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laymil

60 karma · joined October 8, 2010

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laymil··on A Type of Road Junction that Kills Cyclists
Left is across traffic in the US. Different sides of the road.
laymil··on One year with the Truly Ergonomic keyboard
Could you explain what you mean by "this keyboard puts heavy emphasis to press modifier keys (enter, ctrl, alt, etc) with the thumb?" I'm sitting here with one in front of me and can't figure out how I would possibly hit anything in your list other than the 'enter' key with my thumb.
laymil··on Backblaze Vaults: Zettabyte-Scale Cloud Storage Architecture
I'm actually rather surprised you didn't just go with JErasure (http://jerasure.org/).
laymil··on Amazon Prime Members’ Newest Benefit Is Free, Unlimited Photo Storage
It's a rather fair statement to make. The rates of errors in memory are significant[1], and ZFS does nothing to ensure that in memory data structures are uncorrupted; it was designed to be used with ECC RAM[2].

[1]http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf [2]http://louwrentius.com/please-use-zfs-with-ecc-memory.html

laymil··on My experience with using cp to copy 432 million files (39 TB)
And it's interesting and useful for scientific computing where you already have an MPI environment and distributed/parallel filesystems. However, it's not really applicable to this workload, as the paper itself says.

There is a provision in most file systems to use links (symlinks, hardlinks, etc.). Links can cause cycles in the file tree, which would result in a traversal algorithm going into an infinite loop. To prevent this from happening, we ignore links in the file tree during traversal. We note that the algorithms we propose in the paper will duplicate effort proportional to the number of hardlinks. However, in real world production systems, such as in LANL (and others), for simplicity, the parallel filesystems are generally not POSIX compliant, that is, they do not use hard links, inodes, and symlinks. So, our assumption holds.

The reason this cp took such large amounts of time was the desire to preserve hardlinks and the resize of the hashtable used to track the device and inode of the source and destination files.

laymil··on AAAS Blocking Access to the Scientific Literature When They Say It Is “Free”
Yes. Generally, when you publish you transfer the copyright of the article to the publisher.
laymil··on Chrome Remote Desktop for Linux
There are several versions of VNC that support xrandr resizing. Arch documents this working with TigerVNC [0]. Additionally, you can use xrdp + x11rdp.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/xrandr#Using_xrandr_wit...

laymil··on Counting Stars on GitHub
I thought that was well addressed by this comment in the post:

"Looking at the top repo for each language also exposes a weakness in the methodology: GitHub’s language identification isn’t perfect and there are number of polyglot projects. The top Java repo is Storm, which uses enough Clojure (20.1% by GitHub’s measure) to make this identification questionable when you take into account Clojure’s conciseness over Java’s."

laymil··on Anonymous Pro – a fixed-width font designed for coders
There was a good write up on HN a while back about this font, including a republished version called Nameless Amateur which fixes the positioning of the forward slash. See http://1overn.com/2011/02/02/tweaking-my-favorite-programmin...
laymil··on How far the once-mighty SourceForge has fallen
LWN had a similar feature posted yesterday which has significantly more background information. http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/564250/0a106d6379c0d741/
laymil··on Writing a FUSE file system in Go
Fuse requires root permissions in Linux. Most distributions simple make the fusermount binary setuid.
laymil··on A proposal for an always-releasable Debian
Now that Wheezy is Stable, you shouldn't have to do the first step.
laymil··on Ceph storage system
The metadata server has never been a single point of failure in Ceph.
laymil··on New troll scam: pay us $495 or face felony charges and jail time
At this point it just says "Effective immediately, the Internet Copyright Law Enforcement Agency has ceased operations. Please disregard any notices you received from us, and please do not send us any payments."

Too much publicity?

laymil··on Linux TCP/IP Tuning
If you're running nginx in production on Ubuntu or Debian, you'd probably be well-served by using their packages rather than the distribution default ones.

http://nginx.org/en/download.html

laymil··on Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters
Based solely on my own experience, I believe that the benefits to be gained by physical proximity decrease according to an inverse square law. The benefits gained from sitting with the team you're currently working with can't be discounted, but as teams grow and your team overflows a single office, the synergies shared between team members in the same room far outweigh those with team members in the next room, to the point where they could be next door or across the country with little difference.

Embracing the distributed approach and realizing the cutoff point leads to building better tools for collaboration and integrating them into the work environment. Without this recognition, the mentality is that you can always talk to someone in person.

I've worked in multinational companies where collaborating with someone across continents, bar the time difference, was just as easy as working with someone down the hall. I currently work for a company that has not yet achieved this recognition, so working with anyone outside my immediate office takes hard work and determination.

laymil··on Icinga - a Re-architected Nagios fork
You should be able to send data using passive checks. As far as I know, that has always been the model in Nagios.
laymil··on R.I.P. Ruby Hash Rocket Syntax 1993-2010
Correct. It is wonderful sugar, but somewhat limiting. Realistically, you need to know both syntaxes.

  irb(main):001:0> hash={:"symbol with space" => nil}
  => {:"symbol with space"=>nil}
  irb(main):002:0> hash={"symbol with space": nil}
  SyntaxError: (irb):2: syntax error, unexpected ':',  expecting tASSOC
  hash={"symbol with space": nil}
                          ^
	from /usr/bin/irb1.9.1:12:in `<main>'
  irb(main):003:0> hash={"symbolwithoutspace": nil}
  SyntaxError: (irb):3: syntax error, unexpected ':',  expecting tASSOC
  hash={"symbolwithoutspace": nil}
                           ^
	from /usr/bin/irb1.9.1:12:in `<main>'
  irb(main):004:0> hash={symbolwithoutspace: nil}
  => {:symbolwithoutspace=>nil}
  irb(main):005:0> hash={symbol with space: nil}
  SyntaxError: (irb):5: syntax error, unexpected tIDENTIFIER, expecting keyword_do or '{' or '('
  hash={symbol with space: nil}