Only 59F and dripping this late am.
Winter is coming too.
Time. Everyone only gets what they get, but you live as if you got it all. Truly must be a survival trait to not be crushed under the futility of it all, or paralyzed by the choices.
Kids let me sleep in after waking me at 7.
Spent a couple of sleepless hours tuning around the ham and shortwave bands. There was some great DX last night, even though not all the bands were open and there was a lot of noise. New Zealand Radio boomed in, doing an all request music show. Their taste in pop music is a bit different from ours, based on what they were playing.
Lot of hams working 80 m and 40m. Some sort of contest made the bands very crowded, but it also brought out the “big guns” of contesting. HUGE antenna farms in far away places and big signals, made for some very interesting listening and call sign lookups. A lot of the time you wonder if your antenna and rig are any good because you really don’t hear all that much. Then you hear last night, which despite the noise, had more audible stations calling CQ than you could shake a stick at.
I better get some food on the table or there will be drama…
n
Ah jeez.
If there is something horrible that can happen to a person, there is a fukstik out there that will do it. What a tradgedy. The guy is alive and in custody.
Now saying 8 dead, 3 cops wounded.
n
IMHO, God’s Ultimate Judgement will come from within (like the muck-stick mentioned above) and then this soulless skum will be left with the burning embers of this planet.
You see we really do have control over the End of Days, but we do not have the cojones to do what we must do.
Free Will folks, understand it both Good and Evil. To do nothing is to do something. Is it the right something?
Yes, I have been talking with my Preacher Nephew.
Jeeez, I almost feel hungover and I had no alcohol last night. 7 hours and 18 innings is too long a game. Got home at 1am and not enough sleep. Party tonight and I do plan on a few beers. Hope I can stay awake for it. And game 4.
Crikey Mate, BackBlaze says it will take 277 days to backup my system.
One problem with cloud backup. Wait until you have to restore. I use Amazon S3 and it’s dirt cheap but the price to pull it back down is way higher than upload.
BackBlaze will mail you a disk drive for $189.00 which will be refunded when you return the drive. It may take a week to get the drive. That is a long time to wait for files. Downloading selective files to get started may not take long but download 1.5 TB will take a significant amount of time. Not only that it will exceed my Comcast data allocation.
I may have to rethink this backup stuff and start consider storing an auxiliary drive offsite.
Now I need to disassemble the failed drive so that any data on the drive is unusable. Simply removing the platters is enough as no one is going to go through the effort to recover that data.
Disassemble with a large hammer!
“Simply removing the platters is enough as no one is going to go through the effort to recover that data.”
Took one apart last month. Easy peasy. Cool to see the platter. Surprised that there was only one. It was a big drive.
n
Ray a couple of basic NAS units with two drives each in a mirror RAID. Rotate as needed one off site. 1Gb LAN beats the hell out of any remote for speed. For that matter USB 3 or eSATA are good choices.
No, not as much fun as taking the drive apart. Plus you have to deal with flying parts that have to be picked up.
Just took the cover off and found some minor scratches on the top platter. Look minor to me but relative to the size of the data bits probably major, perhaps fatal in this case. No dust in the particle filter, platters spin easily.
Removed the top platter. Big circular scratch on the bottom of the top platter and the top of the next platter. Obviously a major head crash.
I usually have faster upload than down, but both are too slow to consider anything cloudy.
I still like the low untecoverable error rates of hard disks, and the control they give me.
I have the Western Digital MyCloud sitting next to my WiFi router.
One of the reasons I read DailyMail is that they follow up and follow stories to their end.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6320715/Ex-deputy-says-feels-bad-killing-unarmed-man.html
They had good coverage of this story, and now the ending.
n
Disassemble with a large hammer!
A drill press works nicely and makes s satisfying shh-shh sound when you shake the drive after. Between the hole and the debris that sucker is dead.
My daughter attends a small school. Last night was their annual Trunk or Treat event. They ballooned from 80-100 attendees to >400 last year. Last year was our first year attending and helping. Last year we volunteered to do the popcorn /hot chocolate booth. Expect 80 they said I prepped for 120 and was scrambling for more supplies 1/2 an hour in. By the end of last year the two hour event left every helper stunned and shell shocked. I had a “Trunk or Treat Hangover” from the crush for a couple days after.
