Since over a year I have my machine at a data center with pihost. Today I thought I use fact that it’s Thanksgiving to run some defragmentation on the xfs file system. Which can be a really bad idea if you happen to have a ‘icky’ filesystem: I seem to have painted my machine into a corner. The filesystem is corrupt, and when I try to defragment it it dissapears. When it hits the root partition then the machine still runs, but you have no commands left. The good thing is that I could get the server rebooted within a couple of minutes. It does help tremendously to real support 24/7/365.
Category: internet
Flickr had a nice idea: tracking which cameras are being used by it’s members.
It used to be that consumer data was expensive to gather and somewhat imprecise. In some areas this is not the case anymore. I reckon that Nikon and Canon did spend some serious money in the past to track market share. Maybe there is a way for Yahoo! to make a couple of thousand US$. They need it.
Everybody could see that Yahoo! is in trouble since years.
Now they come to realize it.
The ‘peanut butter memo’ could mark the end of Yahoo!. Or the beginning of it’s second coming. They have a chance if they cut the staff by 50%.
Lots and lots of views on the good ole youTube. Who needs to buy airtime if its lingering around for free.
For about one out of thousand commercials that people do care about enough to seek them out.
Running a postfix server with virtual mailboxes. It’s all pretty nice. Vacation however was sketchy. So say the least. One thing that breaks “Virtual Vacation” (implemented via virtual.pl in /var/spool/vacation, and, yes, googlebot, I am writing this for you) are < > brackets around the recpients email address. Entourage does that for instance. I do not think that there is anything wrong with that. Postfix does not deliver the ‘out of office’ reply in those cases though the mysql table called vacation gets the name of the sender added. Tricky and odd bug. My fix was to add:
if($from =~/< ([^\s]+\@[^\s]+)>/){$from = $1 ;}
right after the line:
if ($from =~/([\w\-.%]+\@[\w.-]+)/){$from = $1;}
which was already in there.
Free and open software is great. Just sometimes it’s the odd things that get you.
Mark Cuban gives a name to the other end of the long tail: “Vert Ramp”
Advertising Age is raving about Dove’s “Evolution”. Their headline reads “Better ROI From YouTube Video Than Super Bowl Spot”. Now that’s what some people want to hear. And it leaves reason behind. Jumping head over heals into the current media internet bubble bath.
The Dove campaign is great. How often is there an ad for a cosmetic product that I want to show to my daughter? It certainly works on the internet. Because of it’s content. Certain content will work well on the internet. But let’s face it, if something works really well it will get killed by it’s own success: Today you can find a video of mentos + coke on Google Video. It is prominently featured on the google Blog.
Dove is great since it’s decent and sells soap. Are you feeling having a Diet-Coke or Mentos after watching the latest and lamest sticky liquid orgy? Certainly not. Actually with todays video dropping Mentos into big soda bottles becomes officially lame. The Meme has suffocated itself under it’s own weight.
Update:
Cnet however sings a different song. I wonder how many kids run around now with the video cameras to do the ‘next big thing’.
the slate sheds some interesting light on Copyright and why youTube might be in less trouble than everybody claimed.
sucks to be famous these days.