Super cool idea -- using servers to heat homes

Why not heat your home and water with a rack of servers?. From clickolinko.

Syndicated 2013-05-25 13:59:17 from off by one

SESE -- Single Entry, Single Exit -- Considered Misunderstood

I was just wondering about this the other day...

Syndicated 2013-05-02 14:08:10 from off by one

PFNA -- Proposal For New Acronym

We already have TLA, for Three Letter Acronym, but I've been thinking for a while that the TLA namespace is almost exhausted, which could result in the catastrophic failure of efficient communication. Either that, or everyone is going to have to start using NAT to allow multiple expressions to hide behind one TLA (... but that's a topic for a separate post.) Anyway, having just encountered the acronym SPOF -- Single Point Of Failure -- I propose the acronym AOFL: Acronym Of Four Letters. You can either speak it as "A-O-F-L" or, as I prefer, as "awful."

Acronym creators should transition to the new AOFL protocol as soon as possible.

Update: I'm reminded by Nick Moffitt about ETLA -- Extended Three Letter Acronym. There's also a list there of other four letter acronym acronyms, and even my favorite, which describes the class of acronyms including things like LASER and SCUBA: VLFLA -- Very Long Five Letter Acronym. So I guess that AOFL will just be a forgotten standard -- the Betamax to ETLA's VHS.

Syndicated 2013-03-28 13:13:58 from off by one

cosmic rays!

Pretty cool story about encountering a random bit flip corruption in RAM, and recovering from it.

Syndicated 2013-03-27 13:11:19 from off by one

when will I ever learn?

I do a lot of performance testing in the course of my research, and so, like a lot of other people I imagine, I wrote a little test harness to manage running jobs. That harness treats each test as a discrete part of a larger test -- and runs through them individually until complete. The benefit of this is that you can use the model to make sure that your conditions are the same for each test, you can see the progress of the overall tests by looking at the job queue, and you can pick up where you left off if something goes wrong. I've spent a lot of time on that script.

But then, I always forget about it and start a long string of jobs using a nested for loop... and then I lose all those benefits. My tests aren't particularly sensitive to conditions, but since I didn't use a job queue of any kind, I have no idea when the overall tests will end, and if I kill the task, I'll lose all my progress. Gar!

Syndicated 2013-03-20 16:57:47 from off by one