December 2011
3 posts
Leaders
A good leader knows, instinctively, how to bring out the best from his team. He knows how to focus the raw talent of people and drive their talent into amazing output.
He makes me believe that I can actually do great stuff. And I do.
For the first time, in a long time, I feel pretty good about the future of my company.
“If I can’t get your software running optimally in 30 minutes to an hour,...”
why i work
Names changed to protect the innocent:
Hello, Mr./Ms. Recruiter.
So you seem like a good person, and NYC is a small market. We’re bound to run into each other again, so I’ll level with you, regarding the companies you’ve mentioned that are hiring someone with a skill-set “exactly like mine”:
Up til Friday, I was working as a “DevOps Engineer” in a...
June 2011
2 posts
don't remove spotlight you fools
if you want to stop spotlight from indexing your drive and making your system perform like shit, just add your porn stash to private under the system settings. killing the spotlight daemon will break tons of shit silently, since various software uses the spotlight api to find stuff, most notably the apple mac app store.
so stop riceing out osx it’s not worth it.
install geoip_city ruby gem on osx with brew
brew install geoip
brew link geoip
bundle install
(with geoip_city in them Gemfile)
that’s fucking it. thank you, homebrew.
April 2011
2 posts
portal 2
too short. levels, though varied, were not as challenging as the first game (perhaps because they’re saving the hard levels for co-op, or perhaps i’ve gotten better?).
will do co-op and update this space.
coop sucked, game sucks.
turbotax protip for virtualization weirdos
Howdy,
So I’ve been trying to do my taxes with turbotax; I’m on a Mac so I run Virtualbox to run a windows VM for turbotax. I stupidly enabled 3D acceleration on my VM, so TurboTax actually throws an exception trying to render an image; the hint was the stack trace referencing all sorts of accelerated video rendering shared libraries…
Disable 3D rendering and you’ll be...
March 2011
1 post
vim boot camp / hell week
taking out a whole week to learn an editor (beyond just vim-tutor) might sound like overkill (it might very well be), but if any vim gurus out there are offering some sort of super advanced in-depth class on vim, I’d totally sign up.
February 2011
2 posts
Marvell AppleYukon MacOS X
Howdy.
The Sonnet Presto Gigabit Pro PCIe [GE1000LA-E] card: http://www.sonnettech.com/product/prestogigpciepro.html
is in actuality this:
Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8053 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller Vendor ID: 11ab Device ID: 4362
On MacOS X (Snow Leopard), it works out of the box, and uses the (com.apple.iokit) AppleYukon2.kext (version (3.2.1b1) at the time of this writing).
I...
Dr. O here @ 4pm. any info i should report to him? open up my bridge?
i don't really have anything for Doc O, tbh, need to figure out why the jobs aren't exiting properly for lustre, but was dorking with vmware thepast few days
asking about if we replace kefel, if one of the 48-core amd boxes is okay, but that's kind of a different thing altogehter
H: redouble efforts to poll for hpc candidate?
besides that, "thanks for the opportunity, sorry things didn't work out"
HPC people seem like a rare breed and difficult to find
that sounds expensive
so jobs exiting oddly on lustre, and kefel supplement/replacement
what sounds expensive?
the description
not so much expensive; rather they want bigger and better toys
...which we don't have
right. that still sounds expensive.
they are looking to hire an associate dean of scientific computing. meeting one this week
:)
an applicatant i should say
i think boinc was most definitely born out of necessity; bless those folks who saw the opportunity and ran with it
January 2011
6 posts
Microsoft SkyDrive
It’s 2011. And I’m using Office 2011 for the Mac.
Why doesn’t Microsoft support some sort of Azure-powered or otherwise cloud-based storage support for Office so that I have access to all my documents everywhere without being a geek who knows how to set up FUSE and a WebDAV server (or, pay for MobileMe and use iDisk, lol)?
Actually, I asked myself this, because it’s not...
sewage and cold
So this past saturday, my brother texts me at 6:30am:
“Hey dude, the boiler room is flooded with sewage”
There was a blockage somewhere in our sewer line, and the results manifested themselves in the form of a 1” layer of poop and toilet paper stew on our boiler room floor. His bathroom (he lives in the renovated basement directly below, on the same level as the boiler) was an...
usb serial adapters in osx
before i forget: ls /dev/tty.*
screen attach to them like you do in linux:
to screen attach to a usb serial device with baud 19200:
screen /dev/tty.usbdevice 19200
prolific pl-2303 drivers are here:
MacOS X Drivers
Routing table modification golden rule
Alright so, just to remind myself, hard, remember to just add a /32 route to test first from a test client before adding a whole /n<29 rule in there. This is a golden rule, up there with “FQDN!!!!!!!! Where it matters” and “always add a reverse dns entry you bastards!!!”
An efficient life
You know you’re a geek beyond all hope of redemption when you see the chaos in your wardrobe, trash, and other workflow bits of your life, and see it with much more clarity and approachability as a computational problem than a mundane task.
As the latter, the problem is impossible. The former gets my saiyan blood boiling and motivated to boot.
SNIPs and MIPs
Use MIPs by default, SNIPs if you’re directly attached to a local net.
December 2010
10 posts
configuration management
a sysadmin that doesn’t use configuration management is like a programmer who doesn’t use source control.
hup ur phone
Getting messages like these in your console trying to sync up your phone with iTunes?
iTunes[(pid)] _connect_to_port (thread blahblah): Could not connect to USB mux port for device N: Connection refused
iTunes[(pid)] _MobileDeviceConnect_locked (thread blahblah): Could not connect to lockdown port on device blahblahblahblah
Before you waste any more time googling for the answer, try...
waah
virtualization is the answer but I can’t use it :(
signals and ulimit
I think a user got slapped by a ulimit I put in for the head node…
In /etc/security/limits.conf (which is a PAM facility, btw - doing it here avoids having to throw this stuff into the various shell profiles…)
* hard cpu 5
root hard cpu unlimited
named hard cpu unlimited
nobody hard cpu unlimited
This sets the max anything can run for a total of 5 minutes of cpu time, which is a...
router maxout
grabbing stuff from usenet @ 5MB/s is already tasking my alix 2d2’s cpu to the max. polling is already enabled.
:/
let's calculate pi and do stuff with it
Fun exercises:
1. how does one parallelize pi estimations to n digits? What’s the fastest way that’s accurate, and is there a really fast way that’s going to generate correctable errors?
2. *really* fast substring matching
3. tree structure for manipulating pi digits?
4. unique array of indicies?
5. parallelize everything (shm and mpi)
the volume storage solution
Application:
So this is for a development video encoding platform.
Reads can be really slow (specifically, the product of the peak number of simultaneous clients * the max bitrate of blu-ray 1080p MPEG-2’s, which is 40Mbps)*[http://www.blu-ray.com/faq/] (And, not sure if seeking bumps this number up significantly). Realistically, we’re streaming h264 content, so reads aren’t...
HPC Multithreading
Turned off odd numbered cores on all 64 nodes of the HPC on Friday afternoon.
Principle Investigator emails me on Sunday morning telling me everything runs 42% slower.
I proceed to turn all the cores back on (I’ve got zero political leverage here).
Need to look into why; possible reasons:
1. I turned off hard-cores instead of soft-cores (very possible that it’s not as simple as...