April 2006 Archives
Those of you have known me for a long time (at least since Case), might be a bit shocked by the subject of this post. Unfortunately for all of my friends who would like to see me imbibe, the reasons for my hangover spawn from ingesting a different brownish liquid. But before I go into that, I need to tell a story.
En route to Coachella, Mike decided that he would like to leave the bay area on Friday afternoon, and spend Friday and most of Saturday in Three Rivers, visiting with Elizabeth. Once this course of action was decided upon, we needed an activity. Something easy like a nice hike in Sequoia is too pedestrian for Mike. Instead, the team decided upon some white water rafting, and he managed to rope Chris, Tanya, Zoey, Nate, Jessica, and Anjali into coming down to Three Rivers as well. After many e-mails, plotting, and planning, it was decided that we would do a morning rafting trip on the Kaweah river, and afterwards Mike and I would continue on South towards Coachella.
It seems that the Three Rivers area has been going through a bit of "crazy" weather the last few months. The winter and early spring were especially rainy, and this week a heat wave started up, which caused the snow up in the mountains to start melting. What this all means is that the Kaweah river is really rockin'. I was told that the rapids today would be class 4, and that the Kaweah river is especially challenging, because the rapids come in quick succession, without breaks in between.
As we were preparing to get into the water, I noticed that we were basically going to deploy our two rafts right into the middle of a big, hairy, class 4 rapid. I wasn't really too freaked out about, because I have been rafting before, and it was totally fine.
But, in retrospect, I should have been more nervous about the launch. Apparently, we didn't start off too well, and ended up in the "harder" fork around a giant rock. Pretty quickly, our raft knocked up against a rock, and myself and 2 other people on our raft fell out.
Immediately, I was sucked underneath our raft via the pooling currents in the area. I figured this out pretty quickly, and managed to scramble my way out from underneath there. I don't really remember if I had my eyes open or not, but I think I got pretty lucky in that I chose the correct direction in order to swim out from underneath the raft.
When free of the raft, I immediately popped up above the water (thanks life preserver!), and recognized that one of my fellow rafters was holding a paddle out for me. I managed to grab onto the oar part of the paddle with one hand, while trying to tread water with the other. Unfortunately my grip failed, and that was the last I saw of the raft for quite awhile.
So much happened to me as I bounced down the rapids that I don't remember every single thing. I do know that you are supposed to keep your head and toes above water, in order to minimize broken bones from rocks, and to lessen the chance of getting a foot caught by a rock, forcing your head to be submerged. I think this failure of position was partially due to a somewhat weakened state, from being under the raft for 20ish seconds (without getting a deep breath before going under), and the cold temperature of the water. But it was mainly due to how much I was being jostled around.
I found it extremely difficult to keep my head above water, and facing down-river, much less keep my legs up and attempt to swim upstream towards the raft.
All that I can say is that my head submerged a number of times, I was turned around a number of times, I probably swallowed some river water, and my feet banged against a number of rocks.
Being in that rapid sucked, and it wasn't too long before I realized that I was in serious trouble. I got extremely lucky to have made it through the rapid basically intact. Coming into a section of flat water, I was able to get my bearings, and could see both banks of the river, and another rapid looming up ahead. Even though my body was more stable, I was still having some difficulty catching a decent breath -- I think that I was hyperventilating at this point.
Basically, my feeling at this point was that if I didn't make it to shore, I would pretty-much be done for.
So, judging that I was closer to the right bank, I mustered the strength that I had remaining, and swam. Amazingly/fortunately/thankfully, I was able to swim enough to make it to shore. I spent about five minutes just sucking wind, with my torso still in the water, but my head and shoulders laying on land. During this time, some nice people across the river spotted me. The called the sheriff, and also set out for the other side of the river, to come and see if I was okay.
As I began to get my heart rate down a little, my stomach that it had had entirely too much exertion and river water. And so that, is when I threw up.
A lot.
The most, in fact, in quite some time. My body got literally everything out of my stomach. Just when I felt I was better, I wasn't. When I stood up for the first time, I found that there was more. By the time I finished, I had collected a pretty decent audience.
