The Artificial Load Spike

Since I missed posting over the weekend I thought I'd share a little Linux one-liner that I found amusing. For those that don't know "load" in the Unix world often refers to the system load averages for one, five, or fifteen minutes. The system load average is the average number of processes in the "ready" state over the period in question. Processes in the "ready" state are normally waiting for a chance to use the CPU, but it also includes processes waiting for I/O, which the following one-liner takes advantage of to cause an artificial load spike:

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Date: 2009-04-27 23:03:54, 14 years and 330 days ago

Backstroke of the West

AKA: Revenge of the Sith. This is hilarious; I find myself wondering if I could pick up a copy from somewhere.

Categories: Humour, Movies, Oddities, Linkage
Date: 2009-04-21 23:03:53, 14 years and 336 days ago

Take Courage

The British government has banned a beer ad for, wait for it... "suggesting that the beer could increase confidence". Beer could increase confidence? What a silly idea; I mean it's not like five minutes of searching showed several pages that listed increased self-confidence as one of the possible effects of moderate alcohol consumption. Wait yeah it is, see the Drug and Alcohol Services South Australia and Wikipedia for example.

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Categories: Oddities, Politics
Date: 2009-04-16 23:03:54, 14 years and 341 days ago

Countdown in a Shell Script

Tuesday's still the weekend right? ;-)

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Categories: Computers, Scripting, Linux
Date: 2009-04-07 23:03:53, 14 years and 350 days ago

Battery State Monitor Script

Oops, completely missed posting last weekend, mostly just because I'm too easily distracted. Such is life, hopefully I'll do two or three posts this weekend to even it up.

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Categories: Computers, Scripting, Linux
Date: 2009-04-04 23:03:53, 14 years and 353 days ago