Terminally Incoherent

Taken out of context, this is quite disturbing but funny as hell:

click to see original

Eeeeew!

found via myconfinedspace

Anyone else is having Gmail issues todoay? Whenever I try to send out an email I get the following popup:

It started happening today around 6pm or so. I also have this weird yellow warning square in the gmail chat interface:

If you can’t see it, the message says: We’re experiencing technical difficulties that may prevent your chats from being sent. WTF does that mean?

I’m only experiencing this in Firefox 1.5.0.6 - when I logged into Gmail using Opera everything was working fine. This is bizarre.

Update Wed, August 23 2006, 11:22 PM

I think I found the problem. I disabled and reinstalled Gmail Manager 0.5 extension, and everything started working again. Must have been something wrong with it. Very strange.

If you have watched the Colbert Report you probably saw Steven’s commentary on Gregori Perelman’s refusal to accept the Fields Medal. Perelman received his award for producing a proof to the Poincaré Conjecture showing that it is impossible to deform a holed doughnut into a sphere by bending and stretching it – without cutting or tearing it.

Colbert decided to prove him wrong by taking a doughnut, squeezing it into a ball with his hands and eating it… Just like Zefrank who did the same exact thing on the show yesterday. Zefrank fans are currently freaking out on the forums.

Steven Colbert - You’re On Notice!

I’m willing to chalk this up to a coincidence. After all, anyone could have came up with that joke. Ze was simply first to publish his version due to the magic of the internets. But, since Steven always seems to be on the ball with these kind of things, he should mention Ze on his show. Seriously Steven - this is the least you could do!

Ever wondered exactly how geeky are you? When I say geeky, I mean it in the most positive, favorable way. How much more knowledgeable, and technologically competent are you compared to the unwashed masses?

Below are some more or less cryptic statements that probably won’t make sense to mere mortals. See if you understand all of them without looking them up. In other words, if you look at one of those and you think “WTF in hell???” you don’t get your points. For each one that you actually get, give yourself 1 geek point. If you are stumped, I have the explanations posted below for your convinience.

If asked, could you explain the following statements?

1. ~
2. #!
3. (x?1:2)
4. 127.0.0.1
5. 10 = 2
6. Oct 31 = Dec 25
7. FF = 255
8. A is 41
9. 2147483647*2 = -2
10. s/.\(.\)/&\1/g will make Bob into a Boob
11. #ifdef
12. When I say 12345678, you say 36145278
13. 1337
14. 1D10T
15. PEBKAC
16. s/\//\\/g
17. grep the | cat today
18. (car (cdr ‘(car cdr cadr)))
19. <lt;>
20. nmap -O –osscan-guess –fuzzy target

You can get total of 20 points from the questions above. Here is another batch of questions - you can answer each yes or no. For each yes you get 1 geek point.

1. you know your IP current address without looking
2. and the addresses of 3 other workstations on your network
3. all of your machines have port 22 open
4. you read your email by telneting to port 110 on your mailserver at least once in your life
5. you sent email by telneting to port 25 on your mailserver least once
6. you have a strong oppinion in the vi vs. emacs debate
7. and in the interpreted vs. compiled debate
8. you know for sure that your OS is better than some other OS
9. you have a headless server standing in your house
10. the uptime of one of the machines in your house is one year or more
11. you have a very strong opinion on object oriented paradigm
12. and about functional programming
13. and about Open Source
14. you have a live linux CD and a screwdriver in your backpack (just in case)
15. you have 4 or more electronic gadgets on you at any given time

Finally, give yourself 1 geek point for every programming language you know. Stop counting after you reach 10. If you know more than 10 languages, that’s awesome, but we have to stop this somewhere.

Add it all up and you will get a score ranging between 0 and 45. The higher you get, the geekier you are. Enjoy!

(more…)

I’m becoming anal-retentive about backups lately. Back in the day I really didn’t care about it. But I have seen so many drives going bad in the last few months, that I’m getting obsessive about securing my own data. Right now I do a bi-weekly backup to my secondary drive located in the same machine.

This is sufficient (data is replicated on 2 physical drives), but I’m not really content with it. What if both drives fail at the same time? Hell, what if my computer blows up? I know this is an unlikely scenario, but it worries me.

I really want a fully redundant solution. Lately I have been thinking about setting up a backup server for my house network. I happen to have few ports free on the router, so this could be an interesting project. So fat this is how I envision my data storage on the cheap:

• low end CPU, and enough ram to run OS
• low end graphics card, no sound card
• 1 small (20-30 GB) disk for the OS
• 2 large 400GB+ drives set up as RAID-1 array
• stable linux distro capable of doing software RAID
• samba so that windows boxen can map it

I could reuse one of my old junkers from the attic, or possibly buy a basic headless low end desktop for $200-300. The two large drives would obviously be the most expensive part of the solution. But I’m quite confident you could buy a drive that size for under $200 (I saw one that size on neweg for $135). With a little bargain hunting, and scavengering I think it would be possible to build this system for well under $500.

It could be a very interesting project, and it would sure make me sleep better. My biggest concern of course would be setting up the Software RAID. I have never done this myself, and most of the RAID machines I worked with have it done at the hardware level. There are some really cheap RAID controllers out there - question is, would the OS support them?

This warrants some further research. If and when I go through with this, I will post a complete step by step report on how I accomplished it.