Let’s welcome every foreign student we can get our hands on. Let’s make sure that foreigners come to the Mayo Clinic here, and not the Mayo facility in Dubai or somewhere else. Let’s make sure people come to Disney World and not throw them up against the wall in Orlando simply because they have a Muslim name. Let’s also remember that this country was created by immigrants and thrives as a result of immigration, and we need a sound immigration policy.
Let’s show the world a face of openness and what a democratic system can do. That’s why I want to see Guantánamo closed. It’s so harmful to what we stand for. We literally bang ourselves in the head by having that place. What are we doing this to ourselves for? Because we’re worried about the 380 guys there? Bring them here! Give them lawyers and habeas corpus. We can deal with them. We are paying a price when the rest of the world sees an America that seems to be afraid and is not the America they remember.
Amen! Let’s stop hiding behind an Iron Curtain of Fear.
Are there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system? No. Can they knock down a building? Yes. Can they kill somebody? Yes. But can they change us? No. Only we can change ourselves.
As of 11AM this morning, and until 11AM next Tuesday, I’m “on call” . . . which means that if something breaks, especially at 3AM, I’m the first guy responsible for fixing it.
This is actually a new form of “on call” for me–this is the first time I have been in a “rotation”. At other, smaller companies, I have spent years on-call. Now, that isn’t quite so bad in a small environment where things seldom fail, but it is something of a drag to keep your boss informed of your weekend travel plans so he can watch for pages in your stead. In a larger environment, a week spent on-call can be particularly onerous, because there are plenty of things that will break. But, come the end of the week, you pass the baton . . .
So, this week, I will get my first taste, and over time I will have a better sense as to whether “on call” is better in a smaller environment or a larger environment. I have a feeling that while this week could be rough, that the larger environment is an overall better deal: there is a secondary on-call person, there is an entire team I can call for advice on different things, and the big company provides nice things like a cellular modem card, and bonus pay for on-call time.
If you have a couple of hours free, I recommend sitting back and watching this video of Randy Pausch’s “final” lecture at CMU. He is a smart, talented, ambitious, and accomplished professor who seems to know how to give a lecture, and on this occasion he delivers a lecture some months before he is expected to die of cancer.
He isn’t talking about cancer or dying. He is talking about his life and his advice on how to live life well. I have no commentary; I enjoyed this special moment a great deal and I believe that it is worth sharing.
Images of saffron-robed monks leading throngs of people along the streets of Rangoon have been seeping out of a country famed for its totalitarian regime and repressive control of information.
The pictures are sometimes grainy and the video footage shaky – captured at great personal risk on mobile phones – but each represents a powerful statement of political dissent.
[. . .]
Burmese-born blogger Ko Htike, based in London, has transformed his once-literary blog into a virtual news agency and watched page views rise almost tenfold.
He publishes pictures, video and information sent to him by a network of underground contacts within the country.
“I have about 10 people inside, in different locations. They send me their material from internet cafes, via free hosting pages or sometimes by e-mail,” he told the BBC News website.
“All my people are among the Buddhists, they are walking along with the march and as soon as they get any images or news they pop into internet cafes and send it to me,” he said.
[. . .]
Reporters without Borders describe how a guide for cyber-dissidents provided to young Burmese was seized upon, copied and feverishly disseminated among a growing group of the young, politically active and computer-literate.
Bloggers are teaching others to use foreign-hosted proxy sites – such as your-freedom.net and glite.sayni.net – to view blocked sites and tip-toe virtually unseen through cyberspace, swapping tricks and links on their pages.
I really like to see people taking power for themselves, and I find it all the more gratifying to see the Internet used as a tool in this process.
I’m sure the Chinese government is watching this process very carefully. The BBC article indicates that the government used to be more effective in its Internet censorship efforts: (more…)
A troop of lone-tein (riot police comprised of paid thugs) protected by the military trucks, raided the monastery with 200 studying monks. They systematically ordered all the monks to line up and banged and crushed each one’s head against the brick wall of the monastery. One by one, the peaceful, non resisting monks, fell to the ground, screaming in pain. Then, they tore off the red robes and threw them all in the military trucks (like rice bags) and took the bodies away.
