So North Korea is preparing to shutdown their nuclear reactors. What I am wondering is how many nukes can Kim Jong-Il make with nuclear material they already processed? 20? 40? Even with just 10, they would have enough to destroy key cities in East Asia: Seoul, Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and maybe Singapore. With today's world economy tightly interweaved, no one can afford to ignore North Korea's demands now. I frankly don't see why we wasted time and lives in Iraq for imaginary WMD while North Korea built the real thing. Nuts.
It doesn't matter that US and China has tens of thousands of nukes or that South Korea and Japan can match North Korea's nukes in no time. We have something to lose while they don't and that's enough to force us to dance whenever they howl like hungry wolves.

Apparently, integrity and trust are not bed fellows. If people had any trust in the integrity of Om Malik, Michael Arrington, John Battelle, and others, they would have just laughed off when Valleywag questioned it. Is integrity without trust worth anything?
As a consultant, I get paid to answer questions and state my opinions on anything my clients want yet no one questions my integrity because lip service sinks ships. Isn't it the same for journalists and analysts? It seems weird that people would so readily question the integrity of folks whose livelyhood depends on integrity. John's conversation campaign seems to be nothing more than getting paid to pay attention. Was there any attempt to influence, edit or filter opinions? I don't think so.
I think people need to give more slack and trust instead of condemning their favorite bloggers at the first sniff of rotting fish. There is more going on here than yesterday's sushi and I just don't think respected folks like them can sell out as easily and cheaply as some folks are suggesting. If people are so hungry for distrust, they should question Valleywag's premise which seems to be about profitting from others' misery and embarrassing moments as well as pulling pornography out of shadows.

If you value your own integrity, expect the same from others.

I am looking at SoftLayer for dedicated servers. They received good reviews, better than The Planet which I am using now, and their API support is a step in the right direction. I'll probably start off with an Opteron Express series but their Enterprise Racks services is interesting.

Has anyone tried them yet? What are the differences between Virtual Private Rack and Virtual Dedicated Rack? Also, are there any signs of service quality deterioration from popularity?

If you install Ruby on CentOS 4 via yum, you'll get version 1.8.1 which latest versions of Rails and other gems have problems running on. Building latest version of Ruby yourself is a bit more involving than the usual download/configure/make/install dance so my recommendation is to use the version (1.8.5) in the Testing rpm repository.

To enable the Testing rpm repository, switch to /etc/yum.repos.d directory then:

wget http://dev.centos.org/centos/4/CentOS-Testing.repo

Change "enabled=0" to "enabled=1" in the .repo file then install ruby:

yum install ruby ruby-irb

At this point, you should have no trouble installing rubygems and rails. 

My Google juice is overflowing. I posted about Connie Talbot before my camping trip and when I checked the comments yesterday, I noticed comments from teenage girls. Scratching my head, I checked google and, doh, the post showed up as #2 result for "Connie Talbot", beating both YouTube and Wikipedia. My post still shows up on the first page when I search for simply "Connie".
While I love Barbie Dolls and Hello Kitty as much as any 45 year old man can, I think it's safe to say that search engine space is still wide open technology-wise.

 

It's camping time again. This time it'll be Yosemite, not the valley but just outside. We have another Korean family joining us so we had to get two lots but valley camping is too competitive to get two side-by-side because the lots are snapped up too fast.
We haven't camped there before so we are going in blind. I hope the bears there are less noisy than the ones inside the valley (you can hear them breathing and sniffing heavily as they roam about the camp at night). If you just imagined me inside my sleeping bag clutching pots and listening to bears' phone-sex me into sleep, you got the picture. If you are planning to camp at Yosemite, avoid outer lots. It's a matter of danger but more a matter of sleeping soundly.
Speaking of sleep, we are leaving in a few hours but I couldn't sleep so I spent the early morning setting up a test server. I can't wait to have nothing to do but worry about bears. ;-p

I don't have an answer to the question but thought Annie Heckenberger's comment to Max Kalehof's post was funny:

I’ve noticed a surge…and consequently a mass exodus of their core users. My 20-yr intern summed it up best: when I asked her why she deleted her facebook profile/account this week, she said, “My 6th grade cousin tried to friend me on facebook and that was it. Facebook’s over.”

Free goosebumps for morning! A bit of drama and a lot of talent, catch 6-year old Connie Talbot singing Somewhere Over The Rainbow. Her voice was perfect and her smile is just precious. I just hope she doesn't turn out like Britney Spears did.

If your freshly installed Tomcat 6.0 on Windows is failing to start with a mysterious error about javajni.c, it's because a Tomcat native library depends on msvcr71.dll file which is often missing on Win32 servers. Get a copy from another (likely developer) machine and drop it into SYSTEM32 directory. Tomcat 6.0 should now start like this blog's server just did. ;-p

BTW, following server.xml entry is what you need to enable NIO HTTP 1.1 connector for Cometd and other uses.

<Connector port="8080" protocol="org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11NioProtocol" maxThreads="150" connectionTimeout="20000" redirectPort="8443" />

While I was busy humping ActionScript, Ruby installation on my Mac laptop broke. During reinstall, I noticed that MySQL gem failed to update. After collecting tips and misleads off the net, none of which worked as is, I found a combo that worked for me:

1. Edit mysql.h to defined 'ulong' as unsigned long
2. Use dash-dash space dash-dash for parameter

Apparently, mysql.c in MySQL gem uses ulong which is not defined anywhere so gem install fails. If you define ulong inside mysql.c then make/install, the gem won't show up in the gem list and gem install command will wipe out any change you make, so hacking mysql.h from local MySQL installation seems to be the path of least resistance.
 MySQL is installed at /usr/local/mysql on my laptop so, for step 1, I edited:

/usr/local/mysql/include/mysql.h

then ran (watch the Morse-codish crap):

sudo gem install mysql — –with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/mysql

Total time wasted: 2 foul-mouth hours. Some folks reported success by switching to GCC 3.3 (sudo gcc_select 3.3) but not for me. Above fix works with GCC 4.0 (sudo gcc_select 4.0).