zabbo

Over the years I’ve built up a collection of badges from tech conferences. They’re an interesting record of the path my career took from UNIX sysadmin work to Linux kernel development. I noticed that the oldest of them is now 10 years old and thought it would be a fun time to show them off. I put up a Conference Badge photo set on flickr.

They come to 112MB of 600dpi scans which motivated me to shell out for a Pro flickr account. I had to crop the badge from thebazaar as its enormous speaker ribbon pushed the file size up to 17MB, compressed.

A few months ago I got an email out of the blue from a researcher at ABC News. After some prodding she admitted that she wanted to talk about background information on Hans Reiser. I happily declined, having managed to avoid that particular corner of the Linux file system world.

Today Ted mentions that he tried to help ABC understand the basics.

Let’s hope that it doesn’t end up like the disastrous piece in Wired. I’m not holding my breath.

They never saw me coming.

I was watching hg pull do its best impression of paint drying today and thought I’d sit down and run some numbers on the distribution of directory sizes on a boring linux box. This topic invariably comes up when Linux FS people get in a room together.

Imagine that for each directory we make a rough calculation of the number of bytes that the user cares about in that directory. We’ll include the number of bytes in the file name for every directory entry. We’ll include the file size for each regular file. For each subdirectory we’ll only account for an additional 8 bytes. ’struct stat’ can be a stand-in for inode data. We’ll use it to account for the directory itself and for each non-directory entry.

This is just a rough sketch. It under-estimates the FS book-keeping in a few places. It ignores the targets of symlinks and extended attributes entirely.

The question we’re trying to answer might be obvious to FS developers in the crowd: How many directories — directory entries, inodes, file data, and all — would fit in a single FS block of a given size?

I crunched these numbers on a bare FC6 i386 root file system. The resulting table lists the number of directories (and percentage there-of) which fit inside blocks of increasing powers of two.

[root@kiyoko fs-stats]# ./dir-size-hist -p /
      size            nr < % <
       512            3439      46
      1024            3746      50
      2048            4065      54
      4096            4374      58
      8192            4732      63
     16384            5044      67
     32768            5423      73
     65536            5849      78
    131072            6199      83
    262144            6677      89
    524288            6916      93
   1048576            7059      95
   2097152            7310      98
   4194304            7364      99
   8388608            7395      99
  16777216            7406      99
  33554432            7413      99
  67108864            7417      99
 134217728            7418      99

So, roughly, more than half of the directories in a root file system would fit in a 4k block. It sounds like a great opportunity for obvious efficiency gains — disk utilization, seek times, read cache overhead, etc.

I was surprised to notice that it’s been almost two months since the last loftice update. In that time I managed to lose a laptop drive that had photos showing a few steps along the way so we’re jumping ahead a bit. There have also been the welcome distractions of attending a lovely wedding and helping organize a linux file system developer workshop (free tip: have James order the wine). So lots has happened.

Probably most dramatically: the floor has been refinished. It took them a few passes to get the stain to soak into the old and dry boards. Each time the house smelt like it was made entirely of dry-erase markers. It was absolutely worth it, though, as the result is very nice to look at and is infinitely less likely to give splinters.

The bulk of the trim has been put in and it does a great job framing the room. Again we went with the smaller trim that is readily available these days and is mostly in keeping with the style of the house. We painted it before it went up to save a huge amount of irritating brush work. We just had to spackle and touch up some dings and nail-holes from installation. No sweat.

The railing which replaces the wall is installed. Alice was right; the room feels significantly larger now that it’s effectivey merged with the stairwell. The latter also now gets a strong dose of sunlight as the sun goes down past the windows on the west wall of the loftice. And the cats like watching us through the spindles as we walk up and down the stairs — everybody wins.

Finally, there is some furniture! We rented a van and drove up to the Ikea in Seattle to get matching pairs of desks, chairs, and rugs. I’m quite pleased with the way they fit around the corner formed by the otherwise awkward dormer. It makes good use of the space.

There is still some work to do — finishing up trim, patching some holes, staining the railing, hanging curtains — but it should go quickly. It sure will be nice to have a stable work space again after all these months.

I got a fun surprise in the mail the other day! Chris sent a silly pin that now lives on one of our kitchen aprons. Do get Chris or Shona to mail you something if you have the chance. Their return address sticker comes in the shape of an adorable fawn.

