The new home of boredom.

Moo.

Hi everybody!

I totally spotted Kima Greggs Sonja Sohn at a local Valley coffeeshop. I won’t say which one so as not to discourage more celebrity sightings.

Usually I’m oblivious to whatever incredible things are going on around me, but this time, I was the one who noticed, not Alex. Haha!

Apple Reports Record Second Quarter Results: $1.05 Billion in Profit

I’m afraid of Apple’s positive inertia.

Roy always said “panic is the best motivation.”

Will Apple do something about:

• bizarre crashes after I’ve installed a security upgrade, but before I’ve restarted?
• the occasional failure to properly resize windows after I unplug a secondary display?
• their refusal to recognize apt-get as the One True Software Delivery Mechanism? =)

Hmm, I guess I’m a Mac fan again. I just can’t resist the pretty pretty fonts.

Begin pontification!

There are a few golden rules in high performance server development:

• use the right algorithm / data structure for the job
• precompute as much as you can
• avoid system calls

Usually this boils down to an offline (or high latency) system that sends data to a fast serving tier via message replication or file push.

And basically the only way to read data from a file without syscalls is with mmap.

Too bad Java’s mmap implementation was so half-assed. In Java 1.5 (and possibly 1.6, I’m not sure), you…

• can’t map files larger than 2 GB (yay signed integers!)
• can’t do a bulk copy from an absolute position
• can’t even unmap an mapped file!

The rationale for the non-resolution or won’t-fix status of these bugs is pretty sad/hilarious, or as I prefer, “sadlarious”.

It’s basically “we designed NIO in 1973″ and “obscure security issue means we’ll reclaim that memory when we feel like it”.

And I couldn’t have done it without Kelsey.

But first, I backed up my 4 amazing posts. Because I am serious about backups.

In other news, Pro Nails and Sensual Seduction.

Autoblog recently posted a photo tour of Nissan’s private storage facilities for their rarest and most kick-ass vehicles, and when I saw the Nissan Mid4, I was shocked at its similarity to the Honda/Acura NSX.

The pop-up headlights, the turn signal lights that wrap around the front fender, et cetera.

I just have to know… which came first? Who stole whose paper napkin sketch in what fancy restaurant?

I finally had a Seagate drive die on me. Fortunately I have a 200GB RAID 0 setup (thanks mdadm!) on my clunky old Ubuntu box.

I finally realized a drive was bad when Ubuntu kept re-mounting the RAID as readonly. (A torrent stopped downloading.)

% sudo apt-get install smartmontools
% sudo smartctl -a /dev/hde
smartctl version 5.36 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-6 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 and 7200.7 Plus family
Device Model:     ST3200822A
Serial Number:    4LJ1Z3GZ
Firmware Version: 3.01
User Capacity:    200,049,647,616 bytes
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   6
ATA Standard is:  ATA/ATAPI-6 T13 1410D revision 2
Local Time is:    Sat Oct 20 18:35:14 2007 PDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED!
Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA.
See vendor-specific Attribute list for failed Attributes.
...

I’ll have to look into that 5 year warranty!

It’s lame that mountd, smartctl, and mdadm are not on speaking terms. You’d think mdadm would have marked the RAID as degraded after all of these drive failures.

I really want to see Speed, Style and Beauty: Cars from the Ralph Lauren Collection, but I couldn’t find it in the TiVo interface, and the Discovery Channel website is completely useless. When is it on? Is it only showing on Discovery HD or something?

Oh blogs. So useful for whining.

Real hosting! Alright!