I know, I know, its not Friday again, but I am working on getting back in sync - I am working on a great post about going to the farmer’s market this weekend (with pretty pictures). In the meantime, here’s a collection of some cool techie/geek reads I’ve come across recently:
- Google spotlights data center inner workings Cnet NewsBlog
A view behind the curtain at Google’s data centers, interesting that they go the approach of having many many cheap custom servers as opposed to having fewer more reliable servers. I suppose if anyone knows how to run a big data center, Google would be it.In each cluster’s first year, it’s typical that 1,000 individual machine failures will occur; thousands of hard drive failures will occur; one power distribution unit will fail, bringing down 500 to 1,000 machines for about 6 hours; 20 racks will fail, each time causing 40 to 80 machines to vanish from the network; 5 racks will “go wonky,” with half their network packets missing in action; and the cluster will have to be rewired once, affecting 5 percent of the machines at any given moment over a 2-day span, Dean said. And there’s about a 50 percent chance that the cluster will overheat, taking down most of the servers in less than 5 minutes and taking 1 to 2 days to recover.
- Baking Soda: My Favorite Frugal Substance The Simple Dollar
Trent has a great set of hacks for stuff you can do with baking soda around the home. I use it at home for cleaning cast iron because of its mild abrasive properties, since soap on cast iron will clear off all of the seasoning.Whenever something needs to be cleaned around the house, I just mix about four tablespoons of baking soda into a container of very hot water and mix it until it’s dissolved. The solution just cleans up almost everything quite nicely, from spots on the hardwood floor or linoleum to spots on the windows.
- Workers shifting to 4-day week to save gasoline Reuters
My summer internship has me driving 30+ miles every day - moving to ten hours a day sounds like a good idea - that’s at least an extra gallon and half a week minimum, plus a faster commute.Some 44 percent of respondents said they have changed the way they commute — doing things such as sharing a ride or driving a more fuel-efficient car — or are working from home or looking for a closer job in order to reduce gasoline costs, according to staffing services company Robert Half International. That’s up from 34 percent two years ago.
- This Is Funny Only if You Know Unix Link by Link (NY Times)
The creator of xkcd is interviewed in the New York Times… weird? Very cool story about how he makes a living with a narrowly-focused niche comic.FOR a certain subset of Internet users, “Sudo make me a sandwich” may as well be “Take my wife … please.”
Have a great weekend!
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