Coincidentally, it wasn’t more than a few days ago that Alice and I were telling the story of stayin up ’till 4am with Phil playing Super Bust-A-Move and eating tater tots. I could have sworn that I’d written something about that in one of the previous generations of this blog but I’m failing to find any mention of it. Which is probably for the best. It turns out that the combination of pressed potato sweepings and sleep deprivation is not nearly as awesome as it sounds like it should be.

Alright, I think I’ve got the various blogging pieces playing nice together. wp-hashcash got the boot after having allowed about 40 spam comments in a day. Here’s to hoping that secureimage does a better job. I think gallery2 and its plugin WPG2 are ready. We’ll see how some initial albums go.

I finally got around to upgrading to the most recent version WordPress. It had been so long that I actually had to update twice — first to something even vaguely recent and then again to the most recent. Until I get better image management software running some of the posts will be missing their photos. I’ll repair them soon enough, I’m sure. Bear with us.

Upgrading this blog is part of a general effort I’ve been making to spend more time enjoying hobbiest computing and less time, well, wasting away in front of the TV. Recent diversions have included:

• Introducing hardware raid to our server box as part of upgrading to a modern Fedora Core.
• Getting backups going with rdiff-backup. Yeah, check it out. It’s like I don’t want to lose data.
• Gathering the various pieces (cards, cables, gbics, switch, tray, drives) to get a fibre channel network going in my wee little lab.
• Experimenting with a file system implementation with Aaron.

Further bulletins as events warrant!

This is going to be one of those times where I’m coming late to the party.

I’ve been reading crypto-gram for, boy, I have no idea how long. Years, certainly. It took me that long to notice that his article seperators are primes:

** *** ***** ******* *********** *************

(2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13)

Adorable!

I’ve been pretty lazy about putting in spam countermeasures. My email address, which has been around since ‘97 or so, manages to get almost 1000 pieces of spam a day. Thunderbird can not keep up. So I finally got around to learning what it would take to teach postfix to use the SBL+XBL blacklists that Darrell recently mentioned. All it took was adding a trivial restriction to clients that try to connect — reject_rbl_client sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org in the config file. It’s already hard at work:

554 Service unavailable; Client host [211.195.53.91] blocked using sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org;

I can’t believe I didn’t do this sooner. Also, Happy New Year!

So, do I have this right? Proposition 77 is giving voters in California the chance to stop representatives from chosing their voters (gerrymandering) and it isn’t passing? A LA Times poll shows it losing by wide margins.

I’ll be awfully disapointed if California’s voters screw this up. It seems unlikely that they’ll get another chance and the rest of the country sure could use the example of an influencial state taking steps to make elections competitive again.

On a recent trip to the east coast for a family wedding we managed to pick up some family heirlooms. Amongst them is this fascinating promotional magazine from Timken which was printed in what must have been heady days in Detroit. In it is an article featuring my great, great, grandfather Ernest R. Benson, a former VP at Studebaker. I don’t know much about him, though a shelf in my office would argue that he enjoyed pocket watches. I’ll let the article have the floor.

Dealers and dealer problems are second nature to Mr. Benson. Being human himself, and having a thorough understanding of human nature, he has the happy faculty of putting the “pep,” the pluck, the punch, and the perseverance in every Studebaker man he converses with during his little journeys to distribution centers.

They just don’t write copy like they used to, eh?

Tonight Deb took us to a very tasty restaurant in Ottawa called Stoneface Dolly’s. It was fantastic, no surprises there. What was surprising is that the nice photos of food on the wall were taken by Alan Nodelman who is both Alice’s uncle and Deb’s dentist. We tried to take some pictures with Shona’s camera but they sure didn’t come out and the people sitting under them looked pretty uncomfortable. When we mentioned our nutty connections to the pictures the nice server lady also explained that she had made the food in them and that they were taken at his place.. fun stuff.

I mean, really. Deb and I meet on IRC, years later Alice and I meet in Montréal and end up married, still years later Deb moves to Ottawa and unknowingly chooses him as her dentist.. what are the chances?

A fascinating thing just happened. As I write this, Ben and I are attending a talk at OLS with our laptops, more on OLS later. He pointed out a CNN story about some more bombings in London. Instead of heading to the usual news sources I tried Wikipedia’s current events section and found a stunningly thorough description of events:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_July_2005_London_bombings

Incredible. Check out the “History” tab at the top of the page and look at the frequence at which updates were made to the content.

