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I was just thinking about how I'm going to make the move to FreeBSD+ZFS for Jayne, and decided to write down a few things I want to fix with my computers and stuff this summer. That turned into a rather extensive set of instructions for getting Jayne transitioned, so I figured I'd post it here so I don't lose it! I'm not sure why the lists look so crappy, but whatever.
Kaylee and Simon
Reinstall OS X and Jaunty, and install Windows 7 RC on Kaylee.
Get Steam and friends working in 7. No more Wine!I'm currently consuming 245GB in OS X. This can be reduced to 200GB.
Don't install FCS/CS4 content, this time.
I think a 260/10/50GB split (OS X, Linux, Windows) should do it.Install 2.6.30, pray that WiFi works now. (still no WiFi)
Install Fedora 11 final on Simon.
Jayne
- Move racarr.me to Dreamhost.
Move hortont.com to Dreamhost.
Get better DNS control, put Jayne-services and stuff jayne.hortont.com.Archive and remove Ease wiki.
Install three additional disks (750GB, 1TB, and 160GB), at about 230$ cost.
1TB, 750GB, 160GB, following my usual choices...- Move all content we want to persist to the 1TB disk (use ext3).
- Don't persist backups (maybe Matt's); don't persist Star Trek.
- In theory, without those things we're under 1TB.
- Otherwise, start harassing Amy + CYGNUS for storage.
- We now have 3x750GB + 3x1000GB + 1x160GB (5.41TB total).
- Install FreeBSD-8-CURRENT on the small disk.
- Quickly make sure that all hardware, AFP, git, Apache, etc. work.
- Recreate users, groups (share, www-data, etc).
- Create a RAID-Z pool across the 750GB disks (2.25TB zpool).
- Create filesystems:
- /srv/share/public (setgid=share,setperm=770) @ /tank/share/public
- /srv/share/www (setgid=www-data,setperm=770) @ /tank/share/www
- /home/* @ /tank/home/*
- /git (setgid=share,setperm=770) @ /tank/share/git
- Copy the data from the single 1TB disk to the zpool.
- Add a second RAID-Z pool (consisting of all of the 1TB disks) to the zpool.
- This brings the global zpool to approximately 5.25TB. For all intents and purposes, that should last us through the next two years with no problem, even with me taking video classes...
- Backup Kaylee to Jayne, see what happens. Fix, rinse, repeat. Win.
The last day of Sophomore year (for me) just ended; instead of thinking any more about that, I thought I'd write about a handful of material(ish) possessions of mine that came at small monetary cost (to me or my family), but have since proved to be worth it time and time again. Most things don't stand out in this regard; they integrate themselves into my life, but they aren't something that I actively remember and enjoy every second of. These three, however, are things which have a value far greater than their price for the entertainment and experiences I've derived from them:
 Firstly, our Firefly box set. At the time, it was a somewhat off-the-cuff purchase. Dad, Amy, and I had seen an episode or two on TV, had heard about it on the internet, and were awaiting the movie, but had no emotional attachment to the show. Now, a few years later, I can't begin to count the number of times I've watched and rewatched these fourteen episodes, nor can I possibly estimate the enjoyment I've received both during and between these watchings. Mom commented long ago, while the three of us were quite quietly caught up in the world of Malcolm Reynolds and Co., that those four DVDs were possibly the best 40$ she'd ever spent. I can't say I disagree. (Indeed; all three of my main computers at the moment are named after Firefly characters!)
 Next, the Orange Box. I know this is a strange one, because I'm not a gamer; in fact, I only just finished playing through Half-Life 2 and the two episodes for the first time within the last week or so. However, this collection is more or less my only connection to the gaming world that many of my friends and colleagues so adore; I was introduced to it about a year ago by Mike and Nate, who insisted I play Portal. I sat, for five or six hours, without moving from the chair once, and finished the game — my first introduction to gaming post-PacMan, WASD+Mouse, and probably my single most enjoyable computing experience until Half-Life 2. Now, the story of Gordon and Alyx echoes in my head quite constantly (possibly because I only finished episode two a few days ago, but I hope it stays this way), and provides me yet another world in which to construct thoughts (both in my head, and in my occasional screwing around with the Source SDK, which I hope to soon resume after a few-month hiatus). In any case, this is another 40$ very well placed.
