a confusion of aims

2006-11-29T17:07:00.000-08:00

Why hardware sucks.

An in-depth report. Why do I think hardware sucks? There is a dichotomy among admins about which sucks more, hardware or software. For years I have said, "Hardware sucks bigtime", but do people believe me? Heck no.

I'm stuck inside a cold and hot computer room with fans blasting so I can hardly hear a dang thing. I'm sitting on a semi-comfortable chair waiting for Godot. And waiting. Because Godot, or in this case the Sun engineer, never comes. I wait and I surf and I drink cola and I burp and I eat junk food.

If I was doing software now I would be in a more comfortable chair listening to music, eating better food, and I wouldn't be working. Because it's fracking 8:13 PM at night! I spent my morning luxuriously writing code listening to Aqualung (The group not the song). I had iced tea with artificial sugar, and nice ham sandwiches for lunch.

Now, I have to gobble a crappy Energy bar so I don't pass out from not eating at Mickey Dees, and getting a crappy Diet Coke going deaf from the fans and the alternating heat and cold which pounds my body like a recalcitrant drummer. Why do people like hardware? Do they like this type of experience? Do they need to get their hands dirty in the electronics? Do they like staying up all night getting a headache?

Stupid people! Hardware is just a means to an end. I don't want a car that I have to do maintenance on, why would I want a computer that I have to do maintenance on? I ask you!

Stupid V1280. First IB6 decides to crash, and then not even boot. Then SB0 decides that some of its memory isn't coming up so it CHS disables it. We have to call Sun to get the super secret password. Bozo! But after enabling the CHS IB6 decides to crash again. Mofo. I say it again. Mofo. So we poweroff and poweron at the lom, and accept the fact that the stupid memory is going to be blacklisted. prtdiag tells us the bad memory location.

Meanwhile I just sit here cursing stupid people who like hardware. Yasir says that the hardware can sense fear and so that's why it's being a mofo to me. The truth is that sometimes you get lucky. If the mofo box had been able to boot up we could have detected the bad memory sooner.

2006-11-21T11:35:00.000-08:00

My distro: Arch Linux.

I went through the usual agonies. I hated Windows. I wanted to do Linux full time. I started with SuSE, and it was ok. It really didn't occur to me that there were literally hundreds of distros out there. Someone who was smart recommended Arch Linux. I enjoyed the installation procedure because it was so command line. Arch Linux is a good distro for Unix admins. The first thing I noticed was that it was lightning fast. It's optimized for 686. I had some old computers, and now I was able to make good use of them.

The inevitable doubt creeps in. What about all the others out there? What about BSD? So I tried Ubuntu. The people in the Ubuntu forums are extremely friendly. Arch Linux, not so much. But I didn't like the way they did sound, didn't like the BROWN, and thought the whole sudo thing was bozo.

I tried FreeBSD. It was OK. It is a much more secure OS. Arch really doesn't care that much about security. But there is so much more software written for Linux. And there is a huge user community, so I am able to Googlefix most of my problems.

So I ended back at Arch Linux. On the positive side, it does have a great package manager called pacman. Kind of a goofy name. Also, they have taken their logo from Star Trek. But they don't seem to have much of a sense of humor about that. They are definitely cutting edge in terms of their packages. You have to keep up with all the new developments or rebuild the server from scratch.

I find myself rebuilding from scratch every 4 months or so. Sometimes to fix the package bloat that inevitably happens. Sometimes because I didn't read all the instructions when I updated my packages. The philosophy behind Arch is KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid). You don't have startup bloat, because you choose what services to start. It gets that from BSD.

It's a nice feeling to be in control of the box. My first computer was an Apple II, and I liked the command line control of the box. Unfortunately I have to use my wife's Windows XP box from time to time, because the scanner is not SANE compliant. Live and Learn.

2006-11-20T21:56:00.000-08:00

I thought I would start with something helpful. A little script to convert those .flv files to .mpg. All you need is a little ffmpeg. This is the result of intense research. Converting to .avi yielded smaller files overall, but the sync didn't work so well.


#!/bin/bash
#----------------------------------------------------------------------------
#
#   Script Name: flv2mpg.sh
#
#----------------------------------------------------------------------------
      if [ $# -eq "1" ] && [ -f "$1" ]
      then
              FILE=$1
              MPG=`echo $FILE | sed 's/flv/mpg/'`
              /usr/bin/ffmpeg -i $FILE -sameq -ar 22050 -b 500 $MPG
      else
              echo "Usage: $0 <file>"
      fi