Another Word for Nerd

Went to the Asian grocery store tonight. We still don’t have the guts to buy and try a Durian, but we bought some Durian Wafer Cookies that taste like almonds.

SNAKES ON A PLANE.

Also see SNAKES ON A BLOG.

I’ve never thought much of him before now (as he’s overly self-important), but now there’s proof that Dave Winer is an Asshole.

He used to argue with people that didn’t agree that he invented RSS. Now he just sues them.

After the past 24 hours, I’ve come to the conclusion that there needs to be a universal file system format that has the same support on all operating systems.

My main “server” system here at the house is a Dell PowerEdge SC420 with a 2.5Ghz Celeron-D CPU, 1G RAM, 160G SATA HD, and GigE. Since I got the machine (for $250 during one of Dell’s CRAAAZY DEALS last year), I’ve been running Fedora Core 4 on it with no problems. On top of FC4, I use rsnapshot to do nightly backups of my colocated server and some client machines.

I decided a few days ago that it was time to ditch FC4 and put Solaris 10 on the machine now that all the hardware is fully supported. First, however, I needed to get my rsnapshot repository off the machine. That was accomplished with a 250G SATA hard drive and a SATA to USB2 adapter with power supply. Now I had my critical data on an ext2-formatted hard drive.

I proceeded to reinstall the Dell with the latest Solaris Express release. I then installed the ext2fs drivers for Solaris 10, and attempted to rsync the data back off the hard drive. Five minutes in, the system wedges hard and requires a reboot.

Okay, so that’s not going to work. I carry the HD and adapter back into the other room, plug it into the Mac, and install ext2fsx. When I try to mount the drive, it complains about a bad superblock. So, a couple hours of forced-fsck_ext2 later, I can mount the drive.

When I try to rsync from the Mac over the network to the Dell, the Mac gripes about filenames on the ext2 partition. Crap. That’s not going to work either, and I don’t have another Linux box to mount the HD on.

It was then that I realized I didn’t *need* another permanent Linux installation. I downloaded Knoppix, booted it on my AMD64 Windows gaming box, then plugged the USB/SATA HD in. It was detected and mounted right up, and has been happily rsync-ing everything back to the Dell/Solaris system for the past couple of hours.

I know that in my situation, having a couple of big disks sitting on an NFS server would have been the easiest way to do things. Others might have suggested FAT32, however my rsnapshot backup repository makes heavy use of UNIX hard links, and would not be “portable” to FAT32.

This all demonstrates the need for a truly portable filesystem that can be easily transported between operating systems without having to use ugly hacks. I’m hoping that ZFS might eventually be the solution, if Sun ports it to Linux as rumored and even maybe OSX.

I’m wondering if it would be usable on single disks, since everything I’ve seen seems to emphasize its mirroring/redundancy and handling of multi-disk pools over its non-dependency on byte endianness and portability between CPU architectures.

A year ago, we bought ourselves a queen-sized Tempur-Pedic bed as a “new house” present. It’s been some of the best money we’ve ever spent on any purchase, as neither of us have back problems anymore and sleep much better.

As an anniversary and “one year in Houston” present for ourselves, today I ordered the king-sized EuroBed Tempur-Pedic mattress set from Relax the Back (who had the best price in town, amazingly). It should be here on Monday.

SBCL build on an Apple Intel Core Duo iMac (Dual-core 2Ghz, 1G RAM):

//build started: Mon Mar 6 08:48:56 CST 2006
//build finished: Mon Mar 6 08:58:54 CST 2006
real 9m58.717s
user 8m50.595s
sys 0m31.261s

Thanks to Cyrus Harmon’s patch for 20060503 SBCL from CVS. I used CLISP (v2.37) to bootstrap SBCL from source, then recompiled it with itself just to make sure things were going to work.

gojira:~ mrbill$ uname -a
Darwin gojira.local 8.5.1 Darwin Kernel Version 8.5.1: Mon Jan 30 21:07:08 PST 2006; root:xnu-792.8.36.obj~1/RELEASE_I386 i386 i386
gojira:~ mrbill$ sbcl
This is SBCL 0.9.10.15, an implementation of ANSI Common Lisp.
More information about SBCL is available at .

SBCL is free software, provided as is, with absolutely no warranty.
It is mostly in the public domain; some portions are provided under
BSD-style licenses. See the CREDITS and COPYING files in the
distribution for more information.
*

Cyrus Harmon finally has SBCL working under OS X on an Intel-based Mac. I can get back in the swing of things now. Thanks, Cyrus!

Spent the evening (after dinner) quieting my Athlon64-based Windows game machine. Installed three silicone fan gaskets, one power supply gasket, organized and cable-tied all inside wires, and for the biggest effect, installed a variable-voltage fan control for the big 120mm fan in the front of the case. A knob protrudes out through a slot cover on the back of the machine that I can use to adjust the voltage (and therefore the speed) of the fan. Turning the knob down 3/4ths of the way gets rid of the harmonic that was responsible for most of the noise I had been hearing yet maintains adequate cooling.

I also just got through installing an InvisibleSHIELD screen shield for my 30G Video iPod. If I like the end result, I’ll pick up their version for the Motorola SLVR phone too, as my phone gets a lot more “pocket abuse” than the iPod does.