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| 2008-05-06 13:45 |
| Sometimes it's the hardware |
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A few years ago, I bought this cute little USB hub from Fry's. It was one of those faux-Apple style pieces of hardware, with that milky-glass look, ultra-small and stylish. I used it to connect my keyboard, mouse, and printer to the laptop, but the printer only worked when it was connected directly instead of through the hub. I cursed Linux. Then I started working on the Macbook Air with the same setup. and when the printer didn't work with Mac OS X, I cursed printer firmware writers. Then my keyboard kept inserting random characters, kind of like there was an echo delay. It didn't do that when connected directly, only through the hub. Hey... wait a minute... I switched to the new even cooler USB hub I bought on a whim last time I was at Fry's, and voila, printer and keyboard work perfectly. It never even occurred to me that it could be hardware.
Oh yeah, the Macbook Air. I love it.
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| 2008-04-24 19:44 |
| Even the criminals have MySpace pages now |
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Back in 1995 when the web was just getting off the ground, I went off to university and didn't watch TV for a couple of years. So the next time I turned on the TV, I was immediately struck by the fact that all the car ads had URLs now.
Something similar happened to me this week. I'm down in L.A. visiting a client fortuitously located across from a building covered in the most amazingly beautiful graffiti. One section has a URL for the artists' MySpace page:
I started keeping an eye out for others:
Check out the Google Street View for more awesome graffiti.
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| 2008-04-21 16:47 |
| Supporting assertive women |
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I forgot to make my main point in my post about what managers and other people in positions of power can do to help women succeed: Make a conscious effort to respond positively to assertive, confident women who ask for what they deserve. Go ahead and feel that annoyance or anger or indignation when a woman steps up and asks for her due - and then acknowledge that your feelings are unfair and sexist and try to overcome them.
For some years now, I've been making a conscious effort to support and appreciate women who are brave and aggressive and outspoken. It's not always easy and I know I'm not completely successful, but the results have always been worth it. Women can do amazing things if you just fail to completely handicap them.
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| 2008-04-21 08:22 |
| Asking for it |
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The authors of Women Don't Ask just released an excellent follow-on book, Ask for It. Women Don't Ask explained the problem - women are trained not to ask for things and as a result get less - but Ask for It explains how to solve the problem. I wrote HOWTO Negotiate Your Salary and Benefits - for Women in an amateur attempt to fill this gap. Read Ask for It for in-depth professional advice backed up by numerous studies and experiments.
A particularly depressing chapter is "The Likability Factor." Women have an additional hurdle to surmount - while men can ask for things in a confident, assertive manner, most people respond very badly to women asking in the same manner. From the book:
Using four actors, two men and two women, Linda and her colleagues created a series of videotapes. The videotapes show an employee who's just finished a management intern program being interviewed by the head of human resources for a permanent placement in one of the company's divisions. The division heads were then going to watch the videos and decide whom to hire for their sections. In some versions both parts were played by men, in others both parts were played by women, and in others they mixed it up: The division head was male and the intern was female and vice versa. In half the tapes, the freshly minted employees simply answered questions from the interviewers about their experience in the management intern program. In the other half, the actors used the same script and answered the same questions, but the intern also brought up the compensation package in a fairly aggressive way. [...]
Men who viewed the tapes, when asked how likely they were to hire the intern, said they'd be willing to hire the male candidate whether or not they saw the version in which he tried to boost his salary. Even using pretty aggressive language didn't hurt him with other men. But men reacted very differently to the female candidate. They were 50 percent more likely to hire a woman if she did not ask for the salary increase. In other words, the men's feelings about the woman changed as soon as she declared that she deserved to be paid more - and changed for the worse.
Like the men, women who viewed the tapes were also much more likely to hire a woman if she did not press for more money. But women's responses differed from those of men in one striking and revealing way. Women were also significantly less likely to hire the male candidate if he demanded a high salary. These results suggest two important differences between men and women who negotiate for themselves:
- Women risk being penalized when they negotiate aggressively, whether they're negotiating with another woman or with a man.
- Men can get away with negotiating aggressively as long as they're negotiating with another man.
