Derek writes that Chuck Yerkes passed away in a motorcycle accident (copy on this page).
He sent a mail to the perl.org list-owner address late that afternoon and I replied to it just in the hour before the accident. Freaky. I didn't know him, barely even by reputation, but from reading the memorial wiki, he seems to have been a great for everyone who had a chance to know him. Hopefully they use Unix servers where he is now too. :-)
Festen has finally been released on DVD in region 1, woohoo. Highly recommended if you haven't seen it already.
The I ♥ Huckabees trailer looks promising.
In vaguely related news our Netflix queue is +300 DVDs, plus a couple dozen movies "in queue" on our firewire drives. Yikes. Not enough time to use the projector.
We went to see Collateral last weekend. (imdb, amazon.com)
Lots of pretty pictures of Los Angeles at night. I am a sucker for pretty movies.
Until the end the characters were fun and interesting. I am a sucker for slightly sympathetic bad guys in movies.
Couldn't they have thought of something better than the standard run-of-the-mill action ending?
15-inch PowerBook G4 Battery Exchange Program
In cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and other international safety authorities, Apple is voluntarily recalling certain lithium ion rechargeable batteries that were sold worldwide from January 2004 through August 2004 for use with 15-inch PowerBook G4 (Aluminum) notebook computers. These batteries were manufactured by LG Chem, Ltd. of South Korea.
[...]
Q. If I have a battery with Model No. A1075, do I need to exchange my battery?
A. No, only batteries with Model No. A1045 and serial numbers beginning with: HQ404, HQ405, HQ406, HQ407, HQ408 are affected by the recall program.
Zach Braff has a garden state weblog (trailer, imdb):
Some of you have been asking about the rating. Just so you all know, your government doesn't believe a 16 year old should hear the word "fuck" more than twice in a 2 hour period. The second you say "fuck" twice in a movie your film becomes "R". No exceptions. Pretty crazy, huh? You can blow someone's head off, but 2 fucks makes you unwatchable for someone under 17. Unless they have their parent there to explain it to them. "Mom, I understood the first use of the word fuck, but what's with the second - give me guidance please. I've heard one fuck before, but ever since I heard the second one I've had this insatiable desire to rob a liquor store and refer to all women as "ho's".
Anyway, that's why the movie's R. There is a brief shot of a breast - not mine don't get all excited - but it's because of the "one fuck" rule.
(via James Duncan Davidson)
What exactly did the Iranians tell European diplomats last month
The big story here is not what [undersecretary of state] Bolton said -- at least not in the sense of considering it presumptively factual. It is rather that while we're in the midst of the administration's passing off its past sins on admittedly blameworthy intelligence agencies, it is going right ahead with the same sort of manipulative and deceitful practices that have already caused the nation such grief.
Phil Agre is writing again, yay:
"Some conservative rhetors have taken to literally demonizing the very notion of a democratic opposition. Rush Limbaugh has argued at length that Tom Daschle resembles Satan simply because he opposes George Bush's policies. Ever since then, Limbaugh has regularly identified Daschle as "el diablo". This is the emotional heart of conservatism: the notion that the conservative order is ordained by God and that anyone and anything that opposes the conservative order is infinitely evil."
What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?
(via Red Rock Eater)
Lots of cool organizations and companies are providing open source mirrors. I was surprised though to see that Playboy has an open source mirror, including a CPAN mirror. "I read it for the source code"?
colobus is running again so our nntp service now joined the dozens of other services that are working (most have been working all along).
I just changed DNS to point to the new IP, so if you tried recently it might take another hour or so before your DNS cache expires the bad entry for nntp.perl.org. The web interface is working and didn't change IP.
The tinderbox is still down. We have a plan for setting it up, but we are waiting for something to be able to (more on that later). Don't expect it back until sometime in the middle of next week. We'd like to host it but not maintain it too actively (as it has been in the past), so it's not entirely in our control. :-)
You might have seen some mail trickle in over the last few hours. We've been testing and slowly letting some get through while watching the logs and I just "flipped the switch" to make it go full throttle. Yay!
