Joe’s Blog!

If you haven’t already heard Amazon has opened a DRM-free MP3 based music store. Good times, music that you own rather than rent. Not to mention you can play it on anything that supports the MP3 format. Anywho, currently it seems that linux users can only download single songs rather than whole albums since they do not currently have a download utility for linux. Not to fear according to their docs:

If you use Linux, you can currently buy individual songs. A Linux version of the Amazon MP3 Downloader is under development, and when released will allow entire album purchases.

CFS is the new Completely Fair Scheduler for the linux kernel. It is pretty slick from what I gather. Luckily it was just backported to older versions of the kernel. They backported to version 2.6.22 which happens to be the version of the kernel that the latest Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon release will have as its base. Along with with some other folks on ubuntuforms.org I have put my two cents in to hopefully have this included, if you want it in Gutsy make some noise on the forums. More cool stuff from the kerneltrap.org post:

Which testbox had a system load of 1000.17 at this time, due to a rogue
runaway workload of one thousand (!) non-reniced infinite loops:

top – 14:34:05 up 30 min, 3 users, load average: 1000.17, 839.23, 444.57
Tasks: 1131 total, 1002 running, 129 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 30.8%us, 0.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 68.2%id, 0.8%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si
Mem: 2048992k total, 157688k used, 1891304k free, 18308k buffers
Swap: 4096564k total, 0k used, 4096564k free, 25464k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
3633 root 20 0 2892 1576 724 R 7 0.1 0:00.06 top
2427 mingo 20 0 1576 244 196 R 2 0.0 0:01.14 loop
2429 mingo 20 0 1576 244 196 R 2 0.0 0:01.14 loop

To the root user, the box was fully usable an interactivity was
excellent – i was easily able to kill off those runaway tasks.

( The /proc/root_user_cpu_share tunable also allows the root uid to have
higher weight than other uids. Unit of the tunable is 0.1%, a weight
of 100% is 1024, the default weight of the root uid is 200%. )

VeloNews has this press release about a North Carolina company that wants to start a grand tour in the US.

In its release, the company said it expects the race will be “the largest spectator event in the history of U.S. sports, covering approximately 4000 miles (more than 6000 km) from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean.”

Organizers of the tentative 30-day, 27-stage race expect to invite “25 of the most elite cycling teams in the world and will boast a prize purse currently pegged at $11 million, the largest purse of any international cycling event.”

Sounds cool enough. They also provide a link to this “preliminary site” for the tour and mention the official site www.aqusports.com that will be “made available after Thursday’s press conference”.

Interesting to me is the route on the preliminary site. One of the stages start here in STL and ends in Carbondale, IL which is roughly 5 miles from my home town. The next day starts in Carbondale, IL and finishes in Nashville, TN.

Stage 6 – 9/12/08 Indianapolis, IN to St Louis, MO

Stage 7 – 9/13/08 St Louis, MO to Carbondale, IL

Stage 8 – 9/14/08 Carbondale, IL to Nashville, TN

Lots of racing to be seen within a just a couple of hours of STL. Dope.

I found this post on BoingBoing about what an ISP might charge for if Net Neutrality is removed. I think it is fairly true to life and as Cory on BoingBoing says, turns “the Internet back into cable TV, where access to anything except MPAA content costs extra and is walled off from the majority of users”.

(click to enlarge)