This tells us that men enjoy a huge advantage in the workplace, since in [the U.S.] the vast majority of supervisors, managers, and senior executives - most people's bosses - are men.
What I would love to see is a book aimed at managers on how to manage and respond to women, given the results of Dr. Babcock's studies. It's not just when it comes to negotiating initial salary that this information becomes important, it's during the entire course of an employee's career. For example, women tend not to ask for promotions or improvements in their working environment, believing that they will be rewarded if they simply do good work. As a result, women are more likely to become frustrated and leave a company without ever trying to negotiate a better deal with their management. When management is aware of this tendency, they can make a special effort to approach women about their job satisfaction and signal openness to negotiation and change, and reduce completely unnecessary (and expensive) turnover of their employees.
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| 2008-04-08 23:12 |
| Notes for debugging file systems |
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Whilst debugging file system corruption with ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) eqe, I was reminded that hexdump is slightly misleading on a perfectly valid directory:
val@nifty:~$ sudo dd skip=1536 count=1 bs=4096 if=/dev/hda5 | hd | less
00000000 02 00 00 00 0c 00 01 02 2e 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 |................|
00000010 0c 00 02 02 2e 2e 00 00 0b 00 00 00 14 00 0a 02 |................|
After all, "." and ".." look like, well, dots.
(The file system corruption seemed pretty clearly to be the result of a 16GB CF card occasionally ending up with 4K blocks of all zeroes when they ought to be something else. Don't store data you care about on these things.)
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| 2008-04-08 00:06 |
| Office Space: Cheap beer edition |
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Last night, evan and I held an Office Space viewing party with the following intriguing twist: We would attempt to eat and drink the same things as Peter 'n' the gang in the movie. This turns out to be harder than it looks for a lot of reasons.
- Most labels are hidden. With few exceptions (e.g., Pepsi), the labels of what people are eating and drinking are casually but carefully hidden. We assume this is due to advertising or sponsorship or something.
- The characters eat and drink a lot. I mean, a lot. I had no idea how many times people, say, drank coffee in the movie. It's around 10 times.
- Most of the food and drink is disgusting junk food. The only item they partake of in the movie that I would consume of my own free will is the water Peter drinks in his interview with the Bobs.
The menu we finally came up with was:
Molson Ice - Lawrence scene
Water - Interview with the Bobs
Pepsi and Cheetos - Tetris
Dos Equis - Peter & Michael plot
Miller - Tom's party
Birthday cake - Lumbergh's party
Piña colada - Milton on the beach
Except, of course, that Molson Ice isn't available for love or money in the Bay area. No, the only absurd cheap beer one can get around here is Pabst Blue Ribbon for the faux-slumming hipsters (50 cents a can!). Sam at Thanasis Market assures me he can get it if I order it ahead, but we only had two days lead time. Lina came up with the idea of just writing "Molson Ice" on bottles of some other beer (Moosehead, it was at least Canadian - and not nearly as bad).
It was fun, especially bringing out the cake with "Happy Birthday Bill" written on it and the "4" and "1" candles, but the major downside is the obvious one: Yuck, eating all that junk was disgusting. This did lead to a great deal of fun pawning off the various leftovers on people as they were leaving, but, ew. I woke up with a stomach ache in the middle of the night.
So, if I do this again, I think I'll buy expensive beer and vegan cake, and we'll take symbolic, ceremonial sips instead of attempting to drink 3 whole beers in a 90 minute movie (along with Pepsi and Cheetos and cake and we didn't even try to do the coffee).
And sorry if you weren't invited - we had two days notice, a 12-person capacity, and I was somewhat delirious with that hideous cold going around the Bay area. It was a good test drive and I'm sure the next one will be better.
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| 2008-04-07 11:42 |
| Random tid-bits |
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There's an atavistic pleasure to deliberately destroying a file system. You spend all this time carefully avoiding accidentally dd'ing over your root file system (well, you do if you're a file system developer) and when you actually get to do it on purpose... it's kind of soothing. Even ext3's poor little complaints about invalid journal entries are somehow pleasing to the eye.
(Why was I dd'ing a live file system? I recycled my ancient laptop at Green Citizen. The State of California will now pay the recycling fee for you for things like monitors and laptops. No, really! Hie yourself on down there and turn in those ancient CRTs while the offer is still good.)
