Category: observations

we write letters (and sometimes they get published)

To the Weekday program at KUOW-FM:

Your guest’s romantic view of meat, as a lovingly nurtured part of an integrated farm and home culture, doesn’t jibe with the American agricultural-industrial complex, with its feedlots, manure lagoons, and antibiotic-enhanced meats. As a vegetarian for 14 years, my answer to the question “why don’t you eat meat” has been “I don’t like the way they make it.” Shoveling cereal grains into grass-eating ruminants in order to increases the quantity of meat doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially if your guest is as concerned as he claims about quality and authenticity.

If I were to travel in the central Vietnamese highlands, I would not imagine I could bring my attitudes about industrial food production to the dining experience I would be exposed to. To think otherwise is to be no less doctrinaire than the vegans and other activists your guest complains about.

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disk disasters, resolved

With a little help from Data Rescue, I was able to recover one of the two drives that went south yesterday. On both drives, it looks like the catalog got corrupted. How this happens on a journalling file system eludes me: I thought there was some security associated with that technology.

I have read around this topic and it sounds like Spotlight might be a contributing factor, either through it’s penchant for exercising the disk or through some associated data volatility.

The restored disk is where I keep a lot of backups and my online music collection, so that saves me some heartache. The lost disk might have a mechanical issue: it seems to spin up and down with an audible clicking noise, so I am going to test it out before I rely on it.

For search query purposes, the error -9972 is fixable. I couldn’t find anything but Data Rescue that would do it though. Frustrating that Apple’s own Disk Utility is unable to recover data from a corrupted disk.

disaster strikes, not once but twice

I lost two hard drives today on the same machine, a 120 Gb and an 80 Gb, both mounted externally in FireWire enclosures.

I was in the middle of a big InDesign project and, for reasons I can’t fathom, I backed up all the linked graphic files and the InDesign document to removable media last night. Timely? You bet.

Of course, I lost a bunch of other stuff — applications and the like — and some un-backed-up files. They represent some investment of time more than anything, but still annoying.

So now I am interested in building out a small RAID, perhaps 200 Gb worth. My backup strategy has been haphazard at best: our financial data is backed up offsite as well as internally, so we’re safe there. But backing up Gb of music files, scanned hi-res images, is too expensive to ship to StrongSpace, for example. Disks are cheap enough: 250 Gb for $70 seems like a deal.

Later today, I will look for a primer on the subject: if you know of one, let me know.

sometimes I wonder why I read some of these feeds

The Work Vacation:

I am toying with a new concept, namely The Work Vacation.

The narcissism of university professors is breathtaking at times.

Not all workers can turn their every waking thought into work product, nor can they convert a pleasure trip into publishable prose. Some people want to get away from their work, even if they love doing it.

Stuff like this and an earlier post — suburbs must be wonderful since so many people live in them — make me wonder what planet these feesd come from.

Now playing: Five Years by David Bowie from the album “Ziggy Stardust” | Get it

the power of leverage

Avid followers of my continued progress in domestic engineering will want to read on.

I commented on a crummy domestic appliance some months back. I replaced the defective unit with another, at considerable effort: I had to special order it with a couple of weeks wait time, after researching which ones were a. good and b. available through a local retailer in case I had to return it.

I settled on a KitchenAid unit and it has been perfectly acceptable.

Flash forward to the present day. I got a call from the nice people at Insinkerator and upon returning the call, they wanted to get the old unit back and would dispatch a new one with a local installer to replace it. In the course of the conversation, it became clear that opening a ticket with the Consumer Product Safety Commission was instrumental in getting their attention. When I let the helpful operative know that I had replaced the unit already, with another brand, she was undeterred: she is going to send me a newer model — with a stainless steel tank (the cheaper plastic tanks are what fails) — and I can install it where and when I like.

So the lesson here is, if you have a valid issue, take it as far as you can muster the energy. I figured I was putting my case on the record in case anyone was injured: I really think having 110v wiring with a switch underneath a water tank that has been know to fail is a Really Bad Idea. The replacement unit routes the wiring through the top of the housing. My new friend told me that Underwriters Labs requires them to wire their units as they do, but I am skeptical, and justifiably so. As it happens, having those complaints go on their Permanent Record can be productive.

historical revisionism

HistoryLink Essay: Seattle Neighborhoods: Wedgwood — Thumbnail History:

After the Native Americans departed for reservations, the rock became a popular picnic site for Seattle residents.

I realize that relations with the First Peoples here in the Northwest were more amicable than in other parts of the country, but this makes it sound like they offered to leave, like they felt like they were in the way or something.

I don’t think that’s accurate.

