Inert Ramblings

Sometimes Linux scares me. 452 days of uptime on one of our primary production servers. She just sits there and chugs away processing hundreds of millions of SQL queries and constantly building and rebuilding our source tree looking for errors. Occasionally a process zombies out or the tape drive hiccups, but now it’s a personal vendetta to troubleshoot the system without a reboot. The system has been moved twice…while still attached to the UPS.

But someday that machine will get rebooted. Be it voluntarily or accidentally, a year and a half thick slate of progress will be wiped clean, a new kernel will load, and the infinite loop will start over.

How depressing.

I’ve always said that Internet Explorer sucks and should be destroyed, but now it’s official. After last week’s latest security vunlerability, the Department of Homeland Security’s US Computer Emergency Readiness Team has recommended that users stop using Internet Explorer and switch to another browser with less security problems. Mozilla immediately felt the impact of the announcement as downloads of their free Firefox browser increased.

I wonder if Microsoft will finally get the hint…