Posted by Trejkaz
Fri, 07 Apr 2006 04:13:00 GMT
Right about now, I would have been somewhere between Kyoto and Tokyo, had my original holiday date not been postponed (it’s now set for September, on the assumption that I find someone to go with.)
But instead, I’m stuck in Sydney in autumn, in the shitty part of the season where it starts out freezing cold in the morning (so you wear a coat) and then ends up boiling hot in the evening (so you end up carrying the coat home.) Great stuff. I can’t wait for winter, at least the weather will be consistently cold.
The last three weeks have been a bit frantic.
A whole week was eaten by a house cleanup in preparation for a random house inspection. It really drove home a few things.
People should clean their crap up after they’ve finished using it. I generally do this, so as a result I didn’t have as much work to do as everyone else.
Professional cleaners are actually worth paying for. Or at least, they are worth it if the house is big enough. Particularly in a situation where nobody follows the roster past about four weeks, it will be much easier to just have housemates share the cost of the cleaner doing the work.
The current house has way too few places in which to store cleaning stuff. For instance, it wouldn’t have killed the owners to put in a fixed cabinet somewhere for storage of things like brooms and vacuum cleaners.
There is never enough capacity to throw out all the trash generated during a cleanup. This was especially true this time around as we ended up filling the general waste bin, the recycling bin, and generating 2m3 of bulky trash, and still having about 2m3 left over. It would be better if the council just asked you how much you had and picked it up in one hit, instead of imposing arbitrary limits which then necessitate rebooking.
Moving house is certainly an option from here but it’s always expensive and almost always means two weeks downtime while the DSL gets connected. Buying a house is starting to become an option too, but I think I’ll wait for a few more months before looking into that sort of thing. I can’t imagine being able to afford a very good place anyway. My limit under my current income is somewhere around $300,000… certainly a lot of small places do fall under that, but not any terribly good ones. Plus I’d have to make sure I can cover the mortgage payments by myself, because the banks don’t seem to care about income from renting out the extra rooms.
Other than that, the past week has been eaten up by setting up my MacBook Pro. like so many other people who bought this laptop, I’m affected by the buzzing CPU issue, which I’ve temporarily worked around by hacking QuietMBP to use less CPU, but just enough to stop the noise. Hopefully Apple will fix the problem in a software update, because I’d hate for it to be entirely a hardware problem.
Otherwise, the laptop is practically perfect. Mine got delayed, and by the time it arrived they were already into revision E, and all the original problems people were experiencing had been fixed (well, except the buzz.)
Tags macbookpro, meta, trypticon | no comments
Posted by Trejkaz
Mon, 31 Oct 2005 00:55:00 GMT
I bought myself a nice new, 300GB SATA hard drive on Friday, as I’d finally saved up the money for it. On Saturday I eventually hooked it up, and started moving across the data which was outgrowing my older 120GB drive.
The copy process was taking forever to do from the console so I thought I would do it through KDE just to see the rate it was copying at, and it turns out it was doing an average of around 6MB/s (only slightly faster than copying a file across the network.) I was quick to blame the Linux SATA support at first, but then I started doing some more tests…
- Copying files from the old drive to the new drive = 6MB/s
- Copying files from the new drive to itself = 35MB/s
- Copying files from the new drive to the old drive = 30MB/s
What the? And lo and behold:
- Copying files from the old drive to itself = 10MB/s.
So, the old drive was on the way out and it took this new drive to tell me. SMART gave no errors nor warnings… as far as it was concerned, the drive had a clean bill of health.
The old drive, thankfully, is still under warranty, so getting it replaced was not an issue, though it would mean sending the thing back to the manufacturers. The real issue was that this drive had my boot partition and practically all my data on it, and it all had to be shuffled around.
After a couple of hours of indecision, I eventually decided to sacrifice my old 20GB backup drive to become the new boot drive (200MB /boot, 4GB swap, 800MB /, 15GB unallocated for now.) My old /boot and / moved across to that.
Then the new 300GB got split 40GB unallocated (future plan is to move my Windows dual boot onto that), 260GB LVM.
Ah, LVM… it saved me so much time. For /usr, /var, /home and /data were all on LVM, and it only took me one command to move them all off the old drive, and another command to remove the old drive from the volume group. After that, everything was fairly happy and I rebooted with the backup drive as primary master and the new drive as secondary slave.
I did attempt to shred the data on the drive, though I was only able to do about 5 passes before the thing would lock up (more proof that the drive is about to die) and gave up after that, disconnecting it permanently.
The only immediately irritating thing left is that my machine locked up overnight even while the old drive was disconnected. I hope that this is either due to the newer kernel I’m now running, or the newer NVIDIA driver (NVIDIA are already a good scapegoat, because their driver crashes so goddamn often.) I will update the kernel to a newer one, and perhaps downgrade that NVIDIA driver back to what I was using before which was known to be stable (it’s not like I’m running a cutting-edge card anyway.)
