OK. So imagine that you have a mega popular forum for dev nerds, and want them to be able to authenticate against that forum when they go to edit their wiki. Imagine further that the forum is SMF, which is a really nice forum package, other than the fact that it is written in PHP (they know not what they do).

Other than the fact that this is kinda like getting your peanut butter in my chocolate, or something, it is also a problem since the languages of your wiki (TRAC in Python) and your forum (SMF in PHP) are completely different, and the libraries don't match. Good thing I am here to do this horrible cludge for y'all.

Is tomorrow going to be the big implosion of the stock market that drags us into a global recession, or what?

I am terrified, but I just put a limit order in for SZK ;)

Guess we'll see tomorrow. Hang on tight folks.

After testing elasticdrive all week (painful and repetitive, but necessary), I stumbled upon an idea to radically improve throughput.

The original ED implementation was not a good performer for RAID5, due to it's multithreaded architecture, but the new version supports an ordered read/write model, and has a much lower cpu and memory footprint...

Turns out that when you are interfacing something to the kernel, it is a REALLY bad idea to log to stderr, ESPECIALLY if it is exceedingly rare, and only in your debug logging code. Grrr.

Just got back from the future shop (evil). While I generally loath them, I have a hard time getting angry at a $99 500G hard drive. They have literally thousands of these things lining the entire store. I cannot imagine how they even manufacture these so cheap.

It used to be (in the old days) that after moving out, the worst a nerdy young sprog had to worry about was . the occasional computer maintenance request from their parents. Times however, are changing. Nowadays parental units are far more likely to have a need for personal webmail, chat, picture management, and even a CMS.

More after the break...

So, the rant server is slowly getting moved over to my new Xen/Enomalism based, s00per chr00ted nginx/fastcgi installation. Everything is going rather well. Safe mode didn't break anything (so far), and smf forum was a breeze to set up again.

One neat thing I started working on was wildcard DNS based subdomains. Rant has a LOAD of different domains, all living in subdomains of the main vhost. The old method was a bunch of different vhost definitions, but since I didn't feel like re-entering them in the new nginx method, I figured I would come up with a better way.

More after the break...

Just a note to self. In the case of a serial console never getting around to the login prompt on a Xen DomU, even though it still displays all of the normal console boot messages, just change /etc/inittab as follows:

from:

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1

to:

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --noclear console

Also note: Why do we still call these things tty(s)? That is SOOO 70s!

Oh Boy! I can hardly wait! A well defined security policy document that will doubtlessly be implemented just as flawlessly as the previous html and css standards.

</sarcasm>

Seriously, I am not giving a hard time to the poor folks at W3C, as much as to the implementations. The W3C standards are VERY complicated, but the implementation from the larger vendors (Micro$oft, I am looking at you) were lackluster for a LONG time. I don't expect any better for the security policy framework, but with potentially much more serious ramifications

W3C Policy Document

So... I just finished writing a cool new application, called ElasticDrive. ElasticDrive is a pluggable virtual storage daemon which can store your files in a virtual block device, which is backed on RAM, Flat Files (like loopback), or as a virtual drive on S3!
(in case you missed it, the S3 part is the coolest).
The reason we wanted to build this was primarily for creating software raid to provide redundancy for the instability inherent in Amazon EC2 instances. We use a lot of EC2 machines, but the only drawback is that when they shut down, they are gone forever.
The interesting thing is that there are all kinds of other uses for this block device. Turns out that people can thing of all kinds of neat ways to store data, and reasons why!
Another cool thing is that the storage engines are pluggable, so adding new storage methods is as easy as writing a well define object that can provide the following interfaces:

• poll(): return pending results
• write(ofs,data,handle): Write data at offset bytes ofs, with handle
• read(ofs,length,handle): duh!
• busy(): Well, are you busy, or can you take another request
• flush(): Flush all pending data to prep for shutdown.