Geeky Stuff

I DON'T CARE about the iPhone. Seriously. I want to stop HEARING ABOUT IT.

It's overpriced and uses outdated data technology. Its Internet access is about as fast, maybe even slower than my nearly two year old Treo 650. It costs a fortune and won't even be subsidized. It doesn't have a real keyboard you can feel and type quickly on with two fingers.

I DON'T CARE. I might play with one for a few minutes at an Apple store out of curiosity, but you won't see me buying one.

Apple should concentrate on what it does best: The Macintosh. They were doing great with the Intel transition and released some awesome machines, which are now languishing somewhat due to so much of their resources going towards a fancy phone with outdated radio technology.

They could also stand to update the iPod; other manufacturers of portable media players are leaping ahead with larger screens and all while Apple lets the current iPod with video languish with its two year old design.

Seriously, Apple. Get back to doing what you do best. Leave the phone market to other companies who seem to be doing a better job anyway. Last year.

-Zorin, looking forward to getting an EV-DO capable Treo soon

We got a new toy at work. A SunFire X4500 fileserver. When you look at it at first, it looks like an unassuming rackmount box:

But then you remove the top...

That's fourty eight (48!!) 500GB SATA drives!

That's a total of 24 terabytes of metal. It uses ZFS and after you sacrafice space for redunancy, hot spares, and root disks, you have a solid 16TB of storage to play with.

We're going to be migrating a large amount of data from dozens of individual old Dell servers to this box. It should be interesting to see how reliable it is over the long term. You'd think cooling would be a problem, but there's eight fans in the front of the unit that blast air through gaps between the drives; when I took this photo I had just shut the unit down and the drive was barely warm!

Higher resolutions of the photos and more photos are here, just click "Next" to see them all. :)

I am unbelievably happy to hear this. One record label, EMI, is actually going in a positive direction and offering DRM-free, high quality tracks on iTunes soon. If this catches on with other labels, I will become a much bigger customer of the iTunes music store, as one of my biggest gripes with them is the copy protection.

I have no problem paying for content. The problem is the DRM; if the file is encrypted and restricted, I feel like I don't truly *own* the music I purchased. What if Apple goes under one day and cannot authorize my computers anymore? I know it's unlikely, but it's just the principle of the thing. Also, the DRMed music will only play on iPods and Windows or OSX machines with iTunes. I can't play them on Linux or other music players at all.

I generally only buy a song on iTunes after my other avenues are exhausted, and then only after grumbling and slamming my fist into my desk in frustration. If this no DRM thing catches on with other labels, I'll likely be buying a LOT more music online, because it will truly be mine without the risk of losing it arbitrarily in the future.

Go EMI. Now all the RIAA has to do is stop suing kids and grandmas and maybe they'll regain some respect, hmm? It's nice to see a step in the right direction after all the gloom and doom news concerning DRM we've seen from the entertainment and computer industry as of late.

Last year in March I got a Macbook Pro, Apple's first multi-core laptop. It has an Intel Core Duo processor, which crams two CPUs onto a single die.

Later that year I got a Mac Pro desktop, which has TWO dual core processors for a total of four processors.

Once you get used to having multiple CPUs, it's hard to go back. It is so nice to be able to have a process eating processor time but not slowing down the responsiveness of the machine a single bit. For instance, I can have Second Life running and still have one (or three) processor cores available and running at full speed.

SMP computing is the future. Many new PC desktops are multi-core now and there's more on the way. Even though individual applications don't take advantage of multiple cores that well yet, there is still a massive performance boost for anyone who multi-tasks a lot on a system.

Want to have Skype, a video encode and Second Life running at once? No problem. They each get enough CPU to do their jobs.

Some process gets stuck in a tight loop and consumes all available CPU? You don't even notice it unless you run top or look at the task manager, since the machine feels just as fast.

Meanwhile, on the single CPU G4 I'm using as my work machine now, if some tab in Firefox starts consuming CPU with a flash animation, the entire machine feels slower until I find and close it.

SMP rocks.

Most of the reason why I so wanted the new Macs to come in for the student lab was that I wanted to get my paws on the G4 1GHz / 768MB that was in the lab before. And especially its 20" Cinema Display.

It's mine! I finally have a Mac on my main desk. I'm not sure I'm going to keep it yet; I have to ensure that I can do all my work well using it; since we are primarily a Linux shop (outside of Windows) I worry that there may be some things that are more of a pain to do from the Mac than from my Linux workstation. But so far, so good, and I LOVE the new monitor and the extra screen realestate I get.

One thing that continues to amaze me about Apple is how they manage to make each release of Mac OS X run faster and better than before. This machine is from 2002/2003, yet 10.4.9 (Tiger) screams on it! It came with 10.2 (Jaguar) installed on it. Imagine trying to install Vista on an Intel machine from 2002? Oh my god, the pain and suffering.

