All posts by Dan

Shiny

Toys

While at Fry’s yesterday, I picked up a BTC 6300CL.

This is an illuminated keyboard, but the illumination is almost incidental. The most eye-catching thing about it is its conspicuous sleekness: the unit was clearly designed to be sexy and, it must be said, Mac-like, though the Windows keys along the bottom betray its true intended audience. Its silvery-metallic finish highlights the gentle beveling used to accent its edges, and the whole thing is flat, flat, flat.

After it’s caught your eye, you type on it experimentally and notice how strikingly comfortable it is. The layout is an absolutely-standard 104-key arrangement, making this the first illuminated keyboard I’ve seen that doesn’t arbitrarily and unnecessarily muck with convention just to be different. In addition, the keys use short-throw laptop-style scissor switches. My initial impression is that this seems to help avoid striking adjacent keys by accident.

The illumination, which can be toggled by pressing Esc and F10 simultaneously, is the standard gentle electroluminescent blue. The frosted, translucent keycaps are eminently legible in low-light conditions, or even total darkness.

I’m still in the adjustment phase, but so far I find myself liking it very much.

Footnote: the product page claims that the EL backlight’s lifetime is about 3000 hours. That bloody well better be a typo, since that amounts to barely 4 months of continuous use, at least one order of magnitude less than I’d expect from something that isn’t putting out any perceptible heat. Fortunately, it’s a nice keyboard even when dim, so I’ll still like it even if it burns out. Time will tell.

Thank you, Lord Almighty

Hackery

And I thank you, Lord Almighty up above,
Just for sending down the ‘F’ train to me.
— Mike Doughty,
“Thank you, Lord, for sending me the F train”

Sketches from the notebook of a man walking around in a daze, trying to come to terms with just how hosed he is in terms of the data he has suddenly lost access to:

I left reiserfsck running overnight, having disabled DMA for the wounded drive. (Since reiserfsck failed with lots of ominous-sounding warnings about DMA timeouts and lost interrupts, it seemed worth a shot. Of course, it slowed the process by about a factor of ten — hence the “overnight” part.) In the morning, no joy.

I had to run some errands this afternoon, partly in preparation for John and Jody’s wedding later this week. While I was out and about, I picked up a low-end router, a D-Link DI-604, so that I could restore some reasonable level of network connectivity to the apartment. (I’d have gotten a DGL-4100, but no one had them in stock. It’s probably just as well.)

Walking through the software section at Fry’s, and glancing at the various data-recovery programs on display there, reminded me of the existence of a tool I hadn’t thought about in a while, and had never had occasion to use before: Steve Gibson’s SpinRite. I resolved to look at it more closely once I got home and had re-established web access.

When I got home, I plugged in the little D-Link router, and realized that I should have acquired it, or something like it, a long time ago. Having your own highly-tweakable Linux-based router is nice, but having a foolproof, solid-state box as a backup makes for amazing peace of mind. I will go back to the Linux-based approach in short order, of course, but it will be nice to know that the D-Link is waiting in the wings, ready to pinch-hit the next time I find myself having to juggle hardware. Being able to browse the web for tools and tips did wonders for my peace of mind, to say nothing of having the phone working again.

The first thing I did was scrutinize SpinRite, which looked sufficiently promising that I decided to try it. (Possible salvation for $89 a pop? I’ll take that action!)

Before loosing SpinRite upon the drive, I thought I’d let reiserfsck --rebuild-tree have one last crack at it. In the morning, after the unsuccessful overnight reiserfsck attempt, I had noticed that the drive was a bit dusty, and that some of the dust appeared to be lodged under the integrated-controller PCB. Having a screwdriver nearby, and too much time on my hands, I unscrewed the PCB and blew it clean with a few blasts from a can of compressed air before reassembling the whole thing.

Desperate. Pathetic. Everyone knows that that sort of blind, ritualistic hardware voodoo never does any good.

