Started fsck Thursday at 1:30pm
Still running…
Might have to newfs this one and say screw it.
-Lightningcrash
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
fsck on a 1TB UFS volume, guess how long it takes?
Monday, March 8th, 2010T-minus 8 days until baby
Monday, March 8th, 2010LC’s Horde member #3 is due to be delivered in 8 days.
Now if they only made baby clothes with Quake logos…
-LightningCrash
Hot deals, second edition
Monday, March 8th, 2010So I was given a Gigabyte GA-P965-DS3 by a friend. I had hooked him up with my old, old ass watercooling equipment a little while back. When he heard I needed a C2D board, he volunteered his old board.
So I get everything in the board. I use a spring-screw heatsink mounting system that I bought. It works great.
Now I lay my computer down and just set the board on top of the chassis, supported by the motherboard box. I move the power cables over. I move the GT 220 over and plug the HDMI in. I use some RAM of mine I had extra (part of the 8GB DDR2-800 I got for $90 back in the day)
I hit the power button with a screwdriver…. Fans spin up, C&Q is bumping the CPU fan, but…. nothing.
So at this point I’m guessing the E7200 is the problem.
I have made arrangements with a [H]ard|Forum member to purchase his E6750, I will soon try that and report back. I have taken some Ibuprofen for the headache. 
Until next time!
-LightningCrash
Some hot deals are the beginning of headaches…
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009So I scored a Core 2 Duo E7200 processor for $30.
I place the chip in my D975XBX, and the system doesn’t boot.
I put my old processor back in, and two pushpins on my heatsink break.
So I bundle up the wife and kids and run out to buy a new heatsink at Bestbuy. The heatsink does not make contact with the chip when attached. I don’t know what the crap was wrong with it, I tried it several different times, different directions until I finally realized it uses the same pin setup as my old heatsink.
So I pull two pushpins from the new heatsink to replace the broken ones on the old heatsink. One more pushpin is on its way to breaking, so I replace it too. I plop down on my laptop and look up my board revision’s C2D support. Well, I’m at revision 302 and I need 303 or 304 to be C2D-compatible at all. Even then, only the E6xxx series seem to work (and some E4xxx series). Definitely no E7200.
So I put the old CPU (a Pentium D 950) back into the unit and get it all seated. System boots up and I’m back up.
At least I’m right back where I started, and it only cost me $60 to not go anywhere.
-LightningCrash
Forking in xargs
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009xargs is probably one of the most useful CLI tools in Unix/Linux.
Many people just forget that xargs can fork processes, to multithread an otherwise slow operation.
If you have a directory full of WAV files you want to encode and a quad core, fork that.
ls *.wav|xargs -n1 -P4 -i lame -h {} {}.mp3
rename ’s/\.wav//g’ *.mp3
The -P option is for the maximum number of processes. The -n option is to limit to 1 argument per xargs call. The -i option gives us the {} substitution. Xargs will substitute the filename for {}. This means we get an output file called blah.wav.mp3, so I added the Perl utils rename step.
xargs has many uses with forking, and you could probably even use a VAAPI-enabled mencoder to transcode a whole directory of files this way.
Just don’t fork yourself or you’ll go blind.
Until next time!
-LightningCrash
GPS Phones and Telco Logging Infrastructure
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009This is an extension of a post I made on a gun forum. Someone had asked the feasibility of the infrastructure required to store iPhone user’s GPS coordinates. They threw out the number of 30M iPhones.
It would really be the next logical step in police data collection. Take a warrant for arrest, pull phone records for $30, intercept the guy on his way home from his dealer’s house.
This wouldn’t be a burden placed upon the police, or even the NSA. It would be a money-maker for the telcos.
Lat/Lon can be packed as a 32-bit integer, unix timestamp is a 32-bit signed integer. Add in the telephone number and we’ll just call it 128 bits per reading.
Minutes in a day, 1440, so 1440×128 = 184,320 bits. 23,040 bytes per day.
As you can see, data warehousing for this is next to nothing. An 8GB disk could hold 372,827 days worth of GPS readings.
A day’s worth of GPS data for 30M users would be 675GB raw, before decompression and deduplication.
That would be a pretty tall order for a small business, but if you add in a few hundred legal spying data purchases every day, it would pay for itself pretty quickly.
You’d need a small cluster of servers and you would likely need good SAN hardware. They already store more information than this about the calls that you make. They already have the infrastructure in place.
So is it feasible? Yes, without a doubt.
Until next time!
-LightningCrash
batch rename with regexps, an addendum
Friday, November 20th, 2009You may have read my post on batch rename with perl’s ‘rename’ script, but I recently discovered that it is helpful to read the man page.
I had a folder full of files that I wanted to rename, but I wanted to test things out first. I had settled for making a temporary directory and just symlinking to the files that I wanted to modify. I would run my tests, look at the link names, then delete and recreate the links.
Well, that is no more. `rename` has an option -n, for “No Act”, that will not actually rename the files. Instead, it will just print the filenames that matched and what they would have been renamed to.
Perfect!
Anyway, as the old saying goes, RTFM!
-LightningCrash
Where’s LC?
Thursday, November 12th, 2009Between work, my wife and my kids, I have been a busy man!
I hope to get a few more articles up soon, including finishing the series on find-fu.
Peace!
-LightningCrash
Link for today: Bluetooth Proximity – Ubuntu HOWTO
Thursday, August 14th, 2008I’ve used this successfully and can attest to how handy it is. Kudos to Iceni for putting that Howto together.
BT dongles are getting cheap enough today that this is very doable. Most phones have BT already, so why not try it out?
Linksys also makes a USB Bluetooth adapter with a movable antenna. I’ve not heard anything about that particular adapter, but I would wager that its range is greater than that of normal Bluetooth dongles.
That’s it for today!
-LightningCrash
Just for SB @ Microsoft
Tuesday, October 9th, 2007
You gotta love Fair Use. 