The head monk of the monastery, was tied up in the middle of the monastery, tortured , bludgeoned, and later died the same day, today. Tens of thousands of people gathered outside the monastery, warded off by troops with bayoneted rifles, unable to help their helpless monks being slaughtered inside the monastery. Their every try to forge ahead was met with the bayonets.
When all is done, only 10 out of 200 remained alive, hiding in the monastery. Blood stained everywhere on the walls and floors of the monastery.
There are some pretty nasty photographs on that page, and video of civilians falling to gunfire.
I’ve got a MySQL slave server, and Seconds_Behind_Master keeps climbing. I repaired some disk issues on the server, but the replication lag keeps increasing and increasing. A colleague explained that several times now he has seen a slave get so far behind that it is completely incapable of catching up, at which point the only solution is to reload the data from the master and re-start sync from there. This isn’t so bad if you have access to the innobackup tool.
The server is only lightly loaded. I like to think I could hit some turbo button and tell the slave to pull out all the stops and just churn through the replication log and catch up. So far, I have some advice:
2) MySQL suggest that you can improve performance by using MyISAM tables on the slave, which doesn’t need transactional capability. But I don’t think that will serve you well if the slave is intended as a failover service.
Your options are fairly limited. You can monitor how far behind the slave is . . . and assign less work to it when it starts to lag the master a lot . . . You can make the slave’s hardware more powerful . . . If you have the coding kung-fu, you might also try to “pipeline the relay log.”
After yesterday’s post, I figured I would have to re-synchronize the slave database from the master, but probably build a more capable machine before doing that. I figured at that point, I might as well try fiddling with MySQL config variables, just to see if a miracle might happen.
At first I twiddled several variables, and noticed only that there was less disk access on the system. This is good, but disk throughput had not proven to be the issue, and replication lag kept climbing. The scientist in me put all those variables back, leaving, for the sake of argument, only one changed.
This morning as I logged in, colleagues asked me what black magic I had done. Check out these beautiful graphs:
The default value of this variable is 1, which is the value that is required for ACID compliance. You can achieve better performance by setting the value different from 1, but then you can lose at most one second worth of transactions in a crash. If you set the value to 0, then any mysqld process crash can erase the last second of transactions. If you set the value to 2, then only an operating system crash or a power outage can erase the last second of transactions. However, InnoDB’s crash recovery is not affected and thus crash recovery does work regardless of the value. Note that many operating systems and some disk hardware fool the flush-to-disk operation. They may tell mysqld that the flush has taken place, even though it has not. Then the durability of transactions is not guaranteed even with the setting 1, and in the worst case a power outage can even corrupt the InnoDB database. Using a battery-backed disk cache in the SCSI disk controller or in the disk itself speeds up file flushes, and makes the operation safer.
The Conventional Wisdom from another colleague: You want to set innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1 for a master database, but for a slave–as previously noted–is at a disadvantage for committing writes, it can be entirely worthwhile to set innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=0 because at the worst, the slave could become out of sync after a hard system restart. My take-away: go ahead and set this to 0 if your slave is already experiencing excessive replication lag: you’ve got nothing to lose anyway.
(Of course, syslog says the RAID controller entered a happier state at around the same time I set this variable, so take this as an anecdote.)
I have been following the “One Laptop per Child” project for a while now, formerly known as the “Hundred Dollar Laptop” project, though right now the price comes in closer to $200 . . . in November I am looking forward to getting my hands on one with the “Give One Get One” program. I enjoy following developments on the “OLPC News” blog. Today I learned that Microsoft is scrambling resources to shoehorn its normally-bloated Windows Operating System onto this lightweight gem. That makes me smile because it is usually the case that computers like the laptop I am typing on right now are “Designed for Windows(R) XP” or the like, and it is the Open Source community that must scramble to reverse-engineer and build drivers for the new hardware.
