I have been doing some thinking about life, the universe and everything (so I know the big birthday is actually in two years…) and I decided I would share a few things I have learned on the journey thus far. Some you may recognize. I didn’t come up with any of these in a vacuum.
Mercy is a better than judgement.
No one is poor who has friends.
It is better to leave the job and respect yourself than to endure for the sake of economics.
Being able to look at yourself in the mirror is more important than what other people think.
Making people angry for fun isn’t cool.
Degrees and certificates mean very little. The truly educated continue to learn throughout life and don’t consider their education complete when they earn a piece of paper.
Degrees and certificates are not bad things, though.
People are more important than things.
Helping is more important than hoarding.
Compassion and love are better than being right.
Accomplishing anything takes hard work.
No one accomplishes anything without the help of others.
The “self-made man” and “rugged individualism” are lies. No one is an island.
Better to be a clay pot that contains beauty than a whitewashed tomb.
Learning a new language opens the mind to be able to understand things that are inexpressible in other languages.
Understanding is worth the pursuit, even though you will never understand everything.
Conversation is better than coerced acquiescence.
Listening is more difficult and more rewarding than speaking.
Reading a lot is vital for anyone who desires to write well.
Only those who listen and learn may become good teachers.
Volume has nothing to do with correctness.
Truth is not relative, but perceptions are. To express truth one must first understand the perceptions of the listener.
Every culture is different, none are perfect, and all contain some beauty and truth worth absorbing.
Hating or mistreating someone because of how they look, their accent or language, or where they grew up is dumb.
Fear destroys more than anything other than pride.
People will often say and do things while anonymous they would never do if their names were attached.
Some opinions really are worth more than others and not every opinion is actually valid.
Knowing which opinions are more valid is rarely easy, so listening to all of them is important.
It is okay to be wrong if you are teachable because then being wrong doesn’t have to be destructive.
Very few people are teachable because humility is difficult.
Anyone who treats a waiter or waitress poorly is not a good person. You can learn a lot about someone by taking them out to lunch.
Planting a tree to commemorate a big event doesn’t make as much sense as it used to since society is so much more mobile now. Getting a tattoo is a good substitute in those cases.
Everybody gets grumpy when they are tired and/or hungry. Yelling at them doesn’t help. Feeding them and helping them rest does.
Politeness is a skill that anyone can learn and says to others that you value them as people.
It really is okay to do more than your fair share. It teaches others to be generous and starts a trend.
I’ve been using nginx for this blog and other sites for well over a year, beginning with Ubuntu 8.10. I have had to figure out some things, but overall I have been very pleased. I have upgraded the server for each Ubuntu release since then with no real problems. Yesterday I upgraded to 10.04 and thought all was well when I went to bed last night. However, at some time during the night all of my sites began to return 504 Gateway Timeout errors. Hmm.
I did some checking in logs and detective work with top and such and found that my load averages were running between 6 and 8, on a server that has averaged less than 1 for well over a year. After some research, I discovered that the php-fastcgi process was spawning child processes that did not die off when complete. I have no idea why as I did not change any of the nginx, php-fastcgi or other settings. The high load averages dropped to 0 when I stopped the php-fastcgi service.
After some documentation reading and other failed attempts, I finally solved the 504 problem by making one change in my /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi, adjusting PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=5 to PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=2.
I would really like to figure out why the child processes were not ending properly before and why they are now and better understand what is going on. I’ve also noticed that the responsiveness of the site seems slower, but that could just be my imagination as I have no measurements to confirm/deny. Anyway, if anyone has any ideas, please comment.
All of my sites, including this one, were offline for a bit today while I upgraded the operating system on my server. I am now running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on this server. The upgrade was easy and smooth. Yay!
Yes, we can! Robbie Williamson, Engineering Manager at Canonical and an influential voice in Ubuntu’s release schedule, responded on his blog to Mark Shuttleworth’s call to see if we could release 10.10 on 10/10/10 (which, if thought of as the binary number 101010 would equal 42, every geek’s favorite number). Take a look.
Do you like it when your operating system “just works?” I do. This does not happen easily or without hard work. Ubuntu has a wonderful QA team that has a systematic method of testing releases on diverse hardware platforms. However, they don’t own every piece of equipment out there. This doesn’t have to be the end of the story. Anyone who is willing to do a little bit of work and follow some very clearly outlined procedures may become a part of the team and help make releases better. Interested? Take a look at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing for ways that community members can join the Testing Team and http://qa.ubuntu.com/ for information on the QA Team. These two groups work together toward the common goal of making Ubuntu releases the best they can be through finding bugs, reporting them, and helping find problems on an even wider set of hardware.
There is a new initiative from the Canonical/Ubuntu Design Team to do a much better job communicating their thoughts, ideas and plans to the wider community. They have started a blog at http://design.canonical.com/ that I believe is worth reading regularly. Fire up your RSS feed reader and subscribe after taking a look at the wonderful foundation they have created to kick things off.
EDIT: I should mention that the main way that the Design Team communicates is via the ayatana mailing list. You can find it here: https://launchpad.net/~ayatana
