A few quotes come to mind when I think about what Ron Paul and the Tea Party ideals represent.  Churchill said: “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.”  It seems the media is once again attempting to pick the Republican candidate much as they did last time around with McCain. The media is trying to focus attention exclusively on Perry and Romney… which reminds me a lot of the bit from Futurama where the two clones John Jackson and Jack Johnson were vying for the presidency. Both of these guys represent the old guard of the republican party.. much as McCain did in 08.  This is not 08 though.. this time the stakes are much, much higher and I for one think it’s time to stop settling for the lesser two evils.. it’s time for something better.

One of the reasons I like and support the use of open source software is that you can avoid most of the drama that comes from relying on 3rd party vendors.  By this I mean.. you must pay exorbitant sums for ongoing maintenance, you are locked into their product upgrade treadmill, you have little say in the direction of their products, you have a single source for support, and if your vendor gets acquired there is a very good chance the product you depend on will go away or change in ways that force you to abandon it with even more pain.  I’ve seen this play out from both sides of the table having spent time in both enterprise environments and working for software companies.

I’m often ask what it is I do for a living… and being lazy I usually just say ‘computer stuff’.   In an effort to provide a little more context to anyone who may be interested this is one in a series of postings where I’ll cover some aspect of what it is I do.

In my current role I spend part of the time doing development projects. (aka programming) I’m not a hard core developer though.. it’s not my full time occupation nor do I want it to be.  I work mostly with perl and php when necessary, mysql and occasionally PostgreSQL or Oracle all under various flavors of linux. (debian is my favorite). Usually these development tasks are related to some sort of management automation for a global VoIP network but sometimes they involve making complex things easier to understand.  Part of that involves automating the collection of large amounts of data and then presenting in a meaningful way so that problems and long term trends can be identified.  What follows are some examples of the sorts of things I mean.

With all the fear mongering about radiation exposure in media lately I thought it would good to get a little clarity. I found this great chart that breaks down the normal levels of exposure we all get in everyday life and compares it with what’s going on in Japan.. and what happened with the other two major reactor incidents from history. So far.. it’s really not as bad as everyone in the media is making it out to be.

We have had a Power DNS recursing cacher deployed at one of our busiest sites for a few months now and I thought others might benefit from some real world performance info.  This is running on some older hardware.. dual Xenon 2.8Ghz system with 4G of ram and the only job it’s doing is running this recursor. These three graphs tell the tale.  The first shows that the system is handling peaks of about 3800 queries per second and that about 99% of those are being answered in a fraction of a millisecond.  The second shows that cache hits are averaging about 70-75% and the third shows that it’s doing this work while using at most one quarter of the CPU.  Add to those impressive performance levels that I’ve had zero issues since putting it in production six months ago.

I thought some might find this interesting. Most who work outside of tech (and many inside tech) never see data centers like this. To get to our company servers in this hosting facility I have to pass through two man traps and a total of 5 doors with hand scanners. In addition, each rack of equipment is locked with a unique 6 digit code. There are hundreds of cameras inside the main datacenter and guards constantly watching from a secure room.

 Here’s the scenario.. It’s 1 am and I have to shut down a critical linux server to relocate it in a rack to make room for new equipment. It should have been a 5 minute job.. but on powering up the server it refused to boot past printing the word ‘Grub‘ on the screen. This isn’t good.. this server is needed by a couple hundred thousand customers and rebuilding it wasn’t planned or scheduled.

Time Warner has been offering faster cable modem speeds lately for much the same price as slower speeds a couple years ago. When I got the new modem I noticed there didn’t seem to be a way to put it in bridge mode to work with the linux router I already had. After a little digging I found that the management page for doing this was ‘branded out’ and the link to it was removed from the interface.

Two and half years ago I registered the e85sucks.com domain because it was clear to me at that point that the big push for more domestic ethanol production and use was a scam. Now finally the very same people who were pushing it back then have finally come clean that it was a bad idea.  Now there have been plenty of people saying this stuff for years.. but it’s nice to know eventually the truth can be recognized.

If you have to do any sort of reporting using mysql or other databases you will probably need to use relative date ranges that don’t depend on what day the report is being run. That is if you need a report for ‘last month’ that runs from the first to last day of the previous month.. or previous 3 months etc but not include any days in the current month.   Here is a small collection of queries…