Re: Audacity and Gentoo

On 2006-01-17, Nix <nix-razor-pit@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> ... and stupidity: to wit, Oracle*Mail and Oracle*Office, at which I
> have been cursing for days. I can just imagine the discussions in the
> Oracle Black Helicopter Base in Antarctica: `Hey, we've got a database,
> what shall we use it for?' `How about an email client? We can make it
> really, really awful, and sell it to existing customers. We already know
> they're gullible idiots or they wouldn't be buying anything from us.'

Oracle are like Microsoft, I don't use them myself but I'm glad
they're there, keeps me in a job! I can remember Oracle's
"Unbreakable" advertising campaign, didn't last long.. Also depended
on your definition of "broken".

> (although of course the Darwination was unsuccessful as he had a hot
> spare.)

Resourceful for someone so young!

> ... while I'm located 2km or so from one of the largest TV and radio
> transmitters in the country, which transmits just about everything
> *other* than Radio 4. Guess what the only radio station I listen to is?

Blimey, you could probably pick it up on a cat's whisker set at that
distance, with real cats.

Personally I use podcasting now, there's plenty of good output
available, especially from Australia's ABC national radio network,
Late Night Live and All In The Mind are favourites. It all goes to
the ipod, with a 20-hour battery life now, it no longer needs to be
cabled into the power for all-day listening. Plus of course it's hard
to find every single goon show recording on radio!

> (Heat it up enough, I suppose, and anything will melt...)

Especially the wiring used to cable the thing up!

> It took me some effort to stop the licensing idiots coming around at
> times when I wasn't there to confront me over nonpayment and sending me
> legal threats.

I'll be sending them a "I don't use TV" letter at some point, the
picture's so bad and the fix so expensive or dangerous if I do it
myself that it's not worth the bother. Most of the time I spend
watching my "TV" is spent posting nonsense to usenet, reading email,
browsing the web, messing with machine config etc.. Especially now
that HIGNFY is off the air. I had never paid TV license until the
bust-up between the government and the BBC over Alistair Campbell some
time ago, when in a fit of indignation and a feeling of helplessness I
decided that I'd at least pay my TV license to help the beeb, but that
was before I'd moved to Dorset, which doesn't exist in the BBC's
mentality. The whole county gets rotten reception on the main TV
service and none of the extra services like freeview.

> How on earth do you synch that with the computers? Don't tell me
> there's wristwatch support in NTP!

I don't sync it with the computers, just check the computer time
against it, they're not both going to be wrong by the same amount as
one gets its signal from the internet and NPL, the other gets it from
Germany.

> I just turn the radio on at 7am and listen for the beeps. Yeah, they're
> delayed by a few seconds...

Milliseconds, radio waves are quite quick you know!

> I have a 110 year old clockwork alarm clock. I have to retune it; even
> I think that gaining 25 minutes a day is a bit much.

Makes for a nice lie-in though.. I tweaked my clock yesterday, it's
now gaining 1 minute per day :-/

>> I need to get out more.
>
> ... to buy more clocks?

Nahh, ebay for that ;-)

> I'm not sure I'd easily be able to tell. My bacon was saved until
> recently by the inability of anything I used to preserve subsecond
> timestamps, but that's slowly changing now... ext[23] still don't go
> below a second, so make(1) doesn't care if I'm off by much less than
> that...

Sure, but keeping machines in sync is so easy with NTP that it seems
almost daft not to do it. Even Windows can do it with Tardis.

> That would be a good idea, if I had more than one rackmountable box.
> But a rack for one machine seems like... overkill.

I don't have any rack-mountable computers, they're all sat on shelves
in the rack, the only rack-mountable gear is the UPS, Dell Powervault
DAT enclosure and the KVM. What seperates it from just being a large
cupboard is that all the sides are easily removable to get access to
the stuff inside. I'll be slowly replacing each machine in turn with
a rack-mountable if my upcoming career step takes off, if not I'll be
selling everything I own to pay the mortgage ;-)

> Err, don't you need more than one network cable? Or is there a switch
> in there too?

There's a hub in there, just a 100MBit half-duplex netgear cheapie, I
don't use much network oomph so didn't bother upgrading it.

> (And as for running a whole rack off two domestic power sockets, well,
> it's pushing it, I'd think.)

It depends what's in it, each socket can handle 13 amps, the UPS can
draw up to 13 amps if it's heavily loaded but it's showing 9% load and
keeps it alive for over an hour. The gear that's not plugged into the
UPS is just low-power stuff like LCD screens, laptop, KVM etc. I
calculated that my average ampere draw over a month is about 4 amps
for the entire house based on my meter readings, I'll rig up my
amp-meter on the rack one day but I'd be surprised if it was drawing
more than about 1 or 2. The gear connected to the UPS takes about
280VA, which would work out as around 1 amp. When the racks were
installed at the office that was closed down, the racks were also
running off one or two 13-amp sockets for many many years without
babies being killed or fluffy bunnies being tortured. And that was
with Compaq Proliants!

> When I'm ill it means I can read news from bed. (In its spare time aside
> from that it runs my news server, a postgres server instance, a
> secondary nameserver, and the complex of two intrusion detection systems
> and two virtual machines implementing my firewall. Well, one working
> virtual machine and one broken one I have to fix.)

Ah the joys of reading alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.unix from bed!

Does the machine not make noise? That would irritate me, I can't
stand computer noise when I'm trying to get to sleep which is the main
reason there's no computer in the bedroom at the moment. Now I have
some fanless solid-state machines (with no documentation sadly but I
have got them booting linux using serial console) it's mainly the
bother of running yet more cables and the lack of any real need that's
stopped me.

