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GRAFFITI -- September 10, 2007 thru September 16, 2007>> Link to the Current Week <<Last Week << Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun >> Next Week Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable. About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message. |
 
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September 10, 2007
2222 - Good evening. First off, a big Happy Birthday to tonight's mystery guest. Next, I've been trolling through my GoDaddy account trying to figure out how to transfer one of the domains under my sway to the beneficiary. A couple of years ago, my friend Trang was having a less-than-fun time dealing with her brand-new husband's deployment to Iraq. She wanted some web-way to stay in touch with him. I set up a domain for her as a gift, plunked Wordpress onto it, and she was off to the races. Bruce has been back for a few months now, and the blog is a bit mothballed at the moment. But she doesn't want to let the domain expire, so I'm giving her control of it (as I don't plan on paying the annuals forever). It turns out the correct choice when starting down the path of transferring a domain OUT of one's control is the "Account Change" item. Well named, don't you think? Anyway, now I know, and she'll send me the info I need to get the ball rolling. Then she'll get a confirming email, do the next part, and I'll confirm final transfer. If, later, she wants to actually move the domain off our server, I'll archive it up onto CD for her. But the incremental cost of that domain to our server's operations is approximately nil, so she can hang out as long as desired.
I've got some work-related DNS changes to execute in a short while, once we're past ... heh, there's the page I set up to remind me. Oh, yeah ... once we're well past working hours for most of the normal users. It's a low-impact change, made lower risk by moving the change to off-hours. And now that's done.
Meantime I'm noticing just how much this MacBook can suck under a heavy load. I seriously don't understand why a dual-processor machine like this can't keep up with anything I throw at it. I've got a moderately heavy patching process running in Windows under Parallels, and that grinds UI responsiveness in OS X to a slow crawl. Once I've got an application open (like BBedit, right now), I don't have much problem, but if I want to switch context... for example, it just took over 30 seconds to give me control of an already running instance of Firefox. And nearly 10 seconds to switch back to the active BBedit window. More experiments at a later date...
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September 11, 2007
2006 - Good evening. Progress is. It may be that I need to reboot this beast. I don't have any real sense of what's going on under the hood. I've had Parallels crap all over the carpet three times in two days. Do I ask too much of computers to use this incarnation of the Computer for the Rest of Us? Let's be clear, there are things I like a lot about it. But as the time for Leopard grows near, I consider the possibility of running Linux here instead. I may explore how easy it is to backup the whole system, then reimage with Linux for a few days, just to see how it feels. Because I'm a bit underwhelmed at the moment. Until recently it's been stable and performed well. Hmmm, I thought of this last night, and should look into the possibility that the encrypted home filesystem places an undue load on things, especially when I'm doing stuff that works that hard (like Parallels, etc). I'm going to try a few things. Back later, or tomorrow.
Grrr. I see that I never updated my redirector late yesterday evening when I wrote the Monday post. Sorry about that, it was here, so was I, but you couldn't know that. Later...
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September 12, 2007
2252 - Good evening. Heh. Jerry noted in Mail (probably in response to a reader letter), "Good grief. By 100 MW power delivered to Earth I don't mean as a death ray. I mean to a receiver site." I sent this to him:
Well, sure ... but to those who should fear us, that's not a bad piece of disinformation. Talk about projection of power... Certainly faster time-on-target than a carrier group. grin, .brian
So I turned off FileVault last night. One of the features I was running into is that FileVault pretends to use up space much faster than it's actually consuming it, because it does something like decrypt itself into a sparse filesystem while in operation. So I was "using" the encrypted folder, plus "using the data decrypted for use. I was below 10G available, theoretically. If that had been actually true, I would not have had the space needed to turn off FileVault, because for a while, your space requirements double. So I rebooted, and let FileVault recover space. That done, I turned off FileVault, which took nearly an hour and a half to decrypt my whole home. Now my home is 38G, and I have 51G available on my 120G system disk. That's much better headroom. And things seem definitely snappier than when FileVault was running. Once again I'm testing with lots of stuff open, including a Parallels VM. Let's see if I can provide a bit more stress....
