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Below are the most recent 25 friends' journal entries.
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| Sunday, May 19th, 2013 |
sinfest_mod
[ haloedone ]
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8:58a |
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valaurora
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2:50a |
Strong women and the military
http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2013/05/18/strong-women-and-the-military/ http://blog.valerieaurora.org/?p=1028 My typical morning news routine is listening to NPR’s Morning Edition while catching up on Twitter from the night before – which can be a hilariously jarring experience. Take the news cycle about removing the no-combat rule for women in the U.S. military, in which dozens of reporters uncritically repeated various military units’ contention that women were not physically strong enough for their combat positions.
I was listening to one such story when I read a tweet from Sarah Robles, the Olympic weightlifter. She often tweets things like:
I’ll bet most of Seal Team 6 can’t front squat 363 lbs. Somehow, they assassinated Osama Bin Laden anyway (maybe with the help of, I don’t know, guns and helicopters?).
Or take this one, recently I had the pleasure of watching a strong woman circus act at the Kinetic Arts Center in which the performer climbed – no, rocketed – up a 25 foot long rope, hand-over-hand (look, no feet, ma!), while smiling and holding a girlish pinup pose. She then proceeded to demonstrate vaccuuming and other housewifely activities using an entire adult man as a prop.
And then today I read about Carla Esparza, a 5-foot-1 mixed martial arts champion who won the Invicta Fighting Championships in the “Straw-weight” division. When she’s not competing, she usually trains with men – and beats the crap out of them.
But those are Olympic athletes, circus performers, and martial arts champions – women so rare we can ignore them, right? Then how about my own college weightlifting experience, where I regularly leg pressed twice the weight that my male classmates used? I only ever saw one person at that gym leg press more than I did, and he won the local race to the top of a nearby mountain the following year. As anyone who has ever met me will know, I’m hardly an athlete, but when it comes to physical strength, I have some genetic advantages over many men.
 Sarah Robles Sure, women are, on average, not as strong as men. But strength follows a bell-curve distribution in both sexes, and for all but the most incredibly elite steroid-fueled few men, you can find women who are just as strong. Part of our misconceptions about women’s physical strength is that literal strong women sometimes don’t look like our society’s current stereotypes of “fit women.” If you saw Sarah Robles walking down the street, you’d probably peg her as a couch potato, never knowing that she could bench press the athletic-looking guy walking past her.
But military service isn’t about looks, it’s about ability to get the job done (or it should be). Ironically, the military is already having to turn down more than 75% of applicants – because the (mostly male) recruits of today aren’t fit enough to pass the basic physical fitness tests after a lifetime of too many video games and not enough running around outside.
If this is the competition, women don’t need to be Olympic athletes or martial arts champions to serve in all military combat positions. They just need to train, be determined, and not be kept out by the old boys’ club.
Tagged: feminism, military   |
| Saturday, May 18th, 2013 |
jwz
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5:54p |
Rasputin's daughter on a 1935 Wheaties box
"Europe's Sensational Wild Animal Trainer, Fearless Daughter of Russia's Mad Monk." I learned about this existence of this wonderful artifact and wonderful kook from Bess Lovejoy's Atlas Obscura talk at DNA Lounge last week, which you should surely attend in the future. She also later co-authored a cookbook, which includes recipes for jellied fish heads and her father's favorite, cod soup. She also worked as a cabaret dancer in Bucharest, Romania, and then found work as a circus performer for Ringling Brothers Circus. During the 1930s she toured Europe and America as a lion tamer, billing herself as "the daughter of the famous mad monk whose feats in Russia astonished the world." She was mauled by a bear in Peru, Indiana, but stayed with the circus until it reached Miami, Florida, where she quit and began work as a riveter in a defense shipyard during World War II. Mirrored from jwz.org. |
jwz
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2:41p |
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jwz
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12:39p |
Fucking Zynga
Dear Lazyweb, can anyone tell me how to disconnect my Words With Friends account from my Facebook account? I'm sick to death of it sending me push-notifications that someone I'm friends with on Facebook but have never played Scrabble with has played a word. There seems to be no way to turn this shit off. Things I have tried: De-authorizing the Words With Friends app on Facebook. This causes the the iOS app to go into a loop demanding that you re-authorize it. Deleting and re-installing the iOS app. That stops the auth-loop, but does not stop the "notifications about non-friends" issue, and also makes it nag you daily saying "Hey, you used to log in with Facebook! Log in with Facebook okay??"
