Man I hate USB 1

Our software is installed/upgraded from CD. As part of the build process, we create .iso files and automatically burn that ISO to a CD in the build machine’s burner. When I want to upgrade the test complex on my desk, I can never find the master CD, so I usually burn a copy myself. But I don’t have any blanks at my desk, so I thought I’d try just copying to a USB “thumb drive”, and then mounting the .iso on the test machine using “mount … -o loop”.

So I started copying it to the thumb drive on my Linux box (which only has USB 1), and went away and did something else for 10 or 15 minutes. And I came back and it was still copying. So I did something else for 10 or 15 minutes. And it’s *still* copying. At this point, I suddenly realized my laptop has a USB 2 port free. So I copied the file over the network to my laptop, copied it from there to a different USB thumb drive, and took that over to the test complex and upgraded it. And having done all that, the Linux box is *still* copying the original .iso to the first thumb drive.

Update I just tried it again with “time cp” with a different thumb drive, and it only took 12 minutes and 30 seconds. I’m positive it was taking longer than that before, so I’m redoing the test with the thumb drive that was taking so long before. Maybe it’s the thumb drive that’s slow, or maybe it’s because it’s formatted ext3 instead of FAT32. I’ll report back when that one finishes. If it ever does.

Second Update: After arriving back to work, I find that the copy to the ext3 formatted thumb drive took 2:19:05. Yes, that’s nearly 2.5 HOURS! Dude, that’s fucked up.

Need some artistic judgement

I’m thinking of replacing my 17″ Powerbook G4 (aka “AlBook”) with a 17″ MacBook Pro (MBP), although I’m waiting to see if they announce something with the new three-touch touch pad like the MacBook Air (MBA). Rumour has it that they’re waiting for Intel to bring up production levels on a new chip before they do, and that’s why it wasn’t announced at the same time as the MBA.

SnowbirdsThe best feature of my AlBook is that I got a custom “skin” made featuring a picture of the Snowbirds in flight. I took it to the Wings and Wheels air show in St. Catherines last year, and got all the Snowbirds officers (including Snowbird 10 and 11, and their public affairs officer) to sign it. Several of the pilots expressed admiration for it, and asked where they could get one for their own laptops. The skin is made of vinyl, and the web site said you could peel it off, but I very much doubt it would transfer. And I don’t want to risk damaging it, especially since one of the pilots who signed it died in an accident this year. So it’s going to stay on the Albook. But I definitely want one for the new MBP.

I went to the Snowbirds web site and downloaded some of their high resolution promotional pictures, and their logo and wordmark which are available in EPS files, and played around in Photoshop a bit. I definitely wanted one with all 9 planes, and I think I like this one best, but I can’t decide on the placement of the logo and wordmark. First time ever I wished I’d installed that poll plugin, but please look at the following two pictures and tell me in the comments which you prefer. (As always, clicking the thumbnail will take you to a bigger version.)

Option 1 Option 2
Option 1 Option 2

And before you ask, yes, I am procrastinating. I need to re-engineer one of my tables and the classes that use it, and I don’t want to.

On the other hand, maybe I *can* have too much screen real estate

Well, after working with the two screen setup for a couple of days, I’ve started to get a terribly sore neck. A bit of self-evaluation shows that when I’m looking at the laptop screen, I’m craning forward and down, which is ruining all the good effort that my chiropractor and the stretching exercises he gave me over the last three weeks have done.

So I’m now running with the laptop screen closed, using the KVM to use the big screen for both laptop and desktop use.

Unfortunately when I came in this morning, my desktop was totally unresponsive. I couldn’t get it to wake up when I switched to it on the KVM, and I couldn’t ssh to it from my laptop. So I power cycled it. That required manually fsck’ing the disk, and then when it did come up for real, the mouse went nuts and started opening programs and moving stuff around on my screen like it was being driven by a demented ghost. It had also booted the wrong kernel (one that didn’t support MVFS). So I booted it with the proper kernel and it was ok. Except that as always, vmplayer complains that I haven’t run /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl, so I ran it again. Don’t know why that never “sticks”.

Better, better…

I discovered a new monitor mode for the 24″ CRT that gives me even more screen real-estate. That’s nice.

I also managed to borrow a KVM from the lab downstairs so I can occasionally look in on my Linux box to see if I’ve got any new Lotus Notes “mail”. That’s nice.

Unfortunately the PS2 KVM doesn’t work well with my USB mouse – I have a USB to PS2 adaptor that I was using at one point, with the USB mouse going into the PS2 mouse adaptor, which was then going into my PS2 to USB adaptor. That was mostly a proof of concept (to make sure I could take the output of a PS2 KVM and plug it into my USB-only laptop), and also it made it easier to switch the PS2 keyboard and the USB mouse between my USB-only laptop and my PS2-and-USB Linux box. But plugging a USB mouse into a PS2 adaptor into a PS2 KVM didn’t work so well for the mouse. Every time I switched the KVM I had to reset the mouse by unplugging it and plugging it back in. Not good. So in the meantime I’m using the PS2 mouse that came with the computer instead of the USB mouse I brought from home, and it sucks. No wheel, and it uses a ball rather than optical. Oh, and it’s a Belkin, so it will probably fail in 5 minutes.

Oops

I’ve mentioned before that in order to help defray the costs of putting my stuff on a colo box, I partitioned the box in 3 Xen virtual machines, and rent two of them out. Well, yesterday one of the renters, Terry, asked for a bit of help with his Apache set up. Not knowing his root password, I mounted his hard drive in the “dom0” Xen controller, using “mount /dev/xen-space/xen2-disk /mnt” and started poking around. Well, evidently that managed to confuse ext2 because a few hours later he emailed me to say that his disk had gone “read-only”, and when he tried to reboot it didn’t come up.

Looking at my munin graphs, it appears that when he rebooted, it took down the whole box. I had to email the owner of the rack to power cycle my box, which he can do remotely. When it came back, 2 of the 3 virtual machines came up fine, but Terry’s was asking for a root password to run fsck. I shut down his virtual machine and did a fsck from within the dom0, and it found several things out of whack. But after those were fixed, I was able to restart Terry’s virtual machine.

So lesson learned. I’m not sure if things would have been happier if I’d mounted it read-only, but in the future if I need to mount one of the partitions in /dev/xen-space I’ll shut down the xen virtual machine instance first.