In what world is it a reasonable Sysadmin action to stop cron entirely, just to avoid an (otherwise-harmless) email alert from one cron job out of 30+ jobs on a host?
I am not sure why this particular insanity is boggling my mind so much today. (Perhaps some of it is due to the Sysadmin in question first trying to use 'svcadm diable cron' -- FOUR TIMES -- before realizing their typo.)
Via BoingBoing, scientists calculate what the oceans and land masses would look like if the Earth stopped spinning. It's a lot weirder than I thought.
I love this kind of stuff!
I saw this bizarre and hilarious blog post about TV shows and, well, bizarrity linked last week from Facebook. It's well worth a read. (The author was a writer/producer for The Sarah Connor Chronicles amongst other things.)
Via boingboing, a hilarious rant on why the History Channel's World War 2 season is so unrealistic -- even more so than Doctor Who!
(Emo Philips, that is.)
Emo Philips has posted a bunch of videos on his site, which were otherwise unavailable. This makes me very happy.
My favorite, I think, has to be the Golden Gate Bridge bit. (This is the "Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist, Great Lakes Region, Council of 1912" bit.) Absolutely brilliant.
Forbes has an interactive map that shows how many people moved from between US counties based on 2008 data from the IRS. This is very cool.
Bristol University researchers found that drinkers develop a tolerance to both the anxiety-producing and the stimulating effects of caffeine, meaning that it only brings them back to baseline levels of alertness, not above them.
"Although frequent consumers feel alerted by caffeine, especially by their morning tea, coffee, or other caffeine-containing drink, evidence suggests that this is actually merely the reversal of the fatiguing effects of acute caffeine withdrawal," wrote the scientists, led by Peter Rogers of Bristol's department of experimental psychology.
New Favorite Blog: You Are Not So Smart, "a blog devoted to self delusion and irrational thinking."
Especially The Just World Fallacy, which explains a lot about certain political types, and The Duchenne Smile, just 'cause it's neat.
This is hilarious, but if you haven't seen the end of LOST, don't click through.
Animated GIF explains LOST in 3 seconds.
(Via BoingBoing.)
Arizona School Demands Black & Latino Students’ Faces On Mural Be Changed To White.
What the fuck is going on in Arizona?
Meanwhile, in South Carolina, a State Senator describes an Indian-American candidate for governor[1] (and President Obama) as a "raghead".
What the fuck is going on in South Carolina?
(I do realize that idiotic and appalling racism is not limited to Sunbelt states full of cranky white retirees and the state which was the epicenter of the Confederacy. I will not be surprised -- saddened, but not surprised -- if I have to ask what the fuck is going on in Massachusetts in the near future. My point is: what the fuck?)
[1]This is the same Family Values candidate who appears to have had an affair with a political blogger. Yes, she's a Republican.
So I'm at our local Science Fiction/Fantasy Bookstore, and I'm asking the clerk about when a book is coming out, and in the course of the conversation he utters these words:
I don't really like SF that much. I don't really read.
I suppose it's possible that the owner is scraping the bottom of the barrel on clerks here, but still.
Music industry spokesperson explains why they love child porn (because it gives them the wedge they want to filter the rest of the net).
PowerPoint is destroying military readiness.
I'm waiting for Fox News to call Bill Gates an enemy of America.
Max Headroom finally arrives on DVD. Unfortunately, we still have to wait till August 10th, but it's coming.
Found in a perl script:
my $end_time = `perl -e '{print time(), "\n"}'`;
<voice source="South Park" imitate="Butters">Oww...that hurt my brains. Owwww.</voice>
Whatever issues I have with Obama, this makes me very happy.
Can you imagine George W. Bush attending a seder, much less hosting one?
So I updated one of my servers to Ubuntu 9.10 recently (I like to stay back from the bleeding edge), and it took me a while to realize that somewhere in there — possibly in the recent kernel update — my system beep went away. A little searching showed that a lot of people hate the system beep and were looking ways to turn it off. Fair enough, but apparently Ubuntu thought that it was a good idea to turn off the system beep by default. Bad Ubuntu!
To fix this, I did
modprobe pcspkr
and to make this stick at reboot, I had to un-blacklist the 'pcspkr' module, which I did by removing the
blacklist pcspkr
line in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf.