Another Word for Nerd

and boy, is it LOUD. Not just loud, but uncomfortably loud.

My wife is still asleep in bed, so I shut it down before the extended POST finished – so I don’t have any idea yet if it quiets down after boot (like a SB1K does).

I’m going to have to setup a stand for it in my closet and run power and ethernet under the door, it looks like. Leaving it on my desk in the “lab” is right out at this point. They should include earplugs in the country kit (which they forgot with my system – but that just means a power cord, and I’ve got plenty of those around).

My Sun T1000 server arrived today. I’ll be doing a review of it for the next month and a half, and after that will be migrating it in as the new SunHELP server.

I got Rhapsody DR2 and OpenStep 4.2 running in the Parallels VM on my Intel-based Macintosh.

(OpenStep was the precursor to Rhapsody, which was the precursor to Mac OS X…)

I’m hacking on a system at work to automatically generate network accounts based on employee requests. So far I’ve gotten it authenticating against Active Directory (using adLDAP), and have rebuilt PHP with SQLite support.

Tomorrow I build the majority of the guts of the application and a basic proof-of-concept user interface. Wednesday I’ll automate the actual account creation, by either firing off an Expect script or by using the built-in Expect functions in PHP.

After all that works, I’ll throw the pieces together into a first revision of the production application and put it behind a secure webserver (so passwords don’t get passed in cleartext).

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.

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!

Built SBCL 0.9.10 this morning on the SPARC (E420R, quad 450MHZ CPUs, 4M L2 cache each, 4G RAM) and the x86 system (Dell SC420, Celeron 2.53Ghz, 1G RAM).

First, the Sun box (Solaris 9):

//build started:  Mon Feb 27 09:30:23 CST 2006
//build finished: Mon Feb 27 10:58:32 CST 2006
real    88m9.016s
user    81m11.700s
sys     6m24.700s

Then, the Intel (Linux, FC4) system:

//build started:  Mon Feb 27 10:48:04 CST 2006
//build finished: Mon Feb 27 11:04:15 CST 2006
real    16m11.196s
user    15m7.233
ssys     0m17.781s

No, not that del.icio.us, I’m talking about Delicious Library from Delicious Monster.

Using the built-in iSight camera on my new Mac, I’ve started cataloging all of the books I own – and boy, do I own a lot.

I’m about half done, and here’s the library so far.

I just built Steel Bank Common Lisp version 0.9.9 using a pre-existing 0.9.8 install on two of my systems.

Dell SC420
1G RAM, 160G SATA disk, Celeron 2.53Ghz CPU, Fedora Core 4
~15 minutes.

Sun Enterprise 420R
4G RAM, dual 18G SCSI disks, quad US-II 450Mhz CPUs (2M L2 each), Solaris 9
~2.5 hours.

Joel Spolsky has written one of the best articles I’ve ever read, about the dumbing-down of Computer Science educations. Some schools have replaced languages like Scheme and ML with Java, and are now trying to make Java even *simpler* to learn.