I just turned up the heat by starting up the second VM, a Linux configuration currently running Ubuntu. I can tell that things are getting busy, because running top tells me that the processor usage is headed up over 100% (I can do that with a Core 2 Duo in this box). Here:
203 automount 0.0% 0:00.04 3 41 34 224K+ 732K+ 424K+ 29.0M Processes: 65 total, 2 running, 63 sleeping... 232 threads 22:14:51 Load Avg: 1.22, 1.18, 0.92 CPU usage: 17.6% user, 35.0% sys, 47.5% idle SharedLibs: num = 175, resident = 13.3M code, 2.02M data, 2.61M LinkEdit MemRegions: num = 137566, resident = 1.53G + 6.11M private, 202M shared PhysMem: 1.50G wired, 323M active, 163M inactive, 1.98G used, 25.1M free VM: 14.2G + 125M 322224(451) pageins, 226884(1056) pageouts PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE 717 top 49.5% 0:19.30 1 18 20 732K 360K 1.19M 27.0M 685 Parallels 27.2% 8:38.76 19 201 494 350M+ 97.3M 67.4M+ 1.29G 704 Parallels 14.3% 4:43.37 20 256 491 972M 89.8M 55.7M 1.78G 582 iTunes 3.6% 20:14.42 11 209 2785 113M- 13.0M 115M- 722M+ 0 kernel_tas 2.5% 38:50.35 50 2 1872 15.9M 0B 262M- 1.45G- 374 WindowServ 1.2% 9:33.89 3 498 >>>>> 3.21M+ 33.2M- 30.7M- 1.80G 660 firefox-bi 0.6% 0:57.93 7 103 347 20.9M+ 14.4M+ 30.4M+ 426M 390 Finder 0.4% 0:02.14 3 114 162 1.93M- 4.09M+ 2.27M+ 370M 414 Terminal 0.3% 0:49.69 10 154 207 1.76M 9.32M 7.68M 377M 715 UserNotifi 0.3% 0:00.16 1 64 88 980K+ 1.54M+ 3.29M+ 335M+ 398 Quicksilve 0.2% 2:21.58 5 115 569 71.6M- 2.87M 22.3M+ 583M
And the box starts to stagger about a bit... Admittedly I'm putting more of a load on it than yesterday, by quite a bit. Anyway, bedtime now. More tuning later.
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September 13, 2007
2207 - Good evening. I can certainly say that OS X without FileVault running on my home directory, when I use Parallels actively, is much snappier. I was able to leave WinXP running in Parallels, music playing in iTunes, a variety of other apps running, while I fired up and played the demo for Prey. Moderately fun, a strong story, but not nearly the same freedom of play as there is in Doom3 (Prey uses the Doom3 engine). No skips, drops or crashes, running at 1280x1024. It did slow down at 1600x1200, but then most games do at high texture settings.
Up early tomorrow, 'cause I'm headed up to Gaithersburg for a retirement shindig in the afternoon for one of the guys I worked with up in Montgomery County while I was with NERDS. Good timing, too. I heard about it from Larry just today. Usually those sorts of things pass me by like tour dates with Cyndi Lauper — I hear about it three days later. See y'all.
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September 14, 2007
2151 - Good evening. What fun! I took off from work a little later than I expected, and made it to Bill's send-off gig at Ernie's in Gaithersburg by about quarter to three. The timing was about right - Nearly everyone was there, I went in and worked my way across the room, stopping to say "Hi" to friends from all across the Montgomery County organization, many from the DPWT division. We had a nice lunch, a good chat with friends, and a decent roast of Bill, with pictures! As the flowers on the icing on the cake, I managed to make the run home from Gaithersburg in Friday afternoon traffic in just under an hour (an authenticated miracle).