This year was fantastic. I finagled an extra four folks unassociated with the school to help and assigned the grand parents kiddo duty. I had supplies for 500, and had 20 gallons of hot chocolate ready to serve before the event started plus another 5 gallons of water hot and ready to turn into more. The popcorn machine had a ton of bags ready to hand out before folks arrived and a dedicated person instructed to keep making popcorn and don’t stop until you’re knee deep.
We went through 18 gallons of hot chocolate, 4 pounds of marshmallows, about a pound of sprinkles, 6.5 pounds of whipped cream in cans, 25 pounds of popcorn kernels and 3 quarts of oil to pop it in. That translates to about 300 servings of hot chocolate and another 300 servings of popcorn.
Nobody looked shell shocked and we all had fun and didn’t run out of anything.
Prepping. It’s not just for TEOTWAWKI
“Copyright Office ruling issues sweeping right to repair reforms”
http://www.osnews.com/story/30826/Copyright_Office_ruling_issues_sweeping_right_to_repair_reforms
“The ruling is out, and thanks to the hard work of these individuals, American consumers have a few more rights regarding repair than they did before. Excellent work, and let’s hope this sets a positive precedent.”
I just figure that when I buy a piece of hardware, I can fix it as desired or feed it to the wood chipper as desired.
And yes, we do sell our software source code for a price. I actually quoted it to somebody a couple of years ago. And they, a $250 billion/year company (and customer), took a step back.
My problem is not the lack of backups, my issue is the backups are all in the house. In this incident I did not lose a single file even though the drive was completely destroyed. I need to get something offsite. Transporting is not ideal unless I encrypt the backup. That is not optimal due to having to keep the password somewhere. I also want family to have access in case I croak.
I may start keeping a backup at the church. I go there weekly and my office has a deadbolt and a lock. Master keys can get access but there are only a few of those. Although if the house burns computer files are the least of my worries. Theft of the drives is a larger concern.
Backups are a good thing. I have a dell server that runs server 2012 and 2 vm’s – both server 2012 as well, one is for AD and the other Exchange 2016. I have a data share on the host system for all the files, pictures, etc.
I have a western digital 2tb drive attached and configured windows backup to backup the entire server to that drive every night.
I also have a batch file that I run manually that copies any changes from the shared data directory to an encrypted drive on my desktop, I run it every time I copy something to the share, or once every week or so.
Finally, I have another 2 tb western digital drive that I keep at my office. I bring it back home every month and sync up the data directory. The drive is encrypted.
Oh, I also have dvd’s, and now blu ray’s too, of the data directory in the safe deposit box at the bank. That doesn’t get updated very often… maybe once or twice a year.
I tend to not backup individual systems at all. I do backup my exchange server and do an controller, but I don’t care too much…the data is what is important. Once or twice a year I will export the three mailboxes on the exchange server to a pst and save that off in the data directory.
And yes, we do sell our software source code for a price. I actually quoted it to somebody a couple of years ago. And they, a $250 billion/year company (and customer), took a step back.
Source is only half of the battle.
Death Star Telephone theoretically has the source I wrote for the Linux version of the VPN product, and they’ve never managed another build in eight years despite standard Unix Makefiles and a top-level shell script literally titled “buildit.sh”.
I say “theoretically” because I’ve wondered if they’ve lost the source code. Officially, I haven’t seen it in eight years. Unofficially …
When I was still working for Tau Beta Pi I was covered up in backups.
1. Had a separate sever that nightly backed up all four of the other servers. If a server went down it was easy to bring up a virtual machine on the backup server. It was possible for this backup server to run all four of the other servers. Why have four other servers? Too many eggs in one basket. Redundancy is cheap relative to the effects of extended down time. This backup server made it possible to recover individual files that were kept for 365 days, even deleted files, and past generations of any changed files.
2. Backup for Workgroups (a really awesome product) nightly backed up all the files on all four servers to an external drive connected to one of the servers. Duplicate files were not backed up but simply linked. 365 days of files, deleted and file generations, were available quickly.
3. Nightly the production databases were copied from the production server to another server using SQL Backup and Restore. 10 days of databases were kept on the second server.
