7/27    http://csua.org/u/oon
        "Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has sacked the countryĂ¢â‚¬â„¢s
        intelligence chief in the wake of a controversy that further
        exposed rifts within the political establishment in Tehran. A look
        at recent developments, as top U.S. officials gather for talks in
        Israel."
        \_ When are we gonna invade already?

7/27    Pres Obama is the first out of the closet, proud of it, technocrat
        isn't he?  (I speak of his wide use of electronics, and his like
        to move old systems into the information age.

7/27    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Whig_Party
        "On 19 May 2009 during a national online meeting, the Modern
        Whig Party and Florida Whig Party jointly announced the first
        federal Whig candidate since the 1850s: Paul C. McKain of
        Florida.

7/28    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article6727710.ece
        Yes!!! Women are getting prettier and prettier due to evolution.
        "In men, by contrast, good looks appear to count for little, with
        handsome men being no more successful than others in terms of numbers
        of children. This means there has been little pressure for men
        appearance to evolve."
        Yes!!!! I have a chance to win at the reproductive game of
        human race!                     -average looking overweight sysadm
        \_ I believe it. Look at the old paintings of women. Yes, beauty
           ideals evolve, but so many of those women were downright homely.
           The men in the paintings look similar to men now.
           \_ Actually old paintings indicate that women were fat. Thanks
              to media, they are skinny malnutritioned sticks, the way our
              culture want them to be.
              \_ You are talking about Rubens, but not every painter portrayed
                 women that way. I am not talking about their bodies anyway,
                 but their faces. There are a lot of paintings by people
                 like Gainsborough done in the 1700s which depicted the
                 wealthy. The subjects were not fat. However, neither were
                 most of them attractive. Some of them were quite, but that
                 seemed to be more the exception than the rule. I think
                 better nutrition, and possibly evolution, has lead to
                 more attractive women certainly.
                 \_ The wealthy ate better than the poor, and the wealthy
                    had painters. Eating better-->getting fat-->getting more
                    pictures. As for nutrition and evolution, IMHO better
                    healthcare in general explains it all. You ever wonder
                    why the average American has better looking teeth than
                    the British? It's because Americans spend much more on
                    dental care than any other developed nations.
                    \_ Did you completely ignore my comment that the subjects
                       did not appear to be fat? Ugly, maybe. Fat, no.

7/28    My girlfriend and I took care of my girlfriend's nephew for 3 weeks
        while his mom was off working for the Air Force (she is a reservist
        and a single mom). As part of that my girlfriend stayed at her
        apartment a lot, watching him and the cats. Occasionally he stayed
        at our house. It was a lot of responsibility. The weekend before
        she got back we spent a lot of time cleaning her place. In fact, I
        would say it is a lot cleaner than the way she left it. She got
        back Sunday and came to our house to get her son before going back
        to her place. She was off Monday to recuperate before going back to
        work today. We are a little miffed that she hasn't called to say
        thanks or ask how things went. We thought she'd be pleasantly surprised
        that everything was clean and straightened up. We don't want a
        medal or anything, but a call saying "Wow. Thanks for taking care
        of the place. It looks great. Cats are fine." would have been nice.
        Are we right to be a little (a lot) pissed at this point?
         \_ Yes, she should be fawning over you and your gf.  That said, she
            is probably tired, there is only one of here.  Also, I hate it
            when people clean up my stuff. (did you thrown anything out?)
            \_ I absolutely did not throw anything out. I hate that, too.
               We just did all the laundry, including things like bath
               mats, vacuumed, mopped, cleaned the toilets and tub, did
               all the dishes, made the beds, arranged the furniture (not
               *re*arranged but made sure things like pillows were in place),
               emptied the trash, dusted, sorted the mail, and all the
               typical stuff. I know certain things (like dusting and
               vacuuming) hadn't been done in a while based on the condition,
               which is why i say we left it cleaner than she did.
        \_ Do you mean Monday as in yesterday? Yes, I think you should give
           her a couple of days at least. I am sure she is overwhelmed. At
           least you got a taste of what being a parent is like. Are you going
           to have any of your own?
        \_ Chill, give it a week. You're tired from all of this? Imagine
           doing it every single day.
           \_ Not really tired by it. Did I say that? However, how much
              trouble is it to pick up the phone, if even just to ask if
              we had any problems or issues while she was away? I know I
              would definitely want to know what happened while I was gone
              and I think it's polite to call and say "I noticed you guys
              cleaned the place up. Thanks."
        \_  Did you make sure to thank her for the sacrifices she has made to
            help defend you and your country?  Maybe now would be a good time!
        \_  She may not have even noticed.  3 weeks of training would certainly
            wipe my cache about the state of cleanliness in my house.  Why don't
            you just feel good about having done service for a loved one?