Three natives of the town managed to get over to me, and verify that I was more-or-less okay. Next, my raft materialized. Once I was able to prove that I could stand, and stop throwing up, I was able to get back on the raft and go to the other side of the river. By this time, there was an ambulance waiting for me.
The paramedics checked me out. They were primarily concerned with fluid in my lungs, but they weren't able find any signs of that. They gave me some O2, and recommended that I go to the hospital anyway, just in case there was some fluid in my lungs that they couldn't detect. I wasn't really sure what to do, but I didn't exhibit any of the symptoms that they mentioned, so I decided to go back to the cabin that we rented and just rest.
At this point, the symptoms that I have are mainly due to the throwing up - a lot of sinus drain, headache, nausea, various aches, pains, and sore spots, which when I thought about it, sounded a lot like a hangover.
The game plan for now is to get a lot of sleep, and see how I feel tomorrow. I think I will most-likely still be going to the concert, but I might go later than I had originally planned.
-Andy.
After receiving a tremendous amount of comment spam last night, I have decied to temporarily disable all comments on my blog. I am going to be out of town this weekend, and thus I'm not going to have the time, connectivity, or energy to keep things cleaned up.
Hopefully I'll have time next week to implement some better anti-spam solutions, so that I can have comments but keep the spammy ones out.
-Andy.
In gearing up for this weekend's Tool show, I took a walk down memory lane, and re-visited all of the past Tool concerts that I have attended. Before I got into blogging, I submitted my concert reviews to the ultimate Tool fan site, toolshed.down.net. Over the weekend, I dug around on the site, and found out that all of my reviews are still there. Save for the first one (which got its own dedicated page!), you'll have to search for my name in order to see my review:
- Tool in Cleveland, 11/18/96
- Lollapalooza in Chicago, July 25, 1997
- Ozzfest in Alpine Valley, Wisconsin on 7/19/98
- "An Evening With Tool", May 17th, 2001
- Lateralus Arena Tour, September 9th, 2001
- United Center, Chicago IL, August 28th, 2002
The interesting thing is that with each passing year, the number of reviews housed on t.d.n. grew. I think this is a combination not so much of Tool's growing popularity, but rather of the huge growth of the Internet. Back in 1996, when I went to my first Tool show, there weren't too many "regular folk" who were hip to the Internet. Fast-forward 5 years, and you can tell how Internet penetration has grown in America.
And of course, the other interesting thing is that I am a huge Tool nerd, and I will of course be writing a review of my 7th Tool show, at Coachella. But the times have changed (yet again), and I'll most-likely be posting it here on my own blog, as well as on t.d.n.
-Andy.
Seeing as how Kevin and I are still playing tons of Mario Kart: Double Dash (when will it freakin' end already?!?!), I am still listening to lots of music. I have been listening to a lot of my older CDs, and in the last two weeks, I rediscovered how absolutely astonishing Poe's 2000 record, "Haunted" is.
I mean, this album is just freaky-good. It truly stands the test of time, with such standout tracks as "Wild", "Could've Gone Mad", "Control", and "Amazed". If there is any flaw to this record, it is the little segues, which weave the overall story of the album together. While these little "conversational transition" tracks definitely have their place, and are an integral part of the album as a whole, they do dampen listen-ability after awhile.
Still, it has been nearly 6 years since this album came out, and I have been wondering why there has been no follow-up (because I would buy another Poe album in an instant). I finally sat down with my good friend Google tonight, and tried to dig up the reason why.
Some digging later, and it appears that Poe has been sucked down the hole of a nasty contractual dispute with her record label (Atlantic, I think). That last link is an update from Poe from last November, but I haven't been able to find anything more recent than that.
The moral? Big record labels suck, go indie use something like Tunecore to bypass the traditional music distribution channels entirely.
Oh, and I really hope that Poe records some new material soon.
-Andy.
So, Mike and I are planning to venture out on a crazy road-trip this weekend. It's looking like we'll be stopping in Three Rivers, CA to visit Elizabeth, as we make our way down to Indio, CA for the second day of the 2006 Coachella Valley Music Festival.
