Josh's Blog - Random

Where has all the science fiction gone?

nospam@example.com (Josh Bressers) — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 13:21:00 -0400

I read this Penny Arcade Comic the other day.
Cuspin'
And it made me think. We do live in the science fiction world of yesterday. We have communicators, submarines, space ships, powerful computers. It's absolutely amazing.

So the question, I wonder, is "what's next?" Where is the new science fiction to push it to the next level. I'm not talking about things like warp drive, androids, or society falling apart (possibly due to warp drive or androids). I mean what's next? Back when folks like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells created their stories, they were absolutely crazy. Stuff no ordinary person would ever think of. Stuff ordinary people thought was so insane, nobody would ever do those things.

We've done a lot of those things.

So what now? What are the totally insane science fiction ideas no ordinary person would ever think of? I have no idea. Are there some books I need to read?

Backup your data

nospam@example.com (Josh Bressers) — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0500

So while it's not well known, at least outside of people I talk to often,

I'm a bit of a backup nut. In the past I've gotten a few of my jobs and consulting gigs simple because of my backup experience. I was having a chat with a friend the other day and it occurred to me that it wouldn't hurt to explain what I do for my personal data. Many people don't understand or don't care about personal backups.

The real problem with right now is that there is going to be a giant hole as far as history goes. It's easy to say that with things like archive.org and web sites and twitter and wikipedia and blogs and twitter and facebook and twitter and lots of other things, more data is saved than ever before. This is very true, but it's only a certain set of data. The REALLY cool data will vanish either when your computer disk crashes, or you die and your children throw out that Commodore 64.

I shall tell a clever story to express my point; When I was in college, I lived in a really crappy fraternity house. It was over 100 years old and something was always broken. I often was fixing holes in walls, adding insulation, or whatever else needed some work. I made the unfortunate mistake of showing competence, which meant I was always volunteered to do the actual work while everyone else sat around drinking beer and watching TV. Almost every time we opened up a wall, there was all sorts of goodies to be found. From old newspapers, to things lost in the holes 10 years ago, to tools I left in the last time I fixed the wall.

When history is based on physical things, pictures, paper, wood, records, it doesn't vanish, it lives on as long as the medium does. Let's now think about digital pictures. When your kids have to clean out the basement after shipping you off the old folks home someday, they won't find boxes of pictures and old records, they'll find a hard drive in a box that probably can't be read by the futuristic mind control computers our mechanical overlords force us to use. They probably also won't care enough to see what's on it. It's not like finding a box full of pictures. It's easy to open the box and look at the pictures. It's not easy to figure out what's on some random computer or hard drive.

So this brings up to the idea of backups.

The first thing you need to do is make sure you have your data organized. This is very important. Put pictures in a folder called "pictures", music in "music" (there is a pattern here), and so on. This isn't only for other people, it's for you too. In five years, you're not going to know what that "funny stuff" folder is for.

Have a central fileserver for your house. Even if it's just one of the desktop computers. Make sure your data all lives in the same place, this will be important for backing it up.

Once you have your data collected and sorted, there are a couple of options. I do both of these.

1) Use external hard drives (plural)
2) Use a remote storage service like Amazon S3

As for #1, jwz has a nice write-up of what to do here: http://jwz.livejournal.com/801607.html.

#2 is a bit more complicated.

I've spent a fair amount of time looking into options for using a remote storage solution. None are ideal, I wrote my own called s4ync. It sucks too, but at least I know what's wrong with it.

The biggest advantage to using an online storage solution, is you don't need to go fetch a disk if something goes wrong. I also sleep better at night knowing that to lose my important data, my house, my bank, and amazon.com would have to all explode. The odds of me surviving such an event are fairly low. It's all about risk. I'm not a risky person, so less risk equals more sleep. Your mileage will vary.