4. Each Friday all the data files, database backups, scripts, web files, etc. were copied over to an auxiliary system that was kept on my desk.
5. After the above copy the files were then copied to an external drive that was kept offsite (my house). The drive was brought in Friday and taken home Friday.
6. BackBlaze was then run to backup the files to to cloud.
Excessive? Maybe. But such backups were not expensive and provided a high level of recovery. More than once it was necessary to get an older version of a user’s file, especially MsWord or Excel that the user had completely borked. Took just a couple of minutes to get the file any time in the past up to a year back. Even deleted files could be recovered.
But do take a look at Backup for Workgroups. It is an excellent product, does what it is advertised to accomplish, does it in the background. One master control program on the server with the backup resource, child programs on the other servers talking to the master program and allowing the backup of multiple servers onto a single backup resource. I used it for years and never had a problem. In my opinion a really good product.
And yes, we do sell our software source code for a price. I actually quoted it to somebody a couple of years ago. And they, a $250 billion/year company (and customer), took a step back.
Source is only half of the battle.
Yup, the compilers and personal experience in building the product are important also.
And I looked up the company. I was wrong, they are only 80 billion euros/year gross income.
I still have some hard drives in drawer and no longer use them. Could I just put them in a bucket of salt water for a few months? Should also deteriorate my DNA.
At your age the DNA has already started the downward spiral. 🙂
It has been a while, but I disassembled several hard drives and I found the platters to be interesting (maybe for a wind chime or something) and lots of the little screws are possibly worth keeping for assorted repairs. The cool thing to salvage is the magnets!
Trying to do a simple video playback to a projector for our trunk or treat vehicle…
and I don’t have a lappy with both an OS and a VGA port…. and the little proj only has composite video and VGA. F me! I’ve got a couple of desktops but I don’t want to put one in the car.
I still have some hard drives in drawer and no longer use them. Could I just put them in a bucket of salt water for a few months? Should also deteriorate my DNA.
I just use a hammer and a thick screwdriver. I position the screwdriver at the one of the vents and drive it through the case of the hard drive, dinging the platters.
DNA, I have no idea. Your DNA is everywhere. Getting rid of your DNA will be a lot of work and just about impossible.
I have a Windows PC app, NTI Shadow, that I have scheduled to periodically replace updated files and install new files on my WD MyCloud.
Those files that I modify frequently, I keep on Dropbox.
CowboySlim, who learned all this from RBT.
Kids let me sleep in after waking me at 7.
Now I know why I did not have kids at age 50. Instead, I started at age 23. Now my son is middle aged which makes me old.
I use robocopy on all of my servers and desktops with internal or external backup drives. That gets me a mirror image of the LAN at the office and the LAN at the house onto a single drive (internal or external). Many single drives, 3 internals and 7 externals for the office LAN, 1 internal and 4 externals for the house LAN. BTW, I do not let robocopy delete any files, just update.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocopy
Trying to do a simple video playback to a projector for our trunk or treat vehicle…
and I don’t have a lappy with both an OS and a VGA port…. and the little proj only has composite video and VGA. F me! I’ve got a couple of desktops but I don’t want to put one in the car.
I believe the OFD laptop has VGA. I’m once again in Taylor starting on Wednesday, and the laptop is sitting idle at our test facility out there. DVD-ROM and plenty of horses for video streaming.
After 2 1/2 months, I’m over Taylor and the port-a-potty experience. I’m trying to avoid being out there on Monday and Tuesday, but if you’re coming through town for the Goodwill Outlet or surplus store, I can drive out before heading downtown on Monday.
No people watching in Downtown Austin for me on Halloween. After getting the word about Taylor, I sent email to management insisting on full group support that day, zero tolerance for any excuses related to the office party, other social activities or childcare issues related to the holiday. Bah humbug (or whatever the All Hallows Eve equivalent might be).
I got a call last week to do HFT work, but my guess is that the practice won’t survive the big downturn in the market that’s coming. Plus the company is the most notorious one for paying the exchanges to receive packet feeds from their Cisco switches before the data hits the trading “floor”.