So I guess I can't do this myself, since it's stuck in their DB. I'll just mail them and ask them to delete that. Ha ha ha. - This joke appears to be the closest thing to a non-FAQ support page.
So I go to their Facebook page hoping to message them. There's no option to message them. There's no option to post a question on the wall except as a reply to a previous post from them announcing an new feature in a different game. WTF. So I waste my time trying to strip my complaint down to 140 characters and ask them on Twitter. To the shock of nobody, I get no reply. Then on a completely different, unlinked web site, I find this page. I get a brush-off auto-reply saying "update to the latest version of the app, which will direct you to the FAQ instead of letting you actually contact us."
The fact that they are still nagging me with updates about my Facebook friends when they no longer have authorization on my Facebook account means that they have stored an offline copy of my friends tree, which I'm pretty sure is against Facebook's application terms of service. I'm sure both parties care about this a lot. Yeah yeah, that's what I get for dealing with amoral scumbags like Zynga in the first place. I even paid them money to make the ads go away, so I'm part of the problem. But hey, I like playing scrabble on my phone. Remember when a paying customer could actually email support? Those were the days. Previously. Mirrored from jwz.org. |
voofy
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2:06p |
Revising
I've had enough of revising now - 3 and half weeks to go and it's over So these are the other things I've done, in between revising - listed so that I don't feel so hard done by sitting alone in my room on a Saturday Wednesday I watched Game of Thrones On Thursday I watched some TV, and then went to the pub and saw lots of people Yesterday I learned that courgette plants have male and female flowers on the same plant, and how to tell them apart, and later I ate takeout Today I have made awesome apple and sultana cake, some of it even made it into the oven! Current Mood:  bored |
jwz
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2:30a |
Picasa
Dear Lazyweb: I face-tagged a zillion faces in desktop Picasa while "Store Name Tags in Photo" was unchecked. Now I have checked it and I want it to write all those tags back to the EXIF. How? Alternately: I just want to extract a map of filename → face-names, and then I can take care of business myself. Where's the API? Previously. Mirrored from jwz.org. |
sinfest_mod
[ just_you_wait ]
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1:45a |
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| Friday, May 17th, 2013 | |
dieselsweet
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1:48p |
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| Thursday, May 16th, 2013 | |
dieselsweet
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11:27p |
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| Friday, May 17th, 2013 | |
xkcd_rss
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4:00a |
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sinfest_mod
[ just_you_wait ]
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12:25a |
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| Wednesday, May 15th, 2013 | |
dieselsweet
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11:58p |
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| Thursday, May 16th, 2013 |
lj_maintenance
[ markf ]
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6:02p |
Back online
We've just brought User Cluster #9 back online, and the errors being caused by the maintenance should stop occurring. Notifications are sending again, but may be delayed as there is a backlog of notifications waiting to be sent. If you are still encountering any errors, please open a Support request so we can investigate the issue. |
somewoman
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7:56p |
Nice ride.
18 mile ride today. Shorter than I’d planned on, but the people I planned on riding with didn’t show up (I knew there was a high chance they wouldn’t), so I just meandered wherever I felt like and made the arbitrary decision to cross the river back to St. Paul at the Ford Dam so that I could see it from a different angle. Stopped to check out Minnehaha Falls and wish I’d brought my camera. Normally I do; just didn’t today. |
lj_maintenance
[ mferrell ]
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1:42p |
Maintenance still in progress
We are still in the process of bringing User Cluster #9 back online, and it is unfortunately taking longer than we anticipated. We are making progress, but are still several hours away from this being fixed. To address a few common questions we are seeing:
How many user clusters are there?
