Zen Bastard

only two ways to stand out

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:00:45 GMT

Her: Did you see [particular person in crowded area]?
Me: Doesn't ring a bell.
Her: I'm talking about the one [add details].
Me: Sorry, don't think so.
Her: But they really [more details], almost like [exaggerated depiction].
Me: Honey, you pay a LOT more attention to individual people in crowded areas than I do. In general, if it doesn't look like it needs fighting or wants fucking, I probably didn't notice it.

I might be a Neanderthal, but at least I'm in touch with who I am, right?

How does this even happen?

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:11:09 GMT

$customer has some of those god awful "control panel" servers... not Plesk, but the same concept. You get the idea. $vendor is forcing him to do a migration, because they no longer support FreeBSD, so they want him to move to CentOS. $customer contracts with $vendor to maintain these things... sorta, mostly, except he's still responsible for maintaining the actual servers. Confused yet? Me too.

But really that's not the confusing part, and the only reason I mention it is because SOMEHOW, I am pretty sure $vendor was responsible for this monstrosity:

mysql> SELECT Host,Db,User,Table_name,Column_name,Timestamp,Column_priv FROM columns_priv ORDER BY Host,Table_name LIMIT 8;
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Host       | Db     | User     | Table_name     | Column_name  | Timestamp           | Column_priv |
+------------+--------+----------+----------------+--------------+---------------------+-------------+
| 127.0.0.1  | mysql  | phpuser  | tables_priv    | Host         | 2008-01-11 19:39:35 | Select      |
| 127.0.0.1  | mysql  | phpuser  | tables_priv    | Host         | 2008-06-20 20:03:49 | Select      |
| 127.0.0.1  | mysql  | phpuser  | user           | Host         | 2008-01-11 19:39:35 | Select      |
| 127.0.0.1  | mysql  | phpuser  | user           | Host         | 2008-06-20 20:03:49 | Select      |
| localhost  | mysql  | phpuser  | tables_priv    | Host         | 2008-01-11 19:39:35 | Select      |
| localhost  | mysql  | phpuser  | tables_priv    | Host         | 2008-06-20 20:03:49 | Select      |
| localhost  | mysql  | phpuser  | user           | Host         | 2008-01-11 19:39:35 | Select      |
| localhost  | mysql  | phpuser  | user           | Host         | 2008-06-20 20:03:49 | Select      |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
8 rows in set (0.00 sec)

That's the columns_priv table in the mysql database. If you didn't already know this, the PRIMARY KEY of the column_priv table is a complex key consisting of Host,Db,User,Table_name,Column_name.

See the problem?

If you think that "localhost" has an extra space on it for half of those or something like that... you're fucking wrong. Those are, I shit you not, DUPLICATE primary keys. For every. Fucking. Row. In. The. Table. The same problem was in the db table.

So, for the two tables that control user permissions for every database on the server... there are primary key duplication violations littered throughout the whole fucking thing. Upshot being, whenever the server needs information about user rights, who knows what the fuck it'll get - it might get one record; it might get another record; it might get no record at all, or the whole goddamn server might catch on fire and melt into slag. Duplicated primary keys are something a SQL server checks for on insertion or update of a record... not on read of a record. In fact, before fixing this, I played around with it a little and discovered all sorts of ways to get wildly different results out of querying these tables because of this. In fact, the only way to fix it was to dump the tables completely and recreate them from scratch, because just trying to delete a row would instantly crash the server.

Anyway, it's all fixed now. But what I keep trying to figure out - and failing - is how the fuck did $vendor get those rows in the database to begin with?!

Jane pic du jour

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 19:52:23 GMT

Going back through the metric ton of Jane pics in my camera, this is one of my favorites. She was just under 4 months old when it was taken.

Clickable if you want to embiggenate it.

freak of culture like a white girl with cornrows

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 00:18:27 GMT

Last night I dreamed that I was a teenager again, and that I had an older brother. We were on some kind of screwy football team in high school, with a coach who kept advising us to bang all the (female) reporters who apparently wanted to interview us for the local papers. They were real sluts, and, apparently, wanted some kind of scoop badly enough to be perfectly willing to fuck their way through as many high school football players as necessary along the way.

Also, we were living with grandparents who turned out to be undead. They were feeding us human flesh to turn us into ghouls. And, apparently, the grandparents were going to kill us before the transformation was complete, and feed on us - only I ran away and turned myself "all the way" undead first. By RIPPING OFF ALL MY REMAINING LIVING FLESH. Ha ha, creepy undead grandparents, I win! I think.

I have got to find out what the hell the wife is putting in my drinks. And ask for more of it.

a freak of culture, like a white girl with cornrows

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 16:00:28 GMT

So, the wife and I came home with another box of hand-me-down baby clothes, sized six months bigger than the last time.

Janis's role in this is to sift through the hand-me-downs and sort them into piles of "wrong size", "too stained", "nothing irrevocably wrong with these", and "hey I kinda like this one." My job is to look on, horrified, and advocate burning the entire lot of them.

One of the little 6-month size shirts this go-round had paired strawberries over the left breast, captioned "Berries" in large cursive text underneath them. Y'know, just in case some onlooker is simultaneously incapable of identifying a strawberry yet capable of reading English.

Wife: This one?
Me: Strawberry, strawberry was the neighborhood ho.
Wife: I don't know why they have to put writing on these.
Me: Yo E, she's a berry, let's run a train / Man, I wouldn't touch that bitch / Me neither, ho go home and wash out your beaver.
Wife: Well, I guess that's a "no" then.

I guess we can add "doesn't listen to NWA" to "has never seen the internet" when listing the qualities of people who make infant clothing.

Dell Mini 10v - first impressions

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 19:18:14 GMT

I recently realized that I no longer needed a "full-scale" notebook, and that since netbooks were so inexpensive, I could actually make money selling my Inspiron 6400 and buying a Dell Mini 10v to replace it. So I did that. Much like the Inspiron it replaced, I did pimp out the 10v a bit over baseline - upgraded to Dell's 16GB solid state drive, upgraded the wireless, and upgraded the battery (from 3-cell to 6-cell).

I was never a big fan of the netbook (or, formerly, "subnotebook") form factor - I thought that it sacrificed too much usability for the sake of "being tiny and cute" - but given that I no longer really needed a desktop replacement to go on long trips with me, and given the much lower cost, the netbook was suddenly attractive. For occasional, relatively brief use doing network testing, it's hard to beat.

Hard Drive

One thing I was concerned with is that I never could find out WHICH solid state drive Dell was offering as the upgrade - turns out, it's a Samsung UM410. This is more important than you might think, if you haven't been keeping up with SSDs - the market is flooded with truly abominable SSDs right now which have big "stuttering" performance problems. Luckily, the Samsung is a solid performer - its maximum throughput is an unimpressive 35MB/sec or so, but this is offset by a 0.2ms or so seek time. What this boils down to is, a machine with this SSD in it is unlikely ever to make you go "wow, that's fast!"... but equally unlikely to make you go "wow, that's slow," as we all know a machine with even the fastest conventional hard drive is likely to do. (You know that godawful "crunching" or "grinding" noise your computer makes when it's being painfully, painfully slow? That's your conventional hard drive, stuck with thousands upon thousands of small read/write operations, constantly seeking the heads.)

Again, if you're thinking of going SSD to get away from the awful "my computer is crunching" slowdowns... beware; the Samsung is a solid performer and the Intel will make your jaw hit the floor, but A WHOLE LOT of the current crop of SSDs have MAJOR performance problems and will actually perform significantly WORSE than conventional HDDs.

And as long as we're talking hard drives, here's one of my very biggest bitches about my new Mini... no hard drive activity light. To be fair, one seems less needed with a good SSD installed... but also to be fair, the SSD is an option in the 10v, not the standard, and it's an option that probably relatively few people will take. And even with the SSD, if you start encountering performance problems, you want to look for the hard drive activity light to see "is it doing something, or is it locked up, or did I just miss a click?" With the 10v... you can't. And that really, REALLY sucks. I am pointing my finger at you, Dell, and I am shaking it like the evil Monkey in Chris' closet.

Operating System

The default OS for the Mini 10v is Windows XP, but I ordered mine with Linux on it. I sampled the Dell-installed and Dell-monkeyed-with version of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS ("Hardy Heron") for about ten minutes before screwing my face up in distaste and wiping it, to reinstall first with "plain vanilla" Ubuntu 9.04 ("Jaunty Jackalope"), and later with Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix. The Dell-flavored version had a kind of dubious "launcher" I wasn't too fond of, and had a Yahoo! toolbar forcibly installed into Firefox - with the Uninstall button for it greyed out, no less. Uh, thanks but no thanks, g'bye.

There are some rough spots getting plain vanilla Ubuntu going on the Mini 10v - most everything just works right out of the box, but the touchpad is pretty jumpy and needs some settling down; this required the installation of a package that's not in the main repositories yet, and some minor parameter tweaking. The "mouse buttons" on the 10v are pretty odd - they are the bottom left and bottom right corners of the touchpad itself, and somewhat surprisingly, they actually depress when you push them. However, if you don't tweak the touchpad settings, they're also still motion sensitive when you brush your fingers across them, which makes for some rather odd and unpleasant results when you try to click things with them, or - worse - click-and-drag. The driver package adds a sort of "keybounce" fix to the touchpad, throwing away impulses which were generated too rapidly for a human to have intentionally committed them; the tweaks disable motion sensing on the "button" parts of the touchpad, and enable "edge scrolling". (Details at http://ubuntuwiki.net/index.php/Dell_Mini_10v if you want them.)

Ubuntu Netbook Remix itself is a pretty interesting reworking of the interface to suit the netbook's much smaller screen. It's very usable, although it tends to confuse less technically savvy people on first sight. To be fair, this is not because "it's hard," it's because "it doesn't look like a normal computer" - and that's more of a Netbook Remix thing than an Ubuntu-vs-Windows thing. A few moments playing with it makes everything become pretty immediately apparent, though. Worth noting: the interface does make multitasking a bit more cumbersome, particularly until you actually understand its conventions. Simply finding and launching one of a few applications, though - ie, what a netbook is supposed to be for - is VERY simple and easy.

