Economy Size Geek

Hard to believe but I started posting to this blog way back in March of 2005. I’ve covered a lot of random ground in that time. If you read my feed - you seen a heck of a lot of pictures of things I eat. I spent a lot of time satisfying my craving to write by reviewing movies. I’ve also made a lot of notes about technology I’m experimenting with or learning.
I’ve been tweeting for a while (going back - 07 I used it as a todo list - and jan ‘08 I started posting for other people). I admit I like twitter because it is in the moment - totally disposable - and the perfect place to post pictures of food and drink. Then I joined Facebook. I was a hold out. I played with social stuff via Orkut and Friendster - and much like the first time I sat through a discussion of RSS I just didn’t get it. So when MySpace came out and pushed personal webpage design back to the stone age (hello blink tags) I continued to ignore it. Facebook showed up and has grown into a special kind of monster. The kind of monster who converts everyone I know into recruiters. When I tell non-wired friends that I’m not on Facebook they give me that look I used to give people who didn’t have an email address. As a result a lot of random personal thoughts have been pushed there - since that seems to be the place to indulge people if they want to know what I’m up to. Not too long ago I got a column in Linux Journal (which just got picked up for a 6 month contract - woot!). Having to turn in 1500-3000 words a month has done a lot to satisfy my need to write.

That leaves with a very basic question - what do I do with the blog in 2010? High randomness goes to twitter. Facebook gets the - I’m hanging with Max (my son) notifications - and the occupational NSFW post. It is harder to write long technical posts when LinuxJournal wants me to do that every month as it is. Mix that in with my desire to get out of the server running business. Since my blog sits on one of my servers - I need to determine what to do with it so I can shut the server down.

Twitter doesn’t allow me to write very much - and Linux Journal wants it to be on a specific topic (or at least related to Linux users in some way). Originally, I was going to say Facebook limits posts to ~300 characters - giving me more room than Twitter, but not enough for anything of substance. Of course in the process of trying to figure out what the limit was on characters in Facebook I learned about Notes - which are basically blog posts inside of Facebook. For a moment, I contemplated just packing up the blog and moving over there - especially since you can now easily (some would argue too easily) share everything with everybody. The reality is - I prefer my blog to be a separate thing. That’s probably just old-school dislike of the new school single point of failure Internet, but it is a conceit that is easily accommodated.

Since I find myself with more time and control over my direction in 2010 - the blog is going to take a slight turn. I’m hoping to spend this year learning a lot of new things. Normally, I dump that info into a variety of Red n’ Black notebooks that I keep my experimentation logs in. This year I’m going to try to translate those notes into the blog (so I can search and get a better sense of my progress). I’m going to leave it out here in the public Internet because somebody out there might find some of it useful. I’ll probably end up finding a way to notify my Facebook friends (a large number of which don’t use RSS) what’s going on. So if you miss the food pictures - follow me on twitter or friend me on facebook. If you’re interested in following me on a learning journey - stay tuned.

I published this a page some time ago - now I’m putting it as a post

I wasn’t sure when I was going to talk about this, but I have some good news. I have a new column in Linux Journal. All in all, that’s pretty cool! Both because I have such a long history with the magazine, but also because I’m such a big proponent of Linux.

So far it has been a rough road to hoe. The first deadline was right after my accident. That meant putting some painful time in a chair just so I could I write an article that was long enough. The additional challenge was that the first two subjects were my weakest - Embedded and Security. There are lots of things I do with computers - but I tend to avoid those to areas like the plague.

Truth be told, I thought the reason I was struggling was the subject matter. Normally, I can sit down and speak/write 1000 words on just about any subject. In this case, I had a hard time putting keyboard to open office document. Sure I was in pain - that never helps the creative process. I was writing about things I don’t normally enjoy - that doesn’t help either.

It turns out that the form itself is what was really causing me problems. If you pickup a copy of Linux Journal or Linux Format or any of the other technical journals you will quickly get a feel for the writing style. It breaks down into three categories. First, reporting things as they are. This kind of article replays some event for people who weren’t paying attention. The canonical version is one about kernel development. Who has the time to read the mailing list? This is an easy way to see what is getting included in the next release. The second is the pontification. In this kind of article, the author tackles some kind of broad topic (like the rise of the Linux desktop or penetration of Linux in the enterprise) and describes the situation and possible ways to make things better. The third form has the most representatives, I’ll call it the recipe article. In this article, the author walks you through a path of very specific steps that result in a very specific outcome. I call it a recipe because it tends to follow the same path as a cooking recipe - ingredients, getting setup, steps involved, and final product.

The recipe is cool because it shows you concretely how to do something. When I got the column I though I’d be cranking out recipes for things that I’m doing in my daily life. Turns out I’m a terrible recipe writer. I usually start out with some sort of vague goal that I optimistically think I can accomplish. In the process of pursuing it, I end up learning a lot of extraneous stuff. I also end up pursuing a lot of dead ends. I don’t know that they are dead ends when I start, but eventually stall out and realize I’m not much closer to my goal.

I’m trying to introduce a new form - less recipe - more lab notebook. Instead of editing out and hiding away all the dead ends, I record them. I try to put up signs for the people who come behind me - don’t do this it doesn’t work the way you think it will. It ends up making the article a lot less pristine. In some cases, I end up changing my goal midstream just so I can actually claim victory. That is just how my process of exploration works. To me the failures are as important as the successes.

I’m about to turn in my second article in this style. I have no idea how people are going to re-act to it. Will they like it because it gives them the info they need to explore what I’m talking about, or will they hate it because it just introduces a lot of kruft? I have no idea. What I have learned from the process is that I find it a much easier way to write. It is how I approach the problem, and it seems like a waste to throw out all that extra learning just because it might distract you. I guess I feel like it will only distract you if you are trying to do exactly what I was trying to do. Most of the time, I can’t find a recipe for what I want to do. Instead i have to comb through several and try to intuit which parts apply as I build my path on the fly.