Now playing: Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maesroso by CSO-Fritz Reiner from the album “Beethoven: Symphony No. 9, Op. 125, “Choral”” | Get it

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chronicle of progress foretold — not all of it came true

HistoryLink Essay:Century 21 Exposition — Forward Into the Past! :

This is a Cybertour of the Century 21 Exposition, better known as the Seattle World’s Fair of 1962. It was written by Alan J. Stein and designed by Chris Goodman.

Your Fantastic Journey Begins

We start our day in downtown Seattle, more than a mile from the Seattle World’s Fair. Don’t worry, the futuristic Monorail will take us there in the blink of an eye. The Monorail has been described as a preview of mass transit of the future.

At Westlake Mall, moving sidewalks, or “speed ramps,” will glide you up to the Monorail Terminal. Fares are 50 cents one-way, and 75 cents round trip. Kids ride for 35 cents one way and 50 cents round trip.

The things that came to pass — “micro-mail” (email described quite nicely) — were successful based on their military-funding roots and the fact they served an audience that was able to work through teething troubles. The other improvements — monorail to the airport? nuclear powered cars? — were not so easily finessed.

An interesting look at the kind of predictions people have made and still make. It seems we want the same things but never agree on them enough to get them done.

Now playing: Pavlov’s Bell by Aimee Mann from the album “Lost in Space”

Continue reading “chronicle of progress foretold — not all of it came true”

poor man’s Apache tuning

After literally years of wrestling with Apache performance tuning, I may have stumbled onto something that works for low-volume and even lower-resourced sites like this one.

I read through the httpd.conf file and noticed that I had the resource settings for the server set pretty high: I was creating a lot of listener clients, more than I needed, and the master process wasn’t killing them off very aggressively. It occurred to me I was setting things up to fail by picking (or simply defaulting to) arbitrary values.

So I simply noted how large a single httpd process was in memory — about 12 Mb — and divided that into the amount of RAM I have to work with. 256 / 12 = 21.3, but I need to set aside some memory for little things like the kernel and connection queues. I went with 13 clients.

Where I used to see:
May 21 09:20:00 red root: Watchdog checkfile detected: exiting
May 21 09:20:01 red root: Watchdog running: load of 11.11,
May 21 09:25:01 red root: Watchdog checkfile detected: exiting
May 21 09:25:01 red root: Watchdog running: load of 10.65,
May 21 09:30:00 red root: Watchdog checkfile detected: exiting
May 21 10:40:25 red root: Watchdog running: load of 11.56,
May 21 10:45:01 red root: Watchdog checkfile detected: exiting
May 21 10:50:01 red root: Watchdog checkfile detected: exiting
May 21 16:15:54 red root: Watchdog running: load of 12.21,
May 21 16:20:01 red root: Watchdog checkfile detected: exiting

I no longer have to deal with that.

Likewise, this:

May 19 11:05:29 red /kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace: failed
May 19 11:10:26 red /kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace: failed
May 19 11:10:44 red /kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace: failed
May 21 02:52:25 red /kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace: failed
May 21 04:18:29 red /kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace: failed
May 21 17:41:10 red /kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace: failed

And coincidentally(?) traffic volumes are up: mostly attempted spam, of course, but servicing more requests without adding any additional resources sounds good to me.

say yes

Colbert Tells College Graduates: Get Your Own TV Show:

He closed his speech on an apparently semi-serious note, urging the grads to learn how to say “yes.” He noted that saying yes will sometimes get them in trouble or make them look like a fool. But he added: “Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blinder, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us.

“Cynics always say no. But saying yes begins things. Saying yes is how things grow. Saying yes leads to knowledge. Yes is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say yes.

“And that’s The Word.”

Reminds me of this. I can’t think of how many times I passed up opportunities that might have made a difference in my life, but I’m trying to rectify that mistake and make sure my kids take theirs as they come up.

sourdough waffles

Made these for breakfast and thought they were worth passing along.

The Sponge: make the night before, covered at room temperature.

  • 1 cup (8 ounces) unbleached all-purpose flour
  • 2 cups (16 ounces) buttermilk
  • 1 cup (8 ounces) sourdough starter

The Batter: make the following morning.

  • 2 large eggs
  • 2 tablespoons sugar (I used brown, since I was out of white: it was fine)
  • 1/4 cup (2 ounces) butter, melted (or vegetable oil)
  • 3/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda

For buttermilk, I just soured the milk with lemon juice, after warming it up.

The directions are simple: mix the sponge, let it rest overnight, mix the batter ingredients the following morning, mix both together, and cook. Some recipes call for adding the sugar to the sponge, but I am wary of accelerants like that.

The results are light and crisp, very nice. Makes a bunch, about 16 in one of large square waffle-irons (four at a time). Freeze and toast up for weekday morning specials.