Buffalo Exchange believes there is no market for black combat boots during the summer. In San Francisco. Goth Central. Just saying.
You know those absurd 1-800 numbers on the back of things like Doritos packets? Who calls those, anyway? Answer: Me. I was trying to buy Molson Ice and called 1-800-MOLSON1 to find out if anyone distributes it in the Bay area. (Answer: No.)
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| 2008-04-01 23:11 |
| File systems are irrelevant |
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I gave a lightning talk at the latest SuperHappyDevHouse designed to answer the question "What file system should I use?" for your typical web 2.0 startup. Answer? Make the file system irrelevant. Slides:
Storage for Startups
If you want the soundtrack to the slides, invite me to give a talk. :)
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| 2008-03-29 10:47 |
| Firefox, tabs, drop-downs, and Mac OS X |
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I've gotten quite adept at filling out my address on web forms without touching the mouse by just tabbing between fields - except that the default behavior for Firefox on Mac OS X is that tab skips drop-down menus. The fix:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/apple/why-doesnt-tab-work-for-drop-down-controls-in-firefox-on-os-x/
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| 2008-03-25 15:20 |
| Juvenile colossal squid captured |
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No pictures or details as of yet, but keep an eye out for further results from this Antarctic ocean survey:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10499385
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| 2008-03-21 09:26 |
| Linux == murder |
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I went to pick up the keys for my new apartment on Valencia and met my property manager, a hip artsy woman who wanted to know what my sign was (apparently Gemini is good). I handed her my business card and she says, "Linux... Isn't that the thing started by that Hans guy who murdered his wife in Oakland?"
I think I preferred it when people just stared blankly when I told them what I do.
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| 2008-03-17 21:17 |
| bdar - block device archive |
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Zach Brown announced another cool tool on fsdevel:
I found myself wanting to backup a copy of an ancient ~75g ext3 file
system. I got frustrated by of our utilities which don't saturate
storage. I wanted dd line rates but I also only wanted to copy
referenced data.
So I threw something together which does that. I made it work roughly
like tar so that people have some idea what to expect. So you can do
something like:
$ bdar -cf - /dev/sda3 | gzip -c > /tmp/sda3-backup.bdar.gz
...
$ zcat /tmp/sda3-backup.bdar.gz | bdar -xf - /dev/sda3
and it will do exactly what you would guess it would do after reading
those command lines.
The bdar file format is just a header and then a series of regions of
bytes described by their length and offset. To create a bdar file from
a file system bdar needs to know enough to figure out what extents are
referenced. Restoring a bdar is generic, though, it just stamps bytes
into the target file.
I only taught it the most basic knowledge of ext[234]. Just enough to
show that generating the bdar is ~4x faster than tar and ~2x faster than
dump :). There's still some available disk bandwidth to consume with
read-ahead, but it's pretty close. (single spindle, ~5g of kernel
trees, beefy cpus.)
Source available as a Mercurial repo: $ hg clone http://www.zabbo.net/hg/bdar
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| 2008-03-16 12:13 |
| Linux consultants untie [1] |
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For some reason, I get a surprising number of inquiries about Linux bootloader consulting despite being a Linux file systems consultant. As far as I can tell, this is the result of exactly one instance of the word "bootloader" on my company web site. I've tried a few Google searches but nothing about me comes up immediately so I'm still a little baffled.
If anyone out there is actually an expert in x86 bootloaders, drop me a line and I'll refer these people to you. If you're any kind of Linux consultant at all, drop me a line too - I turn down more business than I accept and always like to have someone to refer potential clients to.
[1] http://www.tshirtbordello.com/images/bad-spellers-untie-shirt.gif
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| 2008-03-13 07:51 |
| CRFS code released! |
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Zach Brown finally got the green light to release the source to his cool new remote file system prototype:
http://oss.oracle.com/projects/crfs/
From Zach's post to fs-devel:
I think the video recording of the talk does a decent job of giving an
overview of the design, and it's a hoot, but I can give a quick summary:
- the user space server exports a private BTRFS volume
- the network protocol operates on ranges of BTRFS disk items
- the kernel client provides posix semantics by operating on items
- the server can grant and revoke client caches of data and metadata
There's a lot of complexity hiding in those four lines but those are the
critical properties to grasp :).
