Category: technology

apple and unix

Apple history OSX technology unix

In unix you tell the system via a file called /etc/fstab which drives should be mounted.
Simple. Works. Except for OS X. Some crazy new fancy database sheme was supposed to replace /etc/fstab. It was all so amazing. It is junk, that’s what it was. Didn’t stop Apple-Idiots to claim it would be amazing. And countless websites offered help. What was one line a file became pages and pages of instructions.

Finally with 10.5 /etc/fstab is also part of OS X. It took years. It’s good that it’s there. it’s not good that it did not become available in the updates to 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 and 10.4. Apple is idiotically stubborn sometimes.

And now, I am worried

confessions of a pixel pusher history technology

Over at Independendant Arts Media Preservation I can read:


The complexity of digital media preservation is fourfold. First, data resides on a physical support–a floppy disk, CD-ROM, or hard-drive, for example–and this physical container or support naturally deteriorates. Second, the data itself may decay. Third, most software is proprietary and has no long-term technical support. Finally, hardware obsolescence makes a great deal of digital media inaccessible.

I would merge point 3 and 4 into one. 3 being able to be overcome by open source. Point #1 is also called Entropie, and it’s a real bitch. If you escape all illnesses and accidents it is will get you in the end. But the “data itself may decay” ??? Huh? How so? If bit’s are not what they used to be, than it’s the first point. Data is pure.

It is kind of scary that the people that tasked themselves with the preservation of stuff have such a bent understanding of the thing they like to protect. Somebody probably started his/her computing experience on a bug ridden system like Windows 95. I wonder what their plan against ‘self inflicted data decay’ may be.

just don’t tell me it’s new

history internet technology

US Airlines scramble to get internet on airplanes. Which is great. I loved it when Lufthansa had it. I wonder why they stoped offering it. It worked well, and I was more than happy to pay 25 US$ for a flight with internet. Actually, while I used to have a second battery when flying with the ‘Titanium’, I don’t open the laptop anymore these days. There is no room for starterts. And a computer without internet connection is nothing more than a grim tease for me by now.

the horror!

history media technology

what could go wrong if Siemens and the BBC team up? everything

I am sure there are lots of projects where people try really hard to push a rope. Instead of pulling on it. If the structures involved are big enough they will try. What a waste of everybodies time!

what Annie said

economy history media politics technology

Annie Leonard talks about stuff Whoever she is.

I am with her. To a point. The breastmilk part is a bit much, and on technology she is just plain wrong. Which discredits the whole piece somewhat. And that is a real shame. Since the whole consumerism / consumption stuff weighted against diminishing returns in respect to happyness is a very important point. And there are others in this presentation that are pretty obvious and get equally ignored. Still worth the link, and maybe even worth watching.

0.09% vs 0.22%

Apple interdubs internet technology

Computerworld looks at internet market share data for different devices / operating systems. The headline reads ‘iPhones closing in on 0.1%’. That does sound like laughable little. The author paints a different picture, but I have no interest repainting that here.

I looked at the iPhone user share on Interdubs, and found the following numbers:

November 0.22
October 0.54
September 0.35
August 0.74
July 0.45

Not surprisingly they are by small magnitudes bigger than the general ones found by Net Applications. I had thought that they would be even higher. The iPhone has a nice display. It’s fully supported by Interdubs. Was it a mistake to invest into the iPhone mode? Absolutely not. It is very interesting to see those numbers. With already having iPhone support there is no second guessing ‘what if there were a special iPhone browsing mode’. There is, and that’s what the numbers look like. Right now.

can not find that host?

Apple OSX technology

Once in while my OS 10.4.11 machine goes stupid, and has trouble resolving specific host names.

Opening a terminal window and entering:


sudo killall -HUP lookupd

fixes this. Lookupd is one of these more stupid Apple ideas. But since Cupertino has inherited the infallible attribute from the Roman Catholic Church it is pointless to tell them about it. Apple is so shiny and perfect to the outside. Inside it just looks like the Roman Catholic Church on the peak of it’s power.

Ma Bell, confused.

communication history marketing technology

So, I needed an 1-800 number. There are lots of vendors. I picked AT&T. They were not the cheapest, but in telco services there are lots of odd offers and services. And it’s not crucial that number. Just something you also need to have. Getting the number itself was alright. They sent an email that it would take a nebolous amount of time (“several weeks”) before they were able to execute my order.

Months passed. No word from Ma Bell. Diving into voice-system-hell. Finally I got somebody that was the right division etc. He simply proclaimed that the number already worked. Which is great, and it actually did ever since. But they could have let me know.

Then I got an email telling me that I had not logged in their Buisness Website for a while, and that they would disable my login should I not do so within 30 days. So I logged in. A question that is innocent enough came up. AT&T would like to know which state I am. Not that they could deduct that from my address. But hey. Of course entering the info brings me right back to the same screen. Oh, Firefox quirk. Can happen.
Safari: Same result. So, do I have to buy a PC to tell them that I am in California? Of course, there are no links where you could contact that division of AT&T and let them know that they website is simply broken.

Neither is there a way to get in touch with AT&T mentioned in that email announcing me to lock me out of the website unless I would log in in the next thirty. Sure, I could spend an hour on the phone tomorrow with AT&T. Like everywhere, once you reach a human things are not even that bad. There are often ways to fix things.

But the problem is deeper than that: AT&T used to be a technology company. They invented the transistor and a couple of other important things. But in 2007 they can not even run a simple website. It fits in the picture that they spend billions, yes, billions not millions, for rebranding. Making them look to good to the outside. While everybody knows that internally it’s just barely good enough. Since they other telco’s suck equally bad they even get away with it. Time for a company like Apple to get into the cellphone Business. No, wait. Ok, nevermind.

mirroring content with ease – or why unix is just nice

interdubs internet technology

A client of mine has a shoot supervisor in Paris. He takes stills for an upcoming job and is posting them on his own ftp site. My client asked if he could use Interdubs instead. He could. There is the public upload function that can be enabled for a login. But right now it does not support creation of folders. And he shot thousands of images. That’s where unix comes in real handy: He had given us the access paramaters for his ftp site where he stores those images. Using wget it was a breeze to write a little script that works as a conduit it and puts those images on to the interdubs server. Now whatever he creates on his ftp server in Europe will be mapped automatically into Interdubs. So people can use the comment feature, see thumbnails, can copy content.

All those nice features that Interdubs has, but ftp naturally lacks. ftp is a great work horse. Kinda. It’s so simple (actually it isn’t even), let’s say it’s so widely in use that it will not go away to soon. So it’s only natural to support it, and work with it. Instead of forcing people to use something more advanced. And with solutions like todays hack they can have the best of both worlds: They don’t need to change the way that they work. And in the same time everybody can have the benefit of working with the best tools available.

But wait, wget stores unix files and interdubs keeps files in a database. Did I recompile wget with Interdubs support? Well, that would be possible, but would take a day. Nobody has a day on a shoot for a commercial. At some point a couple prospective clients said that they could only use Interdubs if they could upload content via ftp. So I wrote an ftp gateway. Same deal: I did not change the ftp source (yet). I just wrote a general filesystem to Interdubs Database mapping tool. Not many people use ftp to upload content into Interdubs: The web interface is way to nice for that purpose it seems. But have this conduit is still a great way to get any data quickly and consistently into Interdubs.

3ware 16 port RAID-5 with 300GB Western Digital

misc technology

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.