In years past, I have always looked on at the Coachella concerts with a bit of envy -- I would like to go, but it is just so blasted far away, that I have never been able to get the motivation together to go. I was even going to sit out this year, even though two of my favorites, Tool and Sleater-Kinney, are playing.
What pushed me over the edge, however, was when I found that Massive Attack is playing at Coachella. Massive Attack almost never tours, especially on these shores. So that, combined with the aforementioned two bands, all playing on the same day (which means I can save a lot of money by only attending that one day), really sealed the deal.
But aside from my favorites, I'm also going to try and see Seu Jorge, Youth Group, Minus the Bear, Wolf Parade (Stan is way into them), Matisyahu, Bloc Party, and the Go! Team. I've actually never even heard anything for the last 3 bands, so I'm planning on going in "totally blind" -- we'll see how it goes.
The planning and preparations are in pretty good shape at this point. I have the tickets in hand, bought some supplies, and booked a hotel. I just have to print out some directions, and pray that my car survives the mass of miles it is about to receive.
-Andy.
Technorati Tags: Tool, Coachella, Massive Attack, Sleater-Kinney
Ticketmaster (oh how I love these guys) put tickets on sale at 10:00 AM this morning for most of the dates on Tool's mini-tour (to follow Coachella). Normally, Ticketmaster's website gets crushed under the load of tons of fans pounding the site for tickets as all of the shows go on sale simultaneously. Surprisingly, that wasn't the case today, but they did sell out extremely fast.
I was hitting refresh in two browsers, and got my first "no tickets are available" message before 10:01 AM. Trying repeatedly, I actually managed to get the page offering me tickets one time, but trying to proceed from there produced an error.
Bastards.
Checking Craigslist, it seems like I'm not the only one to have this problem. So, now the question is, do I pay an insane amount for one ticket, or shall I just be satisfied with their Coachella performance?
-Andy.
Technorati Tags: Tool, 10,000 Days, Ticketmaster, Coachella
Today is the day that the first single from Tool's upcoming album, "10,000" days, was due to be released to radio stations around the country. However, in keeping with my whole "radio is dead" theme, it didn't really make sense to me to spend hours and hours listening to crappy rock radio (filled with tons of ads), just to catch a glimpse of Tool.
So, I downloaded the new single off of the Internet instead (which is a far better distribution mechanism for music anyway).
In short, it's good, but I'm going to reserve my full judgement until I hear Vicarious in context with the entire album, or until I listen to Vicarious 10,000 times -- whichever comes first. Throughout it's 7+ minute lifespan, Vicarious alternates between sounding like a lost track from Lateralus, to being completely different. From flowing and moving to stopping and syncopation. From vocals that nearly fade beneath the music to those that shout and demand to be heard.
Certainly, there is a lot to tide me over here, until the release of "10,000 Days", on May 2nd.
-Andy.
Technorati Tags: Music, Tool, Vicarious, 10,000 Days, Lateralus
So, redefine was down yesterday, and today. Yesterday, it was down because I made a DNS-related boo-boo. Today, however, the downtime was an entirely different story.
Last week, I attended the Bay Area FreeBSD Users Group meeting, and "drank the kool-aid" (so to speak), singing the praises of the next release of FreeBSD on my blog. However, the very next day, redefine crashed.
So much for the stability of FreeBSD 6, I reckon.
The error that I saw on the console was quite strange. It was many recurring messages, that looked like this:
The number following blkno would change, among a small set (3-4) of values. The really strange thing is that the machine was still able to NAT and route IP packets for me. I didn't notice that anything was wrong until I tried to hit a web page or SSH in. In addition, I was able to use the keyboard to change virtual terminals, but I couldn't type any characters whatsoever. The whole thing was very strange. At the time, I was getting ready to go to Seattle, so I didn't have time to do any troubleshooting. So, I just rebooted, and took off.swap_pager indefinite wait buffer: bufobj: 0, blkno ####, size 4096
But then it happened again today. I didn't notice that it was down until I got to work, so I had to leave it down the whole day, until after I got home. Now that I have seen the same error twice, it is time for action. My first observation is that this behavior only occurs when the machine is under some form of load. I know this because this machine had been up for over a month before I swapped it over to being the main redefine. And during that time, I did stress it - I did at least one "make world", several kernel builds, and I compiled a ton of packages.
