Geeky Stuff

Someone working at a Verizon store is using printouts of a (now out-of-date) blog entry I wrote back in 2007 to convince people not to buy iPhones.

http://www.everythingicafe.com/forum/general-discussion/verizon-employees-make-me-laugh-a-little-30643.html

Points (3) and (5) in my blog entry no longer apply, but the rest of the entry is still valid.

I find it amusing that my little rant is being used by Verizon as a sales tool. I should edit the article and put in subtle potshots against Verizon. If he's just blindly printing the page and handing it to folks, he may not notice right away! ;)

Ahh, the good ol' days... (not)

Holy crap. They have 10 gigabit ethernet cards now.

http://www.smc.com/files/AY/DS_SMC10GPCIe-10BT.pdf

Not only are they 10 gigabit, but they use regular copper twisted pair wiring. You can run 10 gigabit ethernet up to 45 meters on plain ordinary CAT5e cabling, and up to 100m on CAT6.

The cards are about a grand a pop, but it'll surely go down. And this is the first time I see a network card with a *fan* on it! I'm not too surprised; the DSP trickery that must be needed to put 10 Gb ethernet on regular UTP must be mind-blowing.

I'm wondering how long we start needing these, though. Only trunks between switches have saturated gigabit ethernet links, in my experience. It'll probably be a few years before servers can make the most of having 10 gigabit links.

This is a history of all the main computer systems I've ever owned, going back to 1983 when I got my first system.

It is mostly maintained for nostalgic reasons.

• 1983 - Apple II+ acquired. 48K RAM, 1MHz 6502, 300bps modem. Total disk storage 140K per 5.25" floppy disk. First computer.
• 1990 - II+ motherboard fails. IIe acquired for $250 at yard sale as interim replacement machine. Interim extends three years. Ugh.
• 1993 - 486SX25 / 4MB RAM / 170MB HDD / 2400bps modem acquired. (first PC)
• 1994 - Above 486 receives various upgrades. Is eventually named SARABI when Internet access is first achieved in late 1994 and a hostname is required.
• 1994 - 2400bps modem -> 14400bps
• 1995 - SARABI gets Linux installed for the first time. It is a 486DX2/66 w/ 12MB of RAM and a 730MB HDD at this point. Kernel 1.2.13 baybee!
• 1996 - MILVA comes along: 386DX/33, 5MB RAM, 20MB MFM hard drive, CGA monitor. First dedicated Linux box. Ran Linux-On-A-Floppy very slowly.
• 1996 - 14400bps modem -> 33600bps.
• 1996 - Later: SARABI upgraded to Pentium 133 / 32MB RAM / 1.6GB. Old SARABI becomes new MILVA and obtains 260MB HDD. At this point it's a 486DX2/66 w' 24MB RAM, still with CGA monitor.
• 1997 - 17" AcerView 76ie monitor acquired to upgrade SARABI's display; 14" monitor goes down the chain to replace the CGA monitor on MILVA.
• 1998 - MILVA upgraded to Am5x86/133, gets bigger disk. MILVA later renamed HUSHPAD.
• 1998 - Modem goes X2 and eventually v.90. Life sucks slightly less.
• 1999 - BigAss(TM) case acquired, along with a ton of SCSI disks for HUSHPAD. This was my "SCSI KICKS ASS!!" phase. Six disks in a full tower case are NOISY. I'm glad I got over this.
• 1999 - Apple IIgs acquired. Transferred all important old Apple II floppies to disk images for eternal preservation.
• 2000 - SARABI completely replaced with DUCHESS, Pentium III 600MHz w/ 128MB RAM running Windows 2000. HUSHPAD inherits SARABI's motherboard and thus becomes Pentium 166 (overclocked) with 96MB of RAM.
• 2000 - ISDN line installed. 128000bps. Modems retired forever.
• 2001 - HUSHPAD upgraded to Pentium II 233MHz w/ 128MB RAM. BigAss(TM) case retired. DUCHESS stagnates.
• 2002 - HUSHPAD CPU upgraded to Pentium III 600MHz. DUCHESS continues to stagnate.
• 2002 - Cat hair becomes a new contaminant to clean out of computers, due to the arrival of Lynxie the Highly Furred GreyTabby.
• 2002 - First flat panel, a ViewSonic VX900, is acquired. 1280x1024, 19", lousy refresh time (even for back then)
• 2003 - NALA (Powerbook G4) acquired. HUSHPAD's CPU fails. DUCHESS mobo+chip used to resurrect HUSHPAD. DUCHESS retired.
• 2003 - Samsung Syncmaster 21" flat panel acquired.
• 2004 - HUSHPAD motherboard fails. Good friend Rieshal loans a Pentium III 600 chip that fits in HUSHPAD's old motherboard.
• 2004 - DSL line installed.
• 2004 - HUSHPAD upgraded to P4-3.0GHz/512MB/160GB. Old HUSHPAD becomes SARABI (fileserver off-site).
• 2006 - NALA upgraded to Macbook Pro. Old NALA sold for peanuts since it had been dropped.
• 2006 - SARABI upgraded to AMD Sempron 2800+. Old SARABI collecting dust at the moment.
• 2006 - MEERCLAR (Mac Pro 2.66GHz / 2GB / 250GB) acquired. Replaces HUSHPAD as primary desktop system; HUSHPAD becomes server.
• 2007 - MEERCLAR upgraded to 4GB of RAM and ATI Radeon X1900XT.
• 2007 - Samsung monitor fails. Replaced with Dell 2407WFP.
• 2008 - Video card in HUSHPAD fails, resulting in failure to boot. Nvidia GeForce4 MX harvested from previous SARABI to resurrect it.