Now the most important part of this: LEAVE INSTRUCTIONS. I don't mean some crappy note that says "This is the data backup" I mean write as much as you can about the data you have stored. I have rather detailed instructions for my family in the event of my untimely demise that goes as far as how to revoke my PGP keys. Be sure to either have a printed piece of paper or a file named something clever like README. The two likely scenarios here, are that your family is looking at this after you're gone, or they're cleaning up all the crap you've collected over the course of your life now that Open Source finally drove you to the looney bin.

In the event it's a situation where the grand-kids find the "box" of old pictures, you will have done the world a great service.

Happy 19110

nospam@example.com (Josh Bressers) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Ten years later and still funny!

Old computer movies

nospam@example.com (Josh Bressers) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 07:16:00 -0500

I watched Johnny Mnemonic (there's also a short story the movie is based on, go read it) last night for the first time in a long time. The movie takes place in 2021, only 11 more years!

I think the most striking thing was that he was to carry around 320 Gigabytes of data in his head. The first time I saw that movie in 1995 or so, I remember thinking that 320GB was an insane amount of data. Today I type this on a computer with almost double that much storage capacity. I love it how movies that involve computer things age terribly. I suppose that's part of what makes them so fun to watch.

Except Tron, that one is still pure awesome.

Argh computers!

nospam@example.com (Josh Bressers) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:27:00 -0400

So this weekend, my home server machine, that does all sorts of stuff for me, decided to crash. I rebooted, and noticed that one of my virtual machines running inside vmware didn't start. Upon spending some time with it, it became obvious that the disk was corrupt, well beyond what an fsck could fix. So I reinstalled, luckily I had backups. Later that day, same thing. At this point I fsck the real disk (fsck on 1TB takes a long time), which fails miserably. So I rebuild that drive, then rebuild my virtual machines, then the next day the server crashes again.

This sad game went on for a while longer before I finally ran memtest86. It lit up like a Christmas tree (note to self, do this first next time).

So the real point of this post though, is to comment on how painless the Corsair RMA process is (they made the RAM in question). Everything was via a web site, and in a few hours, I had my RMA sheet and was off to the post office. It's always nice when I'm ready to throw the computer in a lake, something goes right.

The extra cool thing is I bought this memory as a 2 stick deal, they offered to replace both sticks. Sadly I need this computer to be running, so that didn't happen, but I still dig the idea behind it.

In a strange way, this also makes me happy, as CentOS 5.4 is just days away, so I figure I'll wait and use KVM instead of vmware, which will give me a whole new world of headaches

Attention Burglars: Here is the alarm

nospam@example.com (Josh Bressers) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:47:12 -0400

So while visiting my bank today, I noticed a shiny metal box on the side of the building clearly marked as "Burglar Alarm". I hope for the sake of sanity, that's not REALLY the burglar alarm, but rather just a shiny box to trick stupid thieves and make us customers feel safer.

THIS GAME CHEATS!

nospam@example.com (Josh Bressers) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:45:00 -0500

So I finally bought a Wii this weekend. My Gamecube started making a horrible noise, so it was a perfect opportunity.

I have decided that wiimotes weren't accidentally slipping from people's hands, they were throwing them at the TV. Countless childhood memories of rage came rushing back while playing Wii Sports. I fondly recall yelling at the TV while playing Super Mario Brothers so long ago, knowing full well the NES had some sort of grudge against me. Sometimes the NES controller would manage to hit the TV screen, luckily back in the CRT days, this didn't matter much. These days I have two things on my side though.

1) I throw like a girl
2) The TV is 10 feet away and hangs on the wall (see #1)

It should be interesting to see what sort of clever games come out in a few years, as one can compare the huge leaps in gameplay from Super Mario Brothers to Super Mario Brothers 3 on the NES.

All the Free Tech Support You CAN Handle!

nospam@example.com (Josh Bressers) — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 11:27:55 -0500

So no doubt, in good Christmas fashion, the geeks of the world will make their treks home, and fix lots of broken computers for all their friends and family.

