Endless technology ramblings…
What is a Semaphore? An article I found here is very useful. It says that “Semaphores can be thought of as simple counters that indicate the status of a resource. This counter is a protected variable and cannot be accessed by the user directly.”
This recently came up when the Dell OpenManage storage service would not start on a Linux system. It complained that there were no more Linux semaphores available. Check out the article for more information.
Most of us text message other people and most of us usually have an unlimited text message plan if you do any texting at all. A new way of searching is here. Enter ChaCha. The name came from the Chinese meaning of Search (Cha).
What does it do?
ChaCha allows you to call in or text in a question, any question and receive a useful and helpful text message back (160 characters or less).
How does it work?
A real person is sitting on the other side answering your questions. The beauty of ChaCha is that the question answerers, called guides, get to pick which categories and specify keywords to allow the guide to get questions they enjoy answering. For instance, I can specify that I want to answer questions primarily based around the Internet and computers. Now, most of the questions I receive are primarily about computers and the Internet.
ChaCha pays a guide $0.20/answer. I did the math and you can equate this to around $10-$15 dollars per hour. It’s no job replacement but it really gives you something to do with your free time.
How do I start?
Just text message “242242” (ChaCha spelled out) and you’re set. Start asking questions immediately after receiving the welcome message. You can also call 1-800-2ChaCha and someone will transcribe your voice question to text. You will then receive the answer via SMS.
Ask any question like this: “What’s the cheapest gas between Minot, ND and Kansas City, MO?”
An answer will look like this: “The cheapest gas is $3.55 at XYZ Gas station at 000 S. 110th street in Souix City, SD”
Will it remain free?
I’m not sure about this point. I even asked ChaCha directly and it seems to be free since January, 2008 but may be a subscription service in the future. Any way this is a very useful tool.
Visit www.chacha.com for more information.
As some of you already pleasantly found out today, VMware ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2 has a very large bug which prevents guest systems (VM’s) from powering on, restarting or vmotioning. VMware has identified this bug and is working to fix it. A release is to be posted on their download site by noon (PST) on August 13, 2008.
Here is what the error looks like:
This may seriously harm VMware’s reputation as they just recently released their enterprise hypervisor, ESXi, to the public for free use. Some free users may download the software and think that it simply does not work and could move on to other virtualization options such as Xen or Microsoft’s new HyperV.
The fix is to simply turn off time syncing between your ESX host and guests and then set the date back on the host to 8/10/08. This allows all normal VM functionality.