When
· Naughties
· · 2006
· · · May
· · · · 31 (3 entries)
Underground, Invitation, Le kick and rush · I wonder if there’s any real benefit, when someone whom I’ve already highlighted writes something exceptionally good, in pointing to them again and saying “read this!” But sometimes you can’t not do it. Item: my brother Rob on the joy of underground high explosives. Item: Alex Waterhouse-Hayward on Ana Victoria (oh, my). For my last link you’ll have to be able to read a language somewhat but not entirely unlike French; Mondial 2006 is the World Cup 2006 blog from Libération ; its torrent of high-velocity low-rent French baffles me in places, and it doesn’t help that I’m not 100% au fait with les Bleus, but you have to like pieces like Panini, beer & Co.
Southern Lord · David Byrne posted Heavy Theater in his (excellent) blog, which led me to Heady Metal in the New York Times, which led me to Southern Lord. Look: either you like an endless twisting torrent of uncompromising guitar roar for its own sake, or you don’t. I do. When I feel like this kind of thing, historically I’ve turned to Washing Machine by Sonic Youth, or Arc by Neil Young. But there are people who love and live and breathe this stuff all the time. I ended up buying two albums by Boris; check out Intro, from Akuma No Uta on Southern Lord’s “Listen” page. And I think to myself: What a wonderful world...
The RAID in the Mirror · If you have lots of data to store and are figuring out how to lay out your disks, check out Roch Bourbonnais’ WHEN TO (AND NOT TO) USE RAID-Z. (Hey Roch; could you find a slightly less brutal way to format your blog?) For RAID & filesystem wonks only. It’s a lucid, quantitative explanation of the trade-offs between mirroring, striping, and RAID-ing. Some of the narrative is ZFS-specific, but I suspect that the lessons are pretty general. Out there in the real world of production applications, you’d be surprised how often it is, when you’re waiting for a slow app, you’re waiting for the disk, not the CPU. This stuff matters.
