I really didn’t intend to do a post focusing on I/O, an absurdly boring topic to most people, but I’ve recently stumbled across a few related tools that Linux users might find interesting.

• ionice is standard on newish CentOS, at least. I ran into a situation where I have to back up an active NFS server. This sounds like it could spell disaster, with nfsd needing fast access and rsync wanting to touch hundreds of gigs of data as fast as it can. The nice command is meant to limit number-crunching, not disk-spinning. But never fear: ionice is here! Slapping ionice -c2 -n7 in front of my mammoth rsync seems to have done the trick: NFS stayed peppy for the duration of the transfer.
• Something that I forget often: if you’re copying files around for the first time, or it’s been so long that the files are wholly different, use straight scp or something similar, not rsync. I don’t have the numbers to back it up, but rsync is good at copying over only what’s changed, but it’s a waste of time if the source and destination files are completely different.
• dstat is a colorful replacement* for iostat. (* because it’s not necessarily a replacement, so much as a tool folding iostat, vmstat, and some others into one.) You can read the man page for dstat to find out plenty, but just typing dstat and letting it run is a good enough starting point. Network and interrupt stats, too!
• Some of this interest comes from perusing the slideshows on the Percona Conference site. Also worth checking out are their presentation slides in general.

Call it Six Degrees of Separation of the Seven Deadly Sins. Fark linked to The Atlantic which linked to Neatorama which linked to MetaFilter (yay!) which linked to Las Vegas Sun article. Kansas State University geographers embarked “a precision party trick — rigorous mapping of ridiculous data,” by creating maps of the frequency of the seven deadly sins across America, per-county. Many of the techniques are debatable, which is perhaps where the “rigorous mapping of ridiculous data” comes from: envy is graphed based on burglary and theft statistics, for example, and envy is based on a ratio comparing median income to people living below the poverty line. Gluttony is based on the number of fast-food restaurants per capita, which renders just a few bright red spots in the nation. And pride is seemingly just the average of all the others, which hardly makes any sense.

Here’s the full graphics, which can be viewed much larger full-screen. Despite the “rigorous mapping of ridiculous data,” I can’t help but notice trends. Greed seems most prevalant in areas right on the water. Lust seems much more common in the “Bible belt,” but their neighbors just to the north are at the extreme opposite end of the scale. The South is high on wrath, while the North is abnormally low.

What does this data actually tell us? Next to nothing, I’d wager. And yet I can’t help but find it intriguing.

Newsweek has an interesting piece this week, entitled Walking the Beat, about Facebook’s 150 employees ranging from “porn cops” who review uploaded images to ensure they keep with the site’s rules, to site security personnel (who proactively probe for site vulnerabilities), to liaisons with the police, who handle 10-20 requests by police departments a day and, more intriguing, claim to end up being involved in almost “half the crimes that attract national media attention.” Their “undercover” division mingles in online blackhat and spammer communities to keep the site’s defenses up.

An interesting takeaway from the article: 150 of the company’s 850 employees are involved in policing site content, meaning that the division accounts for nearly 20% of Facebook employees. Another interesting aspect for me is the bit about user reactions: their proactive policing has led to many protest groups, but they’re “not too worried: users may join a protest group, but the fact that they haven’t quit the site altogether shows how sticky Facebook can be.”

Even though some would argue that I enjoy complaining, I find that I’m often reluctant to give bad reviews to companies.

But my review of Easynews? In a word, horrendous. I think I signed up for their $9/month plan in January, or maybe sooner. They were doing upgrades or something at the time, so I was only mildly annoyed that their site was practically useless and had few postings.

I meant to cancel my account, but couldn’t find any easy way so I forgot all about it. I just got my latest credit card statement and remembered, and it seems that they’re still working to get back to fully-operational status.

For any other members looking, it’s https://www.easynews.com/cancel/ and you can choose to cancel immediately or at the end of your billing period. Done.