There are 13 user clusters in total.
How can I find out what user cluster my account is on?
You can see which user cluster you are on at http://www.livejournal.com/misc/whereami.bml if you are logged-in. If you cannot login, your account is located on user cluster #9.
I am not on cluster 9, but still can't post or edit entries. What's happening?
Trying to update or edit posts may still fail even if you are not on user cluster #9. An Error 500 will appear when loading the update/edit journal page if you have posting access to a community which is located on this cluster. The update module at http://www.livejournal.com/portal/ may still allow you to post while maintenance is ongoing.
I'm not getting notifications. Is this related?
Subscription notifications are not currently being sent as a result of this maintenance. You may still receive other types of emails, such as pingbacks and password notification emails, but will not receive notifications of new entries or comments being posted.
What other things aren't working right now?
Twitter digest posts are not currently being imported as a result of this maintenance. Some other pages & features may display errors if they need to access information located on user cluster #9. The inbox and community management pages are both known to be showing errors for people affected by this.
We will post again either when user cluster #9 is back online, or if we have any additional information to post. Thanks again for your patience while we work to fully restore service to the site. |
jwz
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12:53p |
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zaitcev
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10:20a |
At Havana summit they were giving away a paper version of Joe Arnold's "Software Defined Storage with OpenStack Swift". Very useful book for anyone dealing with Swift, I would be glad to pay the cover price of $25. But even more interestingly than tips on care and feeding of Swift, Joe opens the whole book thus:
[...] a de-coupled management system so customers could achieve (1) amazing flexibility in terms of how (and where) they deployed their storage, (2) control of their data without being locked-in to a vendor and (3) private storage at public cloud prices.
These features are the essence of Software Defined Storage (SDS), a new term the meaning of which is being defined. [...] Key aspects of SDS are scalability, adaptability, and the ability to use most any hardware. Through this de-coupling, operators can now make choices on how their storage is scaled and managed and how users can store and access data — all driven programmatically for the entire storage tier, regardless of where the storage resources are deployed.
Parts of the above prompt questions. Firstly, what good is de-coupling in respect to lock-in? SwiftStack effectively locks in by owning the de-coupled management. Sure, you own your data and could, in theory, manage your Swift with another management plane... I do not expect anyone crazy enough to try switching by anything less than standing up a new cluster. In any case, that part is not important, IMHO. The important part is programmatic control.
The phrase "SDS" jumps off "Software-Defined Networking". When SDN came into OpenStack, I was quite skeptical about it. It seemed too much like vendor-driven marketing bullshit. However, as users deployed the Project Formerly Known as OpenStack Quantum, it became clear that SDN answers their needs. The chief need was the ability to shape networks programmatically, overlaid on top of the physical networking plant, in service of the VMs.
When all this cloud thing came about, practitioners also struggled with the definition of it, and in particular the difference from the plain old datacenter virtualization. The difference is the programmatic control throughout. RHEV (now oVirt) eventually grew an API, which blurred the lines. But in OpenStack it was the main feature from the start. So you can manage everything and anything programmatically, including, for example, running on bare hardware. One can say that cloud is "Software-Defined Computing".
So, how does this programmatic thing apply to Swift? Joe had interesting insights cunningly hidden in the book, like these:
In an SDS system, reliability is the responsibility of the software, not the hardware. Replication and data integrity tactics are used to ensure that data does not become corrupt and that lost data is recovered.
[...]
A crucial function of an SDS system is to orchestrate capacity — storage, networking, routing & services — for entire cluster.
Swift covers the first part well already. The second is missing, or "de-coupled".
