While many in the US might think that getting a new car is mostly a matter of picking the right brand and dealership, in the end the darn things still have to be produced. Somewhere. And that part is actually quiet complex.
Nissan had to halt three of its plants since one chip was not available. Manufacturing in 2010 is a highly complex and interlocked environment.
Adding more machines for INTERDUBS. They get tested, triaged and configured for a ridiculous long time. That way once they are production machines they do only one thing: Run.
We experimented with benchmarking the performance effects of SELinux. As we expected it is not worth disabling. But now we know. We also know something we should have known: Enabling SELinux again on a bigger file system will make the next reboot take forever. Hours. Of course it makes sense, since all files will have to be relabeled.
via editblog
According to google the Chrisitan Science Monitor was one of the few publications that made the connection.
How soon before we will have we have ad messages sprayed on highways ?
While we are waving on the space merchants theme I could see that this
art project will turn into a commercial reality soon.
What is happening is that total surface of LED/LCD plasma displays around us is increasing constantly. While classical mass consumption is certainly not growing, the amount of screens to be filled certainly is.
When trying to recursively download some sites via wget I only got one message like:
Wrote HTML-ized index to
Turns out that I needed to add a * to the source path. After I changed
wget -r --ftp-user=user --ftp-password=pass ftp://hostname/path
to
wget -r --ftp-user=user --ftp-password=pass 'ftp://hostname/path/*'
things worked much better for me in GNU Wget 1.10.2 (Red Hat modified)
I found this to be interesting with a great list of sources that illustrate the history of bubbles. Bubble History by Caslon Analytics
In server admin after I had turned on the NFS service I still found a status like:
nfs service is: running
nfsd is: stopped
portmap is: stopped
rpc.lockd is: stopped
rpc.statd is: stopped
Turns out that the other daemons spring into action once you share the first Volume.
Apple makes awesome products. Since years I spend most of my waking hours on their respective recent laptops. That part works so well. The iPhone is alright. I had better phones that worked much better as a phone. But that might be AT&Ts issue. And it kinda works.
Apples online user management is ridicolous though. I keep lots of passwords to lots of sites. And nowhere do I have the amount of trouble that Apple gives me. It never is clear if their different services share the same credentials. Changing / retrieving it is a nightmare. The whole user experience is just broken. I think that happens if you have one part of your business doing really well: You can afford to be sloppy in another. And I am sure that Steve never has to reset his password. And many people are having trouble managing their passwords. So they will not blame Apple for their broken system. I can, since things work on all other major sites and system for me. But not in Apple Land.
I never was intrigued by .mac and so I skipped looking at MobileMe. Which turned out to be a good thing. I wonder if Apple will be able to turn this around. But looking at their websites and it’s vast collection of broken links and outdated developer documentation I have serious doubts that this will be ever better.
No wonder the introduction of “mobileMe” was such a disaster. I, like most people, have registrations with many websites. From pointless things to online banking. Even though there is no official or firm standard for registration on websites certain practises emerged. And overall things work.
With one exception:
Apple.
Their web site registration mechanism for developers is broken. Not by one main outage or problem. More in the million paper cuts kind of way.
* passwords expire
* passwords have odd ’security’ restrictions. Of course you have to try a password to see that the system complains about something
* loging in to one part of the system does NOT mean that you have access to another, or that you just changed password would be working there.
Apples own website is pretty dismal overall, once you go beyond the home and apple store pages: Broken links clutter the whole thing. Links that go nowhere are an inherent problem of the internet. But having them within a company website is just lame. A million paper cuts. Not fun to repeat each one of them. But the mobileMe disaster did not come not as a surprise.
Other areas of Apple are vastly ahead of the game and the competition. The internet is certainly not one of them.
this is just a test.
Goldman Sachs employs 30,522 people. On average they make $600,000 a year. Glad we bailed them out.
INTERDUBS does not charge for storage. No matter how many Gigabytes you need, it is included in the $285 flat rate. Since there is no financial incentive to clean up, some of my customers amassed quiet a backlog of material.
Which actually was somewhat intended: Other tools were more important than the means to clean up and keep the data pool fresh. With Terrabytes stored -and much of it actually no longer needed- this situation changed. Adding tools to simplify clean up was easy. The database had already all needed information.
Getting people to use them was a different matter though. Somehow I got lucky and had what turned out to be the right idea: Between Sunday and yesterday I had a ‘cleanup drive’ in INTERDUBS. Clients with allot of old material were encouraged to delete as much as possible of it. As an incentive INTERDUBS donates to charity relative to the amount of Gigabytes cleaned up.
