The Weekly Weird - 2015-09-25
- You can rent a helicopter to take you from the East side of Manhattan to the West for $95. I have no words.
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After I stuck the 'permalink' at the top of last week's email, a Top Secret source emailed me to say that they got a 500 error trying to view it. I loaded the page from my desktop at work and it loaded fine so I mentally chalked it up to user error/solar flares/etc. Checking the logs however showed:
2015/09/18 15:02:13 [error] 25407#25407: *31379 rewrite or internal redirection cycle while internally redirecting to "/index.html", client: XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX, server: localhost, request: "GET /posts/weekly-weird-2015-09-18 HTTP/1.1", host: "www.skorgu.net"
This was not a solar flare. With the help of wireshark (note to self:
sudo tcpdump -i eth0 -nn -w nginx -s0 -C 100 -W 3 -Z root port 80) I noticed that all ipv6 clients got200, while all ipv4 ones got500. Remember how I bragged about enabling ipv6 last week? Yeah, well I broke ipv4 in the process because nginx. I have ipv6 natively at the computer I was testing from so I never saw the problem. - Misery loves company so of course I'm a bit reassured by AWS having massive downtime recently too. It turns out a new feature increased metadata usage past what could survive a network partition. Distributed systems are hard. - While we're talking about Dynamo, we should mention that there's now a C++ reimplementation of Cassandra for performance. Now this isn't (just) a case of as fast as c, they've made some architectural decisions that seem smart (userspace networking, lockless fast paths, pinning workloads to cores, etc) beyond just "loljava". - If you're not convinced the cloud is just a scam, now there's another place you can stash your data: Backblaze drops the mic with a $0.005/GB/Month storage option. Yes, you read right that's cheaper than Glacier. The 1TB/Month cold storage numbers are now:- $5 Backblaze B2
- $7 AWS Glacier
- $10 Google's Nearline
- $12.50 AWS S3-IA
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"the universe, at a temperature of 3 K, represents a significant renewable thermodynamic resource."
- I still feel like cross-compiling Rust to javascript is taking crazy pills but it seems to work.
- Brendan Gregg is awesome. (comments)
- I feel like when Aphyr criticizes your distributed database the ideal response is probably not "it doesn't work on a single machine either!", especially if you're wrong anyway. Friends don't let friends use MySql.
- Note to self: extend Nikola to publish to IPFS on commit.
- Geographically accurate subway maps! London (pdf)! NYC! Washington D.C.! (via)
- The internet really is a series of tubes: InterTubes: A Study of the US Long-haul Fiber-optic Infrastructure (pdf)
- "Under federal law, the EPA can levy a maximum possible fine of $37,500 per vehicle, EPA officials said on a conference call with reporters today, meaning VW and Audi face potential fines of up to $18 billion for the alleged violations.". There's a bit more detail here.
- LEGO CLOCK. ANOTHER LEGO CLOCK.
- Normally I'm quite down on people using videos to explain things when text would do just as well. CGP Grey is probably the exception, I particularly like his examination of the City of London but most of his oeuvre is worth watching.
- Speaking of videos, here's a good talk about CPUs, datacenters, cache and other fun things.
- I don't eat octopus for a simple reason: self preservation. If you don't look at an animal that's basically a hive mind of intelligent tentacles, able to open jars from the inside and squeeze through impossibly small holes (don't think staying out of the water will save you) and see a carefully engineered minion of the elder gods, well then I don't know what to tell you. Fhtagn.
