• 12:23 I know I haven't *really* spent the *whole* week tired & hungover. I just wish I didn't feel like I have. #
• 14:10 *European Union*
  The vocalist's 'singing along to a song that I only half know' style suits the slow & mopey stuff, but not rockier tunes... #
• 14:39 *Buttonhead*
  Enthusiastic, energetic rambling, with lots of instrument swapping & falsetto wailing. I think they might be 'perky math-rock'. #
• 15:27 *Little Fish*
  Tight, energetic indie with vocalist who sounds rather like PJ Harvey. I can see why they're popular. Might get their CD... #
• 16:20 *Thugs*
  2 chaps wearing guitars bob at each other across a table of gadgetry, noodling melodies over increasingly intense & skittery drums. #
• 16:33 *Obake*
  I couldn't pass up the Swiss rapper! He spits complex French in a fast montone over sinister bass samples with sadly generic beats. #
• 17:12 *Penfold Letters*
  If I was in the mood for dancing, his adept mixing of bleeps, bass & beats would have done; but I'd rather stroke my chin. #

http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/340212179/this-weeks-top-downloads

http://lifehacker.com/398870/this-weeks-top-downloads

• GrabUp Makes Screenshot Sharing Effortless (Mac)
  "Freeware application GrabUp automatically uploads screenshots to the internet and pastes the URL in your clipboard for quick and easy sharing."
• Dock Spaces Creates Context-Specific Docks (Mac)
  "Free utility Dock Spaces creates and swaps between up to five customizable Docks in Leopard."
• TuneUp Automatically Updates and Fixes Your iTunes Metadata (Windows)
  "Music application TuneUp scans your iTunes library to fill in and clean up your music's metadata, including album art."
• Bug Shooting Does Advanced Screen Capture and Annotation (Windows)
  "Free application Bug Shooting is a simple but powerful screenshot application designed to make sharing screenshots via email or with bug tracking applications a cinch."
• AirRadar Offers Better Wi-Fi Network Management (Mac)
  "Leopard's built-in Airport utility doesn't do much except show you what Wi-Fi networks are nearby, and which require a password—but free utility AirRadar does much more."
• PC Wizard Analyzes and Benchmarks Your PC (Windows)
  "Free application PC Wizard is a portable tool that analyzes and benchmarks your PC."
• Urbanspoon Picks a Restaurant for You (iPhone)
  "Free application Urbanspoon finds you a place to eat nearby at the shake of your iPhone or iPod touch."
• Darik's Boot and Nuke Securely Wipes Your System in an Emergency
  "Free, open-source boot disk utility Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN) automatically and completely deletes the content of every hard disk it can find on your computer when you run it."
• AccelMan File Manager Replaces Explorer with Robust Features (Windows)
  "Free application AccelMan is a dual-pane Windows Explorer replacement with a powerful feature set."

http://blog.kovyrin.net/2008/07/20/found-an-ideal-io-scheduler-for-my-mysql-boxes/

http://blog.kovyrin.net/?p=129

Today I was doing some work on one of our database servers (each of them has 4 SAS disks in RAID10 on an Adaptec controller) and it required huge multi-thread I/O-bound read load. Basically it was a set of parallel full-scan reads from a 300Gb compressed innodb table (yes, we use innodb plugin). Looking at the iostat I saw pretty expected results: 90-100% disk utilization and lots of read operations per second. Then I decided to play around with linux I/O schedulers and try to increase disk subsystem throughput. Here are the results:

(more…)

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/07/19/mysql-51-is-to-reach-ga-state-all-to-arms/

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/?p=438

MySQL 5.1 was in RC stage for around 10 months now finally planned to be released as GA soon. As Monty Says MySQL 5.1.26 will be renamed as GA if no serious bugs are discovered.

Lets help MySQL to ensure GA release will be indeed GA quality and support Monty in his call to ensure this RC candidate works well for you.