I just wanted to extol the virtues of rsync. This little application has saved my ass (or kept it from hurting) more than any other UNIX utility ever has.

rsync is simple. It lets you copy a tree of files from one place to another. It does so by only copying what is different between the two locations, though, so it can be remarkably efficient.

Moving three terabytes of data from one machine to another? Don't use cp, or a tar through a pipe. If either of these are interrupted you have to start all over! Just use rsync. If it fails? Shrug, roll your eyes and restart the process. It'll resume near where it left off and finish in no time.

Have to move a user home directory from one machine to another? Use rsync. When it's done, use rsync again to copy anything that has changed. Once nothing has changed, rename the old location and create a symlink in its place. Window of opportunity for error reduced to almost nil.

Backing up your server at home to offsite? Just rsync it. It'll only copy what has changed, even within individual files. That 400MB log file that has 20K appended to it doesn't have to be resent in its entirety; rsync will compare the first 400MB on both ends, sending checksums to make sure they're identical, then send the 20K at the end. Your 512kbps DSL connection will sigh in relief.

This utility is awesome. If you are a UNIX user, familiarize yourself with it. And all of you Mac OS X users have it too; it comes with every release since Panther. Just be sure to use the -E option when rsyncing between Macs; that tells it to preserve HFSplus extended attributes.

Have fun!

(click to embiggen)

Above is my 4G 20GB iPod, opened up. On the left is the 20GB hard drive it came with, which has been removed. As you can see, I have replaced it with a 4GB CF card at the moment, to test the adapter which I received today.

It works! I was able to sync about 3.5GB of music onto it, and play it back, and not only does it work, but those delays caused by spinning up the hard drive when skipping songs are gone.

Now I can safely order the 32GB CF card from NewEgg, and I'll soon have an upgraded capacity, completely solid state iPod!

The iPod feels a lot lighter, too. This will make do nicely until they someday release a 32GB or 64GB Nano.

*geeky cackles of glee*

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac is a native (Intel) application.

Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac is a PowerPC only application, which must run under CPU emulation (Rosetta) to work on Intel Macs.

Yet Office 2004 is *STILL* faster than 2008, even with the emulation overhead.

How is it that MS continues to write such garbage software, yet they are never called on it? People just keep buying it, regardless of how crappy it is.

I think I'll stick with iWork on my personal Macs and not even touch that bloated pile of crap. Unfortunately users want it at work so I have to install it for them...

Sigh.

I was fiddling with work's Canon Rebel XTi camera, and noticed that when I hold it up to my face, the display showing current settings blanks automatically. At first I thought it was an automatic timeout, then I pulled the camera away from my face and the display turned on again! Once again, held it up to my face, display turned off.

Whoah! I found there's a little sensor that detects the presence of your face, and turns off the display when you hold it up to your face to take a photo. The sensor is just over the display and is probably capacitative, like the trackpad on most modern laptops.

I love well-thought-out interface design like this. It solves what would otherwise be a problem (glaring display just under your eyes when shooting) in a completely non-intrusive manner.

I even posted a video of this, because it's so neat.

I just want to remind everyone out there who runs any sort of server or has important data that RAID is *NEVER* a substitute for proper backups.

RAID is only meant to improve reliability and uptime. In other words, a hard drive can fail and be replaced without bringing the system down. It will NOT protect against things like:

- Double disk failures (it happens! More often than you think.)
- Power surges frying the system
- User error (rm -rf * .tmp Aaww D'OH!!)
- and much more.

If you don't have a proper offline backup that is completely SEPARATE from your server, RAID or not, your data's days are numbered. It isn't a question of "if", but rather, "when".

DO NOT TRUST RAID TO KEEP YOUR DATA SAFE. ADOPT A PROPER BACKUP STRATEGY.

The time to do this, if you haven't, is yesterday. I'm serious.

Anyway, end rant. I just needed to remind everyone because I saw it happen yet again.

My boss and I walked into one of our server rooms to look at a modem that was not working. This room also contains some machines used and maintained by the database group; we try not to touch their machines and let them take care of them.

As we walk in we hear a faint muffled sound, as if someone were speaking. It sounded vaguely like a telephone intercept message, so we figured maybe someone connected a telephone in the room and it was off hook.

As we tracked down the source of the problem, we found it. It was a newish machine which was sitting nestled among a bunch of older machines on the database group's rack.

I pressed my ear to it, and it was saying, repeatedly:

"Your keyboard and mouse may have a problem."

Nevermind that there was no keyboard and mouse even attached to the system; it was being used as a server. I went to talk to one of the database group managers and showed her the machine. She was as boggled as I was, and talked to her tech staff to come shut it up.

So yep, computers have talking BIOSes now. And they sound just like Jane Barbe.