Of course, UNR is still a VERY new product, and the occasional rough edge is definitely there to be found. But no showstoppers so far. (In case you're wondering, "Restart" really does restart, btw.)

External Display

This, unfortunately, was NOT an area in which the Mini 10v shone. When I attached an external monitor by VGA cable, nothing happened initially. So I went to the Display applet for Ubuntu Netbook Remix, where I saw my 22" Acer already discovered (good!) but the "Mirror screens" box unchecked. OK, no problem... I checked the box. Nothing happened. Hmm... well, I didn't really want a mirror anyway, I wanted to try dual display. So, I checked the "On" radio button for the Acer, at which point I was told that some settings needed to be added to xorg.conf, which I okayed, and that I should log out and back in, which I did.

It worked, but everything slowed to an absolute crawl. To the point that the normally instant-and-spiffy little animations when I hovered over an icon would take six seconds or more to happen. Moving from one application tab to another would produce all the icons for BOTH tabs overlaid on top of one another, and it would take 15 to 30 seconds to clear the garbage (if it ever cleared). As mentioned earlier, I had no hard drive activity light - which left me really confused and apprehensive about just why my Mini was suddenly a raging pile of slow. So, sighing theatrically, I disconnected the Acer display.

Problem not solved - everything was still glacial. So I rebooted - problem still not solved. After a lot of frustration, I finally dropped to the Terminal, manually edited xorg.conf, and discovered a subsection in it declaring a virtual display, with total width of both the laptop display and my Acer. I deleted that, then restarted, THEN everything was fixed. Whew! Then, much more cautiously, I tried hooking up the Acer and just using the little "change display" key (the F1 key, but without holding down Fn) - THAT worked pretty much as expected, bouncing from "laptop display only" to "mirror" to "external display only" and back to "laptop display only" again as I cycled through. It was quite slow to change state, though - on the order of 5-10 seconds per change - and I discovered that, although my Acer's native resolution is 1680x1050, the Mini would only drive it up to 1024x768 - hardly ideal.

I haven't ever tried running Windows on the Mini, so I'm not sure how much of the blame for this massive fail to lay at the feet of the Intel 945GMA video chipset, and how much of it to lay at the feet of Ubuntu Netbook Remix. But I'd advise caution if you're thinking of getting a Mini 10v for heavy use with an external display... Here There Be Dragons.

Battery

I really had no idea what to expect from the Mini when it came to battery life. I've seen lots and lots of people complaining about what they found to be underwhelming battery life out of netbooks/subnotebooks, and grumbling that SSDs didn't really seem to do much in the real world for battery life, etc etc whine whine whine. Which is part of why I ordered mine with the upgraded 6-cell battery instead of the default 3-cell. I also wasn't sure what to expect, because traditionally, Linux has tended to lag somewhat behind Windows when it comes to extending battery life on mobile PCs.

Well, the first day I had my Mini I left it on the charger for 12 hours like Dell recommended... then the second day, I took it off the charger and kept it off, while I used it until it dropped. I installed a gigabyte or so of software and OS updates, I played around with configurations, I browsed the web, I showed my new toy off to friends, colleagues, and coworkers, I watched some YouTube clips, I drove around town with it open and running in the passenger seat... and I got nine point five hours out of it before it finally gave up the ghost. Color me satisfied.

One thing I will warn you of, though, is that the upgraded battery protrudes SIGNIFICANTLY from the chassis of the netbook. This is a bit of a blessing and a curse - on the one hand, Dell very smartly configured the oversized battery so that it serves as a kind of keyboard angle clip. This is good for typing on it, and it's good for getting extra ventilation, and it's even good for keeping the laptop elevated some from anything nasty you might spill on the desk it's on. It's not so good for fitting it into its custom neoprene sleeve (optional), and it also makes for something of an odd balance to it (and significantly increased weight, though it's still ridiculously light compared to a "real" notebook).

Summary

The Good:

9.5 hours battery life!
GREAT keyboard, for a netbook
Small, lightweight, and attractive
Inexpensive ($440 out the door with 16GB SSD, 802.11n networking, upgraded battery, and neoprene sleeve)
Solid, if not impressive, performance from the Samsung SSD
Equally solid (if equally unimpressive) performance from the 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU
No fans - so COMPLETELY silent, if you get the SSD

The Bad:

upgraded battery throws off the balance of the netbook
NO HARD DRIVE ACTIVITY LIGHT!
Underwhelming-at-best utilization of external display

Baby's First Modeling Gig

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 19:06:39 GMT

OK, OK, so we were paid in merchandise and it's just for this chick's Etsy store... but hey, there was a professional photographer shooting it.

This one is by far my favorite... Jane kicking it Roaring Twenties style with a crazy giant-flower-adorned lace knit headband. I suspect we are going to be seeing that expression A LOT. In Janis' words, "that's the Daddy look."

Can a father be permitted a bit of a facepalm? I'd hoped not to see anything like this for at LEAST 15 years or so...

The front view of the same item. In the words of its maker: "The waist is a drawstring so is completely adjustable. Its shown on a 2 month old who weighs approximately 15 lbs, so pretty much at its maximum "stretch" capacity :)" Jane is a BIG baby. I love that.

pics are clickable, if you want to see them in their original ginormous glory.

They hate our freedom^H^H^H^H^H^H^H undeclared war

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:32:18 GMT

Maybe, just maybe, "they" don't really hate our freedom. Maybe "they" actually hate the way we attack civilian targets inside the borders of countries with whom we are not at war. I mean, it's just a thought. When you're making the news for sending in Predator unmanned attack drones to volley missiles into the funeral of a bunch of people who were killed by - you guessed it, attack by Predator unmanned attack drones, maybe that might piss the survivors and the neighbors off a little more than your "freedom"?

Seriously, why isn't this getting more news coverage? Let me recap:

We have not declared war on Pakistan

We are using military hardware to attack targets within Pakistan's borders

We are attacking civilian targets within Pakistan's borders

WE HAVEN'T EVEN DECLARED WAR!

Why the hell isn't this raising red flags all over the country? I mean, for crying out loud, have you ever watched a Western? The guys who ride by the ranch firing their guns into it through the walls at midnight are not the heroes of the piece.

I'm really not coming at this from the perspective of a fainting dove: I know the place is a goddamn mess, and there's a lot of Taliban in there. But this just isn't the right way to go about... whatever the hell it is we're trying to accomplish. We should either be getting openly and officially invited in by the Pakistani government, declaring war and doing it our way, or butting the hell out. "Just sorta sending in drones to attack civilian targets with HE missiles", with or without the "tacit" support of the Pakistani government - and with increasingly strident protests from Pakistani civilians - is a direct slap in the face of everything this country is SUPPOSED to be for.

the economy: still sucking

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 03:45:15 GMT

This, unfortunately, pretty much sums it up right now.

I am so, SO thankful I have a business (and therefore, a distributed income) - this is a shitty, shitty time to have to rely on too many of your financial eggs coming from one basket.

your daily moment of zen

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:40:23 GMT

disclaimer: no that is not my cat. my cat is a ground cat.

ZFS data healing under FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:43:22 GMT

I decided to do a quick test of ZFS's automatic data healing and corruption protection today.

With the same 5-drive RAIDZ setup under FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE as in the earlier benchmarks, I first created a text file containing the sentence "This is a test of data corruption in live filesystems." I saved that text file to the root of the RAIDZ, then unmounted the pool, then kldunloaded the ZFS module from FreeBSD's kernel.

Next, I used a small Perl script to look through /dev/ad8 - one of the five physical drives in the array - to find the sentence above. Having found it, I then did a raw write to /dev/ad8 changing "This" to "Tgjs". Presto, data corruption!

Now, I re-kldloaded zfs.ko, then re-mounted the pool, and did a quick cat test.txt:

# cat /backup/test.txt
This is a test of data corruption in live filesystems.
#

Excellent - ZFS did in fact catch and heal the corruption I introduced - and if I check the status of the pool, it will warn me about it:

# zpool status backup
pool: backup
state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable error. An
attempt was made to correct the error. Applications are unaffected.
action: Determine if the device needs to be replaced, and clear the errors
using 'zpool clear' or replace the device with 'zpool replace'.
see: http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-9P
scrub: none requested
config:

        NAME         STATE      READ WRITE CKSUM
        backup      ONLINE        0     0     0
          raidz1    ONLINE        0     0     0
            ad6     ONLINE        0     0     0
            ad8     ONLINE        0     0     1
            ad10    ONLINE        0     0     0
            ad12    ONLINE        0     0     0
            ad14    ONLINE        0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

That is pretty freaking awesome.

One nasty caveat: due to an inadvisable configuration line in /etc/devd.conf, by default ZFS errors will not be logged in any system log - if you haven't specifically changed logging configuration on your machine, ZFS errors end up going to user.warn which, again by default, effectively means going to /dev/null. See here for more info on the logging SNAFU.

More ZFS performance data

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:53:29 GMT

Update to the prior ZFS post: I did some more benchmarks. The newer set was performed with one 5MB burst of data written to a random location on the target drive each second, which is probably a better model for most real-world conditions.

Methodology: /data/5M and /data/1M have 5GB of data each in randomly-ordered chunks 5MB and 1MB in size, respectively. /data/zero.bin is a contiguous 8GB file. A process writes a burst of 5MB to a random location in /data/zero.bin once per second; other processes read chunks from /data/1M or /data/5M as appropriate (and as fast as possible) until the entire 5G dataset is read.

In between runs, 5GB of data is read from another file in /home/myname (or /export/home/myname, in the case of OpenSolaris) in order to flush as much of the filesystem cache out as possible. It's worth noting that, as far as I can tell, at least some of the OSes tested have some protection against a single file dominating the entire available cache in RAM - so differences in cache algorithm WILL have had some effect on these results! I could not find any programmatic way to dump the filesystem cache, so the big copy operation from another drive was the best I could come up with.

The methodology is certainly not perfect, but I feel it probably models a lot of real-world conditions reasonably well.

The test machine is an Athlon64 3500+ with 2GB of DDR2 SDRAM, on a motherboard using the nVidia SATA chipset - which means no NCQ (Native Command Queueing) support for the SATA drives. Operating system is installed on a Western Digital 250GB drive. Data drives are five Seagate ST3750640NS SATA-II 750GB drives. NOTE: these Seagates are SLOW PIGS, which is why these performance numbers are so low - and part of why I included baseline single-drive performance numbers!