And it actually worked rather well: People put in allot of work to clean up their backlog of material, and they did so knowing that it was for a good cause.
In total INTERDUBS will pay for 240 vaccinations.
This little detail is also nice, since I had no idea that this solution would emerge when I decided not to charge for storage. If I can continue to run a flat rate based on the efforts like this then I will be very happy.
The world would be a better place if people looking for a free spot in a parking structure only wait for a car to exit after that car is showing the lights indicating that it is in rear gear. If those white lights are not on yet then you just pass it. Simple.
Bush: We have a dollar that’s adjusting, and I am for a strong dollar. One reason I am for a strong dollar is because I want, you know, people to — I think it helps deal with inflation.
When this man came into office it took 90 american cents ot buy a Euro. Now it’s 155 of those.
“I am for a strong dollar”
Funny that the that seems not to be enough. It’s not God setting the dollar course. It’s how many of them you print. If you print to many then they are worth less. If you print less then the they are worth more. Simple.
Warners must feel pretty powerful today. Just a couple of weeks after they threw their hat in the ring it’s all over. Once the stalemate was tilting it took surprising little time for everybody to jump on the winning side. I wonder how quickly one can start reading that Blu-Ray was in any way better than HD-DVD. Of course it was not. Both formats were identical. My theory is that now folklore will be created that Blu-Ray was better, and therefor won. Truth is -and shall remain- that Sony “just” did the better maneuvering and somehow got Warners on board in the right moment. Good that this part of media technology history is over. Now comes the real uphill battle: Blu-Ray vs DVD and the fact that people have more choices to entertain themselves than there seems to be Plastics around.
“Plastics. Benjamin, Plastics”
We have this Laptop that has a glitch. The backlight goes out if you hold it wrong. It’s an older maching (iBook 600Mhz) and it got replaced. But today I wanted to get it going as a server again. It’s a unix computer. And 600Mhz is plenty to serve a couple of web pages. It runs OS X 10.3.9, that’s as long it has not been updated. Now I try to get it on the Apple Airport. And, that is the problem: It does not. Beachball for a while, and then the error message:
There was an error joining the AirPort network "yournamehere"
Tray again // OK
What the fuck!
Frst: that “Try again” is bullshit. It has never worked. Never ever.
Secondly: What exactly was the error? I am sure the computer knows a little bit more than ‘error’.
The Airport works just fine, so it can talk to two computers right now. So why writes Apple code that is retarded in that it does not give you the slightest hint what the problem might be. I don’t expect a hex dump to be slapped into each users face. But somewhere, maybe in a log file (!) the machine could give me a hint what it would be upset about. It’s one thing that Apple stuff does not work with Apple stuff. But to be quiet about any causes or reasons is just plain stupid and ignorant. Fucking Apple Computers. There are other companies being equally crap. Just that Apple runs around with this attitude of being better and user friendly. Actually they are not. They are just better liars:
Ten years ago Apple introduced the iMac. Which is a great machine. And a great concept. Watch in the end of this 7 minute clip how that man calls a circular (!!) piece of plastic “the most wonderful mouse you have ever used”. It’s exactly this arrogant attitude that makes Apple so annoying.
That would indeed be nice.
Adib Frickes latestword installation is showing at Realace GmbH in Berlin right now. It is hard to judge the work of a friend. I like this room. There was relatively little time between opening day and commision. And it seems, that the work is great, as it always has been. There is a certain directness. Other works, that in the making for months or even years are perfect. But by missing perfection amplifies the initial impact of the work. It might become easier approachable by the unintiated. And, with Adibs work, we all are just that.
I am running a 9505 16 port 3ware card with 12 Western Digital 300 GB drives. In /var/log/messages I found
Nov 4 10:48:53 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0023): Sector repair completed:port=11, LBA=0x23268EDA.
Nov 4 10:50:19 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0023): Sector repair completed:port=11, LBA=0x21D88B0F.
Nov 4 10:51:27 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0023): Sector repair completed:port=11, LBA=0x1E71DB4A.
Nov 4 10:51:33 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0023): Sector repair completed:port=11, LBA=0x23289645.
Nov 4 11:02:03 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0023): Sector repair completed:port=11, LBA=0x2111C31E.
Nov 4 11:06:00 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0023): Sector repair completed:port=11, LBA=0x2219A8F3.
Nov 4 11:08:52 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0023): Sector repair completed:port=11, LBA=0x1437A499.
Nov 4 11:09:05 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0023): Sector repair completed:port=11, LBA=0x23455701.
