More Yahoo Silliness

I've seen this picture on Yahoo mail a few times promoting a video on the history of their mail service. If you a actually look at the picture, you may notice something funny... The machine in the picture is an IBM 3178C terminal designed to be connected, via coax, to an IBM mainframe. This device was capable of 80x25 green text. I could not be made to display color, nor could it be connected to a phone line.

The good news is that it could be connected to the internet using a text based browser, called Charlotte (as is Charlotte's Web). This was way before Yahoo... The only way we had to search the internet was with Gopher.

Yahoo Has Hacked Browser History

This is scary, but it is not the first time this has happened in the last few weeks. I'll search for an airfare, then have Yahoo Mail present me with a banner add advertising the exact destinations for which I searched.

As an experiment, I opened Yahoo Mail in a tab, and opened the inbox. Next, I opened another tab, and visited Expedia. There, I searched for an airfare. I returned to the Yahoo Mail tab, and clicked "Check Mail". I was presented with a Netflix ad.

Lets try again. This time Travelocity: search for airfare in a different tab, return to the Yahoo Mail tab, click "Check Mail", and here's what I got...



Theoretically, this should not be possible for security reason. One site should not be able to read another's cookies, and no one should be able to access a history. I tried the same process in IE7, same results. Even works on Linux. The only factor seems to be the site searched: Expedia does not work, Travelocity does. I've seen others (obviously Orbitz), but more travel sites than any. I guess that's what I use the web for most, except technical stuff... certainly not porn.

BTW, the trip to Reykjavik was too expensive. So much for given the bankrupt country money. Maybe I'll go to California.

FC-6 VM On F11 Platform

I recently upgraded one of my virtualization platforms from F10 to F11. It is significantly more stable and refined. An odd thing happened, however. The target system is an AMD-64x2 with 5G. Its was hosting:

FC6 application server
F8 VNC server
WXP Pro with RDC (need it for my current contract)
F10 on 4 node cluster for clustering R&D
F8 on 2 node cluster for web development
F8 application server

Under F10, the box gave great VM performance while at an idle.

Under F11, the FC6 VM pegged the virt-manager's performance graph at 45% of the physical CPU cycles. Yet, within the VM, top saw nothing. Effectively an entire core spinning away on nothing! I re-imaged (via kickstart) the VM as FC8, and now that same machine sits at half a percentage point. I'm not sure I have an explanation other than a different kernel or virt drivers.

Big Prop

This was an odd thing to see on the ride home. Looks like a C-130 cargo plane propeller. It was being towed by a pickup truck.

Scaffold in Chinatown, Pt 4

Maybe David Copperfield is going to make it disappear.

Sculpture Garden Fountain

In the background is the National Gallery rotundra and Washington Monument.

US Capitol

From the window of the commuter bus... Which I got to ride for free. Yesterday's driver forgot his hole punch, and used a pen to mark out the ticket. Today's driver punched over yesterday's mark.

Scaffold in Chinatown, Pt 3

This is getting exciting. Turns out the crew is working at night. About 8pm they close down H St. How truly civilized.

Xen error: xc_dom_find_loader

One of my Xen virtualization platforms crashed yesterday, throwing the error:

Error: (2, 'Invalid kernel', 'xc_dom_find_loader: no loader found\n')

Had the hardest time figuring out the cause.

Then, for whatever reason, I did a df -h and found my the /var/lib/xen mount was at 100%. I wiped out the contents of the save subdir, and moved all the boot_ files to /tmp. Suddenly, all my VMs could start.

Scaffold in Chinatown, Pt 2

They've added another layer of scaffold, but haven't actually done anything. It must be the same crew that has about half of all the subway escalators offline... you never actually see them working.