I'm back....

Well, it was easy to find the 'write in journal' link. Or is that from my slashbox? I dunno. I don't care. Second, it works better for me on IE 8.0 than it does on FF 3.6.

No FF compatibility, less readability than 2.0, inability to save preferences? Lame.

No wonder the number of comments to articles is down. Substantially by my seat of the pants estimation. Eighteen comments on a Android vs. Symbian troll article after 35 minutes? Anti-Apple troll article has 67 comments after three hours?!

They either wanted to drive down page views, will roll this back, or Netcraft will soon confirm it.

so i said in my last je in a response to shadow that i'd drop a quick update, so here it is.

life has been ridiculously hectic and incredibly busy. so i'm still working at the same company, but we have a new name. i'm tech leading a large project for one of the major device makers (think batwings) it's the biggest thing i've ever worked on. it's a huge project just finishing its first year. i don't get to do much coding, in fact i figure i've written less than 1% of the actual code. oh well, i still try to keep my hands dirty with whatever i can find, but managing is really a full time gig.

what else?

2 years ago i decided to pursue my masters degree (computer science) so i'm going to harvard and am about a year and a half away from finishing the degree. this semester (i only do one class per semester, which is more than enough, the sheer amount of work on top of the weekly lectures is enough exhaust most people) i'm taking mobile application development (android and ios.) it's pretty cool thought. never thought i'd actually enjoy going back to school, but alas, i do enjoy it. it's also very much a cultural thing here in boston. everyone you know takes classes, and well with my company paying 100% of my tuition it would be silly not to take advantage of that.

oh yeah, still in boston. still love it. i actually moved into a part of boston called the navy yard. right on the water, across the charles river from the north end of boston. absolutely love my neighborhood. i hang out with solemndragon once a week, and we still get in the odd game of warcraft here and there.

the music thing has been keeping me very busy. earlier in 2010 i had my first placement in an independent film soundtrack. this year will see my second (a documentary) the filmmaker producing the documentary has produced a couple behind the scenes shorts that include 2 cuts from the latest record. i'm trying to raise some money to get the new record pressed on vinyl. and i'm also going back to the studio to record 2 new songs at the end of february (one of them is for a compilation called "singularity" put out by glidescope records). yeah i love the studio, and my friend who owns the studio i use is awesome. the place is very very nice. i am also writing another record that i hope to have out before the end of this year. i've been debating shopping this future record to labels. that's still a long way away. also probably going to be working on a big secret project for the studio, which could be very interesting. i'd like to get another one or two film deals cooking this year.

i also have been getting back into design work. a couple weeks ago i won a design competition put on by mylene sheath records to design the test pressing cover art for one of their bands. i also just finished doing the cover art for an LP for this other label. what's cool is, both covers are hand silk screened. so doing the designs had to be executed with that in mind, very cool stuff.

let's see, other stuff. about a year and a half ago my lactose intolerance has become a full blown dairy allergy so i'm 100% vegan now. it's not bad at all actually. what else? i'm not dating, i enjoy being by myself, i enjoy living like a monk (as a friend actually observed not long ago) actually, and i do. i keep very busy, i do get to see friends here and there (like i said, hang out with solemndragon once a week, and other friends every couple weeks or so.) i get home from work and i get to work on writing music, producing demos for the songs i'm working on, work on other web development projects (keep my skills sharp) school, the day job. yeah there are very few actual idle hours during the week.

so yeah things are not horrible.

yikes. so yeah not dead.

just wanted to drop a quick update for folks who never made the "migration" that i've been pretty busy with the music stuff. spent the last year and a half writing and recording (in a proper studio) a record that was just released earlier this month.

it's nothing earth shatteringly new, more instrumental post-rock, but i got more ambient with it (which is really where i'm going musically)

yeah just more output, another contribution to the noisy attention-whoring part of the internets.

release info: http://skyflyingbymusic.org/
plans: http://skyflyingby.tumblr.com/post/2652663461/plans-and-aspirations

yeah i'm going to try to not neglect this place for as long.

oh for the love of all that is holy... who puts the "write in journal" link at the _bottom_ of the screen? i see /. is sucking as much if not more than usual.

Yo, Tom Hudson, I'm real happy for you and I'ma let you finish, but Breitbart is the greatest troll of all TIME!