Nov 4 11:09:10 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0023): Sector repair completed:port=11, LBA=0x23455749.
Nov 4 11:10:02 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0023): Sector repair completed:port=11, LBA=0x241F28D3.
Nov 4 11:11:54 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0023): Sector repair completed:port=11, LBA=0x20B6CCC9.
Nov 4 11:12:13 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0023): Sector repair completed:port=11, LBA=0x22277DFD.
Nov 4 11:12:13 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0023): Sector repair completed:port=11, LBA=0x22277D80.
Nov 4 11:12:13 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: ERROR (0x04:0x0002): Degraded unit:unit=0, port=11.
in tw_cli the drive on port 11 got reported as failed:
p11 DEVICE-ERROR u0 298.09 GB 625142448 WD-WCAPD3118453
I tried to test the drive via
/usr/sbin/smartctl -t long -d 3ware,11 /dev/twa0
/usr/sbin/smartctl -t offline -d 3ware,11 /dev/twa0
/usr/sbin/smartctl -t conveyance -d 3ware,11 /dev/twa0
/usr/sbin/smartctl -t short -d 3ware,11 /dev/twa0
But
/usr/sbin/smartctl -a -d 3ware,11 /dev/twa0
did not show many good signs:
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error
# 1 Short offline Completed: read failure 90% 6702 396331771
# 2 Conveyance offline Completed: read failure 90% 6702 396331771
# 3 Extended offline Completed: read failure 90% 6695 396331771
# 4 Extended offline Completed: read failure 90% 6695 396331771
# 5 Extended offline Completed: read failure 90% 6694 396331773
# 6 Extended offline Completed: read failure 70% 6684 99434677
Values like Multi_Zone_Error_Rate and Offline_Uncorrectable as well as Current_Pending_Sector promised nothing good.
In tw_cli I then removed the drive in question from the unit:
maint remove c0 p11
The smarctl tests still failed right away. I rescaned the drives in tw_cli:
maint rescan c0
The failed drive was found, and soon after the 3ware controller grabbed it automatically and started the rebuild.
It did so sucessfully. The Current_Pending_Sector value decreased back to 0, and the drive array seems to be functioning
normal right now.
During one of those pesky spurious rebuilds happening on both 9550SX-16ML controllers that I am aware
of the drive failed again. This time with an ECC-ERROR . Not enough of a failure it seems that the rebuild would have
failed. A
maint rescan c0
in tw_cli after the rebuild had finished cleared this error. It’s noteworthy that the spurious rebuild performance came to a grinding
slowdown after the ECC-ERROR.
When I replaced the failed drive things went back to normal and the system has been fine ever since.
Call me crazy, but I think that the story of JH Schön could make a great movie. In the right hands. But I am so much out of touch that it might have come out last spring and friends of mine have worked on it.
Callwave and EVDO are certainly my best technological friends: Getting of a plane, in the hotel room, there would be an ethernet, but why bother? EVDO works. Even here. Then there is a voicemail from somebody that called while I was on the plane. The automatic transrcipt gives me an idea, the company that called shows up, and best of all, all those call back numbers are transrcibed right there. If the iPhone could maybe read a phone number with it’s camera and then dial it, we would be in good shape.
Lot’s of blog rave about thiscomputer animation right now.
I think it is horrible. Smetana is easy to abuse and misunderstand. Dragging Fallingwater into this is just horrible. The first couple of seconds of this Quicktime from hell are nice enough. Although the font choice and especially the animated glow should have been a clear sign of trouble. Fallingwater is one of the more important things that have been made in the last century. Seing it disolved to death is pure horror. The tasteless low point was certainly the eschereseque pan away from that mirror ball.
Not much more to say than this
The advantage with reading is, that you can do it without stuttering. What a shame that one of the better virals (a bad word in itself most of the time) has such a poor delivery and encoding. Flash still sucks. I hate that stupid stuttering effect. Quicktime used to do that as well. 1999.
“Storage Mojo” is usually pretty scientific, this ‘analysis’ about consumer hard drives is a bit more creative. Counting google hits with BRANDNAME sucks is a bit of a short cut. However, the results seem to come up with a winner. And the margins are definite enough to have some meaning. And with this kind of result I like a creative way of using google.
Nintendo’s market cap is higher than Sony’s by now.
eleven years after ID4
27TB is an impressive number for 1994.
Learned today that a dollar bill has an aspect ratio of 1 to 2.35
In case you shoot scope, or want to know if a crop is really 2.35 or something else.