The nntp service isn't up yet, but will be soon.
Robert got all the data out of onion earlier today, yay.
I have another box sending out the old mail queue from onion now and I'm working on setting up the lists again on one of the boxes we got from BizRate some time ago.
Unless I hit some evil show stopper mail should be flowing again some time later tonight.
Oh, if anyone have some spare 18 or 36GB scsi drives then we could use a few to get mirrored drives. :-)
Yay, progress!
The box couldn't even boot on the 5.2.1 boot CD I made, but it did run on the Linux Rescue CD.
Robert copied the raw partitions with dd to another box so we can mount them there. It's copying the /home partition now and should be done mid-afternoon. Haven't yet decided on a plan for what to do after that. I think we'll boot the box in FreeBSD (4.10 system) and see if it can run stable for a couple of hours while we work on copying (from the raw disk image copies) and setting up the lists on another box.
We are trying to figure out what's making the hardware so flaky. We need it to be able to stay up for at least an hour a few times so we can copy everything over to another box. The fsck takes forever all by itself.
Current theory is that it's something causing a short once in a while, as it's sometimes rebooting shortly after plugging keyboard, monitor or serial port in or out. In the past it'd reboot in the same way if we had a keyboard plugged in (but only then, we thought).
The perl.org MX is actually on another system, so it's (almost) only the mailing lists and the NNTP service that is affected. Mail to RT etc is generally still working.
I made a bunch of boot CDs. I booted it on memtest a couple of hours ago. Thursday morning (PST, thursday afternoon UTC) we'll go down[1] to the data center and see how the memtest went, if it stayed up through it and try to get it up and running one way or another.
When we've succeeded with copying the files I'll set the lists up on our new list server and the mail should start flowing again. Hopefully that'll be sometime late Thursday night or early Friday morning UTC.
[1] It's two floors underground, so literally down...
Steve Fink just reminded me that the tinderbox also used to run on onion. We'll try to get that moved over and setup again somewhere.
Thanks for your patience everyone. :-)
Just before OSCON we got a console server and some power management units from Cyclades (it's awesome, can't recommend it enough!) and a load balancer from Coyote Point. Last week I ordered the cables and adapters we needed and monday afternoon Robert and I went down to the data center to install the new goodies.
Plugging in the power management units required us to shut down everything, or at least it was much easier that way. The upside is that now we can login to all our equipment even if we mess up the firewall rules or kernel configuration on a box.
Of course it ended up taking about a billion hours before we were done setting up power and console cables everywhere and configuring the console server.
A good part of the time went, once again, to dealing with the ancient onion server. It started to spontaneously reboot every 10-30 minutes again. (It takes 20-25 minutes for it to boot with disk check and all, big old raid).
I've just spent a bunch of hours moving things around, fixing them to work on the new systems and setting them up on other boxes so we should be doing okay without onion -- except for one big thing. All the mailing lists and the NNTP service is still living on onion. Not entirely sure what to do if we can't make the box run again a bit more stable. The lists and archives are something like half a million files so it's hard to get copied off in the few minutes I get every few hours. And it's our only FreeBSD box now. Can I mount the UFS file system with a standard RHEL kernel? If so maybe I can hook up the RAID to a linux box and copy it off.
Last time onion did this trick it was only while we had the keyboard plugged in, this time it just won't stabilize.
Anyway, the good news is that we are now able to manage more stuff remotely. The bad news is that the mailing list service will be sporadic for another day or two in worst case.
Zzzzz.zZ... time to sleep for me.
ooh, of course now onion is up and I should try copying some more things off there...
Baby, we were born to run against Bush
More than 20 artists, including Bruce Springsteen, the Dave Matthews Band, R.E.M., Pearl Jam, James Taylor and the Dixie Chicks, announced the launch of a ``Vote For Change'' tour yesterday.
"A vote for Bush is a vote for a divided, unstable, paranoid America,'' Dave Matthews said in one of the more strongly worded statement.