I just got an offer on a contract Linux sysadmin position with Bing! travel I'd interviewed for last week. I've got a couple of other positions that may come back with offers this week, but I'm inclined to take this one at the moment.

I'll never empty my list of freaks. First of all because Pudge is on there, and for him to un-freak me would require him to change his mind.

But of far more interest than that is my former brother-in-law. I hadn't forgotten that he showed up here when his crazy assed sister left me. Hadn't thought about him in a while. Was looking around some pages and saw his name on my freaks list. Then I remembered he was 'an hero'. And I laughed. I hope it hurt. It probably did, because for it to have been painless it would require him to do something right for once in his miserable life.

Cowardly chickenshit.

I migrated yet another GroupWise post office from NetWare to SuSE Linux this evening. However, I had undercover help.

The data on the NetWare volume was 65 GB. So we made the ext3 volume 100 GB. Did the initial copy, and had 1% free disk space left. Dang NetWare compressed volumes....

Time to expand the LUN for the new server. The destination box is a Xen VM guest. I'm shady on the details, but after the LUN was altered on the host VM, the entire blade has to be rebooted to see the new space. The admin who was going to take care of it, was going to do it early in this morning, as he normally shows up at 6:00 AM. About midnight, he wakes up: "Oh heck! I'm scheduled to come in late tomorrow!"

Still in bed, he grabs his BlackBerry and establishes a SSH connection to the host VM. Resizes the LUN from the command line and then reboots everything. All is well for me to get the job done tonight (which I did, and it went well).

I did say "undercover" did I not? ;-)

Everybody still having fun with APK? I notice that damned near every post I made last week has been responded to, questioning my educational bona fides. The hysterical thing is that some AC responded to his inquiries. Now, to about half of those, he responded, accusing me of being the AC. The really hysterical thing: I haven't visited /. since very early on Wednesday morning.

So APK spent a day or two running around and accusing people of sockpuppetry who had forgotten his existence hours before APK posted. Classic. How long until he goes all Hans Reiser?

FAIL! :(

Here is an analysis of where the takeover bid by Elliott Associates, L.P. is going. It is long, but seems to me pretty well thought out. It points our that this is a loss for both Microsoft and Red Hat. And a huge loss for Novell (employees and customers).

In my last JE, I asked how to back up a directory structure with way too many subdirectories and files in it. One of the ideas was to do one tar job per top-level directory. Since this one didn't take any more disk space, the SAN guys wanted me to try it first. I had to learn how to use Perl's Parallel::Forkmanager. It worked well.

I have 256 top level directories, so I forked one tar job per directory. We took the VM that runs the server and configured it for four CPUs. I configured Parallel::Forkmanager to only allow four concurrent forked tar jobs. What was a 70+ hour single tar job became a 30 hour batch of 256+ tar jobs. The new scheme runs in 43% of the time of the old job. That's great.

Thank you for the advice. I'm using it well. :-)

I have a system that makes a metric buttload of small files, with a 1:1.2 ratio of files to folders. So 850 GB of files in one million subdirectories. The tape backup system chokes on this, and I have the disk space to copy everything into one big file - the tape system loves backing up that. As my storage grew, my initial .tar.gz job got to taking three days to complete. I thought that converting it to just a .tar file would speed it up, but the opposite happened. That may be due to the fact that I changed the destination file system at the same time.

Any suggestions for an optimal setup to copy a large number of small files into a single file for tape backup? The tape backup exists for disaster recovery, in case the SAN burps (again). I have a lot of flexibility on how to get the job done - suggestions welcome. If there are any system tuning parameters I ought to be looking at, please say so.

Thanks!

Anyone have any preferences for a b/g/n router? I'd like one so that I can put my nice, modern Apple stuff on the N side of things, and the shitty, legacy crap over on the b/g side. Already have an older Time Capsule that isn't full, so I'm not going that route. (Oh, and I'll probably not give my brother access to the N, cause he pisses me off too much).

Thinking to bridge the connection from that to the Time Capsule, and let the Time Capsule handle the rest of it.

I don't care about off the wall firmware. That doesn't interest me in any way, shape or form. Unless I have to deal with that kind of malarkey to get either my Time Capsule or my tons of BT stuff to work nicely.

• Mercury - Mercurial
• Venus - Venusian
• Terra - Terran
• Mars - Martian
• Jupiter - Jovian
• Saturn - Saturnian?
• Uranus - Uranian?
• Neptune - Neptunian?