The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations [of the word GIF]. They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.
Steve Wilhite, creator of the GIF file format.
Booting an Acer Aspire easyStore H340 from External USB
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.
Two days ago, S.M.A.R.T. indicated that hard drive which originally came with the machine was failing, so I replaced it with a spare I had on-hand. I replaced the hard drive, rebuilt the RAID5 array, and everything seemed fine. However, after upgrading Debian to the latest kernel, the machine failed to boot.
I attached my VGA debugging cable and determined that the machine appeared to be having issues with the boot order. Using the H340 service manual as a reference, I attached a spare jumper to JP3 and changed the boot order in the BIOS. I heard that if you removed this jumper the machine would restore to its default boot order, so I left the jumper in and put everything back.
Mission accomplished.
Varnish and Graphite
Effects of Windows 2008R2
The effects of upgrading a (deliberately unnamed) web application from Windows 2003 to Windows 2008R2:
Passive Indexing Wins Again
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.
As we would expect, the performance tends to worsen when we look at longer periods. This is because the typically higher expense ratios of active funds become a greater burden over time. For the past three-year and five-year periods, 86 percent and 75 percent of large-cap funds underperformed, 80 percent and 90 percent of mid-cap funds underperformed, and 67 percent and 83 percent of small-cap funds underperformed, respectively. And there were no asset classes where a majority of active managers outperformed.
Scaling Varnish
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.
Varnish is a pretty amazing piece of software.
