3 New Flickr Features
The popular photo sharing site Flickr, released 3 new features today which I think are pretty cool.
1) Guest Pass- I never post private pictures on Flickr (nude photos of me would likely bring down the 'net with traffic so it's not worth the risk) but if I did, and wanted a non-Flickr member to view them without the hassle of registering for a Flickr account, I could give them a Guest Pass.
2) m.flickr.com- Now I can finally replace my lame TextAmerica page with a new and improved mobile Flickr page. Yay! (Now I really have to get that new phone I've had my eye on...)
3) Camera Finder- This is the coolest new feature and frankly, I'm blown away that they hadn't done this before. You can search for the most popular camera models, settings and an assload of other options. Awesome information and awesome presentation.
The Spam Offensive
Ok, it looks like maybe I'm not so crazy after all. Excluding the cluster this site resides on, I manage 13 Unix/Linux servers all of which process mail and since the end of September, spam has been going through the roof. I mean through THE ROOF. I am not alone. In a normal day, my Spam Assassin installations catch anywhere from 10,000-20,000 pieces of spam. Though I'm able to keep it out of people's mail boxes, spam has a real cost.
For one, CPU power- it takes a bunch to perform bayesian analysis on each message and drop it into the appropriate bucket. Two, disk space. Most of my customers don't want to see spam but I must leave every message on the server for at least 30 days in case the filter gets overzealous or they think they might have missed something.
Just on this blog alone, I've seen a huge explosion of comment spam. Where I normally get 100 spam messages a day, I'm now getting 350-500. Thank god for Askimet! or this site would have been shuddered long ago.
I wonder what the end game is for this situation as it cannot keep growing at this pace. Something's gotta give...
One of Those Days
4:12 AM: Sally wakes us up vomiting large amounts of blood all over the bed
4:51 AM: I try to go back to sleep but abandon the idea at 5:25 and got in the shower
6:10 AM: Arrive at work and find my new cube is not to my liking. It's fine and all but the location on the floor bugs me.
8:00 AM: Paid close to $10,000 to settle the medical bills from the pneumonia I had in 2005 (I had insurance but they claimed this was a pre-existing condition so they sued me. This was a settlement for quite a bit less than they had originally wanted).
11:30 AM: Go to Fred Meyer to get some headphones for work and take out $100 cash back at the self serve register to pay a friend back for concert tickets. I walked off without the cash.
1:31 PM: I write this post.
Nothing really that unusual, but for some reason, I have this nagging anxiety that I cannot pin to anything. I just feel really uneasy. About everything.
Reminds me of a line from Keane's Everybody's Changing:
So little time
Try to understand that I'm
Trying to make a move to stay in the game
I try to stay awake and remember my name
But everybody's changing
And I don't feel the same
This too shall pass, however.
Updates will be slow as the usual fall storms bring power outages to Fall City once again. I also had some problems upgrading my LAN to gigabit ethernet (100 mbps wasn't cutting it anymore- seriously) which required me to do some significant recabling and the installation of two new switches and one router.
Teh Internets
I doubt many of my audience will see the humor here (you guys have lives and are non hardcore computer geeks) but this is just too damn funny. Check out Goopymart's Teh Internets Flickr gallery Some damn funny images with some insightful jokes. Noob and Pwnd are my favorites.
(Via Reddit)
The Hardware That Ran Google in 1999
* 2-proc Pentium II 300 MHz, 512 MB, five 9 GB drives
* 2-proc Pentium II 300 MHz, 512 MB, four 9 GB drives
* 4-proc PPC 604 333 MHz, 512 MB, eight 9 GB drives
* 2-proc UltraSparc II 200 MHz, 256 MB, three 9 GB drives, six 4 GB drives
* Disk expansion, eight 9 GB drives
* Disk expansion, ten 9 GB drives
So we're talkin':
* 1,792 MB of memory
* 366 GB of disk storage
* 2,933 MHz in 10 CPUs
Which is less than half the processing power of my Linux desktop at home. Pretty awesome though that such little hardware could power a site like Google, even before it became wildly popular. My first time using Google would have been in late 1999 while working at Bank One. I had befriended some IT guys and it was one of the only search engines that wasn't blocked by the corporate firewall. Who wouldda thought...
(via Coding Horror and Reddit)
