The new home of boredom.

From rc3.org, another example of the Firefox team working hard to turn Firefox 4.0 into a Chrome-alike.

I already run Chrome on my Ubuntu box and on my Mac. Really the only things that prevent me from using Chrome full-time are:

• web app I’m developing at work must look right in Firefox
• no extension support in Mac Chrome yet

The lack of extension support on Mac is a sticking point for me because I’m a Delicious Bookmarks user. There’s a Delicious Chrome extension that I’ve been using on Linux, works great.

Another point is that Mac Chrome doesn’t have a functional bookmark manager yet. I keep starring things, in the hope that some future version will let me see and manage everything I’ve bookmarked. =)

Briefly:

1. Amazon is selling Settlers and Cities and Knights each for $10 less than I just paid for them. (Ahem, there was a “whiskey situation” I was not involved in.) That $20 could have been several delicious burritos!
2. Mayfair added a sea frame to the latest edition of SoC. While that’s great for setup and new players and all, now I have to buy this damned adapter kit to complete my 5-6 player Settlers universe.

…aaaannd scene.

Not sure what the guilty party was, but my computer stopped driving my monitor, so after some pointless reboots and USB fiddling I re-seated the video card and tried to turn the computer back on.

Then I saw some cool lights, fans whirring, and OH FUCK my hard drive is on fire.

I smelled some life-deleting chemicals, then, fortunately, the fire put itself out.

Now I have a dead computer (I fear it) with a bunch of suspect parts.

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.