We'll see how it goes. Hopefully my boss won't think I'm a traitor for not having Linux on my main desktop anymore...

So I come into work this morning and cannot log into vixen. My home directory is fine (on uzuri, my workstation), so I figure the machine must be hosed in some odd way. Yep, it sure was! The root disk had failed so it was completely dead less being able to serve out NFS, which is kernel code and thus doesn't need the root filesystem.

So I decided to shut the thing down. Vixen was a Pentium III 700MHz with 512MB of RAM, three external 18GB hard drives, and three internal hard drives of varying sizes, all under 20GB. After some quick in-my-head calculations I realized all of this data can fit on the internal disk of my current workstation with space to spare!

I moved the data over, retired vixen, and renamed my workstation from uzuri to vixen. Vixen has nostalgic value; it was the name given to the first Linux box ever in the department, and has always been at my desk. The hardware that was replaced today was deployed in 1998 (though it received a CPU upgrade at one point), so it had been in use for nine years. That's an impressive run for a computer.

So of course, after all that, I couldn't let the name die, so now my workstation is called vixen and it lives on...

I'm such a geek sometimes. It's scary.

I biked 9.30 miles today. It's the first "real" ride (more than a couple miles) in a long time; at least since mid-to-late last year. I've been trying to get back into bike riding regularly, but haven't found the time or energy to do it. I think that energy is coming back. :)

I just wish there were a nice trail around here. The day I decide to move somewhere new, I want it to be next to a nice trail. A place you can ride for miles and miles and not have to constantly watch your back for traffic. Even though I'm careful, I know I could relax more if I could ride for a while without 2000 pound behemoths passing me at high speed. It would also mean I could turn my iPod up a bit more since I wouldn't have to constantly be listening for traffic.

Speaking of iPods, my friend Rieshal tried to sell me an 80GB video iPod for $300, brand new. It's a good deal, but when I weighed $300 versus the delta of what the new iPod gives me over my old 20GB 4G, I decided my old white iPod still has quite a bit of oomph in it. There's three things I like about mine in particular; A) it has firewire support, which the new models lack. I like being able to sync it without eating up yet another USB port, B) The screen is highly visible when the backlight is off... Sure, the color display is nice for watching movies and viewing photos, but when you're just listening to music, it's nice to be able to glance at it and see what song is playing without turning on the backlight, and C) the UI feels a lot faster. I can find a track faster on mine than on the new 80GB iPods, even using the search feature on the new ones! That says something about interface speed.

I will miss these three advantages when my iPod eventually dies, but having 80GB (or more) to play with will be nice. I only have about 5GB left. :)

This cracked me up:

I installed OS updates, dust-busted and rebooted Sarabi. All is well, but if anyone using Zorin.org services has issues, feel free to let me know. :)

Amusingly, even though Sarabi has been up for about eight months there was very little dust inside. This is in contrast to my home machines that look like dust-bunny breeding facilities after only a couple of months!

I guess having that cat around makes a difference... Bad kitty!

I'm a heavy UNIX user, so I find myself frequently sshing to other hosts under MacOS X. This leads to having to open Terminal windows, type "ssh hostname" and have a bunch of windows, all with the same or similar titles, logged into several hosts. This can be inconvenient at best once you find yourself logging into more than a couple of hosts.

I discovered yesterday that Terminal.app supports .term files -- basically description files that when launched, give you a Terminal.app window with those specific settings. So I went to work and found an interesting way to organize multiple terminal sessions.

Check out this script, called "s" in my ~/bin directory:

#!/bin/sh
cat ~/"Library/Application Support/Terminal/Generic.term" \
| sed -e "s/HOSTNAME/$*/g" > /tmp/sshterm.$$.term
( open /tmp/sshterm.$$.term && sleep 1 && rm /tmp/sshterm.$$.term ) &

This will open a Terminal.app window that is ssh'ed into the host provided as the script's first argument, IE:

s zorin@sarabi.zorin.org

Neat, huh? There is one more piece, though: Generic.term

Here is the one I use; just download it and drop it into ~/Library/Application Support/Terminal. You can generate .term files by saving the configuration of any active terminal window by using File -> Save as... in Terminal.app.

As you can see, the "s" script uses sed to replace HOSTNAME in the term file with the hostname you want to log into, then "open"s the term file and deletes it one second later, to give Terminal.app a chance to read the file before it goes away.

My particular .term file also sets the title of the window to be the hostname you connect to, and has a green-ish color scheme. You can, of course, change this to your liking.

This is a useful trick I'm sure all UNIX-using Macheads will like. I'm just learning about .term files now so as I discover more tricks I'll surely post more.