Tag Archives: features

Stewart, Colbert back on without writers for now

The Daily Show pickettersYep, call me a day late and a dollar short, but after all this time, Stewart and Colbert were back on last night, although still sans writers. While I understand it’s a tough situation for all, having this many people out of work (not just Jon, Steven and the writers, but everyone from makeup to camera to sound, etc) is crazy. Think about your job if you were ‘off’ for two months and had no way to resolve it yourself? Anyway, here’s to the shows (and people’s lives) getting back on track soon. As for the ‘talent’, they were back in the guises we love, with Stewart showing his solidarity with the writers by claiming that, “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’ is a show we do with our very creative team of field producers and correspondents and studio people and, of course, our writers,” he said Monday night, then added with pointed irony, “From now on, until the end of the strike, we’ll be doing ‘A Daily Show with Jon Stewart.’ But not ‘THE Daily Show.’” Meanwhile Colbert kept it in character with a tirade I can see in my head, “I got a problem here,” snapped Colbert in his most indignant tone. “There are no words on my (Tele)prompter.” Refusing to concede that writers are required to provide his “commentaries,” Colbert declared, “My understanding is, this little magic box (the Teleprompter) reads my thoughts and lays them up on the screen for me to read to the audience.” His director advised him the words would have had to be furnished by staff writers. “The writers!” Colbert scoffed. “The guys on the fourth floor with the opium bongs, playing Guitar Hero all day! I find that a bit of a stretch.” “I don’t like unions,” railed Colbert, whose on-air persona is a right-wing blowhard, “and I don’t need writers. Which brings me to tonight’s Word” — a favorite feature of the show. But Colbert was quickly mortified: There was no word. That would have required a writer.” Ah, so nice for them to be back, maybe tonight I’ll actually have the TV on again; bring on the election coverage Jon!

Glassbooth – how do you line up with the candidates?

DemocratsRepublicansYou owe it yourself, or me, to visit Glassbooth and fill out their survey. It’s all about politics, specifically how your thoughts line up with the current batch of candidates. Of course mine pull up to Dennis Kucinich, followed by Mike Gravel and John Edwards. Hills is fourth, with Obama a disappointing sixth. Once you have your results you can cross reference every candidate with every issue and get information about how they stand, what they’ve said and how they’ve voted on everything. Really a great site that has educated me far more than I expected. I’m a big Kucinich fan (heck, Willie supports him!) but I’ve never read so much about Gravel, he’s pretty damn impressive too. With all the candidates jockeying for position on the seemingly 100s of debates, it’s nice to have a resource to get some facts. There’s no third party candidates thought, but hey, it’s far more than what most American’s will know about the stances of the candidates on the issues. Everyone should register to vote, then become educated about things; if you don’t you can’t complain.

Music that stands the test of time

TurntableCarrie Brownstein (former Sleater-Kinney guitarist) now has a great blog on NPR called Monitor MixA recent post talked about her learning what bands were important to her father over the years, and it leads to a question I’ve always wondered, what music that is important to us be as important for our kids when they grow up?  In other words, what will make the jump.  I posted a comment, and the submission form wouldn’t let me post it!  I’ll try again later, but for now I’ve put it here.  What bands are important to you, or were growing up, that you can see making the jump to the next generation?

Allow Varnish to reuse its shared object

Varnish logoBACKGROUND:  The following is a proposal I submitted to the Varnish developers in order to make it simpler to integrate Varnish (an HTTP accelerator for web sites) into production environments.  fak3r uses Varnish in front of its webserver, Lighttpd, so it’s likely that the page you’re now reading was served to you not by the webserver, but via Varnish.

Currently Varnish requires a C compiler to be present on the machine it’s running on, since it needs to compile the VCL config file into a shared object each time it starts. During shutdown, Varnish removes this shared object since it will be rebuilt during the next start. This routine repeats regardless of if anything has changed in the VCL config file, and serves as a road bump to getting Varnish into certain production environments since traditionally development applications (such as the C compiler) are not allowed in such instances. For now I am putting aside the arguments as to why it’s is acceptable to have development applications in production instances, since that argument’s outcome will vary in different situations, and I am aiming for a solution that will cover all instances.

PayPal: Open Source Essential to Success

PayPalPayPal has used Open Source and Linux exclusively.  In an op-ed piece, Matthew Mengerink from PayPal gives his four reasons why Open Souce is Essential to Success. “PayPal transacts more than US$1,500 every second of every day, with millions of people around the world relying on the robustness of its system. It comes as a surprise to many people that PayPal runs such a large financial services company on an open source platform, but that’s precisely how we’re able to deal with the two competing demands our business Over 800,000 High Quality Domains Available For Your Business. Click Here. model places on us: security and innovation. The economic, operational, development and security advantages of open source and Linux put us in the perfect position to both grow and innovate in a safe and secure manner. Here are four reasons why we love our open source system — and four tips for you if you’re thinking of making the switch.

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