Operating systems tested were FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE amd64, Ubuntu Server 8.04-LTS amd64, and OpenSolaris 0906.

There were a couple of odd quirks that you can't see in the graphs - OpenSolaris hangs onto writes for a WHILE before committing them; the OpenSolaris read/write numbers are a little misleading because the array would keep chattering with late write commits for quite some time after each benchmark run was nominally complete. Since ZFS writes atomically, and most real-world loads aren't likely to saturate the array 24/7, I decided to leave the numbers as-is - that's the performance you'd experience actually using the array, after all, since a read to any of those uncommitted writes would still produce the new data from memory rather than the old data from the spindles.

Also, whereas for Linux and FreeBSD I would first write 5GB of data from /dev/urandom to /home/myname, and then parcel that out in chunks to /data/5M and /data/1M, on OpenSolaris I ended up actually doing the writes directly from /dev/urandom instead... because I discovered the hard way that if you read-saturate from /export/home, the entire damn system becomes just about completely unusable until you quit. And it was actually SLOWER reading from /export/home than from /dev/urandom directly!

I thought it was pretty interesting that FreeBSD's ZFS implementation and OpenSolaris' performed so differently - one better at larger reads, one better at smaller reads. It's probably worth noting that FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE uses ZFS v6, whereas OpenSolaris 0906 uses a much later version - v13 or so, I think, although I couldn't find a definitive answer anywhere. It's probably also significant that OpenSolaris was the only OS running a big heavy desktop - neither FreeBSD nor Ubuntu was running X, but OpenSolaris was burdened down under X, Gnome, and all kinds of desktop-ish crap. That was probably a pretty big limitation on a 2GB machine.

There's not much doubt that, at least on this scale of hardware, mdraid5 is the performance king - but ZFS has a hell of a lot to offer in exchange for what performance you might give up. Anybody who's ever spent 10+ hours doing an offline fsck of a large raid array is probably quite willing to sacrifice a little bit of read performance in exchange for a promise to NEVER have to do another offline fsck again. The availability of live compressed volumes, copy-on-write, and other features - and how brain-dead easy they are to implement from the admin's perspective - is also pretty compelling.

OpenSolaris: first impressions

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 01:18:52 GMT

I've been benchmarking Sun's ZFS filesystem alongside more conventional ones lately, and as a result, somebody asked me to include numbers from Sun's actual operating system running ZFS. So I figured hey, why not.

I felt like that little girl from Jurassic Park. First, I sit in front of the computer, and stare at the monitor with a relieved grin. "Hey, this is Unix - I know this!"

Then the velociraptors attacked.

I suspect there must have been driver problems with the particular hardware I was using, because holy SHIT was OpenSolaris (2009-06) ever broken. First, any attempt to read from /home/export/myname severely impacted performance of the whole system - making it damn near unusable - until the read finished. Um, what? Then I discovered that if I had a terminal window open, and I fired up nano (a text editor) and then maximized the console window... suddenly, arrow keys started producing ASCII codes on the screen instead of... you know... arrowing. And once a terminal window actually crashed while I was using nano. Then I tried to install the Data::Random module from Perl's CPAN, and... well, the less said about that the better.

I could also go on about dd not understanding the "m" or "g" suffixes to blocksize arguments - despite the manpage saying that it does - or the lack of throughput report at the end of a dd run - despite the manpage saying there should be - or the lack of normally pretty-universal utilities like pv (pipe viewer) in the package repositories... hell, I think you get the picture. There may be some Very Good Reasons to go Solaris instead of BSD or Linux in the Enterprise world that I'm just not aware of, but from a smallbiz ISV's perspective, it felt like HP-UX: sorta like what you're used to, only painfully obsolescent and quirky and treacherous, with a lot of things you expect to be available inexplicably missing.

Again, I have to believe a lot of my problems must have been endemic to the hardware I was using. (Athlon64 3500+, ASUS motherboard with nvidia chipset, 2GB DDR2 SDRAM, if anybody is wondering.) But honestly, from my perspective as an ISV catering to small business... that doesn't help much. I don't want to have to carefully pick and choose from a list of exotic crap to feed my OS; I need to by and large expect it to just fucking work with commodity off-the-shelf parts.

I'll put up new numbers tomorrow, including results from FreeBSD 8.0-CURRENT (which includes ZFS v13, as opposed to the ZFSv6 in FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE) as well as the OpenSolaris results. But I'll save you the tension, if it's the Solaris numbers you want: they sucked. (Which may largely have had to do with the fact that OpenSolaris seems bound and determined to run X Windows, whereas FreeBSD didn't - all I really know is, from the "install it and see how it works" perspective, it blew.)

Jane pic du jour

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 01:17:27 GMT

She is super extra cranky and driving her mother to distraction right now, but omg she was so sweet this morning. And for, you know, like 15 brief minutes earlier tonight after I got home. :)

ZFS and RAIDZ performance

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 01:09:20 GMT

A comment on the Ars Technica Linux Kung Fu forum a couple of weeks ago got me curious - a user there said that as far as he knew, RAIDZ was not supposed to be a performance configuration, with RAIDZ performance not much better, on average, than that of any single disk in the RAIDZ.

