Forgive Bush
Posted 1:20 PM

I read a lot about George Bush, and I've written some as well - letting emotions guide my words. One thing I know, however, is that George Bush is a person - naked underneath an expensive suit. Deep down, just like the rest of us, George just wants to be loved.

I am, hereby, giving George Bush and the Bush administration my forgiveness.

Labels: politics

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Berkeley DB Shortcomings
Posted 1:41 PM

After trying exhaustively to get Berkeley DB to stand up in a production environment, we switched to "TDB" as our embedded database instead.

Berkeley DB just doesn't deal well with processes and threads dropping without cleaning up nicely. In a heterogeneous/complex environment, good database systems need to respond very well to dropped connections. Perhaps there's a way to coax BDB into timing out locks more quickly or allocating more locks, but I couldn't get it to work.

TDB was able to handle a very high load (thousands of reads/writes per second) while also having 1 in 100 connections get dropped or killed without being gracefully closed.

Perhaps it's just a matter of TDB having better defaults for that sort of scenario.
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Jeb Bush Manipulates Florida Ballots
Posted 9:00 PM

Ralph Nader was unable to get the backing of the Green party this year, and was removed from Florida's ballot by a court order. Governor Jeb Bush's secretary of state, Glenda Hood, then stepped in and submitted an appeal, suspending the court order in time to keep Ralph Nader on the Florida ballot. [full story here]

Last time around, Jeb Bush disallowed 30,000 minorities, the majority of whom are Democrats, from voting. This time around, Jeb is already doing the same thing.

It looks like no one can stop Bush. He just might lie, cheat, steal and manipulate his way into Presidency. If so, expect another 4 years of terrorism, war, higher taxes, lost jobs, and environmental hazards.

Labels: politics

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Stem cell article
Posted 6:56 AM

Article I wrote about stem cell research was published in a local magazine. Looking at it now, it seems a bit odd and rambly. Needed better editing. Alas... next time.
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kill.exe hanging/crashing
Posted 11:11 AM

For whatever reason, the version of kill.exe shipping with Windows NT/2000 would hang/crash on one of my servers. I think it was the code that got the "module name" for a match that was breaking (not sure, since it's not open source).

I hastily rewrote "kill.exe". At first, I thought I was crazy to think that "kill" was the culprit. But, indeed, my version kills things nicely or prints an error, and the version shipping with the reskit (or wherever I got it) doesn't.

When given a nonnumeric argument, it searches process executable names and it only gets a match if it matches up to the "." or up to the end of the name. IE: you can "kill calc" or "kill calc.exe" but you can't "kill calculator" or "kill cal" and expect it to match. It kills pids if the first argument consists, entirely, of digits.

Here's the source. And here's the binary.

Labels: windows

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