As experience builds up we're finding a few knobs of ZFS that we want to experiment with. As we gains a better understanding on them, our aim is that tuning them will not be necessary in the future and there is already work in progress to offset the need to tune them. But for those ZFS users that lives on the bleeding edge of performance, I figured this ztune script can come in handy.

Bizarre ! Vous avez dit Bizarre ?

Given that we started to have enough understanding on the internal dynamics of ZFS, I figured it was time to tackle the next hurdle : running a database management system (DBMS). Now I know very little myself about DBMS, so I teamed up with people that have tons of experience with it, my Colleagues from Performance Engineering (PAE), Neelakanth (Neel) Nagdir and Sriram Gummuluru getting occasional words of wisdom from Jim Mauro as well.

Note that UFS (with DIO) has been heavily tuned over the years to provide very good support for DBMS. We are just beginning to explore the tweaks and tunings necessary to achieve comparable performance from ZFS in this specialized domain.

We knew that running a DBMS would be a challenge since, a database tickles filesystems in ways that are quite different from other types of loads. We had 2 goals. Primarily, we needed to understand how ZFS performs in a DB environment and in what specific area it needs to improve. Secondly, we figured that whatever would come out of the work, could be used as blog-material, as well as best practice recommendations. You're reading the blog material now; also watch this space for Best Practise updates.

Bizarre ! Vous avez dit Bizarre ?

Freakonomics guy talking about the economics of crack dealing.

"How do you feel about being poor and black in America?

A) Very good.
B) Good.
C) Bad.
D) Very bad.

or as it turned out:

E: Fuck you!"

Thats verbatim. This is a funny talk, at times, but the subject matter is very serious, and very interesting.

For instance, the average crack dealer made $3.50 an hour, and stood a 7% annually of being murdered.

David Deutsch on TED Talks

How to effectively solve the world's problems, and where to start: a comprehensive talk.

Bjorn Lomborg on TED Talks

You just gotta read this story. This is amazing stuff - this is ...potentially...revolutionary.

I cannot wait for the Discovery Channel special on this.
No doubt - even if it is absolutely positively authentic - if it could be proven beyond the shadow of a DOUBT - people still would not believe this one. People will resist this as surely as they do evolution.

-----

I like the Jesus TV from Discovery. This is neat!

Tomb of Jesus and Mary Magdaline

I now had the software exactly where I wanted it, in an unintended state; the illegal value 5 was now in my target field. I then turn my attention back to the screen and hit the button which, to my complete surprise, incremented the value to 6! Again, an implementation problem, the increment constrain probably said something like "if value = 4 do not increment." In this case, the value wasn't 4 but 5 so it happily incremented it to 6! I then continue to increment the value by pressing the button until I get to 127 and then I pause for a moment of reflection. 127 is a very special number; it is the upper bound of a 1 byte signed integer. Strange things can happen when we add 1 to this value, namely that 127 1 = -128! I considered this for a moment as I kicked back a small bag of peanuts and in the interest of science I boldly pressed the button once more. Suddenly, the display now flashes -128 just for an instant and then poof...screen goes black.

Poof...screen of the person next to me goes black.

Screens in front of me and behind me go black.

The entire plane entertainment system goes down (and thankfully the cascading system failure didn't spill over to the plane navigation system)!

After a few minutes of mumbling from some of the passengers, a fairly emotionless flight attendant reset the system and all was well. I landed with a new-found respect for the game of Tetris and consider this to be the most entertaining version of it I have ever played.

How to crash an in-flight entertainment system | CSO Blogs

Need to link to a New York Times article from your weblog? Enter your link here, and we'll give you the weblog-safe link.

What does "weblog-safe" mean?

If you look at the URLs of each of the stories, you'll see that there's information encoded after the question mark. Here's an example. The special coding tells the Times's server that the link is coming from a weblog, and now and in the future, this link will work without a fee to access the archive.

There's also a bookmarklet, but I can't include the link here (directly). The source code (in Python) is available. Basically they're just doing a database lookup.

With this, perhaps MemeStreams could normalize NYT URLs as they are blogged, so that the click-throughs continue to work later on. Alternately, they could be used on click-through, in conjunction with the redirect function.

For example: if you visit this page from 2005, entitled "A Film Offers Buckets of Blood in Three Designer Colors", you're hoping to see a review of Sin City. If you click through, you hit the walled garden and are served only the abstract. If you pass it through the link generator, you get a link that takes you through to the full text, complete with images.

New York Times Link Generator

This paper describes mechanisms for asynchronous collaboration in the context of information visualization, recasting visualizations as not just analytic tools, but social spaces. We contribute the design and implementation of sense.us, a web site supporting asynchronous collaboration across a variety of visualization types. The site supports view sharing, discussion, graphical annotation, and social navigation and includes novel interaction elements. We report the results of user studies of the system, observing emergent patterns of social data analysis, including cycles of observation and hypothesis, and the complementary roles of social navigation and data-driven exploration.

The most impressive web charting I've seen.

Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Asynchronous Collaborative Information Visualization

Well worth the click.

Pictures From the Sky

In response to Tim Hardaways "I hate gays" comments, George Takei (Mr. Sulu) makes this public response to him.

Gahahahaha PWNT!

George Takei 0wnz Tim Hardaway