So wish me luck! I tried to write recipes and failed. I guess I’m just not that organized. If it turns out that the readers hate my way, I’ll end up writing technical posts on my blog again - which isn’t the end of the world, but will bum me out. I love writing. Having a monthly deadline has been complicated, but has also allowed me to follow up on projects I would have left on my back shelf. In my wildest dreams, I hope people like it and I get other people to do the same. That way when I go look for information to help me do what I want to do, I have a better chance of finding pitfalls before I even get started.

Thanks to the pain from my accident I can’t sit in one place for too long, and thanks to my pain medicine I can’t think thoughts that are too long. What has resulted over the last week or so is a Vicodyn fueled ADD romp through a lot of topics. Some of this you main enjoy, but in reality I’m just writing some notes down for future me.

1st generation SSD drives suck. Sure they are great at first, but the longer you use them and the more fragmented they get, the more they let you down. You can get 2nd generation SSD drives with onboard cache and a lot of other fixes. These things scream even if you don’t buy the Intel X25 ( I went with a Cosair 128GB - Learn More Here

If you upgrade your Xbox360 hard drive - things till be great. If you get one of the new elites figuring that you’ll dump your old flaky xbox 360 on ebay things are more complicated. Whatever you do - DON’T BUY THE TRANSFER CABLE ON EBAY. If you do, you’ll get the transfer cable and some sort of weird pirate software that doesn’t help you legally transfer your stuff from old drive to new drive. For that you’ll need to find a friend with the kit, contact microsoft, or borrow on from bestbuy (process left as an exercise for the reader).

It’s time to expand my home file server again. 2TB drives are seriously cheap. THat means it is time to think about RAID. I still hate hardware RAID. The funny thing is now every motherboard and PCI card supports it - you’d think that you should go that way, but it sounds like the ASIC chips for RAID are terrible. In the past I’ve avoided RAID cards because you have to have a spare card if the card is at fault. Previously I’ve always done RAID5. People seem to hate RAID5 now. So you can contemplate RAID6 (sounds like RAID5 + extra parity drive). Given the rise in drive size and decrease is $/GB people are excited about the performance of RAID10 (which there are several versions of but the sane one is really RAID1 into pairs and then RAID0 those pairs into a big single device). That gives you better performance and you can survive more drive failure at the price of less usable drive space. Inevitably, I’ll end up putting LVM on top of the RAID array. Which led me to ask the question - why do RAID10 - if LVM can handle the RAID0 part. Then after more research it turns out LVM can do mirroring as well. So it might be possible to dump RAID altogether and just use JBOD and LVM (or if I’m feeling crazy adventurous - ZFS via FUSE). I haven’t decided but who knew there were so many options.

As for SATA, there’s straight eSATA and then there is port multiplication. Apparently port multiplication just happens on the fly. As far as I can tell - a PCI-X card should work in x1,x4,x8,x16. I say should - because the one I have seems to fit but it doesn’t work. I can’t tell if that is an issue with the card or the fact that it doesn’t work that way after all.

If you are going to watch the screencasts on closure - spend the time (3hrs) and watch the one where Hickey talks to Lispers. The Java one is seriously boring. After spending a lot of time getting over my Lisp aversion, I’m beginning to think it might be fun to play with. Most notable because - it gives me all the libraries and tools of Java, it gives me the years of thinking on Lisp, and it gives me a whole new way to think about concurrency.

Bluetooth on Linux has come a long way. I had my Ubuntu laptop hooked up to the TV in my living room. It took me all of 2 seconds to pair in a bluetooth mouse and keyboard (from a mac mini). I didn’t even have to go to the command line. I could use the little Gnome panel applet.

Speaking of coming a long way, the ATI card in my laptop seems to be running an open source driver now. This is great because it support hibernate and handled configuring things like turning off the lcd and throwing all the graphics power at the tv. This is stilla bit funky with an nVidia card (which is what I normally select) so maybe I need to keep my eyes on ATI.

Email management sucks. I’m thinking about using Google to do my mail just to get it off my server. I talked to some people and they said - “Google mail goes down - but the good thing is you just wait and it comes back”. Spoken like a system admin - when mail goes down right now I have to scramble until it works.

Wire in The Blood just hit Netflix instant streaming. Very exciting. I did some research and it turns out the show has been cancelled in the UK. Just to add insult to injury they’re working on a US version. Why do they have to do that?

Let’s say you have a motherbaord that needs a BIOS update. Let’s say you don’t run windows on that machine. It seems like most manufactuers has moved out of the stone ages and now provide tools to flash the bios under windows. Since that isn’t an option I’m supposed to whip out a floppy and do the update. Turns out you can use a bootable CD. If you need one get it here Flash CD Iso. Once you have this you can use a tool call IsoMaster (available from apt-get) to add the flash files you need. Reburn it and you are off. Unless you are like me :( I switch to SATA CDRom drives a while ago for ripping performance. No worries - I found a version that will handle it as well Flash CD for SATA Iso. Works the same way but with better drivers.

Big UPSs have big on/off buttons that make a very satisfying click which you push them. Plus you get to hear everything immediately power off or on. I’ve never hit that button on my APC1500. Turns out it is at eye height for my 1 year old son. He like the sound of turning daddy’s infrastructure on and off.

I’m sure there is more but this seems like plenty for one cup of coffee.

I thought it wad just a brand they made up for the intro to tool academy but iguess it is an actual drink

Ozygen saturation sensor - wonder how it works