Parazoid.net

I finally moved my main site to a server in New Jersey (thanks Linode), which took me way too long to get to. Other sites will just have to wait.

Along with the move, I finally got up to date with WordPress too. With so much change I felt it time to get a new theme as well, so enjoy.

I was listening to my iPod at work today when Sevendust’s cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” came on which started a good run of Wikipedia crawling….which resulted in Sad Kermit. While I am a Muppet fan, I thoroughly enjoy this parody. Check it out when you get a chance, you can see the video here.

Side question, what covers of “Hurt” do you like? I heard Johnny Cash’s version before all versions of the song and still love it, but many bands have covered it (Wikipedia has a good list here). So far I’ve only heard the versions by NIN, Johnny Cash, Sevendust and now Sad Kermit, but need to hear more. I wonder if Cake will ever cover it…

I’ve got a list of tools I think are cool or useful, so I’m going to start sharing my thoughts of them here….isn’t that the point? So today’s tool is iftop. It can be used to display bandwidth usage on an interface. If you can’t figure out what it does based on the name, their description of the tool lays it out well:

iftop does for network usage what top(1) does for CPU usage. It listens to network traffic on a named interface and displays a table of current bandwidth usage by pairs of hosts. Handy for answering the question “why is our ADSL link so slow?”.

Small and simple tool, what’s not to like. Real good for those times that you know something is eating traffic but don’t know what. Check out screenshots of iftop at http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pdw/iftop/.

Update: While perusing through logs it is clear that people find this page because they are looking for information on how to read iftop output. Looking back at this post I clearly stiffed everybody on that aspect of things, and have wanted to post an update on how to interpret what’s going on in iftop. Luckily Techthrob.com took care of that far better than I would be able to do, so go check out his article How to Monitor Network Traffic in Linux.

Have you ever have one of those weeks where at the beginning you thought everything was going to be reasonable and time would just pass quickly, but then you run into a wall and everything falls apart? Why can’t this week just end? To make it worse, I was on the way home I was thinking about how it is supposed to snow late this afternoon and how that might mean not going to Poughkeepsie Friday, but now I don’t see how that helps at all.

On a brighter note, here’s a great reference for any How I Met Your Mother fan.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/How_I_Met_Your_Mother

Doing these quizzes isn’t my normal thing, but this had some odd questions and pegged me pretty well. It helps that I did not feel like even attempting to catch up on anything tonight.

Find your own pose!