"McDonald's Happy Meals In San Francisco To Include Gay Marriage License"

A quick search finds that the spam leads to a virus installer masquerading as a video codec. Those wacky spammers!

I reimaged the machine that serves theclapp.org yesterday (7/20/08). I've restored most of it, but if you're missing the darcs repositories, email me.

Got a shiny new system with 4 GB ram. I haven't installed too much on it yet, so /usr only has a gig or so in it, but it's cool to be able to cache all of it.

% time du -s /usr  
1055912 /usr
du -D -s /usr  0.08s user 0.72s system 4% cpu 19.991 total

% time du -s /usr
1055912 /usr
du -D -s /usr  0.06s user 0.11s system 97% cpu 0.172 total

% free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       3632284     205500    3426784          0      32976      67444
-/+ buffers/cache:     105080    3527204
Swap:      2650684          0    2650684

% time find /usr -type f 2> /dev/null | xargs cat > /dev/null 2>&1
find /usr -type f 2> /dev/null  0.04s user 0.10s system 0% cpu 2:11.43 total
xargs cat > /dev/null 2>&1  0.22s user 4.65s system 3% cpu 2:25.38 total

% free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       3632284    1196660    2435624          0      45052    1041212
-/+ buffers/cache:     110396    3521888
Swap:      2650684          0    2650684

% time find /usr -type f 2> /dev/null | xargs cat > /dev/null 2>&1
find /usr -type f 2> /dev/null  0.04s user 0.10s system 18% cpu 0.766 total
xargs cat > /dev/null 2>&1  0.15s user 0.69s system 98% cpu 0.847 total

"What does this mean?", you ask. It means that whatever fraction of time I used to have to wait for a program to load its code from disk, I now have to wait less than one one-hundredth of that while it loads its code from memory.

(If it doesn't, it should.)

Via Bruce Schneier: http://washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080326/NATION/%20840186493/0/BUSINESS.

I've installed phpbb at http://theclapp.org/fora, and created three fora, one for comments on blog entries, one for comments on lw-vim-mode, and one for other stuff.

I didn't really like the idea of using the wiki for comments. In my experience, comments in wikis are poorly attributed and the threading sucks. Perhaps ironically, I've installed phpbb, which doesn't do threading, but at least you can quote people more easily, it's a little more obvious who wrote what, and it's generally a nicer interface for a conversation than a wiki.

For now I left it as a public interface: you don't have to register to comment. If that doesn't work out then I'll change it.

On the other hand, I've no good idea who all reads this, so I may just be shouting in the wind.

On the gripping hand, I know that Zach reads it, so that's one. Hi, Zach!

Update 14 Apr 2008: I got spam and no comments, so I deleted two fora, which still allows comments but makes it easier to delete spam.

Update 22 Apr 2008: I really don't blog enough to have a lively comment area, more's the pity, so I disabled the fora. If and when I blog enough or get enough commentary in email, I'll reenable it. Frankly I doubt that will be any time soon. Ah well.

On 12/31/07 I saw a note at xkcd that they were co-sponsoring a fundraiser at Reddit for the EFF. I bopped on over and gave them $100. I got an email from Alexis this evening that I was one of their top 10 donors, so they're sending me a signed xkcd comic, a Reddit postcard, and a shirt. Cool. Life is good. (No, that's a different shirt. *laugh*)

First post in my new blog. (FYI, my old blog is here.)

Just spent several hours trying to get my new blog into shape to actually publish. Hindered by a bug in ikiwiki's "map" function. Took me a long time to realize it was a bug and that I wasn't just misusing the "map" function. Then spent a long time trying to fix the bug, but (think I) finally succeeded.

I like ikiwiki, but I don't like that I can't just arbitrarily tag stuff, but have to go to the tags page and create a file for each tag.

Update 12/22/07: there's a hint on how to do this at http://ikiwiki.info/plugins/tag/discussion/.