Tales of a Professional Linux Consultant

Excellent video explaining why debt limit extension is taking so long

Courtesy of a comment posted on redstate.com is a link to this youtube video by congressman Schweikert that if fully understood, pretty much explains why congress is having trouble getting its act together with the debt limit.

Summer Life

The last time I had any sustained interactions with pools was roughly 30 years ago when one of my growing up chores was maintaining the family pool, including constantly monitoring p/h, learning about pumps, and skimming/cleaning so that it would be spotless when everyone wanted to get in. 

Still, it's a great family activity and now that I'm a dad, the kids/wife have been constant users of a large pool located at a sports resort a few miles from our house, but with their membership rates rising and all the activities the kids are involved in....it's becoming less and less desirable to keep that up.  We just don't have the time to drive there.

So, in the interest of ensuring that everyone stays in shape, the decision was made to convert our backyard into a family pool.

All great, but apparently there is _alot_ of horrible details that have to be worked out when designing a pool - especially in San Diego, where a new pool could easily exceed $100K in construction if you aren't careful in limiting the scope of a backyard renovation.  Not to mention break the monthly budget if one isn't careful about heating costs.

No, I am not seriously considering building it myself...we'll be going with a pool company, but even getting a full spec detailing what we want to receive for our budget has easily taken ~2 weeks of my time.

Important decisions - we will be getting an automated electric safety cover with an embedded track within the pool foundation and a walk on lid plus overflow reservoir. I'm wincing whenever I think about it as the offered price for the cover alone is a whopping ~$13K, but the cover has the advantage of a) being safe enough that kids/dogs can continue to make use of the rest of the backyard w/o supervision, b) not being an ugly gate, c) substantially reducing pool pump filtering time as the pool is only uncovered during use, and d) saving quite a bit in long term heating due to reduced evaporation.

We'll also be putting in 550 sq ft of heliocool solar panels on the roof with a supplementary heat pump to support an extended swimming season. 

I'll try to remember to post pictures of the construction here.

In other news -- who knew? "Patton" makes an excellent kids movie...at least if you have boys.  I'll see if they like "MacArthur" next....I suspect they are just intrigued about the concept of people who live to fight and who never appear to be afraid - regardless of what the world sends their way.

 

Recent Piano Recitals Performed by Paul and Thomas Marlowe (Video) #piano #kids

Linux Libc developers innovate ever more reasons for new releases to be temporarily masked #gentoo #nfs #linux #in

Mike Frysinger sent an interesting email to gentoo-dev this afternoon:

historically, glibc provided all the ugly rpc support (while not nearly as
relevant today, it still is used by way of nfs support).  the glibc
maintainers have opted to stop supporting this.  at first they declined to
accept new features, but now they've started removing support for new code to
build against it.

libtirpc started off to support the new features (namely ipv6 support), but
has now taken on a new roll of supporting all the rpc code.

so if you have a build bug due to glibc-2.14 due to missing rpc/ or rpcsvc/
header, you're going to have to convert over to libtirpc.

something like:
       inherit toolchain-funcs
       ...
       append-cppflags $($(tc-getPKG_CONFIG) libtirpc --cflags)
       export LIBS+=" $($(tc-getPKG_CONFIG) libtirpc --libs)"

obviously the LIBS part will need tweaking based on your package.

Yes, I appreciate that RPC is deservedly a dead protocol, but anything that impacts NFS is a serious candidate for masking (at least until sufficiently tested and interoperability worked out).  NFS may not be the newest protocol, but v4 was a major improvement and has kept it worth using/supporting.

California Educational Funding and Cognitive Dissonance

I'm not nearly as pessimistic as the guy in this article: http://pajamasmedia.com/zombie/2011/06/08/how-a-teachers-rally-made-me-anti-education/?singlepage=true

However, I do have two simple questions that need to be answered before I would increase donations or approve of higher taxes to pay for greater educational resources...

a) prove that existing funds are being spent conservatively, well, and smartly on those things that have the greatest impact on student achievement. Also, graph the percentage of overall revenue going to school overhead versus teaching over time, and that the overhead is not growing or consuming an unhealthy percentage (in overhead, one should also include the costs of any benefits/etc given to staff that are above/beyond required to find quality teachers in a non-union environment).

b) Quantify the benefits of each additional $ donated/taxed versus student achievement - show that adding $ to the system the way it is will have greater results than otherwise reorganizing where existing funds are being spent. Are we already at the point where additional donations is on the diminishing returns side of achievement?

Running gentoo doesn't mean one has to be on the bleeding edge

I'm falling behind the rest of the gentoo userbase in applying desktop/workstation updates....finally getting around to bumping to glibc 2.12.2, still avoiding kde/baselayout bumps and my package.mask is crowded.

update:  masked glibc update , apparently there are some concerns w/ lvm.

update: kde update complete

update: still holding out on rc/baselayout changes

Regarding Paul Ryan's Plan to Reform Medicare

In reply to today's WSJ Article regarding Rep. Paul Ryan's plan to reform Medicare: I'm conflicted about setting the deficit cutting bar at only $4T, when this article suggests a total deficit of 12T over the claimed period. $4T is enough to generate a huge fight....and either Ryan thinks 4T is the most he can get (which is frightening) or he plans to get the other 8T later (maybe, but I'd rather he'd try for 8T now and get the other 4T later if he needs to). One thing I really object to is his limiting cuts to only those under 55....that is exempting a huge percentage of the baby boomers who honestly should be forced to pay their fair share. I honestly don't think Americans will support any plan that doesn't have _everyone_ and all age groups contributing. The only Americans that I think should be kept away from cuts are those over 80 yrs old or otherwise permanently disabled.

Woot! Near the top of hyperspins ranking of reliability of virtual private hosting companies!

After 747 days of monitoring over 15 minute intervals, we've reached the #13 spot with a total reliability of 99.981%! Note that this number includes all downtime for any reason, including planned maintenance of any kind, or Internet traffic instabilities from upstream bandwidth providers. Rackspace Managed Hosting is currently listed as #15 w/ 99.978% uptime. Amazon is currently listed as #81 w/ 83.566% uptime (ouch). The #1 slot goes to USTINET with 100% uptime over 1212 days (wow!). Of course, probably by posting this I've likely jinxed us... Anyhow, the link to the full report is at: http://www.hyperspin.com/en/ranking.php?type=2&i=1&d=365&s=100

Experiences w/ SATA-3Gbps 2TB Drives

Western Digital Caviar Black - Excellent Performance, 4K sector isn't that much of an issue, pricing is amazing - however overall reliability is poor and WDC has a horrible RMA process in place where they essentially seem to do little to nothing to fix broken drives but to send them out to the next person who requires an RMA resulting in consumers going through an endless series of RMA's. And, note, even though the original drive comes with a 5yr warranty, consumers are reporting that WDC only provides 90 days once you perform an RMA. Summary: Don't touch this drive with a 10 foot pole.
Western Digital RE4 - Almost as good performance as caviar black, but with significant additional reliability and enterprise firmware features. My testing of several of these drives over a 1yr period resulted in no RMA's and pristine SMART reports. The only nitpick I have is that WDC enables a power savings idle feature by default which can be hard to disable on some raid controllers, resulting in the load cycle count increasing by 2 every minute. It is unclear whether this might eventually lead to shorter lifetime of the drive. Summary: Overall good performance, 4k sector support, and