My Slice of Reality

I’m building a fairly high end computer for a friend and to be honest, its pretty much finished. The CPU (Core 2 Duo running at 3Ghz) runs a tad warm for my tastes but I guess 53c while thrashing at Prime95 and ATITools isnt that bad really. Especially not with the stock heatsink.

It also sucks that the 4Gb of memory only shows as 3.2Gb in Vista but that was to be expected. Hell, even the annoying little quarks I’ve run into with the 680i motherboard aren’t bad either; they just took time.

No, by far the most annoying thing I’ve run into was the new NVIDIA monitoring software. Who in the hell though that piece of crap should be published on the internet? Seriously, a spinning collection of your devices with the temperatures displayed below that takes about 2mins to cycle between devices and just plain locks up randomly?

Brilliant.

I did a weird thing today; I imported a bookmarks file from almost two years ago to see what was in there. Unsurprisingly there was quite a few common sites. I haven’t really changed my tech hardware or software sites that I read, or gaming, or even adult sites. I’ve added some more web comics and stopped reading a few others, changed a few forums I hang out with and really dropped out of the 3D graphics scene but on the whole it stayed remarkably similar.

Except…except for one area. Blogs.

I think I first tried feed readers my freshmen year of college but I never got into them. I felt so disassociated from the websites I was reading. It also quickly overloaded me; I could track a ton of information but I simply couldn’t process it. So, for the longest time I kept a folder of websites and just loaded them all in one go, grabbed a coffee, and started to read. It worked well considering the folder consisted of about 80 sites; more than I read now in my feed reader (when I load it).

I find that ironic. There was no overload to me reading 80 sites a day through the web browser. Maybe because I paced myself; there was no rush. If I didnt get to a page? Oh well, let it sit till tomorrow.

With a feed reader I feel like I must get through each new updated item the second its posted. It’s like OCD for information. Its simply not scalable and not reasonable but its what flashes through my slightly numbed brain. I wonder where the disconnect comes in.

Whats even more ironic is how the sites I read have changed. It used to be the personal sites; the big fish in the small weblog pong. I wonder how many of them really make a splash on the scene now? They’ve all been replaced by Engadget and Major Nelson. Or maybe they haven’t. It’s been so long since I’ve really followed or cared how should I know?

But reading the voices of Shelly or Derek or Unix Girl or even Noah feels so strange after such a long absence. The voices sound so familiar but thats it; no longer can I match the face I see when I read the words (even if its nothing close to who they really are). Odd; two years doesn’t feel that long.

More a note to myself than anything else but Lifehacker linked to YouTorrent today which looks to be a pretty sweet bittorrent search site. Similar in a sense to torrentz.com I suppose. Have to check it out later.

BitTorrent: YouTorrent, Your New Favorite BitTorrent Site

About a week ago I bought a Seagate FreeAgent 320Gb external USB drive for my Linux box thinking that I could dump my mp3 files to it as well as backup my documents, pictures, et al to it as well. For the price, it was a great buy and I’ve been pretty happy with the performance. However, I noticed that occasionally Amarok would no longer see the music library and would error out all my songs. This was…annoying. Normally I could fix it by just browsing to the drive and magically everything would work fine.

Strangely, it seemed that the drive was offlining itself, automatically, after an extended period of non-use. Apparently, I’m not alone with this issue either. I have to give Diane props for finding the fix but i’m going to repost it here to clear things up a bit.

I’m running Ubuntu, Gutsy Gibbons (7.10) to be precise. This should work equally well for other versions of Ubuntu as well (and other distributions but your method of getting the needed application will vary). First, we need to grab the sdparm package from the repositories. Open up a terminal window and type:

chris@hooby:~$ sudo apt-get install sdparm

You’ll then see some scrolling output as it grabs and installs the sdparm utility which basically allows you to output and modify the parameters for scsi (USB hard drives, SATA drives, and dvd/cd burners are seen as SCSI) devices.

