Last night, I ran into all sorts of strange behavior on my laptop--unable to log in, normal system calls taking forever to complete, and all sorts of network trouble. This morning I backed up my home directory to my work computer's hard drive (discovering, in the process, that NTFS disallows all sorts of common and innocuous characters in filenames) and ran into several IO errors. Checked the hard drive and (despite SMART claiming everything was fine) it failed the read tests almost immediately. I managed to swap in a new drive and restore most of my files to a fresh copy of Ubuntu (with a customized version of tar to overlook the errors in the archive I made), but I still lost a fair bit of data.
Question: Why can't tar take an argument to skip over damaged sections of otherwise useable archives? A few IO errors at the beginning of the archive doesn't mean the remaining gigabytes of data are unrecoverable...
After a few busy hours, things are working smoothly again. Everything important for work has been recovered, and I'm polishing the asset tracking system I've been working on, in hopes of deploying it before my departure Friday. All things considered, I am quite thankful this misadventure occurred when it did--recovering data is the last thing I want to do in the few hours before leaving. :-)
I've added a check for a small session cookie when commenting. We'll see how well that works.
I've been getting hit with a flurry of blog spam from a large set of IPs. Looks like some sort of botnet. I've taken down commenting until I can write some countermeasures. :-/
What really confuses me about the net neutrality issue is when telco execs say things like this.
"Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?
The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! (YHOO ) or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!"
AT&T is a tier-1 network (specifically, AS7018), which means that it connects freely (peers) with other tier-1 networks. Tier 2 networks peer with some networks, but also purchase transit with tier 1 networks, offering money in exchange for the larger network relaying packets to other destinations. Consumers (both individual and business) often purchase bandwidth from tier 3 networks, which are connected to other networks only with transit agreements. Hence, when a company like Yahoo or Google purchases an OC-192 or what-have-you from a second or third tier network (an ISP), part of the money they pay to that ISP is used to purchase transit with larger networks like AT&T.
Today was my first day at the new dojo; after three weeks without training I was excited to get back into things. It's a bit of a trip to get there--about one and a half hours by bike and light rail, but it was well worth it. I hope to make it out there three times a week.
A few things were different--stretching followed different patterns, white/black belts only, and a second bow for entering the mat, in a different direction... I haven't figured out that one yet. However, the rest of the class went smoothly, and was a great experience. Everyone was very welcoming and friendly, worked hard, and there was very good energy. At the end I was asked to lead stretches, which was somewhat unexpected, because I had never seen these exercises before! I managed to make it through the whole series, but it was definitely an exciting experience.
One thing was mentioned at the end of class which quite surprised me: apparently Akira-sensei is coming here in a few weeks! I guess I'll be training hard. :-)
I'm home, in a way. The last few weeks have slid past faster than I could keep a grip on them, and the academic ski-jump that was finals week left me temporarily in free fall. There were some hard goodbyes to say.
Yet, stepping off the plane from the midwest, I feel unusually grounded. Things here are engaging and immediate. I'm working at the same software company as a lot of NRST alumns, fooling around with VMWare, and generally being an IT ninja. There are interesting challenges to explore, tinker with, and hopefully resolve, and that makes me happy. There will be LAN parties, summer frisbee, and Aikido to look forward to. It reminds me of irimi, in a way.
The Competetive Enterprise Institute has produced an amazing pair of television ads espousing the wonders of carbon dioxide. The most hysterical bit is the tagline at the end: "Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life." To concentrate and preserve more of that precious life, I recommend that the members of CEI hold their breath, and keep holding.
Such nonsensical messages shouldn't be a surprise to anyone; CEI is largely funded by an industry with a vested interest in the continued production of "life". The Clean Air Trust identified Shell, GM, Ford, and DaimlerChrysler as contributers to CEI. ExxonMobil, for example, gave $405,000 to CEI in 2002, the largest contribution in the list of "Public information and policy research" donations by the company.
Today was a great day in Psych. We were discussing the formation of phobias (specifically, classical-conditioning models of phobia response creation), and went over some common phobias like:
- The fear of flying
- The fear of spiders
- The fear of snakes
- The fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of one's mouth.
To recap the events of the past few weeks:
Aphyr.com suffered a brief span of amnesia due to faulty ram, which has since been replaced. Everything seems to be working great now. In the meantime, I've started working at Sys/Net, which is much more fun than tech support. It's chaotic, unsupervised, and way the heck too much fun. Running around with cable testers, patching in ports and messing around with DNS is my kind of job. d=('_`)=b
To my dismay, my northbridge fan started buzzing obnoxiously just prior to shutting off completely. To prevent the premature conversion of my motherboard to slag, I've ordered a replacement cooling fan. ABIT (the manufacturer of my board) gives away free replacement parts, but doesn't have this particular one in stock. Instead, I bought a Cooler Master chipset cooler. It should arrive in a couple of days.
I've written an Atom 1.0 feed for Ragnar. Other changes include a more organized system for passing metadata, improved image thumbnail layout, better cross-platform support, and new graphics. The administration interface still needs a lot of work, though.
This paper explores an interesting technique for measuring the angles of light rays at each point on a CCD, by using arrays of small lenses. There's a decrease in the resolution of the image, but the data captured can be recomputed to generate photographs focused at varying depths in software. This also means that photographs can be taken with larger depth of field without changing the aperture. I'd really love to have a camera that could do that...