Hydrofoiling
I was standing on a floating dock on a Pacific-ocean inlet, a place where it?s obvious why motorboats are such an environmental disaster. Fortunately lots of other people have noticed too and it looks increasingly that more people will be able to enjoy Messing About In Boats without feeling like they?re making Greta Thunberg justifiably angry at them. Hm, this piece got kind of long. Spoiler: I?m here mostly to talk about electric hydrofoil boats from Candela, in Sweden, which look like a genuinely new thing in the world.
How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (Part 06)
This week on my podcast, part six of a serialized reading of my 2020 Onezero/Medium book How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, now available in paperback (you can also order signed and personalized copies from Dark Delicacies, my local bookstore). MP3
Compression, for real
Daniel Nebdal read my articles about compressing dumps. It seems that I'm a rank amateur: he has tried many others with better results than the ones I had: xz has been in base for mumble years, and often gives a better compression/time tradeoff than the bzip family. The default settings are single threaded and slow, but try xz -T4 -1 (four threads, +level 1) - at least for me, it's both faster and smaller than bzip. The speed depends on how many cores you can give it, of course.
Navigating without GPS
Into town this morning for a blood test. For once I didn't take my GPS navigator: after all, I know my way round Ballarat. Turn right on Leith St?don't I? Yes, of course I do. Down Barkly St and turn left towards Bakery Hill, and then I'm there. But where do I turn left? Main Road? Or at the roundabout before. Chose before. Then another 3-way roundabout. Where now? Chose left again and didn't recognize anything until I was at the police station: Eastwood Street, going in exactly the wrong direction. I was able to find my way back, of course, but the real issue is that I relied too much on the navigator.
The daily dump compression
So today my pbzip2 finished: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/4) /dump/lagoon-FreeBSD/0 30 -> time pbzip2 home3 real 309m3.275s user 1771m35.488s sys 28m39.588s As expected, at only 5 hours it was the fastest. But look at that user time: not quite 30 hours! That's far longer than bzip (1576 minutes/26.3 hours) or bzip2 (804 minutes/13.4 hours). I hadn't expected that.
Multimodality
My Wednesday consisted mostly of running around and moving things. I used five transport modes and now I can?t not think about environmental impact and practicality and urban futures. Hop on board the car-share, boat, electric car, bus, and bike, and come along for the ride. Background What happened was, on Wednesday morning our boat was at the boatyard for a minor repair. They?d squeezed me in on the condition that I show up at 8AM to sail it away???they?re pretty well maxed out this time of year when everyone wants to get back on the water.
Compressing dumps, try 2
Yesterday's attempts at compressing backups were suboptimal because I used the old, worn-out bzip instead of the new, better bzip2. So I tried again: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/4) /dump/lagoon-FreeBSD/0 17 -> time bzip2 home real 815m16.263s user 804m19.745s sys 3m54.405s === root@eureka (/dev/pts/4) /dump/lagoon-FreeBSD/0 18 -> l ... -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 273,486,479,360 2 May 13:06 home -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 222,389,811,395 2 May 13:06 home.bz2 -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 223,600,494,258 2 May 13:06 home.bz How about that. Still no ball of fire, but it's much faster, 13.6 hours instead 26.5 hours, almost exactly half the time.
Backup pain
The beginning of the month is the day when I do my level 0 dumps. There's a lot of data to transfer, and they run for up to 15 hours. But yesterday things didn't end quite the way I had hoped: dump -0uf - /home | bzip2 > /dump/lagoon-FreeBSD/0/home.bz2 DUMP: WARNING: should use -L when dumping live read-write filesystems! DUMP: Date of this level 0 dump: Sat May 1 22:05:27 2021 DUMP: Date of last level 0 dump: the epoch DUMP: Dumping /dev/ada0p5 (/home) to standard output ... DUMP: dumping (Pass IV) [regular files] DUMP: 0.59% done, finished in 14:04 at Sun May 2 12:15:09 2021 DUMP: 1.25% done, finished in 13:10 at Sun May 2 11:26:44 2021 ...
NSF CAREER Award
In exciting professional news, it was recently announced that I got an National Science Foundation CAREER award! The CAREER is the US NSF’s most prestigious award for early-career faculty. In addition to the recognition, the award involves a bunch of money for me to put toward my research over the next 5 years. The Department … Continue reading "NSF CAREER Award"
How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (Part 05)
This week on my podcast, part five of a serialized reading of my 2020 Onezero/Medium book How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, now available in paperback (you can also order signed and personalized copies from Dark Delicacies, my local bookstore). MP3
Amazon Q1 2021
Amazon announced their financial results for the January to March quarter last Thursday. I was reading them when an email popped up asking if I wanted to talk about them on CNBC Squawk, which I did. In preparation, I re-read the report and pulled together a few talking points; here they are. Top line Amazon?s gross revenue increased 41% year-over-year, to $108.5B. To use a technical term: HOLY SHIT! This sort of growth on that sort of base is mind-boggling. Granted, shoppers suffering from Covid coop-up played a substantial role.
Long Links
Welcome once again to Long Links, a monthly curation of long-form pieces that pleased and educated me and that being semi-retired gives me time to enjoy; offered in the hope that one or two might enrich the lives of busier people. It?s simple (and accurate) to say that Xi Jinping?s regime is barbaric, obscurantist, and brutal, and that the people of China are badly mis-governed. That given, the place is interesting; I for one am continuously astonished that they manage to hold it all together. Maria Repnikova on How China Tells its Story dives deep on this; on the very-grey line between what can and can?t be said, what Chinese propagandists think it is they?re trying to do, and (especially) the differences between the Chinese and Russian approaches to storytelling.
Firefox: Yet Another Restriction
The Wikipedia page for Pentacon Six contains a number of errors. OK, I can fix that... Oh. How do I invoke Emacs? I use It's All Text!. Or at any rate, that's what I used to do. Since a recent firefox update, it has disabled it. The link is dead-on as well: ?More Information? tells me that it's not signed and thus may steal my personal information. OK, fine, so why not supply such basic functionality in the browser? You could hide the whole Emacs distribution in firefox without anybody noticing.