After months of mindlessly tossing out the hundreds of asinine fishing attempts sent by the credit companies I finally sat down with Google to see if something could be done about it. I eventually stumbled upon 888-5-OPTOUT which when dialed referred me to https://www.optoutprescreen.com/. Victory! Partial, I’m sure, but still!

I thought I’d take NASA’s space-age round of Lawn Bowls as an opportunity to showcase the excellent little corner of the web that is the Astronomy Picture of the Day. Adam introduced me to it back in Montréal and I’ve been a fan since. Their self-descriptive blurb says it best:

Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

So do check it out, there’s some very pretty images over there.

Alice and I have talked about painting since before we moved into this house. It’s only been a few months, sure, but it’s been a long two months. Alice finally had enough and we set out to try our first room. We started with the dinky entry way that is just inside the front door. It’s dinky. I would guess it’s about six foot by six foot by.. how tall are our ceilings? 10 feet?

Alice wins all kinds of points for finding the Miller paint store just down the street from us at Pine and Grand. We stumbled somewhat blindly into a super helpful employee guy (ask for Sean) who helped us find the right kit for our first job. It was very nice to find someone who was clearly enthusiastic about what he was talking about. He was particularly excited about these brushes made right here in Portland by Purdy. We got some of those and some rollers and some sanding stuff and this crazy tack cloth stuff and some spackle and a cute edger and an extendo-pole and some tape and a cheapo plastic tarp and a scraper and paint and primer. I was surprised by how heavy three gallons feels after seven blocks.

You can see what the room looked like when we moved in. That picture was actually taken to show off the cute Ikea bits we got to keep our coats and shoes in line. You can also see the dark purple wall and horrible off-green. The main goal was to get rid of that green. It’s Alice’s kryptonite. We went with a simple off-white for the trim and intended to brighten the room up with some yellow.

All told we ended up with two coats of primer and two coats of color. We taped off the floor and the glass and the light fixture. We also took the opportunity to crack open the window above the front door that the previous super-stars had nailed shut and then painted over. That, and learning to work with the primer, made the first coat the longest by far. It was a solid 4 hours for two people. Well, maybe not solid. We probably spent more time singing along to Madonna than a professional might. We got pictures after the first coat of primer. You can see pretty clearly how hard it was to beat the purple into submission. The second coat went on very quickly. I might have been going too fast with the roller, though. I managed to frost myself.

Luckily, the trim only needed one coat of white on top of the primer. That all went pretty smoothly. The purple, though, refused to die. We weren’t as thorough with the primer in the corners as we should have been. After the first coat it was still pretty obvious that there was something dark and evil lurking under the yellow. We really laid it on thick with the second coat, which went on very quickly, and that seemed to do the trick. Enough so, anyway, that we aren’t interested in the dimishing returns that a third coat would bring.

So, one down and, depending how you count, at least five much larger rooms to go. It’s going to be a very long summer. But if the other rooms turn out like this one did, it’ll be worth it.

A week ago Alice and I decided to head down to Oregon Humane Society to see if there were some feline companions we were interested in. We were lured by some photos on the site of an adorable pair of orange kitties. Completely adorable. I don’t know why car salesmen don’t just pack all the cars in the showroom with mewing kittens. Anyway, the adorable pair were gone by the time we get there.

Oh, yes, getting there. The pet-themed map on their site doesn’t make clear that a red paw is the rough equivalent of fifteen thousand miles. It looks like you’d just be walking a few blocks from the bus stop at MLK and Columbia. No, sir. Well, you’re walking. On a gravel path for a few miles with big scary semis driving by.

We found ourselves at the humane society looking around to see if there were any remaining pairs of kitties that we could see. It turned out there were a pair that were brought in as strays and were confined to the ICU. They explained that the kitties had an upper-respiratory infection, which is really common you understand, and that they’d bounce right out of it. We thought about it for a bit, not very long really, and decided that we were willing to give it a go.

We took them to the vet the next day and found out all sorts of exciting things. Most interestingly that while URI is very common in confined kitties, it turns out that the humane society is breeding some crazy advanced strain that the vet keeps seeing. Instead of a week or so of sick kitties we’re looking at months and hundreds of dollars. I guess you win some, you lose some. We’ve bonded now, though, so there is no turning back.