 Finally, my Arduino. I've progressed on to breadboard- or PCB-mounted ATmega designs at this point, but this is where I got started again. About a decade ago (what!?!), Dad and I spent great deals of time playing around with Parallax's Basic Stamp, making various small devices, teaching me how to program with the then-obvious choice of language, and providing a platform for a young me to experiment. Robb convinced me to pick up electronics again last semester so we could build guitar-related stuff; while this particular reason didn't come to fruition, I invested a significant amount of money getting together anything I would need to complete any sort of small electronic project. I chose to grab an Arduino Diecimila while I was at it, so I had a microcontroller to tie things together. Since then, I've spent loads of time learning the ins and outs of the platform, building small things (and designing larger things), and in general trying to get acquainted with the internet's favorite microcontroller. More importantly than my own work, though, I've helped a countless number of people here at RPI on various little Arduino-based projects, providing experience, parts, or programmers — most significantly, Connor, with his various IED projects (one of which is turning into a summer job!). All for 20$.
It's been a long time (20 days) since my last post — in that time:
- I've moved back to RPI and gotten settled in.
- We have a new President! And he's already doing a much better job. *high hopes*
- Robb and Matt (and Nate!!) and I have started our next project after Seed. I can't tell you about it yet, because we want to wow everyone once it's done.
- I sat through a 3 hour lecture by RMS, who then stayed in Matt's dorm room, down the hall, and went to dinner with Robb and Matt! (more about this experience later)
- I finished and ordered the second revision Intervalometer PCB, this time, for a "dual-core" intervalometer!
- We've had two weeks of class. LITEC is ... incredibly disorganized but awesome; Graph Theory is boring and, so far, a repeat of DSA; ModComp... we'll see; SD&D is strange because it involves designing and writing software with a group of people that I don't know (they all seem cool, though!).
- Seed got a writeup in Ars Technica, which was reposted to Slashdot and OSNews, and prompted #seed on Gnome IRC to become slightly busier than usual!
- I got Seed working reasonably reliably on Mac OS X, and am working on MacPorts packages (waiting on a new gir-repository release), and wrote a Seed/Clutter Pong, though it's really rough and useless at the moment!
- WebKit passed revision number 40,000. This would not be notable except for the fact that Matt has spent most of his waking hours attempting to create Arch binary packages for every single revision of WebKit.
- New pictures! Not much, just of all of us (and of Matt's RMS-signed laptop), but still cute!
It turns out it's really hard to take photos of snow, on a tripod, with an old manual-focus Nikon micro lens... especially when it's well above freezing and all the snow is melting. Oh, well!
I don't write about music much (nor make lists of things, here, much), but I figured I'd share the six most obviously perfect albums, in case any of the few of you here hadn't listened to one of them...
This started as Robb and others poking fun at me for calling Boston's Boston a perfect album... so I set out to find a small set of albums that I was OK with calling perfect, instead, so they wouldn't make quite so much fun of me...
"Perfect" means... every song is one you wouldn't mind running into at any point, but also the album as a whole works together... and makes sense. And stuff. I don't have words for music, really...
All but one of the albums are from before I was born, and the remaining one is still 14 years old... this is mostly because of my musical taste, of course, but I think (unfortunately) that the production of "epic" music is probably declining... you can blame it on the studios, artists, society, whatever... I don't know what it is, for sure, but I'd certainly love it if someone repaired the situation!
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Boston — Boston (1976)
This album was the soundtrack for most of my high school career; it remains the most consistently complete and perfect album I've ever heard. Some (Robb/Gino) call it overproduced, among other things...
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Radiohead — The Bends (1995)
I was only recently introduced to this album (and Radiohead in general) by Robb/DJ/Savannah last year. The first half makes for great music the first time through; the second half takes a few plays, but eventually it's hard to hear just one song and stop without completing the album...
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The Beatles — Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
For a long time before I knew any music, I had a single CD of Beatles songs. It turned out most of them were from Sgt. Pepper; hearing them in context made them all the better!
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Pink Floyd — The Wall (1979)
The longest album on the list, at 80 minutes, The Wall is one that's been with me for quite a while now. You also can't claim to have listened to it until you've listened to it through nice headphones... there's a whole additional... album, if you listen right.
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The Beatles — Rubber Soul (1965)
A significant part of Rubber Soul was the soundtrack for freshman year at RPI; it's also my favorite Beatles album, now, despite the fact that it's comprised of some of their more ignored-but-still-approachable songs.
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Genesis — Invisible Touch (1986)
I was introduced to Genesis by Dad, who has a bunch of albums on CD, including this one. Besides Domino, this album feels short and to the point, which probably contributes a bit to its "perfection". Not complaining about Domino, either, because it's definitely the best song!
