All posts by John Goerzen

A Cloud Filesystem

Software

A Slashdot question today about putting to use all the unused disk space on corporate desktops got me to thinking. Now, before I start, comments there raised valid points about performance, reliability, etc.

But let’s say that we have a “cloud filesystem”. This filesystem would, at its core, have one configurable parameter: how many copies of each block of data must exist in the cloud. Now, we add servers with disk space to the cloud. As we add servers, the amount of available space on the cloud increases, subject to having enough space for replication according to our parameters.

Then, say we say we want a minimum of 3 copies of each block replicated. Each write to the filesystem will then cause a write to at least 3 different servers. Now, what if one server goes down? If the cloud filesystem is short on space, we may be down to only 2 copies of some blocks until that server comes back up. Otherwise, space permitting, it can rebuild that third copy on other servers.

Now, has this been done before? As far as I can tell, no. Wouldn’t it be sweet?

But there are some projects that are close. Most notably, GlusterFS. GlusterFS does all of the above, except the automated bits. You can have this 3 copy redundancy, but you have to manually tell it where each copy goes, manually reconfigure if a server goes offline, etc. Other options such as NBD, OpenAFS, GFS, DRBD, Lustre, GFS, etc. aren’t really well-suited for this scenario for various reasons.

So, what does everyone think? Can this work? Has it been done outside of Google?

xkcd author endorses Obama

Politics

The author of the xkcd comic has endorsed Obama for president. Among other things, he wrote:

Obama has shown a real commitment to open government. When putting together tech policy (to take an example close to home for xkcd) others might have gone to industry lobbyists. Obama went to Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons (under which xkcd is published) and longtime white knight in the struggle with a broken system over internet and copyright policy. Lessig was impressed by Obama’s commitment to open systems — for example, his support of machine-readable government information standards that allow citizens’ groups to monitor what our government is up to. Right now, the only group that can effectively police the government is the government itself, and as a result, it’s corrupt to the core. Through these excellent and long-overdue measures, Obama is working to fight this corruption.

Having Larence Lessig as an advisor, instead of some RIAA shill, speaks volumes about the candidate.

#1 on Google

Humor

I started this blog 5 years ago. In that time, I’ve written about Linux on the desktop, photography, international peace, version control systems, ice storms, Haskell, health care, rural life, Kansas, and infants.

Today I realized something: I am the hit on Google when you search for smelly ducting. This will take you to a story I wrote back in 2005 about an odd odor in our house. I believe it is my most popular story ever, with almost 100 comments — and comments continue to trickle in, a few a week.

What’s the right word to use for that? When the great worldwide democratizing force that is the Internet collectively decides that your most important blog post is about smelly ducting?

I’m glad folks know what matters. Wouldn’t want to worry too much about what’s going on in Iraq, Washington, or Kansas if your ducts smell, that’s for sure.

Obviously every single Presidential candidate has missed out on a key issue in voters’ minds. If only someone would come out with a freshly-scented ducting platform, this country could finally move forward!

Why Are We So Afraid of Socialized Medicine?

Uncategorized, ,

I’ve been thinking about this for awhile, so time to put down some thoughts.

First, what is socialized medicine? If we listen to the politicians that label health care as “socialized”, it seems to be “anything that is paid for by taxes and delivered free or cheaply to citizens.” Putting aside the question of whether that meets the academic definition of socialism for the moment, let’s look at things in the United States that are already socialized:

  • K-12 education
  • Police
  • Fire fighters
  • Public Libraries
  • Roads
  • Airports and air traffic control
  • Military defense and offense

That’s right. We trust the government with our children all day long for 13 years. For free!

Yet this is a country in which hospitals dump the homeless in the gutter for being unable to pay their bills. Even insured Americans find claims turned down for arbitrary reasons. People are afraid to change jobs for fear of losing health insurance.

Why is it bad to have the government pay for health care?

Here in the United States, our health care system is far from best in the world. It’s not even top 10. Or 20. Our system encourages minimizing health care, and doesn’t encourage preventative care.

I’d suggest that, in a democracy, it’s best to have the government pay for health care. That’s because, in a democracy, we are in control of the bureaucrats. If we wish to exercise common sense and pound into their heads that paying for preventative care makes good long-term sense, then we can do so at the ballot box.

So why the scare tactics about government being involved in health care?

Perhaps our real problem is that we have let government get out of our control? Perhaps we are too frightened of change to vote. Perhaps we’ve given up on a responsive government. Perhaps we think that the insurance companies and drug companies will never let us have a good health care system.

Yes, the lobbyists have a lot of power. But we have the power to remove it, and it’s high time we used it.

The audacity of Obama to have hope. To say that we can do better. When Hillary Clinton falls in line with the Republicans and accuses him of having “false hope”, effectively saying that we can’t do any better, then is she — or any Republicans — really a candidate of change? I think that all these accusations from conservatives and Hillary that Obama has “false hope” has finally convinced me that he’s the one to vote for. If everyone else claims that his ideas are too good, that his dreams too big, then I like him.