So far this year, the most impressive for me is an aunt who managed to not install any Windows updates since 2004, and amazingly had no viruses.

How Long Does a Flash Drive Last?

nospam@example.com (Josh Bressers) — Fri, 23 May 2008 07:16:00 -0400

So the question has been bothering me for quite some time, how many times can I really write to one of these USB memory stick things before it finally dies. With as popular as the USB drive based distributions are becoming, I was wondering, how practical are these distributions. The stick used in this experiment is a 1G Sony Microvault USB Flash Drive.

I'm going to see how many times I have to write to this before it dies. (more after the fold, this is a very long post)

Continue reading "How Long Does a Flash Drive Last?"

Life with a toddler

nospam@example.com (Josh Bressers) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 08:16:40 -0500

Overheard earlier today

You better not have that toilet brush again!
put it back
put it BACK
put IT BACK
...
NOT IN THE TOILET!

Pretty Tux Pumpkin

nospam@example.com (Josh Bressers) — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 08:22:04 -0400

I finally got around to carving out my pumpkin last night (nothing like some last minute work). I'm rather pleased with the results.

Mr. Murphy, I hate you!

nospam@example.com (Josh Bressers) — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 09:04:40 -0400

I expected my Saturday to be a rather relaxing day, where I would mow the lawn, and install the new water heater I bought. I don't usually post random personal things to my blog, but I just need to complain about this one in public where it can make me feel better

I never got around to mowing, and installing the water heater went something like this:

1. Go to hardware store, buy what I think I need
2. drain old water heater
3. remove old water heater
3. Find out parts bought in step 1 don't fit in my basement, back to the hardware store
4. Start building the connectors to go from the pipe to the heater, notice one of the fitting bought in step 3 was wrong
5. Go back to the hardware store to buy proper fitting
6. Finally get the water heater hooked up, start filling it with water.
7. notice the primary water shutoff valve is leaking, badly (it was 30 years old)
8. Go to hardware store, buy new shutoff valve
9. drain and move new water heater
10. Cut pipes to remove shutoff valve
11. notice I cut one of the wrong pipes
12. Go back to hardware store to get what I need to fix the wrong pipe I cut (at this point, I bought lots of extra things "just in case")
13. install new shutoff valve
14. Put new water heater back in place, fill it up
15. rejoice as nothing leaks and the house has water again (at this point, it is 11:30pm, I started this project at about noon)

At this point I'm claiming that the reason I didn't hire someone to do this, is that when the primary shutoff valve broke, it would have likely ended up costing me a fortune in plumbing fees.

New and improved pumpkin stencil

nospam@example.com (Josh Bressers) — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 20:07:00 -0400

I'm a rather big fan of carving pumpkins. I'm not entirely sure why this is, maybe it's because I get to roast the seeds afterwards. A few years ago I tried to find a Tux pumpkin stencil and came up dry, so I made my own. This year after many many hours of Gimping around (har har har), I have a THREE color stencil. Orange, lit up candle color, and sort of transparent orange. I created my artists rendition below. As you can see, I'm not a very good artist. The idea here is that the parts that look sort of like a cross between yellow and orange, are where one would just carve away some of the pumpkin, rather than cut it out completely. You end up with something a bit like this picture of a Gollum pumpkin I found (Note it is a three color carving)
http://www.boston.com/ae/events/halloween/2005/pumpkins?pg=2

My original stencil, along with the new one can both be found here:
http://www.bress.net/mediawiki/index.php/Tux_Pumpkin_Stencil

When I finally get around to carving this in a pumpkin I shall post a picture of the finished product. I figured since I finished with my stencil early (I planned ahead due to how little art skill I have), there's no sense in not sharing this.

Amazing Video

nospam@example.com (Josh Bressers) — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 09:57:49 -0400

Thanks to Andrew Tobias I found this video. It's rather amazing to think about what this will mean for the future.