I grabbed one of the little atom pcs I got for LibreELEC (XBMC) or Kodi, slapped a Kodi install on it, got it hooked to my tiny laser proj, shot some quick video, and it all works, just not big or bright enough. Out of time for today, we’ll be free riding on our friends tonight, no trunk or kandy from us.
Will be there to support movie night.
n
“my guess is that the practice won’t survive the big downturn in the market that’s coming”
That’s probably right….
And maybe it’s this weekend. Remember the chart from last time was a series of lower highs, lower lows, and then the dropoff… which is what it looks like now.
n
Hey, you know how when booting, after BIOS, Windows has the four color blobs that circle around a few times and make the Win logo?
The hard drive nazi says “No logo for me!”.
I get 1/4 sized blobs and they rotate about 3/4 of a turn and there’s my Desktop.
I installed the 1Tb WD Blue ssd today. Actually, just finished about 15 minutes ago.
I started about 3PM. Clearing out temp files, browser cache, dumped trash in t-bird and compacted folders, dumped the macromedia folder, and ran Disk Clean up a couple of time. Rebooted. Shut down and connected the new drive. I couldn’t find a data cable but hey, there’s one right there on the CD drive.
Rebooted. I don’t know what the next half hour was about. Windows Update had to do something. And the box rebooted all by itself. The Acronis software that I’m pretty sure I did install said it wasn’t installed. I installed it again and let it run with the default settings.
From 4PM to a bit after 7PM to clone 390GB.
I still need to blow out the dust.
The old drive was a 2TB WD green.
This is crazy. I’m gonna go re-boot again. 🙂
My Windows Experience Index is 5.1 with the old drive. Video is the slow part. I think I can speed it up but I like the visual effects.
The old drive had a 5.9 score. New drive is 7.9.
I installed the 1Tb WD Blue ssd today. Actually, just finished about 15 minutes ago.
Be sure to give us a experience report after a couple of days.
I’ve got WD Blue 500 GB SSD sitting on the desk in front of me here to replace my WD 1 TB Caviar Black hard drive. I need to get off my rump and get that installed. I only bought it back in August of 2017. Now I want the 1 TB SSD for $140.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073SBQMCX/?tag=ttgnet-20
Well, I don’t know for sure but I think WD Blacks are faster than Blues? Greens are the slow ones?
Not sure it matters anymore. I’m looking at my ssd as being pretty much like my entire hard drive is sitting in RAM. It feels like it.
The Acronis software with default settings seems to have worked very well.
A week ago my daughter said she was glad she wasn’t the middle kid because blah blah blah reasons parroted from a classmate who’s a middle kid. I told her that, in theory, I could get a much younger wife or girlfriend and have some more kids and then she’d have her brothers 12 and 14 years older and then the younger sibs about the same amount younger. She was all like uh-buh-buh-duh.
Well, I don’t know for sure but I think WD Blacks are faster than Blues? Greens are the slow ones?
The WD black hard drives are 7200 rpm, the blues and greens are 5400 rpm. The greens have the additional capability of spinning down when they have not been accessed in a minute or so.
I like to install from scratch and reinstall all of my software to get a new copy of registry, etc. I’m not sure if it is any better than the Acronis software though.
I went with the cloning thing because I do not want to re-install every dang program.
So far, I have my PC just as it was but on a new drive. I expect a few bugs to show.
Three hours to clone vs about a week to re-build the system?
Call me lazy.
I got a call last week to do HFT work, but my guess is that the practice won’t survive the big downturn in the market that’s coming.
I sure hope that we do not have a big downturn in the market. My parents are living comfortably with all of their investments, including those in the market. That enables them to be able to deal with their more pressing health issues.
Plus the company is the most notorious one for paying the exchanges to receive packet feeds from their Cisco switches before the data hits the trading “floor”.
This does not sound legal. Or ethical.
Back from trunk or treat and movie night. Couple of really nice trunks, pickup truck beds really. Half a yard of dirt, some grave stones, spooky music, skeletal animals, moving lighting effects, and fake cobwebs, all very well put together.
Movie was Beetlejuice. Man that takes me back. Can’t believe it was that long ago. Spent some time talking to people. Meatspace.
n
@paul, I’m with you. I cloned my wife’s desktop when I upgraded the disk and memory. NO WAY was I going to spend the time to get all the add on stuff working again. Camera drivers, kid toy drivers, software for the kids, saved logins, tons of stuff. Tons of kruft too, but I tried to get rid of what I could before cloning.
