BunkBlog

Wow, that was a long outage.  My hosting service has had a rocky week – I spent two days with email being rejected (if you sent me something and it said I didn’t exist, I do now), and then the servers lost their network connectivity this morning for about six hours. For Dreamhost, that’s very unusual. When I was with CCLhosting, I expected random outages but DH has been very reliable for years now. I’m sure this was just a really bad coincidence of unlucky events.

Back to ripping my CDs – I’m up to nearly 39000 tracks now.

Every few weeks, I update my MP3 player with a “new music” playlist. I used to draw this from the “New Release Rack” at a long-running Midland radio station that had a simulcast here in San Angelo. The simulcast ended (replaced by yet another hits of the blah blah I believe), and then the Midland station turned to Tejano music itself. What a firestorm of mediocrity. But media consolidation has no effect on variety and quality.

Moving on, I decided to use my old favorite from high school, KROQ, as inspiration to keep in touch with the cool new tracks from the music world. They kept a nice set of playlists online, to include their most-requested, most-played, and newest additions. I’d select a few from each list, and away I’d go with a new set of tunes. Last month, I noticed they’d added something even cooler, the Top 106.7 lists. Every year, the station compiles a list of the top 107 songs (they claim 106.7 because of their FM frequency, but 7 tenths of a song is odd). They had listed several of those annual lists on their site. I took a look at the 2008 list and added that to my Sansa. After a few weeks, I had heard all the tracks enough and went back to KROQ for a refresh. Their lists are all gone. Even using deep links from Google searches ends up at their newly-bare homepage. *sigh*

Thankfully, KNDD in Seattle is another great station and their playlist is still listed, so that takes care of my New Music Rack list. And, I found someone online who compiled all the KROQ annual lists from the 80s. Now I’ve got the 1988 list on my player, and I’m very amused. Some of the songs from the year I graduated high school stand up quite well, others not so much. Cocteau Twins are on the “not so much” list for sure. And, what happened to the band Camouflage? They sounded just like Depeche Mode, yet Martin Gore continues to play and Camouflage is gone. Listening to the Sugarcubes is an interesting flashback to a time before Bjork became such a spectacle. Sadly, I did not have nor could not find some of the tracks, so I have the top 93 of 1988.  Close enough, for 20 years later.

On a related note, combined with burning through the Amazon gift card The Boy gave me for Father’s Day, and ripping the several boxes of CDs hiding in the closet, I’m up to over 200 gigs of music on my computer. I’m not addicted.

Caution: extreme geekery ahead.  Do not continue reading unless you know what hda and hdb are, and the joys of logical volume managers.  Cheers.

Way back last weekend, the DVR I built in 2006 decided to be cranky. I had originally built it with a 250 GB IDE drive, then added a 160 GB IDE drive which I’d salvaged from an older WinBox I replaced.  Sometime after that, I put in a 400 GB SATA drive.  That brought me over 800 GB total capacity, which has been enough for the past couple years. I noticed the temperature was increasing on the hard drives a while ago.

I didn’t worry about it, as the machine worked just fine regardless.  Then. last week, I noticed a little hiccup in the video feed while watching the news. As ever, when the tuners have ever had a problem, I rebooted the DVR to reset the tuners. Turns out, the tuners weren’t the problem. As the machine rebooted, it came up with an error which I’ve never seen before, and then halted the boot. Linux boxes don’t tend to halt their boot processes for much beyond catastrophic failure. I spent that night and part of the next day doing the research I needed to, and ran all the appropriate fixes (LVM activation and E2fsck with alternate master record blah blah). Finally, nearly one day after the machine went down, it was back again.

As you can see from the thin white line near the end of this graph, this is the only significant downtime my DVR has suffered in at least the last year.

I looked through the messages log and saw a lot of errors for hdb that imply some hardware failure. Since I bought that hard drive about 6 years ago and it’s been in constant use for over three years (the DVR never sleeps), it’s not surprising I suppose. Now, of course, I have to take care of this. Since I’ve got the machine set up as an LVM drive, I can add a new hard drive and move the data on to it, then remove the old drive. This is complicated by the fact that I have about 100 GB free, and the dying drive is 160 GB. So, I need to add a new drive before I can remove the old drive. That case is kind of crowded. The joys of vgreduce, pvremove and all manner of other exciting commands are in my future.  I’ll probably get a 500 or 750 GB drive, so the DVR will finally crest the 1 terabyte mark. I’ve already got more than a terabyte on my desktop, so it seems only fair that the DVR get to the same level.

The LVM setup is very confused right now anyway.  I’ve got hda1 (4.5 GB) as a standard ext3 boot and root drive. Simple.  MythTV originally required a “live TV” partition, so I had hda3 (15 GB) as the cache and hda4 (212 GB) as additional storage space (the recordings and such). When I added the 160, that became one big hdb1, still simple. The next upgrade of MythTV removed the necessity to separate live TV from recorded shows, and so the hda3 partition became useless. I added it to the LVM pool, which is a bit silly – hda3 and hda4 are both in there, and not just one merged partition. When I bought the 400 GB drive, that got tacked on as sda1. So, my LVM pool is hda3 hda4 hdb1 sda1. When I get done with the next planned upgrade, it will be hda3 hda4 sda1 sdb1.  Maybe I’ll go ahead and merge hda3 and hda4 while I’ve got the thing down anyway. Pretty much any drive I buy today will be large enough for the 217 GB of hda data and the 160 GB of hdb data, and then I’ll have to delete and recreate the hda3 partition so I can add it back to the LVM pool.  In case you want to sympathize with my plight, here’s the full sequence: physically add sdb, partition sdb1 as LVM, pvcreate sdb1, vgextend VG to include sdb1, pvmove all extents from hda3 hda4 and hdb1 to sdb1, vgreduce hda3 etc. to make them no longer active participants in the LVM, repartition hda3 from the old hda3 and hda4, vgextend to include new hda3, turn off machine and physically remove dying hdb.  Then, it’s back and room for more packrat behavior!

