Update 2013-12-02: I no longer use this method. See this post for my new method.
I have three (someday to be four) Roku players at home. I primarily use them to stream Netflix and Amazon Instant Video and to stream MP4s from a home server using Roksbox.
My typical workflow is to rip DVDs to VOBs using Dvdfab, copy the VOBs to my home server, and then convert them in bulk from VOB to MP4 using ffmpeg.
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Some RPMs (e.g. jpackage.org’s tomcat7-7.0.39-1.jpp6.noarch.rpm) express their dependency upon Java by requiring a RPM that provides capability java (as opposed to, for example, depending on the existence of a file /usr/bin/java). On CentOS, this capability is normally provided by the java-*-openjdk RPM. Therefore, if you execute # yum install tomcat7 on a clean install of CentOS, yum will install OpenJDK in addition to Tomcat 7.
Some people prefer to run the Oracle JRE/JDK instead of OpenJDK. Oracle provides RPMs named jre-<em>version</em>-linux-x64.rpm and jdk-<em>version</em>-linux-x64.rpm to make installing them easier. Unfortunately, these RPMs do not provide the capability java. This means that if you already have the Oracle JRE installed, and you install a RPM which requires the capability java, the OpenJDK will be unnecessarily installed (and might even become the default!).
The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations [of the word GIF]. They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.
A couple of years ago I bought a Acer Aspire easyStore H340 to use as a home NAS device. While the H340 came with Windows Server, I decided to replace it with Debian Linux running on an external USB stick. Besides using it for basic file storage, I use Nginx to stream MP4s to Roku devices throughout my home using Roksbox; I use forked-daapd to stream FLACs to iTunes (albeit with limited success – foobar2000 pointing to the CIFS file share works better); and I use CrashPlan to back up my important data (e.g. pictures) to the Internet.
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At work we have a reasonably busy Varnish cluster. We hooked it up to Graphite to allow near real-time visualization of how busy it is. Here’s a sample of what part of our Graphite dashboard looks like when you look over the past four months:
The effects of upgrading a (deliberately unnamed) web application from Windows 2003 to Windows 2008R2:
I’m a bit of a Boglehead, and the data appears to back me up. From http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-57578430/active-managers-lost-again-in-2012/
In 2012, 63 percent of large-cap funds, 80 percent of mid-cap funds and 67 percent of small-cap funds underperformed [relative to their benchmark]. The only asset class to see the majority of active funds outperform was large-cap growth, with 54 percent beating their benchmarks. The worst performance came in mid-cap growth funds where 87 percent failed to outperform.
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As seen on varnish-misc@varnish-cache.org:
I read one web testimony of a person who used Varnish to scale a site up to almost 200 million page views a month.
I’d like to find someone who has that level of expertise.
At work we have a Varnish cluster which, during the month of March, served over 17 billion requests for an average of 6,400 requests/second.
This cluster contains two physical machines with 24 cores and 192GB of RAM apiece. These machines have tons of spare capacity; their load average peaked at approximately 4. We’ve even considered virtualizing the cluster.
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I find these amusing and thought-provoking:
This useful little snippet can be used to find the unique list of extensions for all files in a directory and all its subdirectories. I can never remember the precise awk incantation for this:
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