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Today we bring you yet another bad driver of NJ, though it appears he’s really from NY.

Please people, remember to check your blind spots. Using the rear view and side view mirrors is not enough. You can seriously injure people and create a backlog of traffic, and no one wants that.

via ▶ December 17th’s Idiot Drivers of New Jersey – You Have Blind Spots! – YouTube.

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▶ December 16ths Idiot Drivers of New Jersey – YouTube.

Today we bring you another edition of Idiot Drivers of New Jersey!

This time we have a school bus driver running a red light to make a left turn.

The lead up (which you can’t see of course because it’s out of frame) is the approaching a yellow light at 35-40mph in order to run the light.

Very safe for the children, don’t you think?

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This is a recipe I shamelessly stole from Steve Caruso from Facebook during a power outage last week.  I modified it slightly because I had a surplus of apples.  It’s a delicious breakfast pudding that can be modified to be sweet, savory, or a base for other things.  Enjoy!

Kitchen Stuff Needed:
– Cast iron pan
– Range top
– Oven

Ingredients Needed:
– 3 large eggs
– 1 cup milk
– 1 cup flour
– 1/2 teaspoon salt
– Enough oil to coat bottom of pan and then some (I used olive oil, about 2 Tbsps initially and then poured out about half of it)

Optional Ingredients (used for the apple version):
2 teaspoons sugar
1 tsp cinnamon / pumpkin spice
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 medium apples, sliced to medium thickness, then chopped into 4ths

Alternative Ingredients:
Or herbs and spices
Finely chopped prosciutto or porkroll
Veggies

If you use whole sausages in it it makes Toad-in-the-Hole. It’s versatile. The one above is “plain.”

How To:

  1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees.
  2. Whisk/beat eggs, milk, flour, salt, sugar, cinnamon/pumpkin pie spice & vanilla together in a bowl until thoroughly mixed.
  3. Set down batter to rest for at least 10 minutes.
  4. While batter’s resting, put cast iron pan on the range with the oil in it and heat it slowly over the 10 minutes, making sure it doesn’t *quite* reach the smoke point for the oil you’ve used.
  5. When time’s up, pour the batter into the pan.
  6. Gently place apples into the pan also at this time.
  7. Place pan in oven.
  8. Bake for 15 minutes (10 minutes if you don’t like a crispy crust). If your oven does not have a window, DO NOT PEEK during this time. It’ll fall like a soufflé.
  9.  Turn temp down to 350 and bake for another 10 minutes.
  10. Check it. (If you don’t have a window, peek *quickly*. If too much steam escapes and it’s not ready it’ll fall.) It should be crawling out of the pan. That means it’s done. It won’t crawl as high if you added toppings.
  11. Pull it out and pierce it with a knife where there are obvious bubbles, otherwise as it cools it’ll shrink.
  12. Serve immediately in the pan, cut like a pizza.

2013-12-14 10.41.20 2013-12-14 10.42.53

 

Nutrition Information:
Recipe Totals:

  • 1,184 Calories
  • 45 Grams of Fat
  • 43 Grams of Protein
  • 158 Grams of Carbs
  • 14 Grams of Fiber
  • 59 Grams of Sugars

Per Serving (1/8th of recipe):

  • 148 Calories
  • 6 Grams of Fat
  • 5 Grams of Protein
  • 20 Grams of Carbs
  • 2 Grams of Fiber
  • 7 Grams of Sugar

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There have been a lot of changes to Youtube over the years.  Early users of Youtube may remember that, for a time, Youtube was all but free of advertisements.  It was a place of sharing content (both legitimate content and illegitimate content alike).

And then the great copyright wall fell.  Ads became prevalent on almost every video.  People started to get takedown notices and copyright ‘marks’ resulting in videos and channels being shut down.

Surely, the commercialization of Youtube has had a marvelous effect for people who spend their time making content available to the masses.  People now make channels dedicated to gaming and get to monetize their hard work.  This is a good thing!  I review games too.  I review technology in general.  But there’s big changes happening recently, and it’s killing the very core of Youtube.

Angry Joe rants about this here (a little over 18 minutes long; NSFW — LOTS OF CURSING – this is Angry Joe’s style):


The problem in a nutshell is this: If I review a game, who is entitled to whatever monetary gains are generated by this review?  Me, as the author of the review?  <Game Developer House>, as the big name behind the game itself?