The best of the Internet today, according to me:

• OpenBSD 4.5 comes out May 1st, but is available on their site now. Check out the changelog.
• For whatever reason, they don’t provide a torrent. (Likely because, unlike Ubuntu, it’s rarely distributed as one ISO.) I’d assume the mirrors are going to be crushed soon. I found this Pirate Bay torrent, a good reminder that not everything there is illegal. I’m downloading it now, but it’s quite lonely.
• Here’s a decent OpenBSD install guide, thought it’s not 4.5-specific. Although far from impossible to install, OpenBSD was not designed with ease of install in mind. (OpenBSD 4.5’s official install guide is available, too, of course.)
• I’ve posted about it before, but pfSense is meant to be a spiffy FreeBSD-based firewall and router platform with a good web GUI, for those of you who find OpenBSD really tough to install, or who have a pf.conf with a lengthy QoS section that doesn’t actually work. It’s got a pretty impressive list of features, too.
• For a complete change of pace, Popular Mechanics has a new post, the Top 50 Important Tools. So pointless and yet so interesting. I’ve got to say, though, that I love my Leatherman, which should really be #51, if not higher.
• Everyone is a little bit baffled, but Xapbr posts a Thank You for MySQL 5.4 Community. I think the baffling is due to several things: (1) There wasn’t much talk about MySQL 5.4 as a community release, (2) No one’s entirely sure where MySQL 5.2 and 5.3 went, and (3) Xapbr’s post makes reference to how we’re more fortunate than we realize for there being a community release for MySQL 5.4, which a paranoid person such as me takes to mean, “I can’t say it, but Sun/MySQL Corp. almost didn’t release a GPL version of 5.4.” Here’s a summary of what’s new. Based on the legalese disclaimer, I think it’s legal for me to link to it. A very incomplete summary: better performance on multi-core machines, and a Query Optimizer that’s worth a hoot when doing sub-selects. (“SELECT * FROM t1 WHERE id IN (SELECT id FROM t2)” would never, ever use an index, for example, and would often behave even worse than you’d expect.)

From the, “I’m not entirely sure how I got here” section of the Internet comes this SAN on eBay. At $2,000 it’s a little out of my price range, but it’s pretty much what I’ve wanted for a long time: a box that will just sit in the corner, but that also kicks butt. Seven hot-swappable 1500GB SATA disks with 32MB cache each, behind a RAID controller that supports auto-rebuild and RAID 6. Speaks NFS, SMB, CIFS, AFP, and also FTP and HTTP(S). And apparently, an HTTP/FTP/BitTorrent download manager via its web interface.

And it seems to get good reviews, too. I initially thought it was just a cheap enclosure with 7x big drives, but it’s actually a full-blown computer, and it has some serious features, like the apparent ability to bond across its dual GigE ports, and to work over iSCSI. I’ve seen mention of it having ZFS support if you’re not happy enough with ext3. (ZFS supports a lot of cool features, though I’m not sure I’m familiar enough with it to use it on something important.)

$2,000’s some serious money, but it buys you a 10 terabyte SAN that speaks iSCSI, has bonded GigE, and has a “real” RAID card (one that does more than RAID 1/0). (Oh, shop around! It looks like it’s under $1,000 without disks. Which actually makes it seem kind of expensive.)

I’ve been running a Mac as my work machine for a while now. (And, since it’s a laptop, it tends to become my personal machine somewhat, too.) Excluding things that are specific to programming, here are a few tools I don’t think I could live without–and they’re all free!