Next, you’ll need to find out what the true path to your device is. If you don’t know it (should be something like /dev/sdX where x is a letter a-x) you can disconnect the drive and reconnect it. Then, run

cat /var/log/dmesg

Which should output something similar to this towards the bottom

[ 14.172000] scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access Seagate FreeAgentDesktop 100D PQ: 0 ANSI: 4
[ 14.196000] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] 625142448 512-byte hardware sectors (320073 MB)
[ 14.200000] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off

Now, we want to check the current status of the drive so run the following

sudo sdparm -a /dev/sdb (substitute your sdX for my sdb)

which will output the following

/dev/sdb: Seagate FreeAgentDesktop 100D
Power condition mode page:
IDLE 0 [cha: n, def: 0, sav: 0]
STANDBY 1 [cha: y, def: 1, sav: 1]
ICT 0 [cha: n, def: 0, sav: 0]
SCT 9000 [cha: y, def:9000, sav:9000]

The “STANDBY” flag is what we’re concerned with. We need to clear that. Now the following command can only be run when the drive is actually spun up but if you did disconnect and reconnect the device it’ll be up and accessible so run

sudo sdparm –clear STANDBY -6 /dev/sdb

There won’t really be much showing that the command succeeded. However, if we run sdparm -a /dev/sdb again we’ll see the following showing that it worked

chris@hooby:~$ sudo sdparm -a /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb: Seagate FreeAgentDesktop 100D
Power condition mode page:
IDLE 0 [cha: n, def: 0, sav: 0]
STANDBY 0 [cha: n, def: 1, sav: 0]
ICT 0 [cha: n, def: 0, sav: 0]
SCT 0 [cha: n, def:9000, sav: 0]

As you can see, the standby flag is now gone. Your drive should no longer go into a sleep mode causing havoc with Linux.

If you were paying attention this evening you might have noticed that the amount of posts here has expanded by a factor of something like 30x in a few minutes. Don’t be alarmed, I really don’t type that fast. Rather, I imported my old posts from <a href=”http://www.tealart.com”>Tealart</a> where I used to write and brought  them over here to my new home.

If you’re bored feel free to take a wander through the past.

When you’re starting over might as well go in the whole way I suppose. This blog used to be a part of Tealart, then a sub-domain on Tealart and now it’s got its own home. I’ve tried this before with Fatl which was extremely short lived. Maybe with the changes in direction my life has had in the past few months I’ll be able to keep up. Here’s hoping.

It’s been a quiet (if crazy busy) set of weeks here but things might finally be settling down. The 15th will be my last day working for Sun as I accepted a position with another company for slightly less money and one hell of alot less stress.

I don’t think that the job with Sun is a bad job, not by any means, but it wasn’t quite what I was expecting and I never really felt that we had an adequate level of training or, at times, support. It made it very difficult to work through and while I had hoped to last for a year or two it just didn’t work out.

Having said that I learned a hell of alot in the relatively short time I was there. I feel pretty confident that I could do a reasonable job setting up a small NAS/SAN; atleast with Sun hardware. And, if I ever come across a job were they have a ton of Minnows or STK products I should be pretty good!

Any window user, from the days of 3.11 on should remember this fun scenario. You come from a night out on the town to find your pc shutdown when you distinctly remember leaving it on when you left. You hit the power, it starts up, and you’re greeted with the beautiful “scandisk” screen as it does a health check on your drive. This was done because, plain and simple, the FAT file system used by (and still used today on some systems) Windows was dumb. File corruption was all too common especially with an inappropriate shutdown or power loss. Thankfully, with the more modern NTFS file system its not quite as needed or as common.

*nix, for all its supposed superiority had the same issues for quite a while. In fact, in Linux, with its generally default file system ext3 you’ll see a similar screen (well, its black instead of blue) come up occasionally. This is fsck, or the file system check, which does pretty much the same thing. It checks the filesystem to make sure its coherent and consistent with what the system is expecting. This can take a short amount of time (journaling in ext3, or ufs (solaris 9+), etc. can greatly decrease the time) especially on larger volumes. In fact, LWN recently had an issue with this when their file server crashed taking down the archives of all the mailing list postings. They didn’t post the size of the archive but stated that an fsck of it took over a week.

I recently had to deal with this at work as well. A customer had a 700Gb array with about 300Gb utilized. Due to a bad startup on the solaris box, the array was seen as “dirty” and so it started to fsck it. And did, for twenty two hours until they killed it. When I finally talked her off the ledge I happened to explain to her that this was quite common and in fact, she probably could have seen a fsck time of a week or more on array that large. There’s other variables as well (file system chosen, file sizes, file numbers, array configuration, etc.) but this seems to be an issue now. If an array of that size goes down there’s little point to fsck it. You’re not really going to recover any errors that might be “lost,” you’re just going to waste a mammoth amount of time.