My biggest soft issue was getting all the pointers to her data reset because I used the old 1TB hard disk as a data drive. Once I got My Docs and all the other virtual pointers in the right place it was pretty seamless.
I understand the desire and desirability of a bare metal up rebuild, but I don’t have the patience or time to spend on it any more. The other consideration is that I’ve spent some time and effort KILLING off stuff that would be back in a bare metal install. I’d have to remember to do all that stuff too along with installing all the little things that help out.
n
I have been looking at my home pc to figure out why I am using 414 MB of disk space on my 1 TB hard drive. Good night, there is 205 GB of crap in my c:/windows/temp directory. Does mickeysoft ever delete anything in this directory ? At least Unix deletes /tmp each time that it boots.
Well, now I am using 207 GB of disk space.
I understand the desire and desirability of a bare metal up rebuild, but I don’t have the patience or time to spend on it any more. The other consideration is that I’ve spent some time and effort KILLING off stuff that would be back in a bare metal install. I’d have to remember to do all that stuff too along with installing all the little things that help out.
Yup, maybe I will try out the Acronis software tomorrow also.
Yikes, bedtime!
“At least Unix deletes /tmp each time that it boots.”
My mileage varies. Mint recently corrupted several data files on me, just by opening them. It seems my root partition was full. No error messages, nothing, except I noticed Libre Office opened the files read only. Riiight. Took about an hour to figure out why. Never figured out how they were reduced to nearly zero length if opened read only. It seems Mint saves all downloaded updates by default. Changed that setting, cleared the cruft, and all back to well. Backups saved the day for all but two files. Mint forums did help, but as a lowly user I apparently should have known. I’m a newby to Linux, only about eight years playing and three years as my primary OS. I have used Windows since v2.1 with no issues, admit to studying a bit, but not nearly as much as Linux. I’m done. Buh-bye.
I will always have a soft spot in my head for desktop Linux, but as Nick (?) put it, Windows works for me, but I feel like I have to do all the work for Linux.
I don’t mean to attract flames. Please note that I tried. Hard. Installed more than six distros and had each on a test system for at least a month, some six, one over a year. All had problems that I couldn’t solve. Mint is the last, and it was the best, except for Mepis, which was great. Was, but now in the historical dustbin. Too bad. Kinda wish I had tried Red Hat, but it was not free. May be a lesson.
Windows 10 on a test system still looks solid after several months of updates and spare time pounding. Bet it isn’t perfect, but as Jerry often said, Good Enough.
This does not sound legal. Or ethical.
Read “Flash Boys”. I gotta find my copy and skim through for the name of the company who reached out to me.
I have other things popping.
My home PC has been cloned SSDs for years. 7+ years ago I built it, with 3 SSDs and two motherboards in that time. One original installation.
On the other hand, the 5-year-old PC I have at work got into the endless “Windows is updating” loop and is relegated to the back of the desk. I’ll go get the data when I need it. The kicker is that I have scads of software loaded on the old PC that I use all the time. Installing it on the new PC means I spend at least as much time installing software as getting the work done. It goes that way.
The kicker? I’ve been telling management for YEARS that 5 years is when we should replace PCs. They tell me that they should be replaced on failure. Planned replacement trumps replacement on failure every time. So I had planned to run my PC to failure to prove a point. Point proven, I guess.
The kicker? I’ve been telling management for YEARS that 5 years is when we should replace PCs. They tell me that they should be replaced on failure. Planned replacement trumps replacement on failure every time. So I had planned to run my PC to failure to prove a point. Point proven, I guess.
Good luck with that. Most of my office PCs (and home PCs) are 6 to 8 years old. Around 20 of the monsters. I replace the guts if necessary. I also keep several spare parts on hand, especially case fans and power supplies. All, except two laptops running Windows 10, are running Windows 7 x64.
Man, it is 62 F and really foggy this morning. But a clear sky, the weather liars are saying that we are going to hit 84 F this afternoon.
The Brazos River is down to 38 ft and very slowly dropping down. Maybe it will go back down to its normal 11 to 12 ft soon and get off my radar again.
