Quickly helps you create applications for Ubuntu.

http://www.didrocks.fr/index.php/post/Build-your-application-quickly-with-Quickly:-part1

This is too funny. ThinkGeek had an April Fools’ product of unicorn meat that they called ‘the new white meat’, so the Pork Board sent them a cease-and-desist letter. Unfortunately, ThinkGeek will have a much harder time turning unicorn meat into a real product like they did for the TaunTaun sleeping bag April Fools’ joke when there was a lot of interest in buying it.

Here is ThinkGeek’s reply:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/files/thinkgeek-unicornmeatrelease.pdf

Despite it costing around $2,000 per processor, the tremendous savings on electricity and cooling make it less expensive than a regular server. Also, with its included virtualization, it may waste a lot less CPU cycles. For example, Amazon EC2 only gives you the option of between one and eight virtualized processors, but with 512 processors in one box it would be much safer to oversell the number of processors without causing performance problems when a few of customers start using more processing power. It also seems that you could ignore a lot of scaling issues assuming you could assign hundreds of processors to a single VM. Suddenly, a large server setup could be shrunk down to a couple of VMs on separate 512 proc servers, and you would only need a load balancer to failover in case of hardware problems.

http://venturebeat.com/2010/06/13/seamicro-drops-an-atom-bomb-on-the-server-industry/

This is a very though provoking slide deck. For instance, Netflix tries to avoid using process to handle the complexity that increases as the business grows, since excessive process hinders their ability to respond to market shifts. Processes are still important for irrecoverable mistakes, but allowing recoverable mistakes instead of requiring approval makes the employees more productive.

The most surprising part is that Netflix doesn’t track vacation time and they don’t have any kind of dress code. This is probably only possible since they purposely get rid of employees that are not high performers, and they don’t tolerate employees that poison the team despite being talented.

Previously, I had mentioned Balsamiq, which is really cool but it is a commercial app. GoMockingbird.com is free, at least for now, and it makes it really easy to share your mockups.

Check out my recursive blog.

For several years, I have been using pam_tally to prevent brute-force attacks, but now I have learned about fail2ban, which appears to be a more full featured solution.

fail2ban will look through your logs and block the IP address with iptables whenever more than maxretry failed login attempts occur. Just looking through the jail.conf file, it has separate configs for ssh, pam-generic, xinetd, apache, vsftpd, proftpd, wuftpd, postfix, and courier smtp, and you can set the maxretry independently for each one.

fail2ban has some disadvantages over pam_tally, since it has to parse log files instead of being called for every login attempt. For example, fail2ban does not understand log messages like “last message repeated 4 times”, so someone could make many more login attempts than the maxretry limit suggests.

I found out that property tax collector reports any overdue taxes your mortgage lender. So I get the letter from my mortgage lender, and I assume that it is just a clerical error, but I decide to double check. I find the 2009 bill, and I verify on my bank’s website that the check cleared for the exact same amount. I tell this to the mortgage lender, and I assume it will straighten itself out. But no, they come back to me to say there is still a delinquency. I looked at the 2008 tax bill, and I discovered that the check was written accidentally for 50¢!!! less than the amount due, and the 2009 bill had a tiny note on it mentioning the 50¢, but it didn’t include this in the TOTAL AMOUNT DUE line, so it’s not surprise that I missed it. This was especially annoying, since the letter from the mortgage lender warned me that they would start collecting the taxes and that failure to pay could result in loss of property, but nowhere do they mention that the amount due is 60¢ (yes, there was 10¢ of interest over the last two years).

By this point, I think there will be nothing else to annoy me about this whole process. Foolishly, I tried to pay the 60¢ bill on the Bexar county’s website, so that I wouldn’t have to verify that the checked cleared later on. Here is the error I got, when I tried to pay 60¢:

Well, I’ll just pay a whole dollar then. Not!

I write software for a living, so I do understand how they wouldn’t have tested for this specific scenario, but I still wanted them all to die. I’m a little less irritated at my tax collector, since they sent me a letter acknowledging my complaints, however, I doubt I will ever be in this situation again, and if I am, I might just let the bank take the house. It’s just not worth my sanity.

This is brilliant but sad.