Oh, and you could substitute “college education” for “socialized medicine” everywhere in this article and get equally valid arguments.

LinuxCertified Laptop LC2100S

Debian, Reviews

As you might know from reading my blog, at my workplace, we have largely standardized on Linux on the desktop and laptop.

We use systemimager to maintain a standard desktop image and a separate standard laptop image. These images differ because there are different assumptions. The desktop machines mount /home over NFS, authenticate to LDAP, etc. This doesn’t work on laptops. Moreover, desktops don’t use network-manager or wifi, but laptops do.

Our desktop image uses Debian’s hardware autodetection — plus a little hacking in /etc/init.d/gdm — to automatically adjust to a wide range of hardware. So far this has worked well.

Laptops are much more picky. Our standard laptop model had been the HP nc4400 — a small and light 12″ model that people here loved. HP discontinued that model. Their replacement was the 2510p. We ordered one in here for evaluation. Try as we might, we couldn’t get it to suspend and resume properly in Linux.

So I went out scouring the field of Linux laptops. Companies such as Emperor Linux buy retail laptops from people like Lenovo, test them for Linux, and sell them — at a premium. These were too expensive to justify at the quantities we need them.

Then I stumbled across Linux Certified. I’d never heard of them before. I called them up and asked a few questions. They don’t buy retail laptops, but instead have OEMs in Taiwan build laptops to their spec. They happen to use the same OEM that Fujitsu does, I believe. (No big company builds laptops in the USA these days). I asked them about wifi chipsets, video chipsets, whether they use stock kernels. I got clueful answers to all of these.

So we ordered one of their LC2100s models. They didn’t offer Debian preinstalled, but did offer Ubuntu, so I selected that. The laptop arrived a couple of days (!!) later, configured with the particular CPU, etc. that I selected.

I was surprised at the thrill I felt at taking a brand new laptop out of its box, turning it on, and watching Grub appear before my eyes. Ubuntu proceeded to boot. I then of course installed our regular Debian image on the thing to check it out.

It needed a kernel and xserver-xorg-video-intel from lenny, as well as the ipw3945 driver for wifi, but otherwise worked with the exact same software as our HP nc4400 image. (In fact, it wasn’t hard to support both laptops with that image, since both use a lot of Intel hardware.) The one trick was making hibernate call /etc/init.d/ipw3945d stop so that the ipw3945 module could be unloaded before suspend. (Why this particular chipset needs a daemon is beyond me, but oh well.)

The hardware is great. As far as I know, the ipw3945 was the only component that wasn’t directly and automatically supported by DFSG-free software in lenny main. The screen is sharp and high-contrast (it’s glossy, which I personally don’t like, but I bet our users will). The device itself feels sturdy. It’s small and dense. I haven’t opened it up, but it looks like all you need is a screwdriver to do so.

The only downside is that they don’t sell docking stations for it. Their standard answer on that is to buy a USB docking station. That’s a partial answer, but can’t handle power or video like a standard docking station will.

Also, the LC2100s is much cheaper than the HP laptop, even when configured when nicer specs in every way. That is no doubt partially due to the lack of the Windows tax.

I’m sending off an order for 4 more today, I believe.

DjVu: Almost Awesome

Uncategorized

Earlier today, I started reading about the DjVu family of document formats. It really sounds slick: file sizes much smaller than PNG (and incredibly smaller than TIFF or PDF) for lossless data with the DjVuText format, file sizes much smaller than JPEG with equivalent quality for the DjVuPhoto format, and an advanced DjVuDocument format that separates the background photo from the foreground text and produces a quite nice output. There are wonderful plugins for browsers on all platforms, and server-side support already in Debian for sending pages incrementally as needed by clients.

I tried this out a bit and indeed it looks great on monochrome scans, and I made a quick try of DjVuPhoto as well. That part looks great.

So here’s the bad news.

Debian has no nice way to generate DjVuDocument files. There is a PS/PDF-to-DjVu converter that uses a djvu driver for Ghostscript. But Debian does not include that driver. Though, strangely, the program that depends on this driver is actually in Debian main. (Bug filed.) That program actually will make background-separated images, but only if they are separate objects in the input.

All Debian has is a program csepdjvu, which requires you to somehow manually separate the foreground and background images. Ugh.

So there is no way using software in Debian to produce DjVuDocument files with automatic separation, either from scans or from a digital source. It appears that there may not be Free Software to do this from scans either. This fact is not made clear at all in the DjVu documentation that is around.

The Sky Is Falling!

Uncategorized

A very sad day approaches.

Those of you old enough to remember Gopher may proceed to shed a quiet, ASCII-art tear. Gopher document type 0.

For those of you that don’t know what Gopher is, here’s my quick summary:

* It existed before the web.
* It is an extremely simple protocol designed to be an Internet-wide filesystem, though the bit that let you mount the Internet like a disk never quite happened, though still could. (actually I think I saw a FUSE gopher implementation recently)
* It pretty much does everything that WAP does, but about 50 times simpler. Why smartphones invented WAP instead of just using Gopher is still a mystery to me.
* XML-RPC is usually extreme overkill when you could use a simple protocol like Gopher

Now how many of you remember Veronica and Archie?

