When to avoid kill -9

"Generally, you should use kill -15 before kill -9 to give the target
process a chance to clean up after itself."

source: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/8916/when-should-i-not-kill-9-a-process

My 50 Favorite Jack Handy Quotes

1. I remember how my Great Uncle Jerry would sit on the porch and whittle all day long. Once he whittled me a toy boat out of a larger toy boat I had. It was almost as good as the first one, except now it had bumpy whittle marks all over it. And no paint, because he had whittled off the paint.
2. If I ever get real rich, I hope I'm not real mean to poor people, like I am now.
3. I hope that after I die, people will say of me: "That guy sure owed me a lot of money."
4. Children need encouragement. So if a kid gets an answer right, tell him it was a lucky guess. That way, he develops a good, lucky feeling.
5. I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it.
6. It's easy to sit there and say you'd like to have more money. And I guess that's what I like about it. It's easy. Just sitting there, rocking back and forth, wanting that money.
7. The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A death. What's that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you're too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months warm, happy, and floating...you finish off as an orgasm.
8. The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.
9. Remember, kids in the backseat cause accidents; accidents in the backseat cause kids.
10. I think people tend to forget that trees are living creatures. They're sort of like dogs. Huge, quiet, motionless dogs, with bark instead of fur.
11. Is there anything more beautiful than a beautiful, beautiful flamingo, flying across in front of a beautiful sunset? And he's carrying a beautiful rose in his beak, and also he's carrying a very beautiful painting with his feet. And also, you're drunk.
12. What is it about a beautiful sunny afternoon, with the birds singing and the wind rustling through the leaves, that makes you want to get drunk? And after you're real drunk, maybe go down to the public park and stagger around and ask people for money, and then lay down and go to sleep.
13. Here's a good thing to do if you go to a party and you don't know anybody: First take out the garbage. Then go around and collect any extra garbage that people might have, like a crumpled napkin, and take that out too. Pretty soon people will want to meet the busy garbage guy.
14. One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to take my little nephew to Disneyland, but instead I drove him to an old burned-out warehouse. 'Oh, no,' I said. 'Disneyland burned down.' He cried and cried, but I think that deep down, he thought it was a pretty good joke. I started to drive over to the real Disneyland, but it was getting pretty late.
15. You know what's probably a good thing to hang on your porch in the summertime, to keep mosquitos away from you and your guests? Just a big bag full of blood.
16. I guess the hard thing for a lot of people to accept is why God would allow me to go running through their yards, yelling and spinning around.
17. Don't ever get your speedometer confused with your clock, like I did once, because the faster you go the later you think you are.
18. It makes me mad when people say I turned and ran like a scared rabbit. Maybe it was like an angry rabbit, who was going to fight in another fight, away from the first fight.
19. I think a good product would be "Baby Duck Hat". It's a fake baby duck, which you strap on top of your head. Then you go swimming underwater until you find a mommy duck and her babies, and you join them. Then, all of a sudden, you stand up out of the water and roar like Godzilla. Man, those ducks really take off! Also, Baby Duck Hat is good for parties.
20. If you think a weakness can be turned into a strength, I hate to tell you this, but that's another weakness
21. I wish I lived back in the old west days, because I'd save up my money for about twenty years so I could buy a solid-gold pick. Then I'd go out West and start digging for gold. When someone came up and asked what I was doing, I'd say, "Looking for gold, ya durn fool." He'd say, "Your pick is gold," and I'd say, "Well, that was easy." Good joke, huh.
22. Whenever I see an old lady slip and fall on a wet sidewalk, my first instinct is to laugh. But then I think, what is I was an ant, and she fell on me. Then it wouldn't seem quite so funny.
23. Anytime I see something screech across a room and latch onto someones neck, and the guy screams and tries to get it off, I have to laugh, because what is that thing.
24. If you ever teach a yodeling class, probably the hardest thing is to keep the students from just trying to yodel right off. You see, we build to that.
25. Sometimes when I feel like killing someone, I do a little trick to calm myself down. I'll go over to the persons house and ring the doorbell. When the person comes to the door, I'm gone, but you know what I've left on the porch? A jack-o-lantern with a knife stuck in the side of it's head with a note that says "You." After that I usually feel a lot better, and no harm done.
26. Probably the earliest flyswatters were nothing more than some sort of striking surface attached to the end of a long stick.
27. I bet the main reason the police keep people away from a plane crash is they don't want anybody walking in and lying down in the crash stuff, then, when somebody comes up, act like they just woke up and go, "What was THAT?!".
28. Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis.
29. The people in the village were real poor, so none of the children had any toys. But this one little boy had gotten an old enema bag and filled it with rocks, and he would go around and whap the other children across the face with it. Man, I think my heart almost broke. Later the boy came up and offered to give me the toy. This was too much! I reached out my hand, but then he ran away. I chased him down and took the enema bag. He cried a little, but that's the way of these people.