Yet, I think that redefine is under more stress now that it is on the network. In particular, the blogs here are getting hit pretty hard with comment spam, which can be quite stressful for the machine. In addition, I am passing a lot more data through the network interfaces, which means that the network stack is getting stressed more.
But, before I report this issue to the FreeBSD gods, I thought it would make sense to upgrade to the very latest code in the STABLE branch. That way, if the issue happens again, I'll know that it is a bug that hasn't been addressed since a month ago, when I last refreshed my system.
So now, we play the waiting game.
-Andy.
Technorati Tags: FreeBSD, UNIX, Open Source
I was in Seattle this weekend, visiting Rushabh, Kristen, Justin, and Sarah. Oh, and as if I'm not seeing enough of Kevin these days, he showed up too:
L-R: Rushabh, Kristen, Sarah, Justin, me, and Kevin
But I can't complain, he got me, Kristen, and Rushabh into the Fall Out Boy show in Tacoma for free.
All in all, the trip was pretty good. I had nerd time with Rushabh, where upgraded one of his machines, and set it to running Windows Vista, Media Center Edition. I got to see a bit of Vista, and it is certainly different than XP, I'll give it that. The beta that I saw doesn't look like it is ready to ship, but now that Rushabh is "dogfooding" it by recording tons of movies and Gilmore Girls episodes, I'm sure that Vista will shape up, fast. Right Rushabh?
So, thanks to Rushabh and Kristen for hosting me, and everybody for hanging out with me. I'm tired and going to bed soon, but it was well worth it.
-Andy.
Just bought some concert tickets online via Ticketmaster, and it was as disheartening as always. The service fee, per ticket, was nearly $12! That is an amazing amount of money, when I sit and think about the actual work that Ticketmaster had to do in order to earn that $12 (hint - it is very low). These guys are just printing money.
Even more amazing, however, were my options for receiving the tickets. As always, it is "free" to receive the tickets by standard US mail (the cost is built into those service fees), and dramatically more expensive for faster shipping options. But what really shocked me, is that Ticketmaster now has a delivery option where they e-mail you the tickets, and print them out. Actually, that isn't the shocking part. The shocking part is that this service costs $2.50!
Ticketmaster is charging me more money, to provide a service that costs them less money. When delivered over the web, Ticketmaster is absolved from having to:
- Print the actual tickets
- Stuff them in an envelope
- Pay to send the envelope through the US mail
All of those things cost real, actual money. Compared with e-mailing me the tickets, where all Ticketmaster has to do is assemble some bits, and send them over the Internet. Sure, that isn't technically "free" either, but it is dramatically less expensive than printing and mailing tickets.
Amazing.
-Andy.
Technorati Tags: Ticketmaster, Ripoff
FreeBSD 5 vs. 6
- transition, not that 5 is bad, it was just transition
- some rough edges, in usability and performance of FS
- focus over last year has been on polishing and fixing bugs
- 6 is usable for desktops and servers and appliances
- 6 has proper threading support, with libthr. Works quite well in 6.1. Equivalent to pthreads at the moment. Two different libraries adhere to same API, so you can choose which one want to use, via libmap. Allows mapping different libraries to applications, on a per application basis. Similar to LD_PRELOAD.
- empirically, stability of 6 is on par if not better than 4.10 -> some VM bugs in 4.8, 9, 10, got fixed in FreeBSD 4.11
- And of course, all of this stuff is fixed in FreeBSD 6.
- Definitely increased stability from 5 to 6.
- Definitely not worse than FreeBSD 4, some peripheral things that 4 might still be doing better (random USB device, soundcard, old ATA device)
- Been doing a lot more stress testing
- Yahoo! and Ironport are moving to FreeBSD 6
- hub.freebsd.org now running 6.1-PRERELEASE (12 cpu machine)
- 6 is working much better with multiple processors -- the threading is doing much better.
- Have been back-porting features from -CURRENT into 6.1
- For example, tons of amd64 work from Yahoo! - can go 64bits, but keep custom 32bit applications running.