Except when it does. Except when it does. Because this time around, reiserfsck --rebuild-tree plowed right past the point where it had stopped dead during the five previous recovery attempts, and left me with a successfully-rebuilt and mountable filesystem. I have no idea what convinced the drive to venture back from the sunless lands — for all I know, it was knocking it about eight inches to the carpeted floor when I bumped the box I’d rested it on — and I’m not inclined to care. I’m just grateful for the undeserved third chance I’ve been given. (Yes, tar is chugging away as I write this. I may be stupid, but I’m not criminally stupid.)

All the files I really care about have already been backed up to another disk; I’ll be burning them to optical media in the morning, just to be safe. At this point, I’m down to saving the data I could afford to lose, but would rather not have to recreate. Having paid for SpinRite, I find myself not needing it at the moment. I am utterly unconcerned. I’ll probably unleash it upon the old disk once the backups are complete, just to see what it finds and reports.

I am insanely lucky. My father is fond of saying that it is better to be lucky than good, but I will strive not to push my luck quite so aggressively in the future. Next up: an actual backup strategy.

Important Safety Tip

Hackery

If you are trying to get Gentoo Linux running on a machine with a SATA hard disk, you will either need to pass nolvm2 to the kernel at CD-boot time, or issue the command dmsetup remove_all after you’ve booted.

Otherwise, mount will frustratingly claim that the SATA-disk partitions are busy when you try to mount them after having created them and their resident filesystems with cfdisk and mkfs.

Given current hardware trends, the percentage of first-time users attempting to set up Gentoo on a SATA disk would seem likely to vastly outstrip the percentage of those needing LVM2 functionality out-of-the-box; given that, the decision to favor the former at the expense of the latter seems… ill-considered at best. But then, I wasn’t consulted.

How Long? Not Long.

Hackery

“…’cause what you reap is what you sow.”

Well.

It turns out that the problem might have been with avestriel’s disk after all.

That seems the obvious conclusion, anyway, given that the thing died an ugly death this morning. I took it offline to check up on a filesystem inconsistency, and was informed that the inconsistency could not be resolved without using --rebuild-tree. “No problem,” thought I. “I’ve done it once before.”

Well, yeah, except that last time I hadn’t been treated to controller-level DMA timeout errors when I was roughly a third of the way through the process. “Ooookay,” I thought, trying not to panic, “maybe it’s the controller. Or the cable. Or the power supply.” Easily tested: yank the drive, plug it into a different machine using a different cable. Hope, hope, hope. Nope. Same result.

Bugger.

The drive is currently sitting atop the case of the second machine, powered off. I’m hoping that being allowed to cool off for a bit will somehow make it happy. (It should give you some idea of just how desperate I am at this point, that I’d be willing to clutch a straw so thin.)

If that fails, I will have to do something I’ve never done before, and solicit the services of a professional data-recovery firm. There’s an assload of mail on that disk that I’d rather not lose. (Recommendations as to reputable firms in this area would be gratefully accepted.)

Once that’s arranged, I will have to hire the services of a different sort of professional firm to kick my own ass to the degree it deserves. I don’t think I’m up to the task myself. I mean, the drive all but sent me an engraved suicide pre-announcement. I have no excuse for not having made backups by now. None. Yet here I am.

Memo to self: the next time smartmontools so much as sneezes, buy a new drive and toss the old one. The headache spared will more than offset the money spent. And start making regular backups, for frigsake. Idiot.

Rolling in Doughty

Music

Hot on the heels of the Rockity Roll re-release comes Doughty’s new studio album, Haughty Melodic, which was released today, and which I’m listening to right now. Initial reaction: damn, this kicks ass. About half the album is material I’ve heard before, stuff that simmered and mellowed during the years that Doughty toured the country like an itinerant troubadour with a guitar slung across his back.

You might think that this would leave me feeling ripped off; if so, you’d be dead wrong. The arrangements on the new album are so damn rich, so simultaneously energetic and polished, that listening to them after having heard their acoustic forebears is like seeing the final lithograph after having reviewed a series of pencil sketches. The promise and vitality of the early versions carries through undimmed, but it’s bolstered by tasteful and restrained elaborations and enhancements.