For galactic fairness, he also wrote things that seem wrong-headed to me:
There is no application sharding or managing volumes which can drive operational knowledge and complexity into applications because the SDS system is one cohesive system. Users do not need to ask for or know 'which storage pool' should be used because there is only one namespace.
The problem with hiding the pools outside of namespace is that they become invisible to the programmatic control as well, and such control is essential to the very definition of SDS. Someone at Amazon made a brilliant decision to make buckets a unit of replication in S3, so they can be linked to a region. In effect this hides the complexity but exposes knowledge that an application needs. Thus, any S3 client can do what Joe coniders SDS, but without any de-coupling, through the namespace and inside the API (or it can chose not to do it and just use a default region, for simplicity).
Joe's employees are hard at work implementing the vision as he outlined it, using the concept of regions that are internal to Swift cluster. The problem for everyone else, however, is how the programmatic control of that stack is exclusive to SwiftStack (with some useful things leaking into Swift, such as changeable replica count).
So, in the end, today Swift offers a solid foundation and parts of an SDS system, but the orchestration is "de-coupled" away elsewhere. Seems like a clear challenge to OpenStack to (re-)create the missing pieces.
P.S. I'd love to see the missing parts inside the Swift API and even namespace, although we have a problem here. Our Accounts and Containers are not guaranteed to live anywhere specifically or even on the same nodes. Changing that would be a step that I prefer. But Joe prefers to give up on plugging programmatic orchestration into the Swift API and just "de-couple" the heck of it. John, our benevolent PTL, seems to toe that line. Maybe they are right.
P.P.S. The deal with the programmatic orchestration is something that "unified" storage projects have to address too. E.g. in GlusterFS a program can issue mkdir(2). Is this programmatic control? No, not enough. Okay, they have glusterfsd nowadays, I can create volfiles in there, is that SDS? That is getting closer! |
lj_maintenance
[ livejournal ]
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3:35p |
Maintenance update
We successfully finished maintenance on cluster #7. All accounts’ owners from this cluster can now log into their journals.
We are working on restoring the user cluster #9, it will take approximately an hour. We will keep you informed. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience.
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sinfest_mod
[ just_you_wait ]
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1:18a |
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| Wednesday, May 15th, 2013 |
lj_maintenance
[ mferrell ]
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9:44p |
Maintenance update
To followup on the previous post, the same symptoms for user cluster #7 are also present for users on cluster #9, so we're in the process of fixing it as well. Having 2 clusters to work on rather than 1 unfortunately means that we expect it to take approximately 6-8 hours for everything to be resolved. We do, however, know how the problems with each cluster started and it is not something which will cause any additional clusters to have these issues. We'll post here again either when the issue has been resolved, or if we have any significant developments to update you on. |
lj_maintenance
[ mferrell ]
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6:46p |
Emergency maintenance on user cluster #7
We're doing some emergency maintenance on one of our databases (user cluster #7, there are 13 user clusters in total. You can see which user cluster your account is on here). The estimated duration of this maintenance is 4-5 hours.
If your account is located on user cluster #7, you will not be able to login to your account until this maintenance has been completed. If you are already logged-in, you will be unable to post, edit, or delete any material on LiveJournal until the maintenance is completed.
If your account is not on this cluster, LiveJournal will still be up, you will be able to login. You may be able to post, edit, and delete content, but if any communities you have posting access to are on cluster #7, you will see an Error 500 when attempting to load the update/edit journal page, or viewing your inbox if any messages have been received from a user on cluster #7. Other pages may also be similarly affected if they attempt to load usernames or data from this cluster. You may also encounter problems viewing journals, entries, comments, or private messages from accounts which are on this cluster.
We're working as quickly as possible to get everything back up & running, and appreciate your patience during this maintenance.
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jwz
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10:57a |
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dieselsweet
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12:24p |
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| Tuesday, May 14th, 2013 | |
dieselsweet
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11:14p |
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thargol
