Captcha #WTF.
The Interview - Howard Nemerov
The InterviewYoung man, the world's outside that door.
A theater full of risky charms,
With real and paranoid alarms:
Great heights for throwing oneself down
And shallows of a depth to drown-
Sawdust enough to save a clown.
Let others stay and mind the store:
What are you saving yourself for?Young man, don't wait till you know more.
Too much the combat course around,
You'll never find the battleground.
The graves of some that played it cool,
And took no chance, nor looked the fool,
Are hid beneath the graduate school.
This music is to face before
You find out even what's the score.So to the youth spoke old wisdom,
With leathery face and polished knob,
With golden smile and gold watch fob,
Arthritic knuckles, creaking knees,
And yet in this world well at ease
On sixty years of dignities.
The young man wondered going home,
What was he saving himself from?-Howard Nemerov (from The Next Room of the Dream)
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Broken PostgreSQL on clean (virtual) Debian Lenny install: locales most likely culprit. [fix included]
Just signed up for a Linode.com slice and planning on trying it out in the wild very soon. We'll see how it goes in the long-term; this is just a quick FYI for you googlers pulling your hair out over this:
$ createdb testdb
createdb: could not connect to database postgres: could not connect to server: No such file or directory
Is the server running locally and accepting
connections on Unix domain socket "/var/run/postgresql/.s.PGSQL.5432"?
Huh?! Where am I?
So, you installed a brand new spanking Debian (or derivative) system, and the first thing you did after running 'apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade' was decide to install your favorite database: 'apt-get install postgresql-8.3'. Everything install fine, but the first time you try to do anything with it, it throws out ugly errors. In fact, '/etc/init.d/postgresql-8.3 restart' fails to report any errors whatsoever. Which is too bad, considering our faithful 'ps' reports no database is actually running!
What did I do wrong?
You, in all your fine wisdom, assumed that a clean Debian install with a brand new PostgreSQL would simply "install" out-of-the-box. Your box would argue that you may be a good candidate for the Turing test. Or is it your box that is to blame?
Either way, you find out that not only is PostgreSQL not running, it's also missing key scripts and executables it needs to start. For all intents and purposes, it is just wasting space on your disk. (in fact, it's only missing the initial clusters, but at 3am every problem seems far more severe than usual)
Ok, enough ranting. What exactly happened?
At some point during your install, the locale package did not setup correctly, leaving the PostgreSQL installation crippled. Yes, it would have been nice to let the user know about this; but yes, it's also not the end of the world:
First, fix your locales:
# dpkg-reconfigure locales
Second, pretend you are the apt-get incarnate and finish the PostgreSQL installation all on your own:
# pg_createcluster 8.3 main --start
The original problem seems to be more common with Debians installed on a virtual system (which a Linode slice would most certainly be grouped under), Can someone confirm if this is an issue with physical installations?
End of transmission
There you have it folks. 2 lines of code, many lines of ranting. Feel free to apply the fix and get back to real work. Or you can keep googling about it. I found the fix on the ubuntu launchpad, but if someone has a link to a bug filed in Debian, leave a comment.
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Soccer ball converts kicking to electricity. Energy crisis averted!
Considering that one quarter of the world's population lives in areas with no access to electricity, a group of Harvard University students capitalized on the popularity of soccer to develop the sOccket: a soccer ball the generates and stores energy.
As the FAQ clearly explains: no, it will not explode, because of a "largely technical explanation". More importantly, if they could get the weight down (currently 21 ounces vs regulation 16 ounces), maybe it could become more than just a high-tech gadget and toy?
Gatorade (with their lightning logo) clearly has a marketing advantage over Powerade and Redbull, but in general it's hard to gain better PR than by kicking a ball around to help children in Africa. Someone, get on this quick!
Check it out here: http://www.soccket.com/
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Using Facebook to fight email spam
As you may know, Facebook posts your email addresses in your profile as images. For example, my public email address for 1000it.pl is:
If you go ahead and view the source code you can see that the image is generated by a web API at http://www.facebook.com/string_image.php with 2 parameters (ct is a unique key for every email address and fp is the font size).
What's interesting is the web service does not require any authentication. So we can use Facebook's gracious charity (which I suspect is to make it difficult for you to write a screen scraper to grab all of your friend's emails) and redirect it for a greater good. That is, to protect your public email from spam bots.
Next time you need to post an email address, just pick a font size and post a url instead:
Filed under //
hacks
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Startup Advice Reading List
Came across Mark Suster's blog today, and spent the afternoon reading through his old entries.
He offers sound start-up advice and a shorter series on what it takes to be a good entrepreneur. Some of the advice may appear "common sense", but often the best ideas are; that is, ideas so well articulated that everyone thinks they could have written it (except, they didn't). On top of that, the anecdotes offer a glimpse into the world of professional entrepreneurship.
If there was an unofficial reading list for all entrepreneurs, I'd include Mark's series as well as Paul Graham's essays.
What essential reading should be added to the list? Leave a comment!
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1000it.pl zaczyna robić mały raban w sieci
Nasza reklama ukazała się już na Bash.org.pl. A dzięki współpracy z serwisem Django.pl udało nam się rozgłosić naszą akcję Django z całkiem niezłym skutkiem.
Stała współpraca nawiązana z Django.pl będzie opierała się na dostarczaniu serwisowi aktualnych ofert pracy dla Djangoistów w Polsce. Pomagamy jednak nie tylko Djangoistom! Gorąco zachęcamy do rejestracji wszystkich jeszcze niezdecydowanych informatyków. Dołącz do nas, a zawsze aktualne i ciekawe oferty pracy będą trafiać prosto do Twojej skrzynki!
Pomóż nam, pomóc Tobie! Zablipuj (#1000it) lub zostań naszym Facebook Fanem:
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