Category: Geek

Experimenting with Linux distributions on a removable drive at work lately, just to see how the desktop scene has changed in recent years (birdhouse admin is all command-line and web-based, and I haven’t tried running a desktop Linux since 2001). Over the past week, installed Gentoo, Knoppix (Debian), and Fedora Core 3. Notes below.
Continue reading “Gentoo, Knoppix, Fedora”

Interesting Wired article on Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent — amazed to learn that BitTorrent traffic now accounts for up to 1/3 of all internet traffic, by some estimates(!). Part-way through the piece an interviewee refers to “Microsoft DRM being useful to ‘keep content out of pirate hands…'”, which naturally sets Cory Doctorow into paroxysms of rational response at Boing-Boing:

…there is not a single piece of content in the history of the universe that has been “kept out of pirate hands” (i.e. kept off the Internet, or prevented from being stamped out in pirate CD factories abroad) by DRM. It’s a weird kind of Big Lie strategy by the DRM people to talk about how DRM can prevent “piracy” when there has never, ever been an example of this happening … BitTorrent proves the futility of DRM as surely as DRM turns honest customers into studio-hating downloaders.

Later:

I bought a Sopranos Season Three DVD set for a friend’s Christmas this year. When the friend opened the gift on her Christmas holiday in France, the discs wouldn’t play in her hotel’s French DVD player; nor would they play in the on-site English PowerBook — because the discs had DRM. At that point, the rational thing to do would have been to sell the discs on Amazon and just download Season Three using BitTorrent — the studios have rigged the game so that you get a superior product (e.g., something you can actually watch) when you download bootlegs from BitTorrent, and they actively punish customers who buy their products instead of downloading them.

In a continued public volley, Wired editor Chris Anderson responded to Doctorow’s blog entry, and Doctorow posted an additional rebuttal.

via Weblogsky

Had the opportunity today to install MySQL from source on a rather old SunOS (pre-Solaris) server for another department on campus. Kind of whacky – the gods in that department can’t or won’t support a centralized database on the box, so individual groups have to set up their own installations on separate ports with separate sockets… Absurd. A few sticky spots, but it’s working. Good learning experience, and a good opportunity to put lessons from the Admin class (which was also a Solaris class) to work.

Finished part I of the Unix System Administration class yesterday. Heard some interesting bits from the prof on how national laboratories dealing with problems of missing hard drives are moving to NetBoot scenarios, where the NetBoot server is behind “GGG” (guards, gates and guns). He had just finished purchasing, and is preparing to install, $38,000 worth of Apple XServes and X-Raids for a massively redundant, super-secure NetBoot deployment… designed to service four (count ’em!) users.

Talking a lot about backup techniques in the class this week. Question: at what point does a system become so large that backups simply defy the laws of physics and the limits of current technology? Heard about a system he had worked on with hundreds of servers, each with many terabytes of storage – around 200TB of data in all. Their engineers were among the best in the world at building high-speed parallel networks, super-efficient load-balancing servers, etc. And they owned some of the largest and fastest tape silos in the world. But no matter how much money they threw at the problem, they were not able to back up more than 75TB per week. Full nightly backups were simply not going to happen for them.

In my own little world, finally, after all these years, have a nightly backup system in place for the whole house – a modified version of the rsync scripts I use for birdhouse and journalism, which at all times keep both a complete bit-perfect current mirror and also parallel dirs for each of the past 30 days containing changed or deleted files. But for the home network, replaced the version of rsync that ships with OS X with the binary from RsyncX, which preserves HFS+ attributes and metadata.

Over at fortytwomedia, Web Design Predictions for 2005. Summary: Retro looks are out, wicked worn is in. Multi-faceted categorization will get bigger (e.g. adding a piece of content to multiple categories or views; a no-brainer for bloggers, but surprisingly few commercial sites do this). “Table-using designers increasingly seen as belonging to a lower caste.” Pure red falls into disfavor (thank gawd!) “Web-safe palette is at last widely understood to be obsolete.” Chronological info display popularized by weblogs is downplayed (this is an issue we face continuously with serial publishing – the necessity of a CMS to place the most important — rather than the newest — story at the top; MT requires awkward workarounds to accomplish this).

And the big news for the J-School: We’ve gone so long between redesigns that brown is back in vogue!

After months of occasional experimentation, I finally made Firefox my default browser a few weeks ago.

Encouraging a Mac user to stop using Safari is a harder sell than encouraging a Windows user to stop using Explorer; Mac users already have tabbed browsing, and aren’t plagued by spyware, security craters, or broken CSS support. And Safari has a cleaner interface, so Firefox isn’t going to win over Mac users on looks alone. But FF does have luscious chocolatey goodness where it counts: More powerful bookmark management, plugin sidebars, better resource management (or so it seems), embedded page searching and search string highlighting (this feature alone is worth switching for), even faster page rendering than Safari… the list goes on.

Also experimenting a bit with Firefox extensions, and am blown away by Chris Pederick’s Web Developer Extension, which can analyze any web page (especially ones you’re working on) any which way to Sunday. Rather than list its features, just scan this page and imagine being able to do everything listed there from a single browser toolbar. Phenomenal.

Now if only Thunderbird could make similar advances on the state-of-the-art mail client technology — do for email what Firefox has done for browsers… But judging from the relative amount of press the two are receiving, the Thunderbird project doesn’t seem to have nearly the same momentum as Firefox.