30. A good way to threaten somebody is to light a stick of dynamite. Then you call the guy and hold the burning fuse up to the phone. "Hear that?" you say. "That's dynamite, baby.".
31. If they ever come up with a swashbuckling School, I think one of the courses should be Laughing, Then Jumping Off Something.
32. Just because swans mate for life, I don't think its that big a deal. First of all, if you're a swan, you're probably not going to find a swan that looks much better than the one you've got, so why not mate for life?
33. If you're a Thanksgiving dinner, but you don't like the stuffing or the cranberry sauce or anything else, just pretend like you're eating it, but instead, put it all in your lap and form it into a big mushy ball. Then, later, when you're out back having cigars with the boys, let out a big fake cough and throw the ball to the ground. Then say, "Boy, these are good cigars!".
34. If you're in a war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at the enemy, throw one of those small pumpkins. Maybe it'll make everyone think how stupid war is, and while they are thinking, you can throw a real grenade at them.
35. I believe in making the world safe for our children, but not our children's children, because I don't think children should be having sex.
36. If you go parachuting, and your parachute doesn't open, and you friends are all watching you fall, I think a funny gag would be to pretend you were swimming.
37. Laurie got offended that I used the word "puke." But to me, that's what her dinner tasted like.
38. The memories of my family outings are still a source of strength to me. I remember we'd all pile into the car - I forget what kind it was - and drive and drive. I'm not sure where we'd go, but I think there were some trees there. The smell of something was strong in the air as we played whatever sport we played. I remember a bigger, older guy we called "Dad." We'd eat some stuff, or not, and then I think we went home. I guess some things never leave you.
39. If you ever fall off the Sears Tower, just go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will try to catch you because, hey, free dummy.
40. I bet one legend that keeps recurring throughout history, in every culture, is the story of Popeye.
41. Ambition is like a frog sitting on a Venus Flytrap. The flytrap can bite and bite, but it won't bother the frog because it only has little tiny plant teeth. But some other stuff could happen and it could be like ambition.
42. I hope if dogs ever take over the world, and they chose a king, they don't just go by size, because I bet there are some Chihuahuas with some good ideas.
43. Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word itself: "Mankind". Basically, it's made up of two separate words - "mank" and "ind". What do these words mean ? It's a mystery, and that's why so is mankind.
44. I bet when the neanderthal kids would make a snowman, someone would always end up saying, "Don't forget the thick, heavy brows." Then they would all get embarrassed because they remembered they had the big hunky brows too, and they'd get mad and eat the snowman.
45. If I lived back in the wild west days, instead of carrying a six-gun in my holster, I'd carry a soldering iron. That way, if some smart-aleck cowboy said something like "Hey, look. He's carrying a soldering iron!" and started laughing, and everybody else started laughing, I could just say, "That's right, it's a soldering iron. The soldering iron of justice." Then everybody would get real quiet and ashamed, because they had made fun of the soldering iron of justice, and I could probably hit them up for a free drink.
46. Once when I was in Hawaii, on the island of Kauai, I met a mysterious old stranger. He said he was about to die and wanted to tell someone about the treasure. I said, "Okay, as long as it's not a long story. Some of us have a plane to catch, you know." He stared telling hes story, about the treasure and his life and all, and I thought: "This story isn't too long." But then, he kept going, and I started thinking, "Uh-oh, this story is getting long." But then the story was over, and I said to myself: "You know, that story wasn't too long after all." I forget what the story was about, but there was a good movie on the plane. It was a little long, though.
47. Life, to me, is like a quiet forest pool, one that needs a direct hit from a big rock half-buried in the ground. You pull and you pull, but you can't get the rock out of the ground. So you give it a good kick, but you lose your balance and go skidding down the hill toward the pool. Then out comes a big Hawaiian man who was screwing his wife beside the pool because they thought it was real pretty. He tells you to get out of there, but you start faking it, like you're talking Hawaiian, and then he gets mad and chases you...
48. The next time I have meat and mashed potatoes, I think I'll put a very large blob of potatoes on my plate with just a little piece of meat. And if someone asks me why I didn't get more meat, I'll just say, "Oh, you mean this?" and pull out a big piece of meat from inside the blob of potatoes, where I've hidden it. Good magic trick, huh?
49. As we were driving, we saw a sign that said "Watch for Rocks." Marta said it should read "Watch for Pretty Rocks." I told her she should write in her suggestion to the highway department, but she started saying it was a joke - just to get out of writing a simple letter! And I thought I was lazy!
50. I wouldn't be surprised if someday some fishermen caught a big shark and cut it open, and there inside was a whole person. Then they cut the person open, and in him is a little baby shark. And in the baby shark there isn't a person, because it would be too small. But there's a little doll or something, like a Johnny Combat little toy guy---something like that.

