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After the server crash I mentioned the other day, I solicited suggestions on how to keep my server from running into the same problems again. Monit was one package that several people suggested, so I decided to give it a try. Monit is a monitoring package, written in C, that can be run as a daemon on a server. It has facilities for monitoring the entire server, specific applications, files and directories, and network services. For example, you can configure it to alert you when your server’s CPU utilization goes above 80%, or when your server’s memory usage stays above 75% for five minutes, or when a specific file or directory are missing or changed. ...

I laughed so hard at this wikigroaning article today that I cried.

I installed Movable Type 4 today. My first impression is that the installation is a breeze and that it looks completely different from all previous versions of Movable Type. The administrative console looks a bit like Mephisto. At first glance, it looks like Six Apart has applied what they learned building Vox to Movable Type, which is excellent. This site is still running Movable Type 3.3, but I’m going to try to create new templates in Movable Type 4 and then migrate the site over. Of course, by the time I’m done with my redesign we’ll probably be testing Movable Type 5. ...

The fact that Paul McCartney’s new album, Memory Almost Full is available from emusic.com in DRM-free MP3 format on the day of its release feels like a very big deal to me.

I was working on a small project this week that reminded me again of PHP’s fatal flaw, which is that it is nearly impossible to maintain encapsulation to prevent components of a system from screwing each other up. We have a Web site that uses a big, popular, open source PHP application. The home page of the site loads up some components of the system and displays some information. I had written a tiny application to enable users to maintain one small section of the home page. My application’s involvement with the home page consisted of one function and one callout to the function to display its return value. The function was basically this: ...

Congratulations, Brad, on your ninth blog anniversary. I hold a special affection for all of the pre-twenty-first century blogs.

One problem I had under Fedora Core 4 was that occasionally, some memory-leaking process would eventually use up all of the server’s swap space, and the server would stop responding to everything but ping. I’d have to send in a reboot request and wait for the next hang. This evening, the same thing happened again, despite the fact that I’m running a new OS, new version of Apache, new version of PHP, new version of MySQL, etc, etc. Any ideas on how I can set up monitoring to make sure this doesn’t happen again? ...

Gene Spafford explains the goals of computer science education as opposed to just teaching someone to program: We don’t produce programmers. Anyone can learn programming – all they need to do is buy “C for Dummies” and they can learn to program. But that isn’t learning fundamentals. For instance, ask people who know how to program to write a sort routine and they can do it, although the results may not be pretty – or efficient. But task people with a good CS education – who have had some background in algorithms, big “O” complexity, and data structures – and they should ask about input data set sizes, whether identical key sorting needs to be non-destructive, whether the set is pre-ordered, and whether the sort needs to be inplace or not. That may be obvious to you, but non-obvious to someone who hasn’t been exposed to the science in computer science. ...

It’s been widely reported that the name and email address of the person who purchased the tracks is embedded in both DRM-protected and DRM-free iTunes Music Store tracks. The EFF has found evidence pointing to the fact that the files may contain a lot more identifying information as well. I’m not necessarily opposed to keeping identifying information about the purchaser in the tracks, but I am curious about what else Apple is stuffing into them. ...

Der Spiegel has a slideshow of photos of the anti-globalization riots in Rostock, Germany. I look at the rioters and see a bunch of people looking for an excuse to throw rocks at the police. It’s a shame that their antics distract from and discredit (in the eyes of most) the causes that the peaceful protesters are marching for.