Besides, now I finally know what the bridge to “Grey Ghost” sounds like when sung with real words. (And if you have no idea what that means, have someone lucky enough to own a copy of Smofe + Smang: Live in Mpls. play you that album’s “Grey Ghost”, which contains the amazing “fake-word bridge” that gave Smofe + Smang its title.)

Doughty will be in town on May 20th. Alas, advance tickets have sold out. We will have to try our luck at the will-call booth. Stand aside, puny humans! You place yourselves between me and a man who can use the word “decathecting” in a lyric at your own grave peril.

Rockity Roll

Music

At some point, while I wasn’t looking, Mike Doughty reissued Rockity Roll, which I’d missed the first time around. Not one to make the same mistake twice, I snagged it before it could get away from me again.

Okay, so it was bundled with Skittish, which I already had, but the total price was still $15, so who cares? I’ve paid more for music and enjoyed it a hell of a lot less.

The solo albums are less dissociated than Doughty’s Soul Coughing work. The latter tended, while irresistibly catchy, toward word salad. This was entirely by design, and it was damn fine word salad, to be sure, but it was word salad all the same. You couldn’t stop singing along, but you weren’t always sure just what the things you were singing meant.

Skittish and Rockity Roll are more concrete. Doughty’s immense cleverness with words is still on display, but now it’s used in the service of revelation rather than obfuscation. The newer albums are about longing and loss, missed opportunities and lessons learned. They have about them the hardened, flinty optimism of a man who has been through the darkness and survived, but has not forgotten what he saw along the way.

The best I ever did with my life
Said just three honest words to you
Three droplets in pail of lies
Three gems among the alibis

Skittish is still as good as it ever was; Rockity Roll is a nice counterpoint. Where Skittish is almost austere in its acoustic arrangements, Rockity Roll adds a little more texture. Doughty himself says it most succinctly: “It’s my acoustic thing, plus some low-fi, fake new wave drum machine and synthesizer that I played/programmed.” While no one in their right mind would describe the result as overproduced, it feels lusher, acoustically, than Skittish did. (It also contains a live version of “The Only Answer”, a song that previously appeared both on Smofe + Smang: Live in Mpls. and Skittish. The new version features some delightful counterpoint courtesy of an anonymous keyboardist. The only thing marring it is what seems to be some nasty distortion in the live recording. I’d love to hear a cleaned-up studio production of that arrangement.)

It’s good, good stuff, and money well spent.

Dearth of Venice

Hardware

About a month ago I decided that it was time to put my Athlon XP machine out to pasture. The three-year-old motherboard and CPU offered few opportunities for reasonable upgrades, and the motherboard had suffered more than its share of indignities. (One of the memory sockets had had a few of its pins bent by a careless heatsink-removal attempt; a few of the capacitors had sprung leaks, and while Bill helped me replace those, some of the front-panel I/O headers seemed to have failed somewhere along the line.)

Ah, well, thought I, it’s time to find out what life is like in 64-bit-land anyway. So I proceeded to do a little research, decided that Socket 939 was the way to go, and ordered an Abit AV8. I chose Abit because I fell in love with the company’s highly-tweakable BIOSen long ago, and the AV8 because it’s a no-nonsense PCI design based on VIA’s KT880 Pro chipset. This machine is going to be a Linux workstation: PCI Express is clearly the wave of the future, but there’s no point in placing a workhorse on the bleeding edge.

Linux also motivates the choice of chipset: while the members of the nForce family generally outperform their VIA counterparts, nVidia tend to be highly-proprietary bastards when it comes to technical data, making Linux support patchy. Bill got badly burned by this a while back, when he tried to make an SFF nForce 2 box his home Linux machine. (Come to think of it, I wasn’t all that thrilled with the nForce 2 even under Windows. It was fast, to be sure, but it had all kinds of weird and sometimes-dangerous quirks and compatibility problems. They seem to have ironed this sort of thing out in nForce 3 and 4, but I’ll let someone else play guinea pig this time around, thank you very much.)

