(For some California local definition of 'morning'!)

About 30 minutes ago one of our databases (sb-db03) locked up and stopped serving traffic. This was an active database, so the site quickly stopped when it could no longer serve requests. Alas.

I have failed us over to a backup database and now everything should be working again.

I'm not sure yet what happened to db03, but am currently investigating and will update this post if I come up with a root cause for the problem. Edit: It's back up and doesn't have any visible problems. Disks are fine, data's intact, etc. The graphs and logs show nothing. We'll have to keep an eye on it and see if it manifests further issues.

Sorry for the trouble, please let me know if you still see any problems!

So, in celebration of the end of the school year, last night NM & I hosted some people at our house to watch Hackers and Antitrust. The former is an old favorite of mine; I had never seen the latter, but Noah insisted that it was the best-worst hacking movie ever, so there we were.

After Antitrust I had to go and drink a shot of tequila to steel my nerves. It was that bad.

The thing that was so terrible about it was that the script had a fundamental misunderstanding not of how open source software works, but of how business relationships work. See, the characters do use the term "open source" as a kind of a shibboleth, but at least there's some stab at describing what that might mean (although I think the term they were really searching for is "free/libre"). But that's not as weird as the way that the Bill Gates-ish character is a terrible, terrible manager, or the way that the premise of the plot is completely unbelievable.

Pro tip: When you are working on an enormous project like Word, Excel or a satellite cell phone network that can handle video, you cannot save the project and hit your date by bringing in a kid just out of college, no matter how smart he is, two months before the deadline. You also cannot save the project by spying on other programmers and stealing their code, because code is not Unobtainium, and it is context-specific, not usually something you can just yoink and paste into your own project. 

Also, everybody in the movie looked like they were acting through a thick veil of "I really need to make my boat payment. Please, God, let this movie be over so I get paid and can make my boat payment." Since everybody involved has done other projects that aren't stinkers, I don't think there's any other explanation for it.