I just happened to have a RAID storage server in the shop that was due for a complete wipe anyway, so I decided to take the opportunity to do some benchmarking. Somewhat to my surprise, ZFS turned out to be quite a good performer - despite its advanced data-protection features, it was the fastest filesystem tested for single-process reads, with or without RAIDZ. RAIDZ did quite well too; on multiple concurrent reads it is significantly slower than RAID5/ext3, but still manages to nearly double single-drive performance across the board.

Hardware used:
AMD Athlon 64+ 3500
2GB DDR2 SDRAM
1 WD 250GB HDD (operating system)
5 Seagate Barracuda 750GB SATA-II HDD (RAID array drives)

Operating systems used:
FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE amd64 (UFS2 and ZFS testing)
Ubuntu Server 8.04-LTS amd64 (ext3fs testing)

no filesystem tuning was done for any test - all filesystems were left in their default configuration.

I'm not quite dead yet

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 20:17:49 GMT

I keep meaning to post baby pics, and actually interact with you people, and all that shit. But, you know... been kinda busy with the whole "real life" thing so that keeps not happening. Hell, I keep not reading, much less posting.

In place of those baby pics that I still am not posting yet, here is a picture of a retard riding a scooter in the absolute stupidest way possible that I took with my iPhone this morning on the way to work:

Homeboy was riding that thing, like that, down the dotted yellow lines in between lanes of traffic through a busy intersection downtown at rush hour.

I am guessing that - one way or another - he won't be doing that for long.

Dub FX

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 04:01:45 GMT

I just discovered this guy tonight, and his stuff is fucking OWNING me. If you dig this, 1. look around on YouTube - there's a lot more - and 2. head over to http://dubfx.net and buy his album. $15, PayPal straight to the dude, and he mails you a CD. Postage (to anywhere in the world) included in the price.

one more pic

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 02:48:03 GMT

jette, I am using this as a late entry for your "post a completely unpracticed and unretouched pic of how you look right now" thing.

baby pix

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:18:02 GMT

Jane's first picture - approximately T plus 120 seconds. They came and got me from the room after she was delivered (by C-section - Janis was down entirely, under general anesthetic). The nurse put Jane in my arms, and I walked her down to the nursery. I took that picture just after putting her in the little infant warmer and petting her for a little while.

This one's at roughly T+180 - still in the infant warmer, but she's been stripped from the swaddling blankets and the cap just prior to getting put on the scale and weighed.

Can't tell what color her eyes will be yet; they're that kind of contact-lens-y looking blue that means "they ain't staying this color." We have a feeling she'll end up with Janis' green eyes, though.

Awesome baby is awesome. I am making a CONCERTED effort not to speak to her in LOLcat - but it's tough! (Janis and I both abhor "baby talk", it would suck if we avoided that trap, but accidentally turned LOLcat into her primary language.)

Calamity Jane is here

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:35:43 GMT

And after 28 hrs of fucking brutal labor followed up with a semi-emergency Cesarean section, she didn't waste any time earning her sobriquet!

She was born this morning and weighed 9 lbs 8.9 ozs, 20" long - which had a lot to do with the need for the C-section. That is one BIG, strong, healthy baby. Full head of hair, big wide eyes looking around at everything. She is great.

Janis had a really rough time of it obviously, but she is doing well and she and Jane will get to come home from the hospital after 3 days.

Pics forthcoming soon - the only ones I have now are on my iPhone, and I pretty much killed its charge dead.

I'm a daddy!

PS: you know how they never get newborns right on TV shows? I'll tell you something else they don't even get CLOSE to right - the umbilical cord. Holy crap those things look crazy!

omgz - I can haz baby nao?!

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 11:21:56 GMT

Not YET... but Janis' water broke at 4AM on the dot, and contractions are coming strong and regular... just in time to keep the Man from trying to force us to have the baby in the ER instead of at the birthing center. We're headed down to the birthing center in about half an hour.

I'll let you know more later, and get some pix up - but don't sweat if it takes a while, 'cause I may just decide I have better things to do than RUSH RUSH RUSH to my livejournal. =)

WOOHOO!

NO I DO NOT WANT GODDAMN FRIES WITH THAT

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 17:04:50 GMT

Bought a couple of PS3 games yesterday at the GameCrazy near my work. Jesus fucking christ I am sick of the "add-on" business model - car dealers want to pitch you on an "undercoating", electronics stores want to push their "protection plan", game stores want you to buy a fucking hint book - shit gets OLD. Odds are good, if you are forcing your salespeople to push it hard during every point-of-sale transaction, I DON'T FUCKING WANT IT.

Anyway. It was worse at this GameCrazy than it usually is most places - this kid with the half-shaved, half-long-and-dyed head like an 80's punk rocker was pitching the hint book, the CD scratch protection plan, the pre-order for the next game, AND the mvp member blah blah blah club with EVERY. SINGLE. TRANSACTION.