More DVR fun… This morning, one of the five fans in the DVR started making the grinding sound that indicates something has brushed against the fan blades. After two years of never opening the case, I finally cracked that bad boy… yuck. After giving every fan and air duct a good vacuuming (sorry Leo), the machine is now five degrees cooler inside.  Guess that worked.

Sadly, I now have 20 minutes of downtime this morning. Linux geeks are all about the uptime.

I tried out Wolfram Alpha today for the first time. The new search engine did not impress me. It found no notable events for my birthday (I’m notable!) and then the amazing thing: a search for July 20, 1969 said the most notable event was Josh Holloway’s birthday. Huh. I think something else may have happened that day.

I realized that I may have mentioned a new job here and there through cyberspacewebland, and yet I haven’t said anything about it since taking the job.

So, here we go… My new job is running a simulator for a war game.  I make airplanes and tanks move around in virtual reality, and send messages that pretend to be from those planes and tanks to other planes or bases.  Troubleshooting new scenarios is a fun little puzzle, ensuring things happen when they’re supposed to and that no aircraft remain in the air without forward motion (hovering C130 anyone?).  It’s fun, at least for me.

And, there’s an RPG propped in the corner of my office.  I’m pretty sure there’s a scene in a Daniel Keys Moran novel like that.

Just saw a Citi commercial touting their ability to make wise investment decisions.  I beg to differ.  They asked the U.S. government for a bailout, if you recall.  When any company needs to ask me for money, I question their business acumen.

Happy April Fool’s Day.  Today, even more than other days, don’t believe anything on the internet.  I saw squeeze bacon and a Tauntaun sleeping bag on Thinkgeek, and a Sony UMPC with mini-CD drive on UMPC Portal.  Who knows what we’ll see on Slashdot and others by the time the geeks go to sleep tonight?

To complain to Youtube, click here.

Scroll to the very bottom and click on “new issue”

Select “suspended account” from the options and express your opinion.

The mediafire link (to mirror the video) is here.

Came across this Watchmen-inspired animation on Boing Boing this morning.  Just got to watch it when I got home from work (stupid anti-fun filter on-base), and it’s freakin’ awesome.  I love the idea of Ozymandias playing Shaggy, and Rorschach being just a little nutty.  Right.

Michael Phelps, fastest swimmer on record, smoked pot. Well, that proves it then – doing drugs leads to nothing but failure. Some other pot-smokers I know of, just off the top of my head: President Obama, former President Bush, former President Clinton… Yep, a road to ruin there.

I was behind a Hummer H2 today and noticed it had tie-down points.  WTF?  Is someone sling-loading these things below a Chinook?

‘Fantasy Island’ star Ricardo Montalban died this morning.  One of the most surreal memories I have of Montalban was in 1994.  Driving around the desert of southeastern Arizona in a friend’s sports car (incredibly unwise in an Arizona August), listening to Ricardo Montalban on the radio. Montalban was reciting the history of the border region, including the phrase indelibly etched in my brain, “The seven cities of Cibola,” in that rich baritone.

Goodbye, Mr. Roark.

The woman who is known as the voice of the Enterprise has died, at the age of 76. She’ll always be Nurse Chapel to some, but I’ll remember her as Lwaxana Troi, that saucy lady. Majel Barrett Roddenberry is the only person to have been in every movie, even if only as a disembodied voice.  That voice lives on, in the next Trek film, which is a great tribute to honor a great actress.

I’m sure I can think of someone in the Frozen North who could put one of these trees together…

The tree has a MySpace page.  That’s just wrong.

What’s that, you say? Photos aren’t good enough for you? Fine, you greedy buggers, how about a quick 9-minute highlight video of our Caribbean trip? That should hold you!
More »

Prince, in thrall to his Jehovah Witness beliefs, seems to be opposed to gay marriage and adoption.

Prince: Prince Says God Against Homosexuality.

This is the guy who wrote “Pussy Control” and “Darling Nikki?”  What the hell?

I do not think it means what you think it means.

(H/T to danielmedic)

The great and mighty Siberian husky, Banshee, defended the family from a giant polar bear this morning.  Well, not so much “defended” as “cowered in front of” and not so much “polar bear” as “painted sheep statue.”  But, it was a great adventure regardless.

After the Sheeptacular in October 2007, many of these decorated sheep appeared around town:

One of them was on our walking path this morning.  The dogs were pretty sure it was a giant monster that was going to eat them.

Dear coworkers who babble all too frequently near my desk: “nonplussed” actually does not mean the same as “unfazed” but um…the opposite.  Thank you, please drive through.