So there was this article in Motherboard, pointed out to me by a very young friend of mine. It’s an FBI memo written in 1995 during the Unabomber investigation, about a mysterious, close-knit group of gamers, playing D&D. The article gives hardly any context at all, but that kind of memo during this time is not unusal or even remarkable, from a historical perspective.

So here is a bit of historic perspective, not quite in chronological order.

There are things, Lovecraft hypothesizes, that Man is not meant to know. This paper is touching on these subjects: That is not dead which can eternal lie: the aestivation hypothesis for resolving Fermi’s paradox.

If a civilization wants to maximize computation it appears rational to aestivate until the far future in order to exploit the low temperature environment: this can produce a 10^30 multiplier of achievable computation. We hence suggest the “aestivation hypothesis”: the reason we are not observing manifestations of alien civilizations is that they are currently (mostly) inactive, patiently waiting for future cosmic eras. This paper analyzes the assumptions going into the hypothesis and how physical law and observational evidence constrain the motivations of aliens compatible with the hypothesis.

This is a disk utilization graph on a heavily loaded Graphite box. In this case, a Dell with a MegaRAID, but that actually does not matter too much.

Go-carbon was lagging and buffering on the box, because the SSD was running at its IOPS limit. At 18:10, the write-back cache and the “intelligent read-ahead” are being disabled, that is, the MegaRAID is being force-dumbed down to a regular non-smart controller. The effect is stunning.

Heiko Schlichting reminds us that 25 years ago, on the 20./21. of June 1992, the Individual Network e.V. was created (Text in German). Individual Network e.V. was a NGO of NGOs, a construct where local citizen network NGOs could be members. Individual Network would then make contracts with the German Science Network DFN and other providers and buy traffic rights in bulk, in order to allow its members to use this traffic for non-commercial, private use.

Using electronic devices in the classroom seems to be a topic older than time, and the implementation often involved a lot of tedium. The problems and possible solutions are well understood in Germany (report about LTSP among other things), but the (purposefully) fragmented market for education in Germany is getting in the way here. Biggest problem usually is keeping the machines clean and orderly, and keeping the data available across device loss.

The paper (PDF ) is, to say it in the words of Sascha Konietzko, eine ausgesprochene Verbindung von Schlau und Dumm (“a very special combination of smart and stupid”).

The site mcafee.cc is not related to the corporation of the same name, but the site of one of the authors, R. Preston McAfee.

The paper looks at the utilization data from a number of public clouds, and tries to apply some dynamic price finding logic to it. The authors are surprised by the level of stability in the cloud purchase and actual usage, and try to hypothesize why is is the case. They claim that a more dynamic price finding model might help to improve yield and utilization at the same time (but in the conclusion discover why in reality that has not happened).

I> Good Morning!

M> And to you, too!

I> I hope you have a nice and technically reliable start into a new week full of hope!

I> Here, catch. https://github.com/mattly/bork

M> »A bash DSL for config management« And it’s not even chistmas, ye

I> “the Swedish Chef Puppet of Config Management. […] Bork is written against Bash 3.2 and common unix utilities such as sed, awk and grep. It is designed to work on any UNIX-based system and maintain awareness of platform differences between BSD and GPL versions of unix utilities.

Talk given at the Netways Open Source Data Center Conference 2017. There is a video of the talk on Youtube .

The title of the talk was not final, when I submitted the proposal, so I just set it to “Something Mumble Containers Kubernetes”. It came out as “Containers at Booking” in the end.

This is kind of an interim report about how compute is changing, the factors and pressures at work there, and how that affects us. This is not a finished journey, yet. Things are still changing at Booking.

The Ad and Adblock situations both are now so bad that even Google considers integrating an Adblocker by default into the Chrome browser.

This is a twofold action.

It’s purpose is of course to filter out ads, the worst of the worst in annoyance and the obvious malvertising. It’s purpose is also to take back control on adblocking, because it will let through acceptable ads according to the Coalition for Better Ads standards.

MySQL 8.0 will be retiring support for the Query Cache . The MySQL Query cache is a result cache: The MySQL server will record all result sets that are small enough to keep in the cache, and a hash of the query that produced it.

If a query meets certain requirements, and the hash of the same query string is ever seen again, the query will not be actually parsed and executed, but the same result set will be replayed. There are mechanisms in place that prevent uncacheable queries from being cached in the first place, and that prune outdated data from the query cache.