> You've got a bigger house than me, then, although I guess my living room
> could be called an office (being dedicated to books and computers. TV?
> What is that?)

It's not large enough to mean losing a room isn't a PITA, but in a
previous house I worked from home in my lounge, once I'd finished work
I then had to leave the house to get away from work as it was
everywhere! Stuffing all your gear up into the loft should help,
provided the rats, mice and bats don't get it ;-) I must get my
raccoon hat on and set some traps up there, would save on the food
bills.

As for books, I use my Palm T3 for that, and Project Gutenberg, I've
got lots of books in the attic that I've not read yet and a mound of
technical books but I'd prefer them on the Palm or one of the new
E-Ink machines that are coming out. Sony made one ages ago and have
produced a new one, but anything by Sony is normally designed to
restrict you too much so I don't touch their gear.

> I, er, think I'll wait until I fit that new disk. (15Gb?! Good grief.)

That's 15 gig for the *whole* ROMset excluding CHD files (disc images,
they're too slow at the moment), a game like R-Type takes up a few
hundred K and Pacman even less. There's over 5,000 games in that 15
gig, of which I've played probably about 100 or so. If you fancy some
old-time gaming then I'd recommend it, games like Moon Patrol, Pacman,
Asteroids, Battlezone, Galaga, Galaxians, Metal Slug, R-Type etc are
great for a quick blast if you're not into wasting masses of time on
long, drawn-out games (which feel too much like work for my liking).
Alternatively a Gameboy Advance and an SD-based programmable
cartridge!

> Oh yes, that sort of thing is *hard*. There are a pile of experimental
> notations to try to reduce the amount of Z scutwork you have to do if
> you're Zing it all by hand (and in English? don't be ridiculous. I'm a
> great fan of designs in English but I recognise that sometimes it's
> a bit too much.)

It's amazing how many people say that it must be easy, after all games
manufacturers are making online games all the time. The games are
normally designed around the limitations though, e.g. easily
predictable events such as shooting trajectories and simple
object-passing routines. Mind you he has worked with a number of
games manufacturers in the past, they're certainly upping the ante.

> Oh yes. (Thankfully the distribution part of Recant is easy. The hard
> part is figuring out semantics for version control that are both useful
> and don't conflict with POSIX. I think I've got it now. Time to
> implement and see.)

Can it do binary diffs as well as source BTW?

> There are lots of uses for lossy compression, just not for ordinary
> data. (Hell, MP3 and Vorbis are premier examples.)

Not to mention Word documents, most of the ones I read could do with
losing most of their content!

> are so fast and modern caches so large that I can almost ignore the
> I/O problem, and concentrate on the semantics, which is much more
> interesting for a prototype.

Yeah, no quicker way to madness than creating a finely crafted lame
duck, best to find out if the bleeder will fly first. The only
problem then is making sure that you get it out of prototype mode
before piling on extra layers. A bad sign is when you start thinking
that you could add this bit quickly by using Perl or Python... Have
there ever been any Python scripts that have ever worked?

> Nobody seems to have tried it before, either: I can see projects
> that provide filesystem interfaces to *existing* version control
> systems, but nobody seems to have tried to come up with something
> that provides version control *and* doesn't violate POSIX.

No-one's ever tried climbing Everest on a pogo stick though, the line
between visionary and lunacy seems to be more of a smudge, I hope
you've not crossed it ;-)

> Not only am I not violating POSIX but I'm implementing everything FUSE
> lets me,

FUSE, in my world, is a Sinclair Spectrum emulator, if you're writing
your version control system in Sinclair Basic then I take my hat off
to you!

> which pretty much means everything but ioctl()s. SELinux

(note to self: Look into SELinux again, last time was 2001)

> labelling should work, as should ACLs, as I'm even supporting xattrs
> (which is a godsend, actually, because all the extra version-rolling
> features and so on can get implemented by reading and writing to virtual
> xattrs :).

Wow, someone actually using extended attributes!

> (Obviously I won't be testing that yet; I'd need several terabytes of
> disk space to produce that effect. I'll just have to hope that part of
> the code works. I'm not even sure PostgreSQL can scale to single tables
> with that many rows, although I kind of hope it can...)

My concern with databases is the mess they create when they go wrong,
I've had a fair few problems with them due to power outages (hence my
large UPS), you can of course export the database as an SQL file, as
long as you have 2x the storage space that the database itself uses..
I'm not keen on shutting the database down and backing up the raw
database directory.

> I'm not sure. I imagine it can cope with nodes dropping out, as both
> Coda and Intermezzo can cope with network partitions and suchlike.

Yes, but that would involve redundancy, which wastes space, ideally it
would be able to remove individual store files on a machine in a
controlled manner, moving the data to other locations. I could then
create gigabyte-sized stores on each machine and add or remove them as
the machine's own needs change. I'll read up on it further.

> Why would you need local storage anymore for more than booting?

I use it to hold the OS, and for servers such as mail, news etc all
the data is stored on the local disc, otherwise you get too much
dependency on remote fileservers which becomes a problem when it's
time to change something on that fileserver. I do have one diskless
machine (I replaced my arcade cabinet and my "TV" machine with one
diskless machine with two graphics cards just yesterday) and intend to
back up all my machines to the fileserver in a manner that means they
can be network booted from the backups if the disc goes. Also handy
for creating a standard build, boot machine from network image,
partition discs, copy OS across, boot locally. Particularly useful
for gentoo freaks! I don't want to be in the situation however where
rebooting the fileserver means rebooting just about every other
machine on the network.

Blimey, there's a huge amount of waffle going on in this thread isn't
there!

--
Blast off and strike the evil Bydo empire!
.

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