It seems that the answer is now <Game Developer House>.  Youtube is placing copyright claim marks against users who place reviews of video games, movies, and music online – and then monetizing the content for the original artists instead of the people who have put in the effort to make the reviews.

Forbes has an interesting article about it here as well. Forbes Article

It’s kind of disheartening to see what Google is turning Youtube into.  It’s not at all encouraging.  There was a spectacular backlash during their ‘enhancement’ of Youtube by forcing linkage to your Google+ profile:

Violet Blue via ZDNet wrote an awesome piece about this.

Cory Doctorow via Boing Boing had a bit of a response – but it wasn’t helpful at all (though they have since ‘rectified’ the spam issue).

Paul Tassi via Forbes notes this uproar as well.

So, is Google trying to kill off Youtube with tons of ‘bad’ changes to the site?  Possibly.  Likely? No.  They make a shit ton of money from it.

Are the changes lately for the better?  Only for big wigs and big execs at companies.

“You can make money without doing evil.” || “Don’t be evil.”

Hah.

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A few months ago I successfully deployed and configured an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server Edition for the purposes of installing Nagios and doing on-site monitoring for key servers.  Yesterday I did a bunch of security and hotfix updates to the server, since it was VERY behind (talking >20 security updates and what not) on a lot of packages.  Following a reboot (I know, I know, not necessary but I’m still firmly rooted in the land of Windows where updates and reboots go hand in hand; for shame) I noticed a surge of alerts from Nagios and was thoroughly annoyed to see that the load on the server was consistently way too high – I was getting Warning / Critical alerts nearly every 15 minutes.  Uh oh!

***** Nagios *****

Notification Type: PROBLEM

Service: Current Load
Host: localhost
Host Alias: localhost
Address: 127.0.0.1
State: CRITICAL

Date/Time: Wed Dec 4 23:48:58 EST 2013

Additional Info:

CRITICAL – load average: 5.89, 4.95, 4.04

Status Details: https://nagios/nagios/cgi-bin/extinfo.cgi?type=1&host=localhost

This continued for a day until I got fed up with it.  I told Nagios to stop paying attention to that service and to ignore it completely.  I basically shit-canned the project and ignored it for about 24 hours until I realized it was going to be a slow day today.  So I SSH into the box and load up top, and I wait.  I wait and I wait and I wait.  Every 15 minutes I would see a surge of spawned processes for ping, check_snmp, and a few other ones.  I started to get a clear picture of what was going on.

The reboot of Nagios reset the next check period to be the same for all devices, which was a big problem.  We have 360+ devices in our monitoring scheme, and of that nearly 760+ services being monitored (with more coming in the future, I need to setup Windows device monitoring for our DCs and file servers).  They were all trying to run at the same time.  All 760.  This isn’t a ridiculously beefy server we’re talking about here.

srv-nagios: Virtual Machine Details
VMware Virtual Platform
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 0 @ 2.00GHz
1GB RAM
20GB SCSI Virtual HDD

So after sitting on it a bit I decided to do some research and found that I could limit the number of simultaneous checks in Nagios.  This is of course noted in the documentation.  I must have glossed over it.

 

Maximum Concurrent Service Checks

 

Format: max_concurrent_checks=<max_checks>
Example: max_concurrent_checks=20

This option allows you to specify the maximum number of service checks that can be run in parallel at any given time. Specifying a value of 1 for this variable essentially prevents any service checks from being run in parallel. Specifying a value of 0 (the default) does not place any restrictions on the number of concurrent checks. You’ll have to modify this value based on the system resources you have available on the machine that runs Nagios, as it directly affects the maximum load that will be imposed on the system (processor utilization, memory, etc.). More information on how to estimate how many concurrent checks you should allow can be found here.

Our setting was of course 0, meaning that Nagios tried to run as many checks as it wanted at the same time.  After thinking on it a bit, I figured out what I wanted to do.  We have 760 someodd checks.  We have 15 minute intervals.  I did 760/15 and it came out to be about 51 checks per minute.  I started there.  I set max_concurrent_checks to 51 and BAM load immediately dropped down to a more stable level.

OK – load average: 0.00, 0.13, 0.19

As I add more devices and services to Nagios I will tweak the value.  Checking 60 things at a time should be easy enough to handle, it works out to about 1 a second and since the vast majority of my checks and services are pings and simple snmp queries it shouldn’t be too bad.

Here’s hoping.

A happy Nagios is a happy Mike.

Nagios