They originally had stripper names, it seems. Sheena (really?) and Donna. Alice changed those right-quick to Triffid and Chocky. Chocky is the poor girl with the hilarious dome around her head. She was biting at the stiches left behind from her spaying so she has to be kept from them for a few days before they can be taken out. Triffid is the dome-free one on the left who is about 30% under weight.

For all that, though, they sure are adorable. Even their tiny little cat sneezes are cute.

I’m told my hair smells like potato chips this evening. I’m not sure what to say about that other than that it sounds delicious.

The vastly more exciting news is that Alice and I joined the growing ranks of the proud warriors of household debt. We closed on our new house today. We have keys, money has been thrown around, and apparently the state has our name somewhere in its little brain. I’m not sure why I haven’t mentioned anything here about it before. I guess I didn’t want to jump up and down and make lots of noise before it was unmistakably official.

The house was built in 1906 and is located in “close-in” southeast Portland. It has an amazing number of the little details that we were looking for. We get a nice sized kitchen and eating area that will be great for meals and entertaining. The previous owners were renovating the basement for use as a second rental unit and so walled off a few rooms which gives me a place to hide the computers. Most critically there is a little balcony off of the master bedroom that Alice can enjoy with a cup of tea, weather permitting.

The friendly inspector man said it was in great shape to celebrate its 100th birthday next year. He didn’t have any critical complaints, though we did ask that the sellers have an electrician fix up some things in the panel. That said, there is certainly no shortage of work to be done.

I’m most interested in fixing up the crazy walls in the room that will be my office. It’s right at the top of the house so its external walls are all angled along with the roof. Roughly three-quarter height walls were framed off which also created some storage in the eaves. Something weird happened, though, as the walls were finished with rough boards that look like they’re only primed. I hope it won’t be too painful to throw up some drywall instead, perhaps running a few extra outlets while we have the walls open.

Alice is going to go nuts painting. Someone was not afraid of colour, which is great, but sometimes they leaned a bit too far towards darker colours. Quite a bit of trim is done in this sickly green that stands out once you notice it. I’m all for a few revitalizing coats.

I keep trying to take pictures of the place and keep coming away with cruddy photos. Tonight’s batch, done after sunset, were all far too dark. Sigh. Maybe it’ll be easier to get it right once we live there.

There isn’t a yard to speak of on the property. This is a bonus, I think, being the urbanites we are. It will be nice to occupy the sweet spot where we can grow some cute shrubs and herbs and not have to get a riding lawn mower. The back side of the proprety fits snugly into the inner-elbow of an L of condos that was put up on two corners of the block. The condos have this nice shared green space behind all the condos. Alice’s balcony then overlooks this bit of trees and grass and birds and such, which is very nice. Portlandmaps paints a pretty clear picture.

So the next big chore is the actual act of moving. Hopefully that won’t be too horrible.

When Alice and I arrived in Winnipeg for our visit this Christmas we got stuck in a pretty deep line waiting for the passengers to trickle through the few customs stalls that were open. I’m not entirely sure how we came to the topic but we got to talking about cell phones being prohibited on planes. I’ve long had this theory that it has nothing to do with the safety of the plane but was more about phones being confused when they can see so many cells from high up. I pretended to know what I was talking about.

First the guy behind us in line chimed in. He worked for Qualcomm and thought there was no way that the phones could actually reach the base stations on the ground and that it was about interference with the plane’s avionics. Then the guy in front of us in line mentions that he works in avionics and he didn’t buy that the phones could do any damage. I mean, honestly, what were the chances? It’d be like someone flapping his mouth off about Mozilla while waiting in line between Chris and Mike.

So I dug around a little and found advisory circular 92.21-1 from the FAA back in ‘93.

The FCC currently prohibits the use and
operation of cellular telephones while airborne. Its primary
concern is that a cellular telephone, while used airborne, would
have a much greater transmitting range than a land mobile unit.
This could result in serious interference to transmissions at
other cell locations since the system uses the same frequency
several times within a market. The FAA supports this airborne
restriction for reasons of potential interference to critical
aircraft systems.

Well, OK. A little of column A and a little of column B.

More recently, the FCC is considering allowing cell phones on planes. The plan seems to be to introduce a pico cell in the plane that would let the phones use much less power to transmit. Presumably this would stop the phones from reaching the ground and reduce interference with magical plane goo.