What would you do, restore a backup taking 5hrs or wait for an fsck to finish which could put your machine out of production for a week?

Now that I’m finally debt free (well, excluding college loans which’ll take me the next 20 years to pay off) and the only expenditures I have coming up that I’m aware of is the possible apartment with Laura, I’m tempted to drop a little cash on myself.

The last time I really bought something for myself was my birthday where I got myself a new 19in wide screen monitor. Its a beauty, especially for the price I paid ($129 for an Envision widescreen with DVI? Not bad). However, I’m also tempted to buy something else now. See, theres two options from the way I see it.

1. Xbox 360 or Wii
2. New computer intended for linux day to day

Now if my parents were involved in the decision they’d most likely smack me upside the head and ask what I was thinking. See, I have a pretty decent computer at the moment (Dual core, 2Gb of memory and an X1900GT) which is more than suitable for gaming and day to day work. I also have an Xbox (unmodded sadly) which works alright for older games. Sadly, there aren’t too many new games coming out for the Xbox and its graphics are starting to look a bit dated. And yes, my computer can run 99% of games out there and its more than fast enough for wordprocessing, movie watching and everything else I do but man it puts out a lot of heat. Leaving it on 24×7 makes my room into an oven.

What makes it even more complicated is that a new computer build (Athlon x2, 2Gb of memory, 690G board, hd, case and burner) would cost roughly around $400ish shipped. An Xbox 360 with an extra controller and a game is going to run roughly the same. So, either one puts me back the same. Ones dedicated to gaming solely and the nice thing is you don’t really have to worry about “oh man, can my system play the latest game?” If its designed for the 360, it’ll play it. Still doesnt take care of the heat related issue with the computer though.

Some people might ask why the hell two computers would simplify the heat issues but I could actually shut down the 2nd, gaming, current computer when I dont need it. The new one would be alot more frugal on both power, and heat since it’d be based on much new processes and designs.

For example, my current processor uses about 90-100 watts of power at load where the new one is a 65 watt max processor. My current video card at load uses probably 18-20A and runs close to 75c at load. The integrated on the 690G uses far, far less but even has HDMI/DVI integrated on board

Its an interesting dilemma and honestly, I probably won’t punch the button for a few more months but when Im bored (like now), its damn tempting.

Life has an odd sense of humor. Last night I needed something to read and I was looking for Heinlein’s Numbers of the Beast but couldn’t find it. Instead, what stood out was William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. I’ve read it before, thought it was ok and set it aside. As is his style, its very graphical and descriptive, deep in its imagery. So deep you can almost taste it.

Until, ten minutes ago, I got to the part where Cayce (the main character) remembers September 11. The chapter where, faced with jet lag, she lets go and brings it all back. The disappearance and possible death of a father, a changing of paths, a changing of a nation, and most of all a changing of fate.

I will always remember that day, as I think most people in this country will; but maybe not for the same reasons. I remember being in chem class and the announcement coming over the loud speaker that “america had been bombed.” I remember skipping my next class and going to the computer labs franticly loading websites but none of the mainstream media pages loading. I remember going to arstechnica and hardocp and checking their forums, then anandtech. The rumors flew and swirled. It felt like I was in a maelstrom.

I remember every class being focused solely on the televisions in each classroom. Everyone discussing, amongst themselves what had happened. Possible causes; possible enemies; possible responses.

I remember how we were supposed to have a soccer game that night, against who I can’t remember. It was canceled. I remember walking out to my friends car for a ride home and thinking: “My god, what a beautiful day.” My head couldn’t get around the displacement. It was like two different worlds; mirror worlds.

In one, there were no planes, no distractions; even the sound of traffic was muted. Birds chirped and flew like normal, the clouds passed effortlessly across the sky but in the other world? Death. Screams of pain, of agony. Tongues of flame and fire and suffering.

Its funny how a book grabbed at random can make memories come back; make you rethink things. I had other things planned for tonight, other things to think of but for some reason these thoughts feel right.

Its late, but I remember.