7/27    I have an actual technical question here. My MySQL DBA tells me
        that I can't expect a MySQL port to be able to run effectively
        on more than a two CPU box, he says that the extra CPUs will
        sit there unused. Is this true? I have a bunch of new quad core
        servers that I would like to use as Database machines. -ausman
   \_ It's not that simple.  If you stress test your new fancy multi core
      machine, you'll see that mysql doesn't really use all of those
      cores as much as you want.  one way to really use everything is
      shard your data, and run several instances of mysql on one
      machine, then you'll really use all of the cores ! - danh
         \_ http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?24,53893,262315#msg-262315
            (you can probably get it to use four cores)  -tom
            \_ I realize MySQL is free, but what a POS!
               \_ is this a troll?  What do you want?  I've had no problem
                  loading multiple CPUs, yes, you can't have more than one
                  CPU working a a single SQL query, but this has never been
                  a problem for me.  What do you use?
                  \_ Have you ever gone beyond 4?
                     \_ Yes, was not benchmarking and can't be sure how much
                        more throughput I was getting vs. 4 but I have had 8
                        cores processing at near 100% utilization.
                  \_ Well, a modern database should be properly multithreaded.
                     Oracle and MS SQL Server are. A database that slows
                     down when you throw more CPUs at it is a POS.

7/27    Minutes from politburo: We should migrate email to Google Apps instead
        of hosting it ourselves, since managing the mail server takes up too
        much of VP's time website needs: *RSS *calendar *static pages
        \_ Why is CSUA mail such a problem?  Please discuss?
        \_ Bahahahahaha. CSUA should just outsource UNIX to India.
           While you're at it, move motd to Yahoo Groups, irc+ntalk to Google
           Talk, and picture hosting to Flickr. I'll miss alt.binaries.erotic.*
           but that's the price we have to pay, I guess.
                \_ politburo, i will run email for you if you want.  i have
                   a decade experience doing it.
                   \_ who are you?
                      \_ #2.New()
                         \_ whois number.1
        \_ Relevant discussion happening on csua@csua mail list
           \_ summary: vaheder rejects outsourcing and wants to use the the
              antiquated light saber. the force in vaheder is strong.
              there is hope in this one.
           \_ summary: tom[holub] says sysadm for <10 alumni isn't going to
              be very interesting. however, Amazon donated EC2 and cloud
              computing could be the future, and it'll probably be more
              fun using a canon than a light sabre.
              \_ lol@cloud computing
        \_ If we had a filer, I am of the opinion that much of the pain of
           keeping our services up and running services would be mitigated. Most
           of our uptime problems were because of crashy keg. Another server to
           run VMWare e-sex or whatever it's called now would be nice, but no
           doubt out of our reach
           \_ Who are you? I can probably wrangle a filer to donate. -ausman
              \_ I am politburo. I am root. I am nobody.

7/28    Restored basic website functionality.  I also killed user websites,
        because I think the new root staff had set up the website with a
        default config and were not aware they were enabled.  Sorry if this
        causes inconvenience, hopefully they will be restored soon once
        the website is taken in hand. -mrauser

7/28    Does it make sense to defragment disks on VMWare? My 80GB disk
        on VMWare isn't really using 80GB, it just uses what it needs.
        Will defragment do anything to it?
        \_ If you want to speed up disk operation in your VM, it's best to
           defragment the disks in your VM, then defragment the disk on your
           host machine where the VM files are.
           If you want to shrink the VM files, you need to defragment the disks
           in your VM, then do the shrink operation on your host machine.
           \_ I'm running WinXP under Mac's VMWare Fusion. I can't defrag
              Mac's file system. So is defragging useless under Fusion?
              \_ The mac automagically defragments for you.
                 \_ Don't question the Steve. Everything from Apple is good.