Google's Servers

Google reveals details about its servers.

Google's big surprise: each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there's a problem with the main source of electricity. The company also revealed for the first time that since 2005, its data centers have been composed of standard shipping containers--each with 1,160 servers and a power consumption that can reach 250 kilowatts.

It may sound geeky, but a number of attendees--the kind of folks who run data centers packed with thousands of servers for a living--were surprised not only by Google's built-in battery approach, but by the fact that the company has kept it secret for years. Jai said in an interview that Google has been using the design since 2005 and now is in its sixth or seventh generation of design.

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Excercises for Tendonitis and Carpal Tunnel

This video shows a few exercises you can do to stretch the tendons in your wrists and hands.

Link (via Lifehacker)

Book: Producing Open Source Software

Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project is a book from O'Reilly about managing open source projects—but the information could be applied to pretty much any software project. You can download a free copy from the website.

Producing Open Source Software is a book about the human side of open source development. It describes how successful projects operate, the expectations of users and developers, and the culture of free software. The book is released under an open copyright: it is available in bookstores and from the publisher (O'Reilly Media), or you can browse or download it here.

• Link (via Coding Horror)

DiskDigger

DiskDigger is a powerful undelete utility for Windows. It is capable of doing a deep scan and may be able to recover more files than simpler programs.

• Link (found via Lifehacker)

SendKeys under Vista

If you are maintaining a VB6 application or something similar under Vista, and the application makes use of the SendKeys call, you will likely get an exception, particularly if you are running the application within an IDE. This appears to be due to the security model in Vista.

In my case, I was able to rewrite the code to avoid the use of SendKeys. For other possible workarounds, see:

• vbAccelerator - SendKeys using the API
• Visual Studio Magazine Online: VB Statement Against Vista

Ubuntu: invalid GPG signatures during apt-get update

If you get a message like the following while running apt-get update on Ubuntu:

W: GPG error: http://archive.ubuntu.com hardy-security Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG 40976EAF437D05B5 Ubuntu Archive Automatic Signing Key 

Try deleting the files in /var/lib/apt/lists/ (but leave the 'partial' directory alone) and running apt-get update again.

Source: update gpg error? - Ubuntu Forums

ntpd "Invalid argument" messages in log

I noticed that ntpd was generating a bunch of these messages in my logs.

Jan 14 06:05:14 starbug ntpd[5574]: sendto(xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) (fd=22): Invalid argument
Jan 14 06:05:36 starbug ntpd[5574]: sendto(yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy) (fd=22): Invalid argument
Jan 14 06:05:40 starbug ntpd[5574]: sendto(zzz.zzz.zzz.zzz) (fd=22): Invalid argument

A quick Google search will tell you that this happens when your interface changes. In my case, my dynamic IP address from my ISP had changed. Restarting the ntpd service will correct the problem.