If you know about any bugs in MySQL 5.1 or MySQL 5.0 (which are still unfixed in MySQL 5.1) make sure to report them on bugs.mysql.com. If there are some bugs already reported but still not fixed as of MySQL 5.1.26 make sure to post a comment to let MySQL know the bug is affecting you as well. The scream factor is important for bug fix prioritization so if you can make a story of your suffering because of the bug to slashdot you should be quite good.

If you’re the customer - make sure you put that note in your bug report. Bug reports from customers should be treated more seriously so make sure you use this advantage. And if you’re not a customer I guess one of your friends is so you can ask them to vote for a bug for you.

It also helps to be descriptive to explain why exactly this bug is important. Many MySQL developers are isolated to the customer so they may not quite understand how often bug circumstances happen and how bad are consequences.

It is surely helps to have repeatable bug reports but make sure to report bug even if you do not have one. If significant number of people are reporting similar issue it shows some problem exists, even if they can’t exactly pinpoint it. It helps MySQL with bug hunting and what is even more important it helps other users which know they are not alone and can find a workaround assuming fix does not exist.

In general I’m quite happy to see MySQL 5.1 is reaching GA stage and I think it is already better than Quality Disaster MySQL 5.0 initial release have been. Though I still think it is not quite where yet when it comes to Quality. Error rate with 5.1 we’ve seen among the customers during last few months was higher than with 5.0, also Scalability of MySQL 5.1 is often subpar compared to MySQL 5.0 possibly due to this bug which is not fixed up to now (not in 5.1.26 at least)

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Complaint that OP's boobs are too large.
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Request directed to community for support and anecdotes.

http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/340177733/best-video-feeds

http://lifehacker.com/398876/best-video-feeds

We love bringing you good video clips that show off hacks or give clever advice or different perspectives; Check out our weekend watching tag for a few we've posted so far. But what are your favorite sources of Lifehacker-relevant video out there? I've been keeping tabs on Authors@Google, Boing Boing TV, TED Talks, and O'Reilly video. Any others worth adding to our subscription list? Shout out your favorite internet video feeds in the comments.

http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/340145080/veedee+eyes-offers-pre+configured-linux-distros-for-virtualbox

http://lifehacker.com/398848/veedee+eyes-offers-pre+configured-linux-distros-for-virtualbox

If you've been checking out the newest VirtualBox beta for Mac OS X, or you're intrigued by Linux but not ready to deal with virtualizing it, the Sun xVM VirtualBox VDI Index—or, as it's skeevily nicknamed, veeDee-Eyes—has a host of pre-compiled, pre-configured images for you. No need to set up space, "boot" from a live CD and mess around with hardware config, as copies of Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE and others are ready to run. Not all of them are free, with a few of the multi-GB distros asking for a buck or two to cover server costs, but a good number of interesting variants and betas are there for the taking. VirtualBox runs on Windows, Mac, or Linux, and is a free download.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=380

Kieran Healey, who will spending a year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, is looking forward to research at the "Stanford Superconducting Supersocializer, which will … propel local college sophomores at tremendous speeds into unfamiliar groups of people in an effort to plumb the structure of the elementary particles of social interaction", in order to test "the emerging Standard Model of sociophysics":

Kieran explains:

The organization of the Quirks is of course well known, with some of the early triumphs of post-war research focused on the internal dynamics of the quirk-matrix (Up, Downer, Charm, Strange, Top Bloke, Asshole). The complex of interactions centered on W and Z remains wholly mysterious, however. The Liketons, too, pose difficult questions, though the recent discovery of observer-dependent YouTube effects has gone some way toward clarifying their role. Finally, the famous Biggs Hangeron also remains problematic, as it is not only notoriously easy to observe but in fact also impossible to ditch at parties.

