Yes. I want one. Right Now.
From the Chicago Tribune's review:

...a bacon and cheese sandwich where bread is replaced with fried chicken. Re-read that last sentence, and just try to grasp its cultural significance. The toothpaste is out of the proverbial tube.
...Double Down's larger implication is that KFC has broken through a barrier of culinary decency, besmirching the good name of sandwiches and all that is honorable... The absence of bread robs this “sandwich” of dignity.
All told, the ripples from this landmark product launch will be significant. Stand-up comedians will construct 10-minute riffs around this. Taco Bell will follow suit and introduce a taco called the Carne Go-Torta, where the tortilla shell is replaced with a meat sleeve. Freedom-loathing terrorists will hate us for this. I can see it now.

America, just because you can, it doesn't mean you have to.

Made of awesome. Full of win. Nothing more needs to be said.

New A-Team Trailer Increases Nostalgia Factor by Roughly 300 percent

MySQL 5 Upgrade

Up until this year, our mysql.agni master was running version 4.1. Shortly after I started at Linden Lab, there was a project to upgrade the entire tree to version 5.0. Our resources were limited back then, and the operation was a total failure. It turns out that MySQL 5.0 has a much different disk i/o usage profile for our query rate and load type. When the master was upgraded to version 5.0, it promptly collapsed under heavy disk i/o load and unacceptable response times. Worse still, we did not have a proper version 4.1 host slaving off of the new master, so there was extended downtime and some data loss as we failed back to the older version and had to replay queries from binary logs.

Fast forward to the end of 2009, and we were much smarter, and better equipped to upgrade. By this point, all of the slaves in the tree had been upgraded, and it was becoming difficult and confusing to maintain a mixed-version slaving tree, with some on version 4 and some on version 5. We were operating on upgraded hardware with more capacity and headroom -- particularly concerning disk i/o.

My former co-worker, Charity Majors, authored an extremely thorough public blog post concerning this upgrade, and our planning to make it come off without a hitch. We built a robust load-testing and analysis rig, and put the new version and hardware through its paces multiple times, in multiple ways, to make sure that we'd be OK this time. The major difference was our consultation with Percona and our decision to use one of their high-performance tuned builds of MySQL. In addition, we came up with an awesome plan for performing the upgrade, and a fallback mechanism if we needed it.

The trouble with fallback in this case is that normally, it's not possible to hook up a MySQL version 4.1 slave off of a 5.0 master. This means that once we upgraded to the new master and had writes and updates going to it, we'd have no version 4.1 server to fall back to without losing data. Charity was able to rig up a script that rotated the binary logs on the new 5.0 master every 5 minutes or so, and sent the contents of the log over the network to a fallback host, where we would feed the binary log queries (via mysqlbinlog piped into mysql and various filters to compensate for 4.1/5.0 incompatibilities) into the database and get it up to date and ready to fail over to if we had issues with version 5.0. Of course, performance wasn't our only concern, and there were millions of lines of code just waiting to bite us in the butt and potentially require falling back.

On January 5th, 2010, all went as well as could have possibly been imagined. We cut over to the version 5.0 master, and there were no issues. It's so nice to finally be on a relatively recent version of the software, and more importantly, to have our master and slaves all be on the same version. And so our march onwards continues towards ever-improved performance and stability!

Age 62, of Shorewood, passed away peacefully Friday, March 5, 2010 at University of Chicago Medical Center.

Born August 23, 1947 in Chicago, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and served during the Vietnam War. He worked as a Project Manager and Communications Instructor for Ameritech.

His family was his life.

Surviving are his wife, Kathy A. (nee Kupka) Raven; his children, Richard James (Jill) Raven, Cherie (Brian Chapin) Raven, and Kristin Ellen (Ben O'Connor) Raven; four grandchildren, Brook Elizabeth and Richard John Raven, and Audrey Katherine and Edward Michael Chapin; one brother, Daniel Joseph Raven; and several nieces and nephews.

Preceded by his parents, Stanley and Dorothy (nee Coakley) Raven; and three siblings, Raymond, Robert, and Dorothy Raven.

Funeral services for Richard M. Raven will be Wednesday, March 10, 2010 at 11:00 a.m. at the funeral home chapel. Internment will be in Resurrection Cemetery, Romeoville. In lieu of flowers, memorials to University of Chicago Cancer Research Center, 5841 S. Maryland Ave MC 1440, Chicago, IL 60637 would be appreciated. Visitation Tuesday, from 3-8 p.m. at:

Fred C. Dames Funeral Home 3200 Black at Essington Rds., Joliet (815) 741-5500 www.fredcdames.com

"The weird sense of duty really good sysadmins have can border on the sociopathic, but it's nice to know that it stands between the forces of darkness and your cat blog's servers."

Ingredients:

• ~3 strips bacon (I use precooked for convenience)
• 2 slices of bread
• Some peanut butter

Lightly toast two slices of bread. Spread peanut butter on the toasted bread. I like to put three half-slices of cold, pre-cooked bacon on each slice and then put it back in the toaster oven for a few minutes. If you're using regular bacon, or don't have a toaster oven, I suppose you could cook up the bacon in a skillet. Put the two pieces of the sandwich together, let it cool down for a bit, and then enjoy. Yum-tastic!

"We came, we saw, we kicked it's ass!"

Trust me, it's catchy. Watch it twice.

That said, in a few years there will be a generation of adults for whom The Goonies is not the nostalgic icon that it is for us. And those people are going to ask you why you have a tattoo of a retarded pirate on your arm. If there are any measures you can take to prepare yourself for this outcome, you should probably do it.

...and that's sad.

Since my day-to-day life deals with computer science in a more practical and hands-on way, the topics that I have chosen are more practical in nature. Last semester, I gave a talk about MySQL in production, and specifically how we use it at Linden Lab to make Second Life work.

Just last week, however, I gave a slugtalk describing how DNS works out here in the real world. I think it went pretty well. Download my slide deck as a PDF here.

GeoCities, once one of the 10 most visited domains of the entire internet, and repository of around 10 terabytes of people's home pages and information dating back to 1994 is shutting down today. Ken Gagne says all that needs to be said about it in his excellent ComputerWorld blog post today. Soon we'll be losing such gems as my high school friend Josh's Phiggity-Phat Home Page from c. 1996, featuring amazing gems on Fred Couples, David Carradine, Peter North, and the A-Team. Such a loss, indeed. Thankfully, the archive team is working on saving it. Also, check out XKCD's tribute to geocities in today's comic.

An awesome retro news report from 1988 about the super scary Morris Worm. Centered on MIT, it features none other than jis himself a few times. And an amish part-time virus hunter cum MIT student? Courtesy of The Scottographer .

Some good quotes: "the students were safe ... their computers were not." "the suspect, somewhere.... a dark genius."