- Drivers added
- Large update to ATA disk driver, supports more software RAID, and some of the pseudo-hardware RAID
- SAS - Serial Attached SCSI support, same connector as SATA, but SCSI protocol - starting to get support in FreeBSD 6.1
- nullfs works much better now, can be used in jails
- Nate Lawson talking about ACPI next month
- Nawaf Bitar, June bafug talk, was head of system development at SGI, giving talk on multithreading and multiprocessor schedulers.
The response:
- What I saw could be a reporting error, with thread changes, been some reporting bugs concerning display of who is using what cpu
- things display as running on cpu 0, but might have been running on other processor, but when they release, they drive back to CPU 0
- should loadavg be 2 if you max out a dual processor box? (I can confirm that this was the case on FreeBSD 4.x, but I'll need to look to see if it is the case on 6.x).
- On FreeBSD, there is nothing to affect processor affinity. On "nice to do list".
- Julian was able to dredge up some knowledge of some some sysctls - kern.sched - some tunables, one called "followon" in particular. If you are a thread in single process, about to give up the CPU, find another thread from same process and continue (try to keep multiple threads on same cpu). This is turned off by default.
- The upcoming ULE scheduler might have some affinity stuff
- There is a kernel option, KTR, which enables fine-grained kernel tracing. It is different from ktrace or truss, in that KTR allows for an instrumentation view inside of the kernel.
- Lot of events have KTR flag on them, on compile time, compile in a mask of bits, then use a sysctl to activate them. logs entries into a KTR buffer in memory, can drop into kernel debugger and "show ktr" to show the list, or run a userland program to dump buffer out to file. ktrdump? One of the bits is for the scheduler, thousands of entries per second.
- Google for "KTR, scheduling, graph" -> utility to draw scheduling graph and show which thread on which CPU.
- ktrace -p <pid> will attach to an existing pid, and print out the syscall information.
- ktrace -dp <pid> will attach to an existing pid, and all of its running children, and print out the aggregate syscall information.
- ktrace -dip <pid> does the same as above, but also captures information for children that spawn while ktrace is running.
- csup works for checking out a particular tag
- csup doesn't do mirroring of source tree
- csup has just been checked into current
- we think csup does as good as a job bandwidth-wise as CVSup
- Doing FreeBSD 5.5 release to tide people over that can't move to 6 yet.
- HT is a performance gain if you are doing floating point work
- Xen virtualization will appear in 6.2, both domain 0 and and running in Xen VM. Each Xen VM will be able to claim a CPU, to better utilize multi-core boxes. Design of Xen require architectural things in the kernel that FreeBSD doesn't have yet.
- There was a question about the state of alternative schedulers in FreeBSD. The answer, via Scott, is that ULE is still fairly neglected, some work done a few months ago, still experimental. Not sure of the ETA.
- For wireless, there is something called "WPA supplement"(?), also does WEP, can also be used to configure wireless NIC before running dhclient
- rcorder - determine order that scripts will launch, based upon rc.conf and dependencies in the new RC system.
-Andy.
Technorati Tags: bafug, FreeBSD, UNIX, Open Source
A quick Google pointed out this helpful blog post, which said to set an "API Password", and all would be well.
Well, I did that, and things weren't well. Things haven't been well for days. So this evening, I finally sat down with "print STDERR" and figured out the problem. As it turns out, there is a bug in Movable Type (in my opinion). In the file 'cgi-bin/mt/lib/MT/XMLRPCServer.pm', there is this function (right at the top of the file):
sub mt_new {
my $cfg = $ENV{MOD_PERL} ?
Apache->request->dir_config('MTConfig') :
$MT::XMLRPCServer::MT_DIR . '/mt.cfg';
my $mt = MT->new( Config => $cfg )
or die MT::XMLRPCServer::_fault(MT->errstr);
$mt;
}
However, I did an upgrade from a really old version of Movable Type. Thus, I had both the old 'mt.cfg' and 'mt-config.cgi' files in my 'mt' directory, and of course the old file had an invalid configuration, which was causing the above code to fail spectacularly. The fix is to either change the third line of code to look like this:
$MT::XMLRPCServer::MT_DIR . '/mt-config.cgi';
-Andy.
