occasional (ie, not once a day) exercise and moving around a lot more.
On the minus side, I'm still trying to reprogram my mind to eat right (and not just eat everything in front of me, whether its too much or not, thanks to Italian mindwashing); the concept of being constantly hungry is a weird distraction, and if I'm not careful I start to feel "slow" because I'm guessing my blood sugar levels are dropping low from the low calorie intake.
Gah.
At least I can -tell- by appearance that I've lost weight. Now I just need to get down to 90kg and see if that corresponds to a loss of fat around the stomach, or whether I'm eating away at muscle. |
|
|
| Nerd stuff |
[Jan. 7th, 2009|05:16 pm] |
So I'm dropping little Squid/Cacheboy boxes around the place to get some live data on said software in production.
If you run a smallish (for now!) personal site or open source site, and you'd like to give the "Adrian really needs some more production caches to do testing and benchmarking on, so he can improve things!" free content delivery network a go, please drop me a comment. All you need to do is tell me the site IP and hostname(s) and then point a CNAME at the right place. You can always point the web domain entries back at your own server if things go bad.
I'm going to then gather data from said live system and use it to develop better documentation, tools and improvements to Squid/Cacheboy. And you'll be saving on your traffic bill. :)
I'll open it up for slightly larger than small sites (as in, if you're doing more than a few megabits at peak) in a week or so. I've got enough donated kit and bandwidth here to push like ~ 100mbit of data right now; so don't be afraid to jump on board if your stuff is slightly popular at times.
Its for a good cause. I promise. :)
Oh, and you'll also have your sites available via IPv6. :) |
|
|
| Jogging! |
[Dec. 14th, 2008|09:17 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Queens, New York | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | accomplished | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | various dance tracks | ] |
So on the advice of my brother, I've been exercising. This includes a bit of free weights when I have my gym clothes in the city (note to self: buy more gym clothes so you can leave some of them in the office, right next to the gym.) and I've also started jogging.
Now, this is actually rather hard. I'm ~ 120kg; the idea of shifting all that weight around doesn't exactly appeal to me. I'm more worried about busting something out of ineptitude more than anything else. But, I took his advice, so jogging I have been.
To start with, I was running more than jogging, and couldn't survive more than about 20 seconds before my shins ordered me to stop. Ok, so I start slowing down to try and find a stride which I can maintain for a decent amount. Then I started jogging in 30 second blocks. This hurt a lot too; I couldn't manage more than about 10 minutes of it before my body complained.
Its now been about two weeks and I've been jogging on average every other day. Today I managed to jog 10 lots of 1 minute blocks, then 2 lots of 1.5 minute blocks and 1 2 minute block. I decided not to push it - I felt like I could jog more, but I want to make sure I'm not going to do any damage. I'll try a little more tomorrow, see if I can do 10 x 60 seconds and 5 x 90 seconds; then 2 x 2 minute block.
What I find rather interesting is that it is taking me time to warm up. Jogging for 15 or 20 minutes isn't really "exercise", it actually feels like "warmup". After the 15-20 minutes of jogging I'm left feeling like I'm ready to do -more-. Hm! What a curious feeling! :)
What is even more amusing is that I'm jogging in cold weather. Its not cold cold yet - its only uhm, around freezing at night - but it actually seems to stop me from overheating too quickly. I remember trying to jog back in Perth - I'd end up in a massive amount of sweat after 3 or 4 minutes. Here, I'm sweating after 20 minutes of jogging, but I'm not disoriented or dizzy. Hm, I wonder if there's something busted in my temperature regulation.
Anyway. I'm enjoying this jogging thing, and it actually helps that I can measure an improvement after only two weeks. Lets compare the above to around NY and see. Of course, the aim is to get fit and to drop a good 20kg; hopefully that'll come with time. :) |
|
|
| Help! Cubicle Decoration! |
[Dec. 7th, 2008|06:47 pm] |
Hi everyone!
I need some help decorating my cubicle. Please email me links or suggestions of things to print out and staple to my cubicle. :) |
|
|
| Cooking adventures, or "pizza wut?" |
[Dec. 7th, 2008|05:49 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Queens, New York | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | accomplished | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Electric Dreams | ] |
I decided to try making pizza today.
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=52552&l=9518e&id=545168086
Holy crap it turned out great. My mothers direction for the dough were pretty simple - 30g yeast in hot water, 1kg flour, make it up, let it sit. The rest I've done before. I made it up - and the dough wasn't "right". Too much yeast to the dough. Hm, add a bit more flour. It was still too sticky and runny. I basically kept adding more flour to the mix until it felt "right". Don't ask me for quantification of that, ok?
It then rose fine. I added some more flour to fix it up until it didn't stick to my fingers as I rolled it around (which was purely from how I've seen my mother make it.) I then did what I knew how to do - oil pan, knead dough into pan, apply stuff, bake, take out, add more cheese, put in, bake a bit more, voila. |
|
|
| Random Updates |
[Nov. 23rd, 2008|12:01 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Queens, NY | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  amused | ] |
I had a fantastic time last night. Just thought I'd let y'all know.
I've just finished reading Wicked (well, I finished reading it last week, but in "adrian time" that equates to "just".) All I have to say is "Wow."
I bought a copy of the complete works of Lewis Carroll. Illustrated. In a fantastic binding and gorgeous blue and gold embossed cover. Wow. Anyway, this is about as far as I've gotten into Alice in Wonderland, after pushing through reading (and -saying- it to myself to get the rhyme pattern going) The Hunting of the Snark:
Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!
How I wonder what you're at!
Up above the world you fly,
Like a teatray in the sky.
Twinkle, twinkle little bat!
How I wonder what you're at! |
|
|
| IPv6 adoption |
[Oct. 31st, 2008|02:59 pm] |
Idle thought for today - IPv6 adoption might be amusingly quicker if google and such posted -live- stock data on an IPv6 portal, versus 15 minute delayed data on an IPv4 portal.
Hmm.. |
|
|
| stuff and nonsense |
[Oct. 24th, 2008|09:53 am] |
So I just had breakfast at a diner. A real diner. Complete with waiters in white clothes and black bowties. That was nice. I have a few more hours before we head back to Philadelphia for the weekend. I drive back to New York on Sunday. It should be fun! |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
| |
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
erikarn's journal
contemplative
bouncy