So Many Languages

"The global programming community is fashion-driven to a degree that would embarrass haute couture designers from New York to Paris."

-- Steve Yegge

Partial Application

One of the most handy and unusual techniques in JavaScript is applying functions, both in whole and in part, as well as transforming them on the fly. [more]

If only I could figure this out...

Selling Out

It's what happens when you sell outside your niche.

A sellout convinces a group of supporters -- who are used to being abandoned by their champions -- that he is truly like them. And then once that subgroup is won over and makes his career, the sellout abandons them for the more lucrative world of mainstream success that his supporters gave him access to, the world where centrism and unoriginality is rewarded. [Read More]

Pets in America

Every puppy sold or given away makes it more likely one in a shelter will be put to death.

...read more here

Duuuude

yankee doodle dandy -> "doods" -> "dude"

It came from over here

 http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/data-analysis.html

"mathematics cannot tell you if your hypothesis is true.

mathematics can tell you if your hypothesis is consistent with the data.

if the data is sparse and unclear,

then so is your conclusion."

Killing Kernels

My computer’s been acting up since I upgraded to OSX 10.9, so I’ve been peeking at the Activity Monitor to see if I can learn why it's crashing.

After checking the Activity Monitor app a few times throughout the day, I started to recognize a pattern. Occasionally, I’d see a new process called kernel_task sitting up at the top, consuming almost a gig of RAM.

Hmm, I thought, something fishy’s going on here; I’ve never seen this process before… I’m used to Firefox, Chrome, Rubymine, or occasionally Emacs at the top, but kernel_task? Naturally, I immediately wanted to kill it. This (I decided in the moment) is why my computer’s been crashing. If I just kill kernel_task, I’ll free up memory for the rest of my programs and maybe even stop my computer from crashing.

Before I enthusiastically killed the thing, I thought I might as well google it. I wasn’t worried it was a virus; I was worried it was a weird bug in the new OS or something related to this greedy iPhone or Polaroid bluetooth thing called distnoted I caught getting away with 3.5 gigs a few weeks ago.

Good thing I landed on this forum post before I killed it. Turns out, kernel_task is the operating system itself. This is simply an informed guess, but I think OSX 10.9 may have changed the Activity Monitor’s default process view from My Processes to All Processes. I wasn’t used to seeing kernel_task in the list, so when it showed up I figured it didn’t belong. Lesson learned? Well, no, not really.

Bitcoin Rising

OK, this IS BTC we're talking about, but still, what goes up doesn't necessarily come down.

Wordpress is on board. So is Reddit.

Will BTC be the next Apple?

An Atheist's Glimpse of God

An Atheist's Glimpse of God
HACKER NEWS | FEBRUARY 18, 2013
http://pulse.me/s/iDzid


One of the benefits of working for a startup like C42 Engineering (where I help build rubymonk.com -- the name is a coincidence) is the broad range of... ... Read more

--
Sent via Pulse

Sent from my iPhone

Pair Ducking

A few times a month, I'll look up at one of my colleagues and say, "hey, got a sec? I need to talk to the duck," and they know this means I'm going to talk to their head but they can basically keep doing what they're doing and nod occasionally. This serves several purposes: (1) It's less insane-sounding than actually talking to an inanimate object in an open work environment. (2) It actually feels better and forces me to think more clearly when I'm talking to an actual person -- the cognitive focus is higher when the object of conversation can actually, in theory, think and talk back (YMMV). (3) And finally, although it does require some focus on the part of the other coder, it's not nearly as taxing to them as actually helping me solve the problem or pairing up with me. So it's a good compromise somewhere between pair programming and talking to an actual rubber duck. Again, YMMV. Maybe I'll call it "Pair Ducking."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5239673

the web has almost caught up to...1997

http://mitallast.github.com/diablo-js/

Differentiating porn from pandering

In most states, producers of adult entertainment face possible charges of "pandering," or paying persons to perform sexual acts (a charge ordinarily levied against "pimps" and other coordinators of prostitution services). But the California Supreme Court's decision in People v. Freeman (46 Cal. 3d 419 [1988]) held that a person does not commit pandering if the purpose of the payment is the production of a legal entertainment product rather than the sexual gratification of an actor or observer. A New York district court recently reached a similar result (People v. Paulino, 6687/04 [2005]), but the production of adult entertainment in other states continues to present significant legal risk.

http://people.hbs.edu/bedelman/papers/redlightstates.pdf

Excel is Everywhere

"I've seen Excel used in amazing ways.

Yes, I've seen it used as a spreadsheet, to crunch numbers. I've also seen people sit down with a calculator and compute cell values themselves, blissfully unaware that the software could do it for them. Excel is a tool for lining up numbers.