Technorati Tags: MarsEdit, Movable Type
After work today, I drove into San Francisco for dinner, making it three nights in a row that I have headed into the city for dinner. Normally, I'm not super-city-guy, but some friends from CWRU are in town (Chris and Karen Ishida), and since I haven't seen them in a long, long time, I have felt compelled to make the trek to the city three times in a row.
And let me say this up front - San Francisco has been great. On Sunday night, for example, it was raining both on my trip into San Francisco, and on the ride out. Both times, however, there was an accident on 101, but in the opposite direction that I was travelling. This means that I avoided not one, but two major traffic jams.
And it got even better today. I slipped out of work, and got on the high right around 6:00 PM. At the height of the evening rush hour. But the rain had stopped, and the big game was on TV, so I had one of the best rides into San Francisco on a weekday, ever. I made it from Sunnyvale to downtown in right around 40 minutes. Absolutely zero traffic.
And when I got to my destination in the Mission, I found a completely legal parking spot after only about 10 minutes of searching.
Totally amazing.
I had the feeling that I was burning through some serious "driving karma", especially for that amazing drive into SF. And, as it turns out, I was right, as I found out on the way home:
My Saturn is a bit lighter now, thanks to that bumper paint that got scraped off.
It was around 11:15 PM, and I was driving in a middle lane south on 101, minding my own business. The road wasn't very crowded, and it was clear sailing in front of me. I don't know what caused me to check the blindspot on my left side, but suddenly I saw a car that was coming up from behind, in the left lane. It was driving a bit erratically, I suppose, but all of a sudden it got really close to me, like he was trying to merge into my lane without seeing me.
I popped off the cruise control, and veered a bit to the right (out of my lane), in order to avoid him. But in so doing, I lost a bit of speed, and didn't get the separation that I needed to. Because he swerved again, much harder this time, and then I felt the "pop" of our bumpers touching.
What happened next was really amazing -- the guy breaked super hard, spinning his car out. Looking in my rearview, at one point he was perpendicular to the flow of traffic, before righting himself back into a lane. But I think that he came nearly to a dead stop in the middle of 101 -- which is a huge mo-no, no matter what time of day it is.
Luckily, all of the other drivers on the road managed to avoid this guy, and he was able to pull over behind me so we could exchange insurance information. But all said and told, we were both pretty lucky. My car just has a scrape, and we couldn't even find the equivalent on his bumper.
But now, of course, I get the hassle of getting this fixed. But, at least the driving scales are balanced, and I don't have to live in fear of having taking more driving karma than I have given.
-Andy.
I have been "working" on some major upgrades to my home computing infrastructure for several months now (and by "working", I mean mostly playing Mario Kart with Kevin). My main server, redefine was getting a little stale - the OS was stuck on FreeBSD 4.x, I was clinging to Apache 1.3.x, and Movable Type was stuck on version 2.6, and was really spam-prone as a result. Plus, the hardware was getting pretty noisy, and I wasn't doing so good about having RAID and backups of my disks.
So, I have finally stiched together enough time to get all of these things fixed. Back in January, I bought two 400Gb SATA drives and a RAID controller. I slapped this new hardware into one of my older machines (dual Pentium Pros upgraded to Dual Pentium II's, baby!), and installed FreeBSD 6. I then installed the latest Apache, Movable Type, etc., and got everything configured. And above all, I am running on mirrored drives now. Disks and RAID controllers are so cheap nowadays, that it really didn't make much sense to have a single point of failure with my most important data.
The biggest challenge was in getting all of my data moved over from the old setup to the new setup. Good old rsync handled bringing all of my static data in the home directories over. However, the Movable Type upgraded wanted me to switch from BerkeleyDB to MySQL, which required getting MySQL configured (not necessarily my forte, but I got it to go), and then converting all of the blog data. I had some issues, but luckily the Movable Type forums and documentation are pretty solid.
So, there may be broken-ness abound for the next few days. Right now, for example, my blog will take comments, but they appear to be going into some moderation system that I don't fully understand. In fact, comments appear to be a lot different in Movable Type 3.2. It looks like I have a lot more reading to do...
-Andy.