Anyway, incidents like this make software feel stable as a rock. And they really make you thank Linux for LVM because I would have wasted a lot of time buggering around with partitions if I weren’t using it. :-)
Tags computer, hardware, trypticon
Posted by Trejkaz
Tue, 05 Apr 2005 11:42:00 GMT
Well
Tags broadband, iburst, internet, trypticon
Posted by Trejkaz
Fri, 01 Apr 2005 04:38:00 GMT
Spotted this little morsel on 43 Folders and thought it was eerily appropriate for our household.
At one point in my third year of college, my housemates and I felt entropy’s hot breath on the back of our necks. As the dishwasher overflowed with week-old plates and the crisper teemed with blue and brown goo, we acknowledged it was time for a radical change. Thus, Richard, Jake, and I made a pact to instantiate what we called “The One-Fork Rule.” Each of us was issued one and only one of each eating tool: cutlery, plate, bowl, glass, etc. We were to bond with our tools like an infantryman with his rifle. If your fork was dirty when it was time to eat, you were to clean it. You were not to breach the sacred seal of the duct-tape-sealed boxes containing all the additional forks and plates. Like all emergency measures “The One-Fork Rule” passed in time, but I can tell you, it really works if you’re ever feeling overwhelmed by the crufty multiples in your kitchen–or elsewhere your life. Consider trying it for a week or so whenever you need to simplify or just get it together. – 43 Folders
Ah, like an infantryman. “This is my glass. There are many like it, but this one is MINE.” *polishes*
But I’d love to see the dishwashing piling up as fast as it is now, with a maximum of four plates, four bowls and four glasses in circulation. And pots are easy. :-)
Tags organisation, trypticon
Posted by Trejkaz
Mon, 07 Feb 2005 03:46:00 GMT
This might possibly be my first on-topic post ever on this weblog since it relates directly to Trypticon infrastructure. Amazing.
Our little server box at home was having some serious issues last week. Logging in from work was almost impossible at times, and towards Friday it seemed that logging in from the local network was just as futile. Packet loss was starting to top 60% even when pinging from another machine hanginf off the same switch. Complete madness.
Anyway, since it didn’t happen on the previous install which was on the machine, I had two suspicions…
- Something about networking in kernel-2.6.8.1 was screwy, or
- Something about the network card itself was screwy.
Not wanting to gamble, I figured I would fix both issues at once. The particular network card we were using to connect it to the LAN was amazingly a 10Mb/s card (must have been the one we used to run between the server and the cable modem, back when it used to do our routing,) so I switched it over to use the 100Mb/s card instead. That should have the obvious benefits. :-)
Aside from that, I had it compile a new kernel overnight (literally… it took somewhere on the order of eight hours to complete) and rebooted in the morning.
Everything was more or less fine after that, with only one obvious problem remaining. That problem is this: you can’t expect to run Apache, Samba, Postfix, and at least three other services on a machine with only 64MB of RAM, and expect all services to be responsive at the same time. :-)
So I’ve come to the conclusion that we need to replace the server even though it’s working again for now. It’s been running for a very long time now, my best recollection is getting it some time around 1998, so it’s lasted extremely long under the circumstances. The machine used to run Windows and first became a Linux server when I wanted to run Windows and Linux without the hassle of dual booting… back when I was still sceptical of Linux as a desktop OS (of course, I’m thoroughly sold on the idea of Linux as a desktop OS these days.)
So the new server, well… it doesn’t have to be shit-hot. My current thoughts look something like this…
- Cheap motherboard with everything on-board, assuming it has on-board networking that doesn’t completely suck. Two network interfaces is considered a bonus, but I don’t believe such a thing exists on any motherboards which still count as “cheap.”
- 2.4GHz Celeron or similar low-end, less heat-prone CPU.
- 256 or 512MB RAM. 256MB would honestly be enough right now, but with 512MB I might even be able to run my Java-based web server from it, along with everything else.
- 120GB hard drive. I will most likely stick to the standard Western Digital on this. I may be inclined to switch to using RAID-1 in the future though, so perhaps it’s a better idea to stick to 80GB on the initial disk, getting dual 120GB disks in the future.
- Reasonably quiet case and power supply, at least as quiet as possible without breaking the budget.
Ideally, it would be a completely fanless setup to ultimately remove noise, but I get the feeling that this isn’t possible without going overboard. The budget for this system is around $400, which I’m finding hard to meet.
So if anyone wants to suggest a way I can meet this budget, go ahead. :-)
Tags computer, hardware, trypticon