At any rate, the board arrived scant days after I ordered it. I was on the verge of picking up a Winchester-core Athlon 64 for it when Alex happened to lend me an issue of c’t containing a detailed description of Intel and AMD’s processor roadmaps. From it I learned that the Winchester Athlon 64 I coveted was already on the verge of being rendered obsolete by the new Venice core, which was to be released that very day.

Naturally, “released” is a many-splendored term, especially when it comes to two companies like Intel and AMD (or nVidia and ATI) engaged in a years-long struggle to club each other over the head with anything that comes to hand. In this context, “released” apparently means “we put out an announcement, and shipped a handful to hardware-review sites we like.” It’s got sweet fuck-all to do with “you can plunk down your cash and actually buy one, sucka.”

So here I’ve been for the last month, on tenterhooks, sure that if I waited just a few more days, the floodgates would open and a cornucopia of purchasable Venice-core CPUs would spill forth. The best estimate I’ve heard so far is Friday, May 6th. “Soon, baby.”

Of course, with my luck, it’ll turn out that my motherboard needs a flash upgrade before it can use a Venice CPU, and all of that waiting will have been in vain. Let’s hope not.

Son of Land Shark

Idiots

If vampires existed, the halls of my employer’s HQ would run red with blood, and echo with the terrified screams of the desperate and hunted. How do I know this? Because it’s pretty clear at this point that no matter how often you tell people, “They can’t come in unless you invite them,” there will always be some moron capable of answering the door, looking right at the fearsomely ridged brow and mouthful of gleaming ivory razors, and saying, “Candygram? Sure, put it right over here!”

How else to explain the fact that I have, since this morning, recieved several hundred copies of the e-mail virus du jour, all obviously originating from within the corporate network, sent from the machines of people who would never consider eating a pastry someone left on their doorstep, but who think nothing of opening a sketchy-looking attachment they didn’t ask for?

I used to wonder what was wrong with these people, but I’ve realized that I don’t actually care anymore. I just wish that I didn’t have to work with them. The ever-inventive Dirk has suggested that we introduce a new mandatory step to the hiring process. We e-mail the candidate a .zip file containing a program whose only purpose is to inform us, over the network, that it has been run. If we see that a prospect has taken the bait, that person’s resume is flushed faster than you can say “enormous walking liability”, and they never, ever get to work for us. Sound harsh? You haven’t had to endure a steady trickle of the same obvious, artless trick showing up in your mailbox all day, knowing all the while that it’s only because someone sitting at most a few hundred yards from you is apparently incapable of putting two and two together.

(Dirk suggests that the originating e-mail address be an obvious forgery, but I’m not sure that’s necessary or even desirable. The cleverest e-mail viruses take pains to look like they were sent to you by someone you know. The real test is not whether you can spot an obvious trick, but whether you’re paranoid enough to not reflexively trust mail appearing to be from a familiar source.)

Krid is my shepherd

Movies

Dirk was all over me last week, repeatedly urging me, in the strongest possible terms, to see Kung Fu Hustle. I finally got around to it on Saturday, and… well, he was right.

It seems, whether you look at blockbusters like Finding Nemo or more obscure films like Waking Life, that the trend is towards taking animation and making it look as realistic as possible, either in terms of texture and lighting, movement, or both.

Kung Fu Hustle turns that logic on its head — it’s a nominally live-action movie that feels like a cartoon. I realize that this might sound like damnation with faint praise, but the thing to realize is, it’s a very good cartoon, one that combines comedy and action in equal measure without ever forgetting its heart. It’s ultimately a story of redemption, if you want to look at it that way.

With ass-kickings. Lots of ass-kickings.

My charming companion for the evening was Celina; if there’s a better person to see a martial-arts movie with, I don’t know who it might be. (Getting to see her reaction to Steven Chow’s taking his shirt off was a little added bonus. She loves Jet Li, but she wishes he’d stop being so modest and bare his chest already. Maybe she’ll get her wish with the release of Unleashed, which looks promising in other ways, too. Bob Hoskins and Morgan Freeman? Yeah, I’d pay full price to see that team-up.)