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One more day...

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Statistically undefined...

An article so stupid it's funny.

I love the quote, "The statistic probability of this event is itself statistically undefined."

He also has a follow-up article. Not quite as stupid, but still has some gems: "the coincidence of the two main firms that control the world having a perfect track record is impossible²."

Best WSJ article ever!

How many articles have two haikus?

For those in finance...

An explanation of the banking system...

For those in finance...

Terry Duffy's testimony about the May 6 debacle.

So that's why it's so much better to trade futures than stocks.

A ditty about PMR

Here.

Disgusting

How many TVs do you own?

A Math Wiki ...

... On Localization Techniques in Equivariant Cohomology

Interesting...

... visualization of tax brackets

Nice pic of my building

... from some person on flickr

So much for btrfs...

On the initial kernel I used for install, I couldn't do a rebalance of the data (kernel oops)...

A new kernel wouldn't boot claiming fsck errors. Turned out to be a malformed udevadm install.

And to top it off, X stopped working.

I reformatted as ext3, fixed the udevadm, and reinstalled the mesa, drm, and X packages, and all works fine.

I'm not sure if the second and third problems had anything to do with btrfs, and I've seen no other signs of corruption. But given that I'm always running bleeding edge kernels, even the oops is disheartening.

Seems like a good idea, but I'll wait before putting it on my root again (or on my NAS)...

Classic CTA photos

Some CTA photos of historic interest

From James...

"Feel, feel, I say---feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live, especially to live at this terrible pressure, and the only way to honour and celebrate these admirable beings who are our pride and inspiration."

Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies

Recipe

btrfs root!

My desktop now has btrfs as a root filesystem. I largely followed this guide. I used a lucid (daily build) live cd to get the job done. I didn't reinstall, so I had to resize partitions to get a separate /boot (parted doesn't do this anymore, but gparted does). My kernel is a custom kernel with btrfs as a module, so that was good. But the update-initramfs doesn't remake initrds for kernels not installed via package (ya ya, I should use a package), so one has to do that specially. Also, the root device as specified in grub's config needs to change for the new UUID. With those caveats, the guide worked perfectly.

Here are the bonnie numbers:

                             btrfs 
Sequential Output (Char)       238
Sequential Output (Block)    48884
Sequential Output (Rewrite)  31956
Sequential Input (Char)       4596
Sequential Input (Block)     89337
Random Seeks                   114

Again, the sequential output may or may not make sense, but it is consistent with the previous number. The sequential input number is way too high, as my disk shouldn't be able of reading more than 75MB/sec (so says hdparm). I'm starting to lose faith in bonnie...

I tried to rebalance, but I got an oops... So that's not working for now.

I'll play with this for a while before I consider putting it on my NAS. :)

btrfs

Thinking about taking the leap to btrfs... Here are some bonnie++ numbers for ext3 & btrfs filesystems mounted via loopback, as well as the raw underlying filesystem (ext3):

                              ext3  btrfs    raw
Sequential Output (Char)       491    309    790
Sequential Output (Block)    78512  50047  58462
Sequential Output (Rewrite)  28843  32065  31820
Sequential Input (Char)       2200   3887   2725
Sequential Input (Block)     70306  79169  78204
Random Seeks                   156    114    175

Nothing too interesting, but it looks like sequential input performed well. Sequential output didn't (but the ext3/loopback did much better than ext3/raw, so maybe it's just noise?).

Liquid cooled goodness...?

So I decided to play around with this liquid cooling idea... I have a small case though, so I went with the Exos-v2 external radiator/fan/pump combo.

My Core i7 used to boot at ~35C and then quickly be in the 35-40C and then shortly after boot it would be very stable at 40-45C. As far as I know, I didn't see it exceed 60C under load... But I'm not sure if I was looking when I really exercised it.

Now with this liquid cooled thingamajig, it stays below 40C at idle which is nice, but under load it can easily get above 60C and I can push it to just above 70C.

Unfortunately I didn't record good data before installing the cooling.

So what gives? Am I imagining things or is this too hot?

Vegan Peach Cobbler

Recipe