Nuffing.com

American troops using a newly-developed acoustic locator, mounted on a wheeled platform. The large horns amplified distant sounds, monitored through headphones worn by a crew member, who could direct the platform to move and pinpoint distant enemy aircraft. Development of passive acoustic location accelerated during World War I, later surpassed by the development of radar in the 1940s.

via In Focus
World War I in Photos: Technology

May 11, 2014May 11, 2014

Dilbert 2014-05-11

via Dilbert
Dilbert 2014-05-11

May 10, 2014

Can MySQL be a 12-factor service?

A while ago I wrote about some of the things that can make MySQL unreliable or hard to operate. Some time after that, in a completely unrelated topic, someone made me aware of a set of principles called 12-factor that I believe originated from experiences building Heroku.
That’s been over a year, and I’ve come to increasingly agree with the 12-factor principles. I guess I’m extremely late to the party, but making applications behave in 12-factor-compliant ways has solved a lot of problems for me.
This experience has repeatedly reminded me of one of the applications that continues to cause a lot of the kinds of pain that the 12-factor principles have solved for me: MySQL.
Example: configuration files. I initially thought MySQL’s technique of multiple configuration files that serve as defaults, overrides to the defaults, and eventually are overridden by the commandline options was a good thing. In fact, you can blame me for that pattern being imitated in Percona Toolkit, if you want to blame anyone for it.
But then I started to see the problems with it. Quick question: how easy is it to set up multiple MySQL instances on the same server, in your opinion? Had any problems with that? Any unexpected things ever happen to you?
12-factor solves many of the types of problems I’ve had with that. For example, I once needed multiple instances of an API server on a single operating system host. This was very difficult because of conflicts with configuration files and init scripts, which I’d created by copying the way MySQL does things. Moving the configuration into the environment variables solved most of those problems and helped solve others.
I don’t necessarily expect anyone to understand this unless they’ve had first-hand experience with it. After all, I didn’t until I got that experience myself. I know a lot of people believe fully in the results of following 12-factor principles, so I won’t spend time trying to explain it here.
Thought experiment: how hard would it be to make MySQL accept all of its configuration as environment variables? I think it would be feasible to make a wrapper that reads the environment variables and exec’s mysqld with the resulting options. But if MySQL could be configured via environment variables directly, that’d be even nicer. (I can’t think of an environment variable it respects at the moment, other than TZ.)
I don’t propose blindly following 12-factor principles. They are most applicable to stateless or little-state applications, such as API servers or web applications. They are harder to use with attachable stateful resources, such as a database server. But even a system like MySQL could sometimes be improved, with regards to operational characteristics, by following 12-factor principles.
Pic
via Planet MySQL
Can MySQL be a 12-factor service?

May 9, 2014

The Most Important Security Settings to Change on Your Router

Your router is the first line of defense against hackers trying to access all the internet-connected devices in your home. Sadly, many of the top Wi-Fi routers are easy to hack. You should be concerned—and also make sure your router is set up properly.

PBS gives parents a way to monitor what kids are watching on its site

The PBS KIDS website is a pretty great hub of entertainment for little ones. And even though there’s nothing but useful learning content to be enjoyed there, PBS still wanted to make it easy for parents to monitor what their kids are doing on the…
via Engadget RSS Feed
PBS gives parents a way to monitor what kids are watching on its site

May 8, 2014

Epic Games to openly develop next Unreal Tournament as free title

Epic Games is developing the next edition of Unreal Tournament openly, and will be free, the game producer has announced. The development team will be making code and content for the first person shooter freely accessible to interested parties, and plans a "collaboration between Epic, UT fans, and UE4 (Unreal Engine 4) developers."…