Linguists also have high hopes for the SSS. It's been more than four decades since Richard Feynman conjectured that the total cross section of high-energy undergraduate interactions depends on the resonance production of highballs, but a Grand Unified Theory of communicative interaction has remained elusive.  While the SSS is unlikely to help with the fundamental problem of bringing gravitas into the theory, it may well enable the first direct observation of the elementary particles responsible for sociolinguistic accomodation.

http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/340116894/get-google-maps-screenshots-to-go

http://lifehacker.com/398877/get-google-maps-screenshots-to-go

Reader Chimera says that you can use the iPhone 2.0 software's built-in screenshot-taking ability to save images of Google Maps to your device before you leave the house (and the fast Wi-Fi connection) for directions at-the-ready. This technique is especially handy for iPod touch owners, and would work with any handheld device with maps and and screengrab capabilities.

http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/340075171/look-around-corners-and-over-walls-with-a-diy-periscope

http://lifehacker.com/398868/look-around-corners-and-over-walls-with-a-diy-periscope

Peek over walls and look around corners with a periscope—a long tool that uses two mirrors to show you hard-to-reach places. Over at how-to site Instructables, they've got the step by step for putting together a periscope using a thin mints box, duct tape, two small mirrors, and an X-Acto knife. The kids will love this one.

http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/340036751/forgo-a-new-car-purchase-with-online-hourly-rentals

http://lifehacker.com/398874/forgo-a-new-car-purchase-with-online-hourly-rentals

My pal Susie decided not to replace her totaled car and happily opted to rent by the hour with Zipcar instead (possibly NSFW link there). With rising gas and insurance prices, her choice is more common and beneficial than ever. Think Zipcar and its ilk is a viable alternative to actual car ownership? Let us know in the comments.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=379

Nicholas Widdows writes about a clause he found in Toni Morrison's Beloved (p. 259):

(1a) the well is forbidden to play near

("in the free indirect speech of Bodwin, an elderly white man… not filtered through the thoughts or hearing of any of the black characters", according to Widdows). Every so often we post about some comprehensible examples that strike us and our correspondents as unacceptable — examples like this one — and then our task is to try to decide whether these examples are all inadvertent errors, or whether at least some of the instances represent a non-standard system different from our own. (Not infrequently, the latter turns out to be the case, to our astonishment.)

So Widdows and I spent some time searching for examples similar to (1a), so far without success. While we're waiting for more data (including judgments from people who find things like (1a) ok, if there are any), here are some remarks on the structure in (1), to make it clear just what would constitute a similar example.

The example in (a) has a subject (the well) and a copular predicative (is forbidden to play near), in which the complement of the copular verb is a predicative AdjP (adjective phrase), composed of the adjective forbidden and ITS complement, the VP to play near. This is an infinitival VP, composed of the infinitive marker to and its complement VP, play near, and play near consists of a head verb (play) and a PP complement to it, in which the object of the preposition near is missing. The crucial point is that the gap in the elliptical PP near corresponds to the subject of the whole clause (the well); the well is interpreted as the object of the preposition near. That is, (1a) is interpreted in the same way as the impeccable:

(1b) it is forbidden to play near the well

At this point, seasoned syntacticians will recognize that the relationship between (1a) and (1b) is formally parallel to the relationship between (2a) and (2b), and between (3a) and (3b):

(2a) Kim is hard to listen to ___.

(2b) It is hard to listen to Kim.

(3a) Sandy is easy to understand ___.

(3b) It is easy to understand Sandy.

In classic transformational grammar, this relationship is viewed, somewhat metaphorically, as a matter of "raising" an object (object of a preposition, as in (2), or direct object, as in (3)) within a VP complement in a clause to be the subject of that clause, by "moving" the object to subject function. This process is sometimes referred to (reasonably enough) as Object-to-Subject Raising (OSR), and in the case of (2) and (3) as Tough Movement, since many of the predicatives involved in the relationship there are adjectives or nouns denoting difficulty or ease: adjectives tough, easy, hard, impossible; nouns snap, bitch, devil. (Longer lists are given in the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, p. 1246.)

Now, forbidden doesn't fit into any of the semantic subtypes enumerated in CGEL, and neither do semantically related items that can occur as predicatives in the (1b) structure: prohibited, taboo, verboten, proscribed. Like forbidden, these are bad (for me) in the (1a) structure:

(4a) *the well is prohibited/verboten/… to play near ___

(4b) it is prohibited/verboten/… to play near the well

Looking for (a)-type examples involves varying the verb and the preposition in the infinitival VP, and of course the raised NP: the road is forbidden to play on, this door is prohibited to stand near, etc. This is a tedious enterprise at best, because it's likely to pull up piles of (b)-type examples, not to mention (c)-type examples like:

(1c) Terry is forbidden to play near the well.