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Just after Thanksgiving, I ordered an Asus Eee PC 901 from Amazon. I had a few reasons for this rather large purchase: first and foremost, I want to work on Wayland with Robb, but need an Intel graphics card (we're planning on making this our RCOS project for next semester); it's fun to tell people I bought a new computer just to obtain a crappy graphics card; in addition, Kaylee's starting to show signs of age (being a year and a half old, and stuffed in my backpack and banged around daily... college life is not easy on a laptop, just ask Robb's, or Anthony's...), so I thought I should take a little stress off that machine; also, a little tiny laptop makes more sense in the classroom, gets out of the way more, and it's just plain adorable.
The machine I got is the Linux version, of course (more about that later). Intel Atom at 1.6 GHz, 1024x600, 9" matte display, keyboard about the size of my fingers, 20 GB SSD, 6-cell battery (lasts about 5 hours, though without wireless it's more like 8, and without X, 9), 802.11n, bluetooth, etc.
So! What have I found?
I love the keyboard. I wasn't expecting to so quickly adapt, but it's just fine for me! I'm writing this post on it, I write code on it, typing is no problem whatsoever. The small screen is no problem, either — it's led to me thinking a bit about how I use a computer, and I'll show you what's come of that later... it's plenty bright, too. The wireless card is extremely strong (comparable to, or perhaps better than the Thinkpad T61, worlds better than my MacBook Pro)... the camera is acceptable but I really don't care about little integrated webcams. The build quality is perfectly acceptable, it's no aluminum MBP, but it's not as flimsy as, say, the poor parts of the T61 (everyone I know with a T61 has parts flaking off... unsurprisingly, if you play with it for a minute). The design is ... poor, but not as poor as your run-of-the-mill laptop. To be honest, the Dell Mini 9 design is far superior, just in terms of jutting bits and the overall material consistency. For some reason, Carol prefers the Eee's design over the Mini, but she also has a sunshine-yellow, cursive-font Amarok... (just teasing!)... here's what it looks like, and it's a reasonably adequate explanation of the feel of the design of the Eee, if the Mini 9 is iTunes: (and mind you, we still love Carol, just like we still love the Eee!)
The SSD is awesome, though it could have been significantly more awesome. It turns out Asus ships different SSDs in Europe vs. America; Europeans get transfer speeds of ~80MB/s, which is only slightly slower than Jayne's epic hard drives. However, my Eee (and many of the other American Eees) only gets ~30MB/s, which is closer to the speed of the T61's hard drive. Nothing horrible, but certainly nothing to write home about, either. None of these speeds compare at all to the >200MB/s that people are getting with the new Intel SSDs, but those cost twice as much as an Eee by themselves! (someday, someday, I keep promising myself... two years, perhaps, with my Nehalem laptop :-D) In any case, it's really really nice to be able to swing the machine around without worrying about moving disks, especially with it being so small and light! (it's really too bad that there's still fans... and more unfortunate yet that the Atom runs warm...)
The trackpad is no problem, though I of course have the same problems with it as I do on my MacBook Pro: I cannot obtain an acceleration that I can deal with. I wish there were a magical "match OS X's mouse acceleration" button, but there's not... perhaps there will be in Wayland's input system. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
The Xandros install that ships with the machine is a piece of crap. Whoever thought that shipping Xandros was a good idea... needs to talk to whoever wrote the epic Ubuntu-based launcher that ships on the Mini 9. Anyway... after taking ten minutes to determine whether I had accidentally ordered a Windows XP Eee, Robb and I spent a few more minutes laughing quite hard on the floor in our room before grabbing an external CD drive and installing Ubuntu.
I've since hacked up my Ubuntu install quite a much: instead of a full GNOME, I'm using awesome, a tiling window manager, scriptable with Lua. This way, windows take up the full size of my display, always... I have nine "tags", which I currently use purely as virtual desktops, but which actually carry a bit more recombinational power that I have yet to learn to make use of. I keep Pidgin on the last tag, Thunderbird on the second-to-last, Firefox on the middle one, and tend to work on the beginning tags, heading right. This has worked well for me so far, though I think it's rather unconventionally simple compared to the crazy flexible way most awesome users work.
I've constructed a tiny kernel that has just what I need, and massively edited boot and shutdown scripts. Boot is between ten and fifteen seconds now. Halt/reboot is like three, as it's basically just a sync and power down. I'd be able to do five second boot if I had one of the 80MB/s SSDs, but ... I don't!
There's a bunch of buttons built into this silver line between the keyboard and the hinge — I've got them set up to a) play the Jayne song, from Firefly b) xkill c&d) turn on and off the VGA port, auto-detect its resolution, and (if turning it on), set the background to a plain color, for "presentation mode". They're pretty cool, even if I don't usually like extra buttons. I use GNOME-Do for most other launching tasks...