Anyway, I was just looking at a post that suggests that since the OLPC is rather ambitious, technologically and culturally, they have no qualms about redesigning the keyboard: no more CAPS LOCK but instead a mode to shift between Latin alphabet and the local alphabet. Also, perhaps, a “View Source” key: which could perhaps allow kids to poke under the Python hood and check out the code that is running underneath. My goodness!
I’d like to chime in with a “me too” . . . sure most people don’t find much use for the hood latch on a car, but we’re glad it is there: it allows us to get in if we need to. For the smaller number of people who DO want to play under the hood, the hood release is invaluable. We all learn differently and and those who are going to get into computers ought to be given the access and encouragement to learn.
As for code complexity: you can still view the source on this very page and understand much of it. I understand that Python is constrained to 80 columns and is highly highly readable.
As for breaking things: EXACTLY!! The kids ought to have access to break the code on their computers. Rather than turning them in to worthless bricks: worst case you reinstall the OS! Talk about a LEARNING experience!! Anyway, programmers use revision control: hopefully an XO could provide some rollback mechanism. :)
It should also be good for long-term security … people will learn that computers execute code, and code can have flaws an exploits. If the kids can monkey with their own code, you KNOW they’re going to have some early transformative learning experience NOT to paste in “cool” code mods from the Class Hacker. ;)
Sweet! This is the first new laptop I have ever ordered for myself! I’ve been following the HDL-cum-OLPC project for a while now, and the eBook functionality has always sounded sweet to me. I’m eager to check this gear out:
Give One Get One
Between November 12 and November 26, OLPC is offering a Give One Get One program in North America. This is the first time the revolutionary XO laptop has been made available to the general public. For a donation of $399, one XO laptop will be sent to empower a child in a developing nation and one will be sent to the child in your life in recognition of your contribution. $200 of your donation is tax-deductible (your $399 donation minus the fair market value of the XO laptop you will be receiving).
For all U.S. donors who participate in the Give One Get One program, T-Mobile is offering one year of complimentary HotSpot access.
I’ll probably post something once I receive and get to play with it a bit, but I figure that’s a month away . . .
The Girlfriend is set to receive her Eee PC today.
So, a quick briefer: the girlfriend recently bought a new car, and wanted to give her old car to her brother, who lives in New York. Instead of merely shipping it, I suggested that driving it across the continent is indeed a fine undertaking, and this is what we did for Thanksgiving week, taking a southern route through Barstow, CA to Chinle, AZ to Durango, CO, and stopping to see my relatives in Pueblo, CO, her relatives in West Des Moines, IA, Thanksgiving with my folks in Chicago, and on East to spend some time with her family in New Jersey, where we also got to explore New York City together. We flew home on Virgin America Tuesday evening.
The trip itself was not easy, but you could say that we covered considerable distance in space and in heart. The gory details are a story for another time and medium. Here I share an anecdote.
The girlfriend demonstrated her cool little Eee PC to my father, who was of course impressed with the little bugger running Linux. I told him that I myself had ordered from the OLPC “Give One Get One” program and he said he had wanted to do that himself. Unfortunately, times are a little tough for his family just now and they can’t really afford it.
When we got to New Jersey, the girlfriend’s brother wanted to reimburse us for some of our travel expenses–the girlfriend and I viewed the trip as our own vacation, but the brother had budgeted something to ship the car. I thought a moment and accepted some payment, which I then turned around and sent to OLPC to ship a computer to Dad. “A gift begets a gift begets a gift . . .”
(Today happens to be Dad’s birthday, too!)
I had worried that the Give One Get One program had concluded, but according to their web site the program has been extended through December 31st, so no difficulties ordering another for Dad. Then I got another e-mail today:
Your XO laptop is on the way.
Your donated XO laptop will soon be delivered into the hands of a child in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Mongolia or Rwanda. In one of our recipient children’s own words, “I want to thank you people because you had given us the laptop and I love it so much.” Your generosity will make a world of difference in these children’s lives, and in the future of their respective countries.
Thanks to your early action, your XO laptop is scheduled to be delivered between December 14 and December 24. Our “first day” donors are our highest priority and we are making every effort to deliver your XO laptop(s) as soon as possible. We will send you an update upon shipment.