We've all seen Excel CSV files used for reporting and data interchange because they're easy for programmers to generate. I've seen an application's configuration managed by tweaking a CSV file in Excel and uploading it to a server. Excel is a tool for separating labels from values.

I've had screenshots pasted into Excel and attached to an email. Excel is an ubiquitous file format.

I've received an entire application wireframed by the accounting department, with each screen drawn with filled-in ASCII-art columns on its own worksheet and every button hyperlinked to a worksheet showing the next application state.

That really threw me off when I saw it. But when I look back, I realize just how clever it was. Front-end developers are always praising grid-based design, aren't they? That's exactly what what Excel was being used for. Excel is the first layout grid many people encounter."

https://davidmichaelross.com/blog/microsoft-excel-is-everywhere/

Tesla's robots uncover New York Times Journalist Jon Broder's deceit.

"Cruise control was never set to 54 mph as claimed in the article, nor did he limp along at 45 mph. Broder in fact drove at speeds from 65 mph to 81 mph for a majority of the trip and at an average cabin temperature setting of 72 F."

http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/most-peculiar-test-drive

Xenu

Wikipedia: Xenu, the highlights

Within the Church of Scientology, the Xenu story is part of the church's secret "Advanced Technology",^[7] considered a sacred and esoteric teaching,^[11]and normally only revealed to members who have contributed large amounts of money.^[12]

...

In 1988, the cost of learning these secrets from the Church of Scientology was £3,830, or US$6,500.^[10][32] This is in addition to the cost of the prior courses which are necessary to be eligible for OT III, which is often well over US$100,000 (roughly£60,000).^[14] Belief in Xenu and body thetans is a requirement for a Scientologist to progress further along the Bridge to Total Freedom.^[33] Those who do not experience the benefits of the OT III course are expected to take it (and pay for it) again.^[27]

...

The broad outlines of the story—that 75 million years ago a great catastrophe happened in this sector of the galaxy which caused profoundly negative effects for everyone since then—are publicly admitted to lower-level Scientologists. However, the details are kept strictly confidential, at least within Scientology.

...

The Church of Scientology forbade individuals from reading the OT III Xenu cosmogony without first having taken prerequisite courses.^[35]Scientologists warn that reading the Xenu story without proper authorization could cause pneumonia.^[35][36]

...

In a letter of the time to his wife Mary Sue,^[42]Hubbard said that, in order to assist his research, he was drinking alcohol and taking stimulants and depressants ("I'm drinking lots of rum and popping pinks and greys").

...

Writing in the book Scientologypublished by Oxford University Press, contributor Mikael Rothstein observes that, "To my knowledge no real analysis of Scientology's Xenu myth has appeared in scholarly publications. The most sober and enlightening text about the Xenu myth is probably the article on Wikipedia (English version) and, even if brief, Andreas Grünschloss's piece on Scientology in Lewis (2000: 266–268)."^[20] Rothstein places the Xenu text by L. Ron Hubbard within the context of a creation myth within the Scientology methodology, and characterizes it as "one of Scientology's more important religious narratives, the text that apparently constitutes the basic (sometimes implicit) mythology of the movement, theXenu myth, which is basically a story of the origin of man on Earth and the human condition."^[20]Rothstein describes the phenomenon within a belief system inspired by science fiction, and notes that the "myth about Xenu, ... in the shape of a science fiction-inspired anthropogony,explains the basic Scientological claims about the human condition."^[20]

LSD Thumbprint

On a normal large dose of LSD there is the high visual activity, sensory alteration, synesthesia, ego loss, etc, etc. On a thumbprint it feels like you completely short circuit your brain. All cognitive function stops. Like pouring water on a breaker panel it pops, then all connections and activity are fried. The cognitive filter is shut off and eternity is able to creep in. Obviously all brain activity doesn't stop because you keep breathing and your heart keeps pumping. The brain stem, hindbrain, medulla, pons and cerebellum are probably not affected. read on ...

Some Interesting Featured Articles from Wikipedia

Featured articles are considered to be the best articles Wikipedia has to offer, as determined by Wikipedia's editors. They are used by editors as examples for writing other articles. Before being listed here, articles are reviewed as featured article candidates for accuracy, neutrality, completeness, and style according to our featured article criteria. There are 3,800 featured articles out of 4,164,078 articles on the English Wikipedia. Thus, about one in 1,090 articles is listed here. Articles that no longer meet the criteria can be proposed for improvement or removal at featured article review.

Actuary

Autistm

Brown Dog Affair

Manzanar

Isaac Brock

CSI effect

Execution by elephant

1 - 2 + 3 - 4 + ...

0.999...

Logarithm

1987 (What the Fuck Is Going on?)

Xenu