The Mandelbear's Musings

01:47 pm - Yet more on Sidekick

Here's an AppleInsider article that claims to have information from inside Danger and Microsoft.

Additional insiders have stepped forward to shed more light into Microsoft's troubled acquisition of Danger, its beleaguered Pink Project, and what has become one of the most high profile Information Technology disasters in recent memory.

The sources point to longstanding management issues, a culture of "dogfooding" (to eradicate any vestiges of competitor's technologies after an acquisition), and evidence that could suggest the failure was the result of a deliberate act of sabotage.

Hanlon's Razor still applies, though; stupidity is more likely than sabotage in my opinion.

02:52 pm - More on the Sidekick out(r)age

More links on the T-Mobile/Sidekick disaster.

This article on Engadget is probably the best of the lot -- it blames it on Microsoft outsourcing an upgrade to the storage-area network without making a backup first. You would think... And there may be another disaster in the making, if their $50 all-you-can-eat plan comes out and people who haven't learned from the Sidekick debacle (or know how to run rsync on their Android phones) pile on and suck up all their bandwidth.

And here's Gizmodo saying that, whatever you may have heard from T-Mobile, your data is probably G O N E.

Good luck.

01:55 pm - Retro gadget meets USB.

The Device, Patented Process Indicating Apparatus - Gizmodo

Billed as "possibly with world's first hand-crafted luxury computer peripheral" - The Device is a status-indicator for virtually anything your computer monitors. Connecting via USB, packaged software can customize what The Device tracks. Examples include CPU usage, Counterstrike frags, Ebay auction status and radioactive decay rates.

The Device displays information through 3 methods. The first and most obvious is the pair of analog dials. The "Ethereal Glowing Tube" is filled with an Agar-based gel that can glow at 5 intensities. And the "Red Incandescent Lamp" (a.k.a. party light) can either be set to glow or blink "in extreme circumstances".

Current Mood: geeky

02:25 pm - The ultimate in mobile computing?

Sun's Project Blackbox -- datacenter in a container - Engadget

We're typically not of the ilk to bust out a post on a Sun datacenter solution or yet another clustered supercomputer, but technically Sun's Project Blackbox is portable -- if you consider a shipping container portable. We wouldn't believe it if it were anyone else, but the gimmick here is Project Blackbox is a shock mounted transportable datacenter capable of accommodating up to 250 Sun Fire T1000s or x64 servers, with up to 7 terabytes of memory and as many as 1.5 petabytes of disk or 2 petabytes of tape storage -- just supply water and power, and the thing will run on its own.

Current Mood: geeky

09:07 am - Adventures in home computing

... part mumble. Just before leaving for six days of Westercon, I very sensibly put my backup drive in another room and made a second set of backups (just of the important stuff: /home, /local/starport, and /mm/record) on yet another drive that I had lying around. Came back, retrieved the backup drive, and did a full backup. The system hung when I tried to unmount it.

Oops.

Taking this as a Bad Sign, I did an fsck after the reboot, and sure enough the disk was fscked up, though not too badly. From the dates on the inodes in lost+found, I'd say I had a couple of corrupted directories due to a crash back in 2005. Redid the current backups, and all is well for the moment. But I was very glad of the spare backup disk -- things could have been much worse.

But a corrupted directory can potentially cause an arbitrary amount of data to go kablooie, or at least become very hard to recover. My current nefarious plan to back up remotely using encrypted blobs has a similar problem unless there's enough reduncancy in the system to ensure that I never lose all the copies of any one blob. (It's still somewhat safer because blobs -- even directory blobs -- are immutable and so never have to be rewritten. Hmm: log-structured blob store?

09:47 pm - Further adventures in home computing: Loot

My order, of three replacement UPS batteries, arrived from APC this morning. One is for the BackUps 500 I've been having trouble with in the office. The other two went into the two BackUps Pro 650's that I salvaged from the discard pile at work. I may do a little shuffling-around.

This afternoon, after a successful demo (and a fight with balky presentation software that inadvertantly illustrated a talking-point about the superior simplicity of paper as a document representation), I went to the dentist to get my new crown installed. That, of course, puts me across the street from Guitar Showcase, and the Sennheiser HD280Pro headphones I'd spotted two weeks before after the first appointment for the crown. They advertise 32dB noise isolation, and are significantly more comfortable than the Vic Firth 'phones I bought about a month ago -- they have nice wide, deep cuffs, and nothing presses on my ears. Not horribly expensive, either. I may take them in to work; my office there is pretty noisy, and they're comfortable enough to wear for long periods.

08:48 am - Adventures in home computing

My new backup script seems to be working -- about 8 minutes to mirror a day's changes in over 100GB of files. Still needs to be parametrized, then I'll write it up and put it up on my website. And I really need to move the Debian mirror to a larger disk on the gateway; it's occupying 70GB that I'm going to be needing soon.

09:45 am - The Daily Mirror

Finally got my daily backup script up and installed on the fileserver. Basically all it does is mount the backup drive and all of its partitions (which are identical to the ones on the main drive), mirror each partition with rsync, and unmount the backup drive.

It still needs to be parametrized better -- right now it's specialized for that particular set of partitions.

09:18 pm - The weekend so far

While the flower_cat and chaoswolf were off at Baycon and Furcon meetings (I just barely missed them coming back from my walk), I mostly stayed home and puttered. Got the new patio chairs assembled, upgraded the memory on super_star_girl's computer so she can play more of her games on it, and installed a second 200GB drive in the fileserver for daily backups. (It looked like there was a 3-second power failure last night. Looks like I need a new UPS battery for my main client machine.)

With any luck, I might actually manage to do a little recording tonight, too.

08:36 pm - Close call

Sometime yesterday evening I mounted the USB drive, fired off my backup script, and went out for dinner. Made the mistake of leaving the drive online when we went back to Consonance (more about that in a later post) for the dead dog Schroedinger's Cat filk. This morning, I found that the drive was busy, and the locate database updater was thoroughly hung in I/O wait. sync hung, too. I ended up powering down.

After rebooting, I fired up the USB drive and attempted an fsck. It hung, with a mysterious message about a USB disconnect. Urk!

Before I started using the USB enclosure for backups, I used removable IDE trays. In fact, there was one still in my workstation, and another in the suspect USB enclosure. Made the swap, powered up, and ran fsck again. This time, it worked. Hmm. I don't think I ought to trust that USB enclosure anymore. The tray is less convenient -- in spite of the fact that it's nominally hot-swappable, Linux doesn't really support it. And the rack has a fan. Blaugh. Need to start cycling through multiple backup drives. And get offsite backups going.

Current Mood: relieved

07:45 pm - Another milestone

NetBSD 3.0 released

NetBSD's niche in the BSD ecosystem is portability -- it's been ported to more CPU architectures and platforms than any other OS I can think of.

08:26 am - Top ten weirdest USB drives

Top 10 weirdest USB drives. (Via Slashdot.)

The USB thumb is our runner up in the Top 10 weirdest USB drives ever. Having a thumb sticking out of your computer is really, really weird, and it also gives a completely new meaning to the expression "thumbdrive".It looks very realistic, so you can probably use it in some pranks to your friends and colleagues.

Delightfully twisted. The web page says "top 10 ... ever", but I refuse to believe that the human imagination is that limited. This one is apparently a homebrew mod, by the way, but many of the others are available here. I know sushi is more expensive in Japan than it is in the US, but even so...