Video of the LCA CRFS talk:
http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2008/Fri/mel8-247.ogg
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| 2008-03-13 07:44 |
| LJ philosophy |
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1. Okay, okay, people without LJ accounts can now comment, they will just be screened for approval to avoid the spambots.
2. Wow, sounds like I need to switch from LiveJournal now that Basic accounts are no longer available to new subscribers. Suggestions? Good lord, I'm so tired of moving my blog.
3. I've finally solidified my Theory of LJ Friends (just in time to switch blog thingies). I'm not into "private" posts or friends-only comments, so the only remaining purposes of the friend marker are (a) ego boosting, (b) directing people to blogs they will also like. So I may go through and revamp my friends list. Don't take either the old or the new list personally.
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| 2008-03-13 07:39 |
| Useful ext3 documentation (and undelete tool) |
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After a classic 'rm -rf ~', Carlo Wood learned the entire ext3 file system layout and journal format and succeeded in recovering most of his home directory. In the process, he happened to create the most detailed description of ext3 layout I've ever seen:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~carlo17/howto/undelete_ext3.html
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| 2008-03-07 18:21 |
| The Hans Reiser Show |
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Someone pointed out that Hans Reiser started testifying for his murder trial (against the advice of his lawyer) a few days ago. It's the usual level of black comedy only possible with the kind of terrifyingly focused personality common in open source. E.g.:
---
And then the defendant began answering why he told partygoers his family was a financial burden.
"I was being a patronizing asshole."
"What I was saying, men don't need for themselves wives and children. If a man is taking care of wives and children, he is being generous," the defendant testified.
"It does sound like you were being a patronizing asshole," DuBois said.
"Yeah."
"Why were you being a patronizing asshole on this occasion?" DuBois asked.
A few responses later, the defendant said that marriage and family "it's altruistic in the financial sense. Well, and, uhm, you know. It's a lot cheaper to hire a housekeeper."
---
The whole thing is being live-blogged (whatever that means) at Wired:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/hans_reiser_trial/index.html
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| 2008-03-07 17:48 |
| Focus follows mouse on Mac OS X: Only $14.95! |
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| airbook |
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Okay, this is it for Mac OS X for me. I want (like any sane person) focus follows mouse. A few googles later, what do I find?
http://www.atomicbird.com/mondomouse
Yes, for only $14.95, I can have a trivial obvious window manager feature! Plus a few other trivial obvious window manager features! Because Apple hates useful software!
No no no no no no. I'll keep using Mac OS long enough to get a feel for the ways in which it is better than other desktop systems, and then I'll reinstall the Airbook with Linux.
On a related note, I just installed a very nice piece of free software, Menumeters, which while GPL still had a request for donations on its page - not unheard of, but not normal either. It got me thinking about my experience turning Linux file systems consultant. I've had a delightful time discovering how much capital I've built up over the years in terms of both knowledge and reputation. This is what you're building when you work on open source, skills and reputation - not some trivial piece of software you'll sell for $14.95 a pop. Once you have that capital, you have lots of options, including convincing other people to help you build some nontrivial very valuable piece of software.
Post Script: Yes, you can turn on focus follows mouse for X11 apps, but X11 apps are only a fraction of the windows I use and are poorly integrated with the rest of the system - e.g., when my focus in an X11 window, the screen gradually dims because it thinks I'm not typing. Drove me nuts until I figured it out.
Post Post Script: Argh! And it won't charge my BlackBerry 8100 via USB out of the box! I thought this stuff was just supposed to work!
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| 2008-03-05 09:25 |
| Maintainer needed: TCP/IP Drinking Game |
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So I just updated the TCP/IP Drinking Game with the latest batch of questions... many of which were over a year old... Augh, the guilt, the guilt! This, folks, is the sign that you need to find a new maintainer.
Interested in maintaining the TCP/IP Drinking Game? Requires the willingness to grovel through the RFC database and frequently peruse books made of actual dead trees. If so, email me.
Next up: the File Systems Drinking Game?
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