There's plenty to do tomorrow, but I think we'll plan our day around a visit to G Street Fabrics, this time the Rockville store. Last December we went to the Seven Corners store, and found all the fabric that turned into our bedspread, and helped us pick the new wall color for our bedroom. The plans for the window treatments didn't come out the way Marcia wanted, so we're going to hunt up some more fabrics for that. She wants grey, I want dark and rich. She's already got grey carpet, so I'm angling for a win here, not a compromise... Grin.
root@vetinari:~# apt-get dist-upgrade Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Calculating upgrade... Done The following packages will be REMOVED: compiz-gtk dbus-1-utils human-cursors-theme kinoplus libglew1 libgnome-speech3 libnss3 libuniconf4.2 libwnck18 The following NEW packages will be installed: apparmor apparmor-utils apturl bluez-gnome bogofilter bogofilter-bdb bogofilter-common . . . xwud yelp zenity zlib1g 968 upgraded, 151 newly installed, 9 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 725MB of archives. After unpacking 499MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
That's the start of an upgrade to Gutsy Gibbon (current) via commandline update. There are several hundred package names elided from that listing, just to give you a sense of what's involved in something like that. It's fun because I'm screwing around with Parallels, and I can put regular Ubuntu back in about 15 minutes if I bork things badly. But I might as well do some bug testing and reporting, be useful to my recommended distro these days. I do NOT recommend doing this on a system that you count on for any sort of work or play, and if there's unbacked up data on such a box, well, shame on you!
When I started the process running, the update reported about 16 minutes and change to get the packages all downloaded. But that was with a kick-ass repository. Once it got everything it needed from multiples, the baseline us.archive.ubuntu.com round-robin URL kicked in, and completion (of downloads) is floating between 20 minutes and an hour, as each package can be downloaded from another mirror in the pool, and they have varying speeds. Once all the packages are down, it'll take some finite-but-long period to apply all those updated packages in an order that doesn't break the running system while they're applied. Then I'm SURE I'll have to reboot to bring a new kernel online. I might have interesting things to report tomorrow, or maybe just boring stuff. We'll see, won't we? Ciao!
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September 15, 2007
2144 - Good evening. This morning, as we were preparing to head over to G Street Fabrics, the phone system at work called me - there was a voice mail notification of a down system service. Sigh. So, we got in the car, and went to the office. A box didn't come back to life from an automated reboot. Something to keep an eye on. But the manual process worked fine for me this morning. So, after testing the now-available services, and checking the logs for anything untoward, we continued on with the shopping.
We found some nice fabric for drapes and accents, and Marcia found the satin and velvet she needed to make something for Faye to wear at her wedding. Back home, I noodled for a while, then did a woodshop project - a desktop organizer for pens and other assorted stuff. I don't really like the coffee mug solution, nor the plastic organizers. I'll put up a picture tomorrow, the stain/seal is still drying.
Anyway, early bed. I'm exhausted.
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September 16, 2007
 Homemade desktop accessory |
1721 - Good afternoon. Slept well, awoke to temperatures in the low 50's. Feels more like Fall than late Summer. Yeah, at right is the thing-holder I cobbled together yesterday to hold the stuff I care about, on my desk. I like it mostly because it limits how much I can keep - coffee mugs and other more formal round-ish accessories tend to hold far too much stuff, and most of it never gets used. The back row is slots, for things like the scissors and letter opener. Small round holes for pens on the second tier, large holes for highlighters on the lowest tier. Four pieces of wood, plus some filler strips to make the one large slot I made in the upper into smaller individual slots. A bit of sanding and some dark walnut stain/sealer finished it up. I'm sure that Marcia is expecting a crappy hand-thrown ashtray, next. Sheesh!
The upgraded-to-Gutsy Ubuntu install is working, but that's all I know right now. I've not taken the time to experiment, as shopping, shopping, and mowing have eaten my day.
We broke Iraq. How many more troops and billions are Congress going to pour down the rathole? I *do* think that the job is worth doing, as we went in and broke it. But a Congress divided and trying to appease voters who only know they want the troops home... it's hard. No politician is going to tell the truth. We fucked up going in, and we'll fuck up worse pulling out before the job is done. Meantime, our armed forces make the sacrifices on our behalf... My condolences to the families and units of the fallen. You do us all honor with your commitment to freedom and your country.
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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.
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