- Spam subject: “Your watch will find you no matter where you are.” What if I don’t want Stalker Watch to follow me around?
- @BadAstronomer writes a short-short story:
Beware of what you wish for… Immortality is boring.
- Waiting for food at Rubio’s. Employees are trying to get the lyrics straight for the latest Jack-In-the-Box commercial.
Category: Tech
Out with the Old
OK, I think the new server is tested enough for now. Time for lunch. And, I think, a walk.
…
Odd: I just watched two people tossing things over the edge of the roof of an office building in the distance for several minutes.
…
I’ve just turned off our oldest internet-facing server. I’m not 100% sure, but I think it went back to 2001 – almost as old as IE6!
Impressed by Smooth Fedora 11 Upgrade
A few days ago, my Linux desktop at work popped up a message saying that Fedora 11 was available, and asking whether I wanted to upgrade automatically. Well, I didn’t have time to deal with it then, and in the past when I’ve upgraded Fedora (either from a CD or from a downloaded image), it’s been a big production, what with running the installer, rebooting, installing updates, updating third-party repositories, and finally rebooting again after all the updates are installed.
So I put it off for a few days.
Today I decided to try it.
The automatic upgrade program is called preupgrade, presumably because it downloads everything you need in order to prepare for the upgrade. It downloads everything while your system is up and running, then sets it up so that when you reboot, it will launch the installer. It installs everything, makes the changes, then reboots into the newly upgraded system.
And then it’s done.
It’s network aware, and works through yum, so it will actually take into account both third-party repositories and anything that’s been updated since the new release. It actually went out to livna.org RPM Fusion and picked up the appropriate NVIDIA display drivers.
Download while you work. Reboot. Wait. Done.
The only snafu I ran into was that it removed my copy of the Flash plugin, but I think I was using the experimental 64-bit one anyway, so it’s not terribly surprising.
I get the impression that Ubuntu has had a similarly smooth upgrade process for a while. And after my experiences moving from Fedora 9 to Fedora 10, I was seriously considering jumping ship. (Hazards of living on the bleeding edge.) But it looks like I won’t have to.
Now I just have to find time to play around and see what’s new!
Update: I’ve run into one snafu: xkb error popups every time I wake the computer from suspend. Resetting the keyboard worked.
DMOZ Contact Unknown
So is dmoz.org dead or what? Applied to edit a category, got the “reply to this to confirm” message, replied…and got user unknown.
Update: I re-sent my confirmation from another address and it went through. Apparently their server doesn’t like mail from pobox.com. But instead of saying so, it gives a bogus “user unknown” error.
Coffee Cliché
Realized I’m doing the cliche coffee+laptop+wifi thing…except I’m at home with coffee I brewed myself and using my own network.
The Twitpocalypse Explained in Layman’s Terms
It’s a trending topic, but there’s a lot of misunderstanding about the Twitpocalypse. Here’s what’s going on, in layman’s terms (I hope).
What’s happening?
- Every Twitter post has an ID number that goes up by 1 each time.
- When a computer program stores a number, it sets aside a certain amount of space for it. Bigger numbers take more space because they have more digits.
- One common format is called a “signed integer.” It has 32 binary digits (1 or 0 only) with one digit set aside to indicate a minus sign. The biggest number it can store is 2,147,483,647.
- Twitter’s status IDs are approaching that number.
So what’s the likely impact?
- Twitter itself can handle bigger numbers and will be fine.
- Third-party apps that store the ID in a bigger format will be fine.
- Third-party apps that store the ID as text instead of a number will be fine.
- Third-party apps that store the ID in this particular format will end up with bad IDs as they try to cram a big number into a small space.
If I were to guess, the most likely breakage would be that replies might be attached to the wrong previous post — but again, only with apps that use this particular format for numbers.
Twitter itself will probably sail through cleanly (and has been planning to move up the schedule so that affected app developers don’t have to fix things in the middle of the night), so don’t expect any fail whales. Unless so many clients have problems that lots of people switch to the website.
Update: Not surprisingly, most Twitter clients are unaffected by the Twitpocalypse. I’ve used both Twidroid and Twhirl with no problems since Twitter passed the mark. I figured a few would get tripped up, but the real surprise is that it hit Twitterrific. One of the most popular clients on the iPhone? They do have an update, but a lot of people are unable to connect.
Why, the NERV!
Spam from “Gendo Ikari” selling lava lamps. The mind boggles.
Edit: I guess that orange goo in the finale wasn’t Tang after all.