5/18    did somebody say tar ball?
        http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/17/tar-balls-key-west_n_579660.html
        anyone else wishing we could just gzip these?
	...

5/3     Is it possible to bzip2 on the fly? Like:
        % dump_stuff | bzip2 -stdin > dump_file.bz2
        \_ Yup, it works fine.  You don't even need a flag:
           % dump_stuff | bzip2 > dump_file.bz2
           \_ whoa, why didn't anyone tell me about this, and why is this
              not on the man page. I've been doing the stupid command
	...

10/27   I just read an article that Facebook had moved their database
        to all SSD to speed throughput, but now I can't find it. Has
        anyone else seen this? Any experience with doing this? -ausman
        \_ I hope you're not running mission critical data:
           http://ask.slashdot.org/story/09/10/27/1559248/Reliability-of-PC-Flash-SSDs?from=rss
        \_ Do you have any idea how much storage space is used by Facebook,
	...

1/9     I want to share maybe 100 photos with close family only. I don't
        want anyone else to be able to see them, not that they are naughty
        or anything. I want to then take them offline and replace with
        more photos in 6-12 months (no need for permanent online storage).
        I use iPhoto for my photos on my Mac. I don't want to pay for this
        service. It would be nice if the s/w could compress images
	...

9/9     Is there a gzip-like unix command that will encrypt a file?
        I'm looking for something that's widely available. Thanks
        crypt (not very secure - DES).  Or failing that, openssl or gnupg
        \_ openssl or gnupg... what are you looking for?  Those will work fine..
           \_ Thanks for the recommendations. I'm basically experimenting
              with a way of using my friend's computer to backup my
	...

9/19    So I have this proprietary logger that writes into a temporary
        directory, and to rotate it, we simply rename it, gzip it, and
        the logger is smart enough to create a new log file. However,
        I've noticed that even after we rename it, the logger still
        APPENDS to the log file, and during the time we gzip and delete
        it, the stuff that is appended, is lost. So I'm wondering if
	...

11/29   I archived a big direcotry (3GB) using tar with bzip2 compression (-j)
        and I notice that to extract any file, tar seems to read through
        the whole archive decompressing it byte by byte and takes a VERY long
        time, no matter how small that file is.  Is there a better archive
        method?  (I am archiving on to a file, so dump does not work.)
        \_ Use zip.  The compression isn't as good, but you can access any
	...

4/21    Cute problem:  You are given n bits which resulted from flipping a
        biased coin n times (you don't know the bias).  The problem is to come
        up with an algorithm which will produce as many unbiased independent
        random bits from this string as possible (on average).  You have no
        other sources of randomness except the input bits.  One possible
        algorithm would be to pair up the bits, and produce a random bit 1 if
	...

4/22    So is the defactor compression program on UNIX bzip2 now? I gotta
        admit it compresses a lot better than gzip, and while it's hecka
        slow it's pretty good.
        \_ No, it's still gzip. bzip2 is only for dweebies who care about
           saving 10-20% on a file in return for 50% more compression/
           decompression time. If your internet pipe is really limited I
	...

12/30   Does anyone know what happened to Windows port of Emacs 21.x?
        I can only find downloads for 20.7 now on gnu.
        \_ look harder: http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/windows/emacs/21.3
           \_ There are only README files in there.
              \_ tried reading any of them? you might have noticed that
                 http://ftp.gnu.org was hacked a while back, and they haven't
	...

1/4     I want to test how my servers behave during a disk failure and
        a RAID reconstruction so I want to simulate a hardware failure.
        How can I do this in Linux without having to physically pull
        a drive? These disks are behind a RAID card and run Linux. -ausman
        \_ According to the Linux RAID wiki, you might be able to use mdadm
           to do this with something like the following:
	...

9/13    Thanks to Jordan, our disk server is no longer virtualized. Our long
        nightmare of poor IO performance should hopefully be over. Prepare for
        another long nightmare of poor hardware reliability!
        ...
        Just kidding! (I hope)
        In any case, this means that cooler was taken out back and shot, and
	...

2/14    You sure soda isn't running windows in disguise?  It would explain the
        uptimes.
        \_ hardly, My winbox stays up longer.
        \_ Nobody cares about uptime anymore brother, that's what web2.0 has
           taught us.  Everything is "stateless".
           \_ You;d think gamers would care more about uptime.
	...

7/22    Playing with dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/<disk> on linux and bsd:
        2 questions, on linux when <disk>==hda it always gives me this off
        by one report i.e. Records out == records in-1 and says there is an
        error. Has anyone else seen this?  Second, when trying to repeat this
        on bsd, <disk>==rwd0 now, to my surprise, using the install disk and
        selecting (S)hell, when I try to dd a 40 gig disk it says "409 records
	...

8/3     VMWare + Windows XP + Validation question. I need to test stuff with
        Service Pack 3 installed. I have a valid key that I own (yeah yeah I
        actually *bought* a copy, please don't flame me for supporting evil
        M$). Is it possible to register the key once, and then duplicate it
        for testing purposes?  Will Windows or Microsoft detect copies and
        disable the rest the copies?
	...

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.
	...

7/24    Firefox 3.5.1 on MacOS is a piece of crap. It crashes ALL THE TIME.
        It has crashed 3 or 4 times on me in the last hour, and not on
        the same pages either. The new Yahoo! home page also sucks ass.
        \_ os x keeps trashing my raid disk: '11 hours to rebuild. have fun
           with the kernel IO subsystem running like shit until then".
           Worthless piece of shit.
	...

7/17    -rw-r--r--@
        What does the "at sign" mean? This is on Mac OS. VMWare disk file.
        \_ The file has metadata attributes
           \_ How do I add/delete attributes to files? What about
              -rw-r--r--+ <-- what is the "+" sign? Also how do you make
              tar preserve these attributes?
	...