The kicker? I’ve been telling management for YEARS that 5 years is when we should replace PCs. They tell me that they should be replaced on failure. Planned replacement trumps replacement on failure every time. So I had planned to run my PC to failure to prove a point. Point proven, I guess.
I replace hard drives on critical systems when the warranty expires.
If motherboard/CPU combinations survive the first year, chances are that they will run a long time. The problem becomes memory upgrades and, if you didn’t buy Crucial/Kingston, replacement of defective sticks.
I have a Q6600 as my primary desktop. I put 16 GB into the system when I started grad school six years ago, and I paid close to $400 for the DDR2 sticks since DDR3 had essentially taken over the market at that point. I don’t even want to think about what that upgrade would cost today, and most shops dependent on Windows 7 can no longer buy new so they play in the surplus space.
What they do is pay for a custom, low latency connection that is faster than the connections to the garden variety connection to the trade data.
Some experts insist that HFT provides a valuable addition to market liquidity. Also, I have a bridge to sell. To the extent that HFT works, it is theft from the margins of ordinary transactions. Anyway, beyond a certain point, I believe that market liqudity is a *bad* thing. It’s part of what turns “investing” into “playing the lottery”.
I would personally love to see capital gains taxes scale inversely to the length of time an investment has been held. Under one day? 100% taxes on any gains. Under one month? 50%. Under one year? 25% And so on. The lowest bracket could be near zero.
Funny that “buy and hold” is what retail investors are told, but the big boys all make their money on short term trades, some measured in nanoseconds.
n
Kinda like casinos saying that when you are up you should keep playing “with the house’s money.” They know the odds are in their favor and the longer you play the more you give back. It’s YOUR money. You won it. Which is the point of gambling (notionally.)
Some experts insist that HFT provides a valuable addition to market liquidity. Also, I have a bridge to sell. To the extent that HFT works, it is theft from the margins of ordinary transactions. Anyway, beyond a certain point, I believe that market liqudity is a *bad* thing. It’s part of what turns “investing” into “playing the lottery”.
A lot of interesting tech comes out of efforts to improve HFT, regardless of the ethics. The two big non-Microsoft C++ compilers have improved dramatically just in the last few years, and some meaningful improvements to the language have resulted.
Everything in software is sensitive to C++ performance anymore, including the hipster favorites which ride on top of the LLVM tool chain like Rust, Go, and Swift.
@Greg: I used to love compilers and compiler technology, but it’s been a long time, and I’m certainly out of touch. Still, LLVM sounds neat, but really just like a modern “compiler compiler”, which is a concept that has been around for a long time. Translating high-level code into machine code (usually with an intermediate stop of some sort) is not difficult. What’s difficult, is making that machine code run efficiently. Optimization at high levels (like memory management), and at low levels (like unrolling loops).
Has LLVM brought new things to this picture?
Has LLVM brought new things to this picture?
Primarily, LLVM introduced a very complete IR and a set of tools for turning that program representation into machine code or running directly, albeit unoptimized. Someone writing a compiler for a new language no longer has to worry about anything beyond getting their syntax translated into the IR, but the side effect is that a language built on top of the tool chain effectively becomes syntactic sugar for C++.
LLVM also introduced a proof-of-concept C++ compiler, Clang, which has quickly become a significant rival for GCC and is the compiler of choice for Apple and some of the major Linux distributions. While it is hard to say which compiler is “better” the competition between the two has been a Godsend to anyone working with complex template-like libraries such as Boost since error messages have improved significantly and code bloat is way down.
man, I understood each of those words individually, and even chunks of them in combination, but OMG how things have changed….
n
man, I understood each of those words individually, and even chunks of them in combination, but OMG how things have changed….
Greg is an ubertechie, way beyond me, and even I did not get what “IR” is. I am guessing “intermediate something”.
I did understand his overall comment though. He basically said that the world is moving from compiled languages to interpreted languages. And he is correct.
And he said that the new CLANG C++ compiler is awesome. I donm’t know, I have yet to try it out as the only C++ compilers that I have used are GCC (2016), VC++ (2015), and Watcom C++ (1995).
Of course, I could totally wrong about any and all of the above.
IR = Intermediate Representation