Was heute in der "Bild"-Zeitung steht, steht morgen ueberall. Vielleicht sollte man sich also mal genauer anschauen, was sie schreibt. Die kleinen Merkwuerdigkeiten und das grosse Schlimme.

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Using Ruby and SQLite to create Linux clusters that take advantage of idle nodes and bypass expensive software solutions.

My friend Dave Clements always is game for a brainstorming session, especially if I’m buying the coffee. Recently, we met at the usual place and I explained my problem to him over the first cup. My office had a bunch of Linux nodes sitting idle and a stack of work lined up for them, but we had no way to distribute the work to them. Plus, the deadline for project completion loomed over us.

Over the second cup of coffee, I related how I had evaluated several packages, such as openMosix and Sun’s Grid Engine, but ultimately had decided against them. It all came down to this: I wanted something leaner than everything I’d seen, something fast and easy, not a giant software system that would require weeks of work to install and configure.

After the third cup of coffee, we had it: Why not simply create an NFS-mounted priority queue and let nodes pull jobs from it as fast as they could? No scheduler, no process migration, no central controller, no kernel mods—simply a collection of compute nodes working as fast as possible to complete a list of tasks. But there was one big question: was accessing an NFS-mounted queue concurrently from many nodes possible to do safely? Armed with my favorite development tools—a brilliant IDE named Vim and the Ruby programming language—I aimed to find out. link

 32.times{|y|print" "*(31-y),(0..y).map{|x|~y&x>0?" .":" A"},$/}

Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour’s most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.

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I consider the mozex extention for Firefox a "must have." With mozex, I can edit textareas with vim and handle mailto links with mutt!

Mozex will also enable you to view html source in vim. link

You can edit your mozex prefs by typing about:config in Firefox.

 My personal take is that they just wanted to make sure that
 *everybody* is keen on getting an account. Make it exclusive,
 by invitation only. Seeding it amongst the geekest of geeks,
 first generation invites went quickly. But seemingly invited
 users got their own share of invites.

 Now it has become a practical test for the claim that every two people
 in the U.S. can build a chain of mutually known persons of maximum
 length 6. If that is true, how many invites per person would you need to
 reach saturation?

 Make people sign up and store their information on your company disks?
 Easy. Instead of crawling and begging them for their data, be a snob
 and make it a challenge for them. They will fall for it.

 On my box I have gobs of gigabytes for email storage, no ads
 and a very fast interface via procmail, formail, mutt and grep.
 I will not entrust a company with a service I can provide just
 as good.  I will be the last one without a Google email address.

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For details and downloads, go to: freeride.rubyforge.org/

Many bug fixes in this release especially on the Windows platform. There are also some new features: all dock panes can now be dock and undocked, Debugger and Script Runner works better on Win32, debugged process can be run in a console for Windows users to see the process output…

Have fun! And, as always, feedback and contributions are welcome.