Month: May 2005

Should Microsoft buy Red Hat?

After reading through this post and linked articles, I went ‘Hmm..’ and remembered one of the recent Paul Graham‘s articles ‘Hiring is Obsolete‘ where he mentions that:

There might be 500 startups right now who think they’re making something Microsoft might buy.

Than I thought that if Microsoft is to buy Red Hat, there will probably be a huge wave of Linux people starting up companies and making all sorts of things that Microsoft might be interested in after Red Hat purchase. But Microsoft will probably be busy fighting a bunch of anti-trust cases.

While I understand that the whole thing is a rumor, it feeds some interesting thinking…

Reminder about NTP

NTP – Network Time Protocol allows for automatic and precise time synchronization over the network. There are many problems that can be caused by incorrect time – starting from logs confusions and going to software locks due to file timestamps. Configuring NTP is very easy. Just install the ntp RPM that comes with Red Hat or Fedora Linux (or a number of other Linux distributions) and use one of the two modes described below.

Full blown NTP server. In this mode, you’ll have to edit /etc/ntp.conf to specify a number of NTP servers to synchronize time from, as well as a lit of machines that can synchronize time with your server. Usually you’d want to have only one full blown NTP servers per network.
Simple NTP client. This is even easier to configure than the previous mode. All you have to do is add these two commands to your scheduler (cron or similar) to execute hourly.
```
/usr/sbin/ntpdate -s ntp_server_ip_or_hostname
/sbin/hwclock -w
```

While modern computers are very smart and fast, they don’t have any special skills at keeping the time precisely correct. Internal timers get offset by power cuts, CPU usage bursts, and things like that. The daily changes are small, but when left unattended for a longer period of times, clocks can run ahead or stay back for as long as days!

Here is a log record from one of the servers in our office:

21:01:01 ... ntpdate[...]:  ... offset 0.250427 sec
22:01:00 ... ntpdate[...]:  ... offset 0.251682 sec
23:01:01 ... ntpdate[...]:  ... offset 0.251269 sec
00:01:01 ... ntpdate[...]:  ... offset 0.251013 sec
01:01:01 ... ntpdate[...]:  ... offset 0.250451 sec
02:01:01 ... ntpdate[...]:  ... offset 0.250061 sec
03:01:01 ... ntpdate[...]:  ... offset 0.250239 sec
04:01:01 ... ntpdate[...]:  ... offset 0.250313 sec
05:01:00 ... ntpdate[...]:  ... offset 0.250112 sec
06:01:01 ... ntpdate[...]:  ... offset 0.250554 sec
07:01:01 ... ntpdate[...]:  ... offset 0.250691 sec
08:01:01 ... ntpdate[...]:  ... offset 0.249850 sec
09:01:01 ... ntpdate[...]:  ... offset 0.250418 sec
10:01:01 ... ntpdate[...]:  ... offset 0.250070 sec
11:01:01 ... ntpdate[...]:  ... offset 0.250488 sec

As you can see, this machine’s time inconsistencies are as large as quarter of a second per hour, which can result in 6 seconds per day (24 hours). This alone can cause noticable slowdowns in software that counts on time being always correct.

P.S.: There are NTP implementations for other operating systems as well. Google is your friend.

Canon baby

I spent some time trying to catch one of Maxim’s priceless expressions. Somehow he can fire them out three a second, until I get the camera. Than it all changes and I have to do all sorts of tricks to make him smile or “think”, or even look in the right direction. As a result of such photoshoot, I usually get close to a hundred of images which are just 10 pixels different from each other. After a few tough choices regarding which images to keep, I am left without about half of the original images. Than I start to postprocess them and after going the half of them, I get bored and start experimenting with filters, crops, contrasts, and saturations. When I finish, I go through all of the images again and see if I can attach a comment to any one of them. And only than I publish them… And only than I look at them and see if I really like anything. Most of the times, I like just one or two pictures. The question is: if I like only one or two pictures out of a hundred, why do I bother with all the rest? I don’t know…

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-05-23_POTD

The magic of photography

My father-in-law called today morning and said that he will most probably come to visit us next week. I was really surprised to hear that. Last time he was here about one month prior to Olga’s and mine wedding. That is to say that he was here around June of 2002. Lots of things happened since than, including our wedding, Olga’s hospital adventure with gall bladder, and the birth of our son to name a few. Neither of this events caused him to come.

And than this sudden phone call today morning…

I was thinking about it and couldn’t figure it out. Why? Why now? And than Olga helped me out. Her father got some pictures of Maxim that we passed with Olga’s mother. He gets the pictures and calls us to let us know that he is coming within the next couple of days. It seems like a very strong correlation to me. Even if it’s not so, I’d like to think that it is.

The power of photography, so to speak…

On hair

While waiting in the queue for D.Simos today we had nothing better to do than watching other kids and making fun of them. Maxim looked superior to all of them no matter age and gender. And than we saw this girl…

She was brought in by a Cypriot couple. She couldn’t have been older than two weeks. Very small and fragile. Tiny even. But her head was covered with so much hair that I couldn’t believe my eyes! Maxim always had enough hair on his head to make us happy, but when this girl passed by I turned to him and said: “Hey, baldy, did you see THAT?” He looked back in confusion…

Still love you Max. You’re my baldy!