• smcFanControl. (Wow, my version is way out of date.) My machine can hit 75 degrees Celsius, at which point parts of the laptop are too hot to touch, and things inside can’t be happy. Apple seems to have designed the machine to stay quiet: even as I’m at 75 degrees, the fans don’t ever exceed 1,000rpm. But they go to 6,000 rpm, and smcFanControl will take you there. It’s not until somewhere around 3,000rpm that I even start to hear the fan, and it makes a big difference. (6,000 rpm can bring the CPU and chassis down 20 degrees Celsius in under a minute.)
• iStat Menus, which place helpful (and customizable) things like network speed, memory utilization, and CPU graphs in the Apple bar (whatever it’s called: the menu bar across the top of the screen). With 2GB RAM (and a tendancy to have way too much stuff open), it’s handy to keep an eye on its usage, and it takes maybe 20×20 pixels to do so. Clicking on the graph brings up a spiffy graph and a breakdown of the top processes using RAM.
• QuickSilver, and I don’t even use it for half its potential. Ctrl+Space and start typing, and it’ll match things. “fir[Enter]” and I’m in Firefox, “ter[Enter]” and I’m in the terminal, “tex[Enter]” and I’m in TextMate… It’s actually capable of much more, too.
• Firefox and Thunderbird. Even though the Mac comes with Safari and a pretty slick mail client, I think power users will feel most comfortable with these. And both are quite customized (and plugin-ized) just to my liking.

Thanks to Rusty for pointing out a lens that, apparently, made its debut more than two years ago, yet went entirely unnoticed by me. The Sigma 200-500mm f/2.8 lens.

f/2.8 means that this lens lets in a lot of light, allowing you to shoot in dimmer light or to get really high shutter speeds for freezing motion in sports. You rarely see zoom good lenses above 200mm, much less with an f/2.8 aperture. But Sigma has done it, and it goes all the way to 500mm. (Bonus: they include a 2x tele-extender, allowing the lens to serve as a 400-1000mm f/5.6 lens.) 500mm is a pretty long telephoto.

There’s a problem with crossing a really long lens with a really wide lens, though. The fact that it’s $22,000 worth of glass is one of them. The other is that it’s ludicrously large.

The Italian JuzaPhoto has a review of the lens, the only site I’ve found that far that actually used the lens prior to reviewing it. There are a lot of 100% crops from what appear to be Arab postage stamps, with a link to some real shots with the lens. The shots are quite remarkable, though I find it odd that there are maybe 8 photos in the world known to be taken with this lens.

But one pressing question remains: why, Sigma, would you make the lens green?

Although you probably shouldn’t take your reviews from someone who watches very little TV, the first season of Damages was absolutely, positively the best show to ever air on television. Besides being a thrilling show to watch, it was brilliantly produced. One of the lead character’s mottos was “Trust no one,” which can easily be adapted to what should be the show’s motto: Trust nothing.

Season 2 finished this week. From the very first episode I was uneasy. While the first season left lots of loose ends, it was a hard act to follow. A second season was bound to be like Mona Lisa II: even if it were done with the utmost of skill, it’s following something that’s difficult to top. And that’s mostly how I still feel about Season 2: a great TV series, but really not on par with the first.

But I disliked Season II for some other reasons. For one, it was a largely different cast of characters, and it took me a long time to figure out who was who. And I really didn’t care for Ellen in the second season: perhaps she was just burned out from all that happened in the first season, but I found her personality thoroughly unlikeable.

While Season 1 had a thrilling aspect where the characters you liked suddenly turned out to be evil and vice versa, Season II sometimes took this to ridiculous extremes. It almost became predictable: if you liked a character, they were bound to be bad, and if you disliked a character, they were bound to be good. The show’s affinity for playing with time by abruptly shifting to “5 Months Later” or “3 Months Earlier” also grew tiresome at times, too. Since very early on in the second season, every episode would feature a flash-forward to a scene that was explained in the final 15 minutes of the season. I won’t give anything away, other than to say that I found what actually transpired to be lame and implausible. I’d use that same expression to describe a few other events that occurred.

Overall, I’d give the show a solid “B.” It’s still a great show, but Season 1 was a tough act to follow, and I had a persistent feeling that Season 2 wasn’t up to those standards. If you haven’t seen Season 1, don’t watch Season 2: the show should really be experienced in chronological order. To the question of whether Season 1 fans should watch Season 2, my conclusion is “Meh.” It’s not a bad show, and it has great parts, but it won’t live up the standards that Season 1 set.

Post things! The main page was blank! Oh no!