NPR ran a story this morning on caffiene and coffee. ..
Monthly Archive for September, 2006
upgrading my laptop tonight to the (soon-to-be) beta of the next Ubuntu release. I’ll try and catalog how it goes.
At the moment, it looks like I’ve got over a gigs’ worth of pacakages to download … definately an overnight job. So, aptitude -d dist-upgrade it is…
So, a little over 1,100 packages takes about half an hour to install on my 2.something or other laptop. Not too shabby. It’s not a complete upgrade — there’s another handful of packages that had to be kept around through the first dist-upgrade. Next round looks like it’s going to take out sysvinit and replace it with upstart. Think I’m going to delay that one, as I need to head off for the moment … more later
Second round of dist-upgrades … This is interesting. The system automatically wants to install upstart … and forces the uninstallation of sysvinit, which dpkg doesn’t like. And because of the vaugeries of aptitude, I have to type “I understand that this is a very bad idea” not once, but twice, for the OS induced replacement of a critical package. Not that I wasn’t planning on doing that anyway, but, there might want to be some though given to that — it comes off a bit scary (well, replacing sysvinit should be scary, because without it, you got nothin’) and the upgrade is supposed to be “smooth” …
Despite the warnings, however, my machine rebooted quite happily. Which is good, because I hate having to dig up rescue CDs … So far, seems good. I like the new artwork. Edgy installs firefox2 beta, which means that most of the extensions I had installed won’t work … I hadn’t been too dependant on those, although I’ll definately miss the delicious plugin. Nothing earthshattering those, and those’ll come back in time.
I’ve been using Rojo for about a year. It’s a nice little web-based aggregator, and suits my usages better than bloglines did. Last week, they rolled out a major update to the site. And, last week, I was going to write something nice and excited about it. It seemed like they had fixed some of the speed issues, and the interface tweaks seem much more polished to me.
Clearly, I didn’t. Because after getting that first glimpse, all of my feeds vanished. Then they were back, but inconsistantly. And the only way that I could read anything was if I told it that I wanted to see all read and undread items in my feeds — not exactly the ideal way to read RSS feeds, especialy when you’re floating somewhere around the 50 or so that I track …
A week or so later, they seem to have gotten all the kinks worked out, though I’m still noticing occasional glitches. From what they say, it was a load thing — they had adapted the site to use a full-on SOA, with various bits of functionality being farmed out as web service calls. Like, for example, what feeds I read. Remarkably, I suppose, the authentication service never had a problem … Anyway, they ran a test environment, which didn’t managed to simulate their real usage loads, and the secondary servers collapsed under the full load.
I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of lessons to be pulled from this, not the least of which is that it seems they did a rather poor job of communicating what was going on, and that it would have been wise to roll back to the previous version after discovering the major (as in, broken core functionality) failures. I’m sure there are some other lessons to be gleaned from browing the reactions posted on their forums, but those strike me as two of the major ones.
I just finished up and submitted an article to Dragon Magazine. It’s another Dark Sun article, for the January Campaign Classics issue. The article is intended for a planescape style “travel to another world” campaign, which pretty much focuses you in some awkward directions — especially for a world that’s always wanted nothing to do with the standard D&D cosmology. Think I did pretty well with it though. I’ll see if the editor gets back to me.
I owe Brax a thanks for looking over the article for me, doing a bit of editing, and shaving off about 250 words, all on short notice.
Well, the demo a couple of days ago went smashingly. This was the good sort of “stunning him speechless”. Now, we get a bit of rest, though apparently we’re in for a wave of new mini-demos, now that the control gate has passed and we’re on the path. Looks like we’ll need to throw a branch into the svn repository… 