So I got up there, made some chit-chat about the demo video of Bloody Roar they were playing (old, shitty fighting game - imagine if Tekken had been conceived by a bunch of furries, and you'd pretty much have Bloody Roar) while he's ringing me up (and asking for my phone number - christ I hate that. STOP DOING THAT, retail, it's fucking invasive!). And then he starts in on the four different pitches, and I'm like no, the ONLY thing I want are those two games, no add-ons. He starts in on the second pitch. No, no, no. The third pitch. Nope nope nope. And he actually gets PISSED OFF. He says "You aren't even going to let me finish? That's pretty rude man."

Now don't get me wrong - I understand that employees HAVE to ask you all this crap. I know about mystery shoppers, I know that managers watch store video, blah blah blah - which is why I am SMILING when I say no, no, no. For christ's sake dude, it's not like I am dehumanizing you, I started that pointless convo about Bloody Roar prior to all this right? It's not even like there is some awesomeness in your pitches that I maybe JUST NEED TO GIVE A CHANCE and suddenly HOLY SHIT I TOTALLY WANT THAT, because guess what, there was a line! I heard EVERY SINGLE ONE of those fucking pitches when you delivered them to the LAST guy!

Anyway, I'm not going back to that place again. GameStop is shitty too, but at least they hold it down to only one or two pitches per transaction, and their clerks have been a lot more livable since they instituted the mandatory one-hot-chick-behind-the-counter-per-shift rule a year or two ago. For some reason, the presence of the hot chick calms down the uber-dorks who normally man the store - they don't fawn all over you and try to be your friend constantly when Hot Chick is in the store... even though they don't fall all over Hot Chick either. Weird.

one day, this will be you

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 19:39:16 GMT

Recently, I ended up servicing some older folks' home computers. I don't really "do" residential service anymore, so this was more than a bit out of my normal routine.

Hoo-boy. Everybody knows that old people tend to get kind of disconnected with reality. What we tend to forget is that old people also maintain their own version of reality... especially now that they have the internet helping them stay connected to as many of their peers as possible.

Let me tell you something, old people fucking LOVE powerpoint. My wife pointed out that "it's great that at least they use it", but then again, they use it like a New Guinea tribesman uses a rifle - hold it by the barrel and club the living shit out of anything that moves. Also like the tribesman, they think that shit is GREAT, it is the best club EVER, and they want to SHARE how fucking great it is with you. They are like, holy fuck did you see how I beat the shit out of that pig? You wonder why the fuck you put a scope on the rifle the last time you visited. (So does he.)

Another thing about old people is that they have friends with names like "Blobby" or "Gan-gan" or "Wee-waw". At some point, it has ceased to seem odd to them that a person might choose to replace their own fucking name with an unflattering adjective, or a random collection of syllables. They might not do that themselves, but it no longer seems WEIRD to them that they know people who do. At some point, in their view, it has become perfectly reasonable to insist that the entire world mimic an infant when addressing you, because that shit is FUCKING ADORABLE.

So here you are, installing a powerpoint viewer so that the emails that "Lumpy" or whoever sent are again openable. You open one, to make sure that everything works properly, and you are treated to utterly unremarkable stock photos of puppies and kittens, lifted from magazines or maybe an ad agency catalog. Every slide has "DO NOT CLICK!!!!!" stamped on it in several random locations, with the occasional "NE CLICQUEZ PAS ICI!!! :) :) :)" to break up the monotony and display how fucking erudite the author is. A MIDI file plays in the background. It is Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, and it is rendered using the default sample banks on the motherboard's built-in audio chipset. It makes you yearn to go back in time and kill Mozart. The possibility of causality loops and/or rifts in the space-time continuum seems, frankly, worth it.

You close the powerpoint quickly, and let the old person know "it works now." Nice try, but no dice - you must now watch at least five of these in the presence of the old person, because they don't get the logic of "these are powerpoints, powerpoint viewer has been installed, these will now work." What if one of them doesn't?

The next one is an illustration of a space shuttle, apparently lifted from a 1980s science textbook or Popular Science article. It is the only slide, and it is not animated. A low-fi copy of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" plays in the background. While you are reluctantly watching this, there will be a brief conversation about how "Glompy" or whoever "just sends the funniest emails, all day long!" Old-people eyes will likely be shining while you are told this.

...

OK, OK, you get the point: "old people, lol". But you have to realize, at the pace that technology moves, one day that is going to be you. Now imagine what that "old people lol" scene is going to look like for you. What are you into right now? What seems a little odd and new right now? What is, perhaps, just a little bit beyond you right at this moment, but you think you've about got the hang of it? No seriously, imagine it:

"Boy, why aren't you following my Twitter? Don't you want to know what your old Granddad is up to?"
"Granddad, nobody uses Twitter anym -"
"And why haven't you friended me to your Myspace? Is there something you don't want your old Granddad to see?"
"Myspace? You think I use Myspace? Seriously, Granddad, nobody's on that!"
"You don't give me any of your lip, young man! Now friend me so I can see what you've been writing. And have you been to myspacebling.com? They have the best graphics!"
"Granddad...!"