I've also tried looking for (a)-type examples with raised direct objects instead of objects of prepositions — things like:

(5a) *fried foods are forbidden to eat ___

(5b) it is forbidden to eat fried foods

Also, so far with no success.

In any case, the (a)-type examples would represent an extension of OSR to a new class of governing predicatives (the forbidden class) — not an entirely unreasonable innovation, but has anyone made it?

http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/340014547/take-psychedelic-pictures-with-your-iphone

http://lifehacker.com/398861/take-psychedelic-pictures-with-your-iphone

Wired's How-To Wiki demonstrates how to exploit the iPhone's unusual shutter to take distorted photographs. The trick? Just twist your camera as you're taking a picture.

The reason? The iPhone uses a CMOS sensor, which more or less "wipes" the shutter across the sensor like a scanner rather than the circular aperture of a traditional camera. The iPhone's CMOS scanner seems to be a bit slower than, say, the CMOS sensor on your Canon camera. Therefore, as the camera is recording the image, any changes over that small but significant amount of time are recorded.

Taking a psychedelic photo is actually just as easy as it sounds (works better in bright sunlight), but read on for a quick video demonstration.

http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/339975186/set-up-a-movie-theater-in-your-backyard

http://lifehacker.com/398873/set-up-a-movie-theater-in-your-backyard

With a projector, DVD player, a bed sheet, and an extension cord, Wired's How-To Wiki runs down how to make a movie theater in your backyard this summer.

http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/339933293/hitchsters-helps-you-catch-a-cheap-airport-ride-in-nyc

http://lifehacker.com/398846/hitchsters-helps-you-catch-a-cheap-airport-ride-in-nyc

Find yourself in New York City without an airport ride, but don't want to pony up the disheartening full fare for a cab ride? Hitchsters.com hooks you up with other taxi riders taking the same flight to save money and ensure you arrive on time. The benefit over an airline-sponsored shuttle van is that your fellow passengers are trying to make the same flight, so you won't have to hop on two hours early or risk missing your take-off. The service is currently live for Manhattan and Brooklyn pick-ups, but plans to expand. Thanks, Jason!

http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/339905922/get-better-vacation-photos

http://lifehacker.com/398872/get-better-vacation-photos

Macworld runs down how to get vacation photos that don't look just like everyone else's with some power tips on gear, camera settings, perspective and more.

Bandwidth used means radio transmissions sent, and overhead means more work done by the processor, both of which take battery power and reduce battery life. Meanwhile, compression turned out to not be very helpful. Since it's negotiated during connection startup, it doesn't help with startup overhead. It does help somewhat with steady-state bandwidth, but at the expense of additional CPU cycles. The result is that enabling compression actually reduced battery life in our tests -- it took more power for the CPU to do compression than we saved on radio power.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rsepulveda/2682893278/

rsepulveda posted a photo:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rsepulveda/2682888398/

rsepulveda posted a photo:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rsepulveda/2682064393/

rsepulveda posted a photo:

http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/entry/sun_blueprints_site_now_a

I just bumped into the Sun BluePrints Wiki and I think it is worth a visit. It is a companion to the BluePrints Blog and part of the move towards Self-Published Content at Sun, which increases agility and responsiveness to user's needs.

The Recent Content page lists chronologically the latest changes. The more recent entries are created in Wiki format, while the earlier ones are PDF attachments.

Some of the documents that caught my attention include:

• Hadoop Primer • Optimizing MySQL Server on x64 Servers and Storage • Configure J4000 and ZFS in 10 Minutes • Modularity in Data Center Design • Using SSD instead of HDD • V12N Entries: Solaris HW, LDOMs & CMT, LDOMs & IO, xVM Hypervisor.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/towleroad/feed/~3/339969013/rearview-mirror.html