The new hostname is Simon, of course, what with the Eee being a PC (so it must be male), but rather effeminate, and fitting in with my recent Firefly naming scheme...
I'm on my way to the GNOME Developer's Summit, but some news just came down the RSS tubes:
MacBook Pro video flaw
Apparently they're going to pay us back for having repaired our machines because of the flaw, and they're fixing the flaw for free from now on out (I presume this means out-of-warranty, which is good for everyone!). They're also acknowledging that it was still a problem with machines shipping last month (probably even this month), and that NVIDIA supposedly misled them in suggesting that no MacBook Pros were affected...
I had a thought yesterday about a feature I'd like to see in Nautilus or Finder...
If you're anything like me, you probably keep a lot of crap on your desktop, mostly related to things you're currently working on (and you file them away later). This certainly isn't the most efficient system, and I can assure you that it's not the prettiest.
So I thought... wouldn't it be cool if you had a little menulet that allowed you to rapidly create directories (in a definable place, say ~/Documents/Projects, or something), and switch your Desktop between representing the contents of each of these project directories easily? If you could get this implemented, it would also allow you to assign a particular project's directory to a Space/Virtual Desktop, I suppose, but I don't use them, so I'm more interested in the thought of a cleaner desktop, and the inherent organizational improvements.
I shared this idea with Robb (who noted that he thought something similar might possibly be in KDE4, though none of us have paid much attention there), and he started to implement it in Nautilus, but discovered that, while Nautilus respects XDG_DESKTOP_DIR, there's no way to convince it to reload the directory (SIGHUP, the most obvious choice, also causes the creation of a new browser window). He also noted that simply replacing the ~/Desktop folder won't work, because, if you've registered for filesystem notifications on the old ~/Desktop, you'll lose your notifications when you replace the directory.
Finder is a different story entirely. Apple uses some sort of magic to determine what directory is the Desktop, and I haven't figured it out yet. It was very promising at first... I created two directories with files in them, deleted ~/Desktop (with root privileges, because a user can't delete their own Desktop...), linked one of the new directories to ~/Desktop, and *BOOM* the files are there on my desktop. But that's the only time it works... if you try to change the link, the desktop continues to represent the new folder, no matter what you do. I have a thought regarding chained links, but I'm not actually sure it's going to work; I'll try it tomorrow.
So! If anyone has any suggestions... now would be the time :-)
So, one week later, it's time to write the obligatory what's-cool-in-the-app-store post! I'm sure my answers won't be any different than everyone else's, but it's this sort of post that's always funny to look back at in the future :-D Remote — The single most awesome iPhone app, Remote lets you control iTunes on your computer from anywhere on your network, with your phone! It looks almost exactly like the 'iPod' application that's been on the iPhone since day one, but changes are instantly reflected in the music playing from iTunes! CubicMan — The only non-free app on this list, CubicMan is a game that I remember from the jailbreak days; though it was much less polished then, it's still just as enjoyable. I'd recommend it to anyone, unless you're easily frustrated. NetNewsWire — Brent Simmons's classic news client, for the iPhone! Syncs with the desktop client through NewsGator. The only issue I have is that it's a little pokey, but apparently he's fixed a lot of performance problems in point releases that have yet to be vetted for the App Store. BoxOffice — Awesome local theatre search and Rotten tomatoes access app. Not much else to say! Twitterific — The iPhone version of the Iconfactory's now-famous Twitter client; looks just as nice as its big brother, the ads on the free version aren't that annoying, and (besides Twitter downtime) the application works great! Facebook — The 1.1 update to the official Facebook application added the one feature I was planning on complaining about: lack of wall access; indeed, it also added photo tagging, access to extended profile information, and more! This app more or less is already at the point where it completely replaces everything one could possibly want from the also-awesome web app. midomi — A nice listen-to-music-and-find-it application. Works well for me, others aren't so happy!
Any Mac users here probably know of Perian — in fact, I'd venture a guess you've probably got it installed!
In any case, I'm just writing this to note that if you try to export (transcode) a video file in Quicktime Pro, there's a chance that, if you have Perian installed, the audio won't come through — in fact, you'll find yourself completely unable to extract the audio from the file!
The only solution I've found is to use the proper codec for the video (and I've not found a solution for situations where said proper codec doesn't exist, except try to wade through the mencoder {warning: 1.1 MB wall of text} mess...). Perian's great, but this would be a good bug for them to fix.
I've only had this problem with DivX files, which, luckily, have an alternate, 'official' codec.
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