the accidental screamer

confessions of a pixel pusher linux technology

Needed to build a new NAS server with safe raid storage. It’s more or less a near line storage solution, so I tried to go for best price per Terrabyte. Just before it dissapears into what will be hopefully years of uninterupted service I snatched it’s keys and took it for a spin on the weekend. So to say. I am still tweaking things, but right now I get just a hunch more than 600 MBytes a second sustained writes xfs.

Which is actually quiet awesome, considering that there is not a single SCSI disk to be found in the case. We paid a very reasonable price for the net 6Terrabytes we got. In theory this machine could record 3 streams of 1920x1080x23.98 10bit dpx frames. For 3 hours.

ramadan

misc

Ramadan started today. I am glad that I am not in a country that observes it. No food during the day. After dawn people try to make up for what they missed during the day. Big freaking food orgies. Men shop for food during the days, and of course they buy allot, being hungry and all. Then the women have to cook it, and throw most if it away. Rinse. Repeat. One month of that.

tubeyou!

media

numbers on TV usage

There are more TV’s than people. The average person watches four hours thirty five minutes of TV.
That’s 494 505 frames of NTSC flickering. Every day.

I wonder how many people have no TV at all. A TV is the last thing I miss. They are huge, show crap, and just
sit there demanding to turned on. The laptop I fold, and that’s that. It’s gone, out of sight. Well, if it weren’t for the little white annoying pulsating light. One day I will cut the cord to that. It is annoying.

driving around with the handbrake firmly engaged

linux technology

What do I know about computers? I mean, really. So I build this rather big machine, to read along a couple of million weblogs. Needs storage. Sure. I get a 3ware raid controller. Works like a charm btw. There are more blogs, there is more spam, nothing surprising or new. The machine start to have a load of a solid 95-100%. Well, linux can deal with that, and it can. Today I tune another server, and look at parameters. One of them is the scheduler that is used to do the actual IO. The default for my kernel was anticipatory. I changed that, so that
cat /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler

reads now

noop anticipatory [deadline] cfq

And, what a surprise, the IO load starts to decline and the CPU is idle for 10-15% again! Of course this makes only sense on a server with lots of IO and database activity. That poor machine had to do stupid things for years.

As I said: what do I know about computers? Academic, yet interesting question would be how many CPU cycles are actually wasted on things like this, how many are needed?

limits: disk size and imagination

history linux technology

Some days things have the feel of a ‘techno groundhog day’. Once again I set up a computer. Once again it has a considerable sized disk system. It used to be that 30Megabyte (no typo) Winchester disk. Today it’s that 8TB raid. And the problem remains the same: The tools choke on the size. I forget what it was twenty years ago. It was not as easy as it should have been. And that did not change. To cut to chase of the technical knowledge that might be helpful now and will certainly be laughing stock in the future (30MB to big: hahaha):
Getting a 3ware 9550… with 16x500GB drives is a good idea. Fits in one nice case and in a Raid 50 config you end up with 6.3TB usable capacity. Historically it needs to run Fedora Core 4. Which is happy to find the array after the installer has been launched with linux dd and a proper floppy drive (!!) has been inserted with the 9550 drivers. The next mistake one can make (and I sure did) is to let the installer automatically partition the drive it found. Knowing that big disk systems can be trouble to start the OS from I already had seperated a 80GB boot partition in the 3ware bios. The Installer went along, formatted the whole thing and did it’s install. Which take some 6 hours I would guess.
Only problem was, that the poor thing could not boot from what it had made. The automatic partition manager was utterly confusde by the size of drives it found, but didn’t let that stop it from trying and failing hours later anyway.
Manual partition of the 80GB boot drive got me over that part. Having an OS to boot: priceless.
The data partition only started working after using parted and a crucial ‘mklabel gpt’. Only then it would accept the size of the partition correctly. Otherwise it was silently reducing it, and then would fail to mount after a reboot.

Sofar the gory technical details.

