I’ve been following the outage at the 365 Main data center in San Francisco. The speculation as to why the backup generators did not prevent the power outage from taking down some of the colo rooms in the data center is really interesting. Valleywag has blanket coverage of the story. Data center knowledge has a good explanation of the flywheel UPS technology that 365 Main uses, and how the outage might have caused it to fail. ...
How grim is the mortgage market right now? Check out these numbers from Countrywide Mortgage: Countrywide said about 5.4 percent of the home equity loans to customers with good credit that it held an interest in were past due at the end of June, up from 2.2 percent at the end of June 2006. By comparison, more than a fifth of subprime loans were past due at the end of June, up from 13.4 percent a year ago. ...
General David Petraeus is supposed to issue a report in September that will assess how well the “surge” is going. The Washington Post has obtained a leaked copy of that report: I meet with Iraqi security force leaders every day. Though some have given in to acts of intimidation, many are displaying courage and resilience in the face of repeated threats and attacks on them, their families and their comrades. I have seen their determination and their desire to assume the full burden of security tasks for Iraq. ...
I’ve collected a variety of links over the past few days. Leading off, The Slacktivist explains the real purpose behind all of the think tanks, institutes, and foundations in Washington DC – unemployment insurance for disgraced or out of power political operatives. The Homeland Security department has decided that you can carry lighters onto planes again. Most surprising bit in this article – a DHS spokesman actually uses the term “security theater.” Maybe there’s hope after all. ...
What’s it like to drive a car that was featured on posters plastered over thousands of bedroom walls in the eighties? Edmunds.com is finding out, having purchased a used 1984 Ferrari 308 and subjecting it to a long term road test. Consistently fascinating. Firefox seems to be picking up market share like crazy in Europe. Saifedean Ammous writes about the right of return for Palestinians at 3quarksdaily. Be sure and check out the first comment for a powerful counterpoint as well. ...
Here’s link roundup number two. Before I get started, let me elaborate a bit more on yesterday’s mention of the old link blog. When I said that nobody read it, what I meant was that it got about 10% of the readership of the front page. I was putting more and more energy into it, and unintentionally, less into the front page. I think it makes sense to put the most energy into the bit that people are actually reading, so I consolidated the two again. Unfortunately, that meant that I was posting fewer links. I’m still trying to find the right mix. ...
I still haven’t struck the balance I’d like between posting links and posting longer features here. I had the link blog for awhile, but nobody read it, so I gave up on it with the intent of posting the links to the main blog, but my output has diminished significantly. I still track lots of links, by way of my del.icio.us account. I don’t want to just repost that list of links here because some of those links aren’t really very interesting. ...
Turns out the same kind of bugs that were found when Apple released the beta version of Safari 3.0 for Windows are present in Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Windows instant-messaging client Trillian. They’re all related to unsafe handling of malicious URLs. The good news is that none of them worked on my Mac. These exploits work by way of different mechanisms. When Firefox is installed on Windows, it registers itself as being the handler for any URLs that begin with “firefoxurl”. This enables developers of other applications to launch Firefox automatically. Unfortunately, this mechanism can be used to pass arbitrary instructions to Firefox via the command line. The Trillian exploit is similar. It registers itself as the handler for “aim” URLs, and then accepts the parameters passed to it and passes them to the command line without properly validating them. ...
Here’s a number that blew me away: Nineteen percent of meals [and snacks in the U.S.] are eaten in the car right now. From an interview with Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore’s Dilmena. (via 3qd) I eat in the car less than one percent of the time. I would say never, but it’s a bit more frequent than never.
You learn something new every day. Today I learned about correspondent inference theory.