Horsepower: 215 hp @ 6,250 rpm Torque: 185 lb-ft. @ 2,750 rpm

…there, now I won’t forget this anymore.

I purchased a new car recently and in doing so became (for the first time) moderately curious about its performance characteristics. I set about to see how it compared to my previous vehicle performance-wise and was immediately struck by a pivotal question…

Link: The Truth About Horsepower, Torque, and Acceleration

If you’re a Unix geek you need to check out this thread:

Link: Unix Geeks With Too Much Time

I just got pwned by the Digg effect — for like 15 hours — and I’m still unsure of where the bottleneck was.

Was it MYSQL? Was it Apache? I need to do some research. If it’s my host I’m going to pummel them, and if it’s inefficient code on my server, then I’m going to rectify that. I do know that I could still ping my site while the website was down. I could still SSH to it as well, and get mail.

I’m thinking it has to be AMP based. So embarrassing…I pay good money for a dedicated server, and I should to be able to withstand a Digg effect better than this. This can’t happen again.

If anyone’s a guru on optimizing servers to withstand traffic onslaughts, let me know.

If only I would have GNU-own.

It’s better when you say it out loud, but I thought it was genius.

The other night while driving back home I happened upon a stretch of country road that had dozens of frogs either hopping across or just sitting there.

I hit many of them, and it bothered me greatly. I swerved to avoid quite a few, but some were just so bent on suicide that they basically jumped right in front of me.

The irony was that I was listening to Danzig at full blast through all this. So I’m singing along to “satanic” music being pumped through the car at a deafening volume, yet I am getting upset because I’m inadvertently killing little frogs on the highway.

The real question at hand, though, is how most other people feel about killing frogs on the highway. Especially those who would judge me for listening to Danzig. I can’t help but think they wouldn’t care much.

lsof is one of the most powerful Linux/Unix tools out there, but it’s relatively unknown and unused. I’ve just completed a short guide to some of its most useful functions. If you’re into *nix at all and are not familiar with this incredible tool, go have a gander.

Link: A Guide To lsof

On Sep 11, 2006, at 11:42 PM, David wrote:

I’m still believing that Bush is giving us the best response of the recent and present presidential choices in this matter, and feel he’s done more to thwart attacks on the USA and promote some semblance of stability in the mideast than any of his opponents would have done.

Unfortunately, David, what Bush has tried to do, or what he has “intended” to do, has nothing to do with the reality he has created. I happen to believe that he’s fundamentally a “good” person in that I believe he thinks he’s doing the right thing. So I don’t think he’s evil or hateful or anything like that.

But that doesn’t matter. The fact is that the world hates this country intensely because of his actions, and this fact has put is in far more danger than we’ve ever been before. See, the thing you and other conservatives are not realizing is that terrorists need something in order to operate: they need the world to agree with them, or at least a large part of it.

If terrorism lacks support, it dies. And I’m not talking about finacial support — I mean popular support. What Bush has done is create a massive upsurge in support for terrorism across the entire planet. Nobody likes us anymore directly as a result of him. Not even our allies have any sympathy for us. At this point we could be bombed on our own soil again and the world would basically agree that we deserved it.

That’s what you’re not seeing. It’s not about being militarily tough on terrorists. That doesn’t work if you’re creating hate at the same time. You have to act in a way that makes the entire world sympathize with you, thus removing the power from the terrorists. If you are “tough” on terror, but go around making the entire world hate you then you’ve done the country a huge disservice.

Here’s a mathematical way of looking at it: imagine you have two elements — protection and animosity. For every point of protection we lower our risk by 1 point, and for every point of animosity against us we gain 10 points of risk.

So if you’re trying to lower risk (which is what he’s trying to do), you can’t launch a campaign that raises our protection by 15 points while simultaneously raising the animosity against us by 100. If you do the math you’ll see what this does to our country’s actual danger level, and pointing to how much protection that 15 points got us is utterly meaningless.

This is precisely the world we’re living in now. We’re being told that the military gains we’ve made are winning the “war on terror”, when in fact we’ve done nothing but make it more acceptable to attack us due to our behavior. I ask you to consider this and rethink your opinion.

Sincerely,

– Daniel Miessler E: daniel@dmiessler.com W: http://dmiessler.com G: 0xD158D5A3

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