"Help me out with this, son. Your old Dad's a mite pissed at this website; I'm firing up the old Low Orbit Ion Cannon."
"Oh god, Dad, not again... For the millionth time, that doesn't WORK anymore. We don't even use TCP/IP anymore! All that old 'internet' stuff is just emulated on the Cloud!"
"Yeah yeah yeah, you just help your old man and keep your 'Cloud' crap to yourself. Now why won't it work? Do I need to install the Visual Basic file again?"
"Oh, Dad... jeez. I give up."

"Honeybunch, help me out will you? I need to get this running and it says I'm out of space. I don't know what that means, I've deleted everything off my hard drive and..."
"Um, it's talking about your cloud space Granddad. You have plenty of local storage, but the app needs more room in your... oh good lord, what's with all these freaking cats?"
"Those are LOLcats honey! Oh, I have some funny ones, let me show you..."
"Um... yeah, I know they're LOLcats Granddad. I just... ugh. You just... listen, just don't save them to your cloudspace, save them to... oh, nevermind. Here, let me move those for you, ok... ok... all right, you can install your app now."
"Look at this one! It's an anteater! 'Fuck you, I'm an anteater!' Ha ha ha ha. Sorry honey, the old man's sense of humor is a little vulgar sometimes."
"GRANDDAD..."

"Heh heh heh, did you get that video I linked to on your Facebook boy?"
"Faceboo... oh, you mean that old 'website' thing you made me sign up for? You know I don't really use that stuff Gran... oh JEEZ Granddad, 2girls1cup AGAIN? Seriously?"
"Heh heh... no, keep watching boy! It's not what you think. They're gonna do something else in a minute!"
"Granddad, I KNOW. EVERYBODY knows. Just... look, just stop with this stuff, okay?"

Maybe you won't be that kind of old person. (Yes, you will.) But even if you aren't (and really, you will be), they will be your peers. You will relate to them. You will understand them, and you will appreciate what they think is funny, and it will seem completely fucking normal.

You don't have to believe me... all you have to do is wait.

in case you were wondering

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 04:39:00 GMT

If you're the goofy-looking shithead with a giant white-boy 'fro who kept opening up your BRIGHT AS THE FUCKING SUN cell-phone and HOLDING IT OVER YOUR HEAD towards the end of the 8:00 showing of the Watchmen tonight, and you were too much of a pussy to look around when somebody soccer-kicked the living shit out of the back of your seat about the ninth time you did it...

That was me.

On the other hand, if you aren't that dipshit, and you haven't seen The Watchmen... for the love of fuck, go see it. I hadn't read the graphic novel, but I was familiar with its premise - it's a literary deconstruction of the superhero genre, beginning with the crappiest of pulp-era fifth-rate costumed "heroes" you'd never heard of before. And I knew that it had gotten a hell of a lot of acclaim. Well, judging by the movie... it fucking deserved it.

HIGHLY recommended.

helios - is it linux, or is it just bad stories?

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 02:23:16 GMT

So over at techsupport, I see a link to a blog post about a Linux advocate who supposedly got jumped by Microsoft fans in a gas station parking lot. First of all... wat? But, you know... weird stuff can occasionally happen. Who knows. But the story rings false about ten different ways. And I keep thinking... shit, I know I remember this blog. Helios, Helios...

Yeah, I remembered it all right. This is the same guy who, back in December, managed to get frontpage on slashdot for a story in which, supposedly, an elementary school teacher writes him to call linux "possibly illegal" and accuse him of "holding the children back" and nebulously threaten to sue him for putting it on "disadvantaged children's computers."

Unsurprisingly, the slashdotters congealed into a rabid mass, and demanded contact info on "Karen", the teacher. Helios guy refuses to provide it, and supposedly the slashdotters lit up Texas elementary school phone boards like christmas trees trying to find her anyway, and failing, at which point - again, according to this guy - she calls him tearfully, and he assures her he would never, EVER give up dox on her, and she Learns To See The Light and now thinks linux is teh awesome.

If this doesn't already ring kind of false in your ears, consider this: supposedly, slashdotters descended in a horde and failed to get dox. When is the last time one of the really big communities - slashdot, genmay, /b/, the goons - failed to uncover somebody, especially a non-tech, who aroused their ire?

So, yeah. That was in December. All of three months later, this dude is claiming that techs who service Windows assaulted him physically in a gas station because he is "putting them out of work". Of course there's no police report; of fucking course he tells it that the big, hulking guy got physical, threatened to "give him a tour of the parking lot" and... ::camera cut:: the big guy is on the ground! YAAAAY, our hero won teh fight!

Jesus fucking christ.

This is not the kind of publicity linux needs. I have no idea whether or not this guy has actually done much of any real work on a "distro" of his own, or how many "disadvantaged children" he's given computers with Linux on them; but I do know these stories stink to high heaven and I don't want to see any damn more of them.

Exhibit One: In Which Our Hero Schools The Schoolteacher

Exhibit Two: In Which Our Hero Triumphs At Fisticuffs

Side notes for those who don't know me personally: the only Microsoft product I own is an Xbox 360 - and that's gathering dust next to the PS3, which I greatly prefer. Every computer I own runs either Linux or FreeBSD. I service and sell all platforms professionally, but prefer when possible to use either Ubuntu Server or FreeBSD for server infrastructure. If that isn't enough to brand me "not-a-microsoft-fanboy", see http://freebsdwiki.net - that's mine.