The bigger problem is:

Disks have become bigger. Ever since computers are around. Everybody knows this, is exposed to this, and benefits from it. The big question is, how can you write a software that deals with the nuts of bolts of disk systems and not be freaking prepared for that? Of course that 30MB harddrive I dealt with 20 years ago would have been a bit overwelmed to run a partition scheme that would be ready to hold 6 Terrabytes. First question is: Would it be really? Sometime people are scared of wasting 3% but waste the future of something. This side of the equation can be argued with.

There can not be ANY execuse for the way systems fail on bigger hard drive: Numbers roll over, systems report -1600% free space. Shit like this is unacceptable. Tremendously stupid. If you code like that, then you should not code. Period.
Disks will be bigger tomorrow. Deal with it. At least create an error message along the lines of “Can not create partition bigger than 2TB” etc. Fail gracefully. You might have not the money to buy enough disks to test it, but you CAN put in checks for these limits. Nobody will slip in an extra 10% ‘integer boost’ to help your code out. The limits are what they are today. Shame on the authors of the tools for the lack of imagination. If physical harddrives can catch their code only after a few years like they do I am actually surprised that y2k did so little damage …

Breakfirst at Shutters

daily life

Sitting on a patio, view on to the Pacific. I am rarely more than a few miles away from the Ocean when I am in LA. Still, I never see it. Being first I had time to watch the people. Mid aged men, fresh haircuts, overweight, just not enough to risk their marriage, blue shirts and khaki pants. It seemed hard to believe, but none of them seem to have something to do with the others. It was not a convention of one blue shirted company. It’s just what the average person looks like that has Breakfirst at Shutters in Santa Monica. All of them, no execption, have Blackberries. Or is it, that the Blackberries just pick a host that is blue shirted and khaki panted? They have them, and they use them. Constantly.

Interesting glimpse into a strange world it was.

The food is overpriced and not that good.
The view (of the ocean) is. As is the Ocean.
Might try to see it again in a month or so.

Universal: no blu-ray

media Sony

Universal retracts support for retates it is not supporting blu-ray

And so it begins to tip and slide. People said generally that Bluray had the upper hand in the beginning of this format war. It certainly is no ‘war’, since nobody cares. But it looks like Blu-Ray’s chances of getting the market are slimming down quickly. It’s not at the tipping poing yet. But it might happen quicker than Sony wants.

This kind of press puts even bigger pressure on the PS3. Not that it could deal with the current level. I have not seen an announcement that production has begun. Two months left to launch, and nobody has ever seen a PS3 how it would be sold. Just design mockups and Blu-Ray players.

update 9/24/06: it seems that this news item was kind of a press stunt: Universal never backed Blu-ray in the first place. They just said again they would not do it.

an alternative approach

confessions of a pixel pusher misc

Just heard an interesting interview with Jon Favreau who will make Iron Man the movie. At some point the show should be available as a podcast

He seems to consider carefully where to use CG, and where not to. He cited “Top Gun” allot, which I saw for the first time yesterday. Which would be in itself worth a longish blog post, but I have to work today. Sundays are great for work, since there are less interuptions.

d new tunes

Apple misc

iTunes 7. It’s blue. Again? Wasn’t it already? Album art is nice, yet also scary: I think you need an iTunes login to use this feature. So in theory Apple knows what Music you have. They say that they will not keep this data. It would be a big blow if they would. For everybody. I wonder if the RIAA sharks start to circle the infinite loop.

Apple could use this data. Big time. Imagine what kind of data mining they could do. Knowing about the Music collections of millions of people. Think Amazon’s ‘people that bough this also bought that’ feature on steroids.

Just let’s pretend that Apple sticks to their word. And let’s hope that as well.

Video playback is nicer now. It was actually a horrible hack: “Ze Frank” was mostly tugged away in the lower left corner of the interface.

npr real player, why?

internet

On NPR I heard that the director of “French Connection” did cut the chase to a Santana Track without an intention to actually use that sound in the movie. Which is a neat little story I think. The NPR page for this has a real player link to the movie and the audio. That’s great, just that real player is so horrible it stopped worked a while back.I hope NPR eventually will realize that it real player is not working. For nobody.

They might as well try to sell their programs on 8Track tape.