Christmas Is Almost Here

General

It seems like Christmas started on Saturday this year. We had a nice snowfall, with a not-so-nice 40MPH wind accompanying it. We got drifts, and had whiteout conditions outdoors for a little while.

Sunday morning came and I went out early to see if we’d be able to get the car down our driveway. At about 1/4 mile long, shoveling the whole thing is not a practical option. Fortunately, I got most of the way down the driveway before the car got stuck, so I only had to shovel a little bit.

Sunday was our big Christmas choir day in church. We started off with Star of the East, and old Christmas tune. Research into the church archives revealed that it was first performed by the adult choir in the 1930s — and it was sung in English. Mrs. H. F. Voth was quoted as saying “they sang from the heart and meant it sincerely.” It was fun to sing this old song.

Later on, the whole church sang Oh, beautiful star of Bethlehem, another old tune that isn’t heard so often anymore. One of the older people in church told me later that song was special to her because she remembered carolers singing it at her house years ago.

The service ended with Nun Ist Sie Erschienen (score, mp3, story), a tune sung in our community for many years. I fondly remember my grandpa playing this song on his harmonica. Maybe it’s just stuck in my head for some reason, but it seems it was one of his favorites. This particular day, the pianist — who was my band teacher when I was in school and is now retired — improvised a beautiful accompaniment to the song. We sang it four times: twice in German, and twice in English. One of the older women in the congregation, whom I normally can’t hear because she sits in front of me and down the row in choir, was singing with such strength that I could hear her clearly from my seat.

Moments like that bring home the timeless nature of Christmas to me.

Ice Photos

Outdoors, , ,

For those of you wanting to see some pictures from the recent ice storm, here you go.

The morning:

img_4166.jpg

This bush sorta got short and flat:

img_4173.jpg

A tree branch:

img_4183.jpg

And another:

img_4185.jpg

Then, at noon:

img_4200.jpg

Then the snow came:

img_4229.jpg

If you have trouble finding the driveway… well, good thing we’ve got reflectors.

img_4253.jpg

The rental generator that kept us warmish:

img_4262.jpg

More snow:

img_4287.jpg

You can also see the whole set on flickr.

A Clarification

Outdoors

You may remember my post Monday in which I told Mother Nature to “bring it on”.

I would like to clarify that remark at this time. I would have preferred Mother Nature to interpret this in the President Bush sense of “please don’t hurt us”, rather than the “let’s just knock out power to the entire plains region”. A nice little romantic power outage Tuesday evening would have been nice.

We lost power at 3:10 on Tuesday according to my workstation’s logs. It’s still out, and our rural electric cooperative is estimating it will be another week until it’s back, though that’s better than the Dec. 22 date the state’s much larger for-profit utility is giving people. We were lucky enough to be able to find a generator to rent on Wednesday morning. $35 a day isn’t cheap. But on the other hand, we don’t have a flooded basement due to not pumping out the sump pump, our food isn’t spoiled, and our pipes aren’t frozen.

At work, our Internet connection went down Tuesday morning. We use a fixed wireless connection, and this was the first time our ISP’s radios have been tested in ice. Some antenna designs performed flawlessly. Then there were the antennas we had. 80% packet loss or worse. It wasn’t safe to get up on the roof to deice them until Wednesday afternoon, and even then we couldn’t get all the ice off. Finally today the connection was back to normal.

That two weeks after someone — yes — dug through Sprint/Embarq’s apparent only fiber-optic link into town. Took down all long-distance calling into or out of the town, most cell towers, as well as all access to 911 (since dispatch is in another town) for about 8 hours. If we had still be using wired T1s, we would have been out of service with Internet as well.

All told, 200,000 households or business customers of the state’s largest utility have been without power. Dozens of other utilities have also had significant outages. Ours alone lost 700 power poles and there are substations in need of repair all over the eastern part of the state. And we weren’t even the hardest hit.

On the generator, we can generally pick any three of refrigerator, server, workstation, or furnace to run. So sometime warm, I’ll upload the pictures I’ve taken so far. We have one nice CFL-powered electric lamp we’re using, flashlights, and a kerosene lamp. It’s amazing how after just a few days of this, we’re starting to want to go to bed earlier. Or perhaps that was because I haven’t had the chance to get a lot of sleep lately…

When we look out the house to the east, we see pitch black. Normally we can see some yard lights in the distance. Not this week. Nothing at all to the east. To the west, we can see yard lights tantalizingly close — only 2 miles away, fed from a different location. Ah, the joys of being at the very end of a utility’s network.

All this despite the fact that this storm wasn’t really all that bad. The roads were never really terrible, and there weren’t as many trees down as there were in the ice storm of 2005.

I heard a comment on the news today from an Iowa Republican who had followed the GOP debate yesterday. She mentioned that Romney made a comment like “Well, guess there’s no global warming in Iowa with an ice storm like this, huh?” She pointed out that if Iowa was still as chilly as it used to, it would have been a snow storm instead of an ice storm. I agree.