A Joke

Humor

Overheard on today:

Richard M. Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Donald E. Knuth engage in a discussion on whose impact on the computerized world was the greatest.

Stallman: “God told me I have programmed the best editor in the world!”

Torvalds: “Well, God told *me* that I have programmed the best operating system in the world!”

Knuth: “Wait, wait – I never said that.”

Views from the porch

General

I’ve enjoyed Cliff‘s views from the porch.

I’ve decided to post some of my own: click here for a few photos.

I also threw in one of the porch itself, to prove that I really can point the camera in all those directions without leaving it :-)

Here’s that one:

Maybe soon I’ll post the views from the *back* porch. Between the two, I think I could get a 360-degree view…

Just A Geek

Entertainment / Arts

Recently, I bought a copy of Wil Wheaton’s book Just A Geek.

I’ve read one chapter so far. And I have to say: great book.

This has to be one of the most insightful, brutally honest books I’ve ever seen.

It’s also funny. Here’s a little snippet, recalling his first-ever book signing:

… a guy walked over to me, and extended his hand.

“Hi, Wil,” he said, “I’m Tim O’Reilly.”

HOLY MO– WIL! IT’S TIM O’REILLY!! HE CAME OUT TO SEE YOU!

Before I could scream out, “I KNOW! I KNOW! I KNOW! GREAT GOOGLY MOOGLY!” my brain said, “Stay cool, Wil. Don’t geek out.”

I heeded my brain’s advice . . . “It’s really nice to meet you,” I said. . .

Check me out. I totally behaved myself.

“Nicely done,” said my brain. “Have some serotonin.”

Wil talks a lot about his two inner voices: his totally-honest self, and the voice he calls Prove To Everyone Quitting Star Trek Wasn’t A Bad Idea, or just Prove To Everyone for short.

I think we all have some of Prove To Everyone in us. Especially Americans, and free software hackers, where competition and, well, proving onesself are expected.

It’s time to loosen up a bit.

I’m going to enjoy the rest of this book.

Control Room

Movies, Reviews, Society

Have you ever wondered why so many Arabs hate Americans? Why they view us as occupiers? Why they want to be rid of both Saddam Hussein and us?

We watched Control Room tonight. What a fascinating documentary. There was no narration. Just journalists talking. Arab journalists, American journalists, Pentagon spokesmen. Lots of different viewpoints. Lots of insight.

It was hard to watch at times — they showed footage of how events were covered in different countries, and it was graphic sometimes. They also showed the journalists talking about why they covered things in a certain way.

It was very moving, and thought-provoking.

Sometimes it is useful to have a view from an outsider (to America) or an insider (to the Middle East).

Hello, ext3. Goodbye, reiser4.

Linux, ,

So I’ve been trying out various filesystems over the past few months, by converting a few machines to them and using them on a daily basis.

I’ve found that reiser3, JFS, and XFS are all risky and actually corrupt data on crashes. JFS also has a few weird bugs that make the kernel oops, and sometimes cause filesystem corruption. All of the above also have starvation issues, where one IO-intensive process can dramatically slow down everything on the system (by a factor of 100 or more).

Reiser4 has proven better — only one small issue that I can recall. But it’s got a huge problem: no ability to resize a Reiser4 partition. That is rather ridiculous these days, and really reduces the utility of LVM. (Hans says he’ll make it resizable when someone pays.)

So I’ve tried out ext3 again, for the first time in a few years. I’m using data=ordered,commit=300 (or 600 on some machines), which still makes it safer than the other journaled filesystems.

And I must say that it is impressive. The old bottlenecks that I was used to were gone. The thing is reliable and fast, and scales well. I’m going to move everything back to ext3.

So why do Hans’s benchmarks show reiser4 being better? For one thing, most benchmarks measure throughput, not response time, so things like starvation don’t cause black marks in them. Most of them don’t even use multiple processes to simulate real-world activity anyway. Plus, ext3’s default mount options (commit=5, for instance) are much more conservatve than other filesystem’s. To get a fair test, one should increase that commit= number on ext3.

Here’s another discussion about ext3.

Some nice code: libarchive

Programming

Yesterday, while looking for information on the format of tar files, I discovered libarchive, which is part of FreeBSD. libarchive and read about 5 different tar formats, 4 different cpio formats, zip, and ISO images, and supports gzip and bzip2. It can also write 2 different tar formats plus cpio and shar. Very nice.

Oh, and its tar.5 is the best reference on the tar format I’ve seen.

I’ve packaged up libarchive and bsdtar (the default tar on FreeBSD, which is built using libarchive) for Debian.

Grandpa’s Creek

General

“Dad would have really enjoyed this.”

My uncle Ron said those words last Sunday, referring to my grandfather, who passed away earlier this year.

We were having a little family gathering, the first since the events surrounding Grandpa’s death.

We met as his old farmhouse, and then headed out to his creek. My dad already had a fire going — ready for the hot dogs and brats.

That creek, though it’s muddy and smelly at times, has a lot of fond memories for lots of my relatives.

For most of my childhood, uncle Ron lived in Indonesia. Every so often, his family would come back to the US for a few weeks. And just about every time he was in Kansas, he wanted to go camping by Grandpa’s creek.

He’d usually manage to gather a few people to go with him. Just who went would vary depending on schedules, but usually included my cousins (his children), my brothers, my dad, and Grandpa. We’d often go fishing in the creek as well.

At this point, I need to explain a small detail about that creek. It runs through the middle of a pasture. The kind that cattle live in. So, you have to be careful where you step. Also, you have to remember that you might be visited in the middle of the night.

My cousins, brothers, and I set up our sleeping bags on the bed of Grandpa’s pickup. I don’t remember where my uncle and my dad slept. Grandpa was the smartest one, though. He’d drive his car out to the creek, through the pasture, and spend the evening with us. Once it got dark and people were turning in, he’d drive back home for the night. And he’d be right back out there in the morning.

There was also an incident one time where I was fishing with my dad and my brothers, and I fell into the creek. But that’s a story for another day.

This week, my uncle was visiting, and the family got together out by the creek. Most of us hadn’t been there in a few years. It was a great time. We were probably there for four hours, despite the wind.

During a lull in the conversation, towards the end of the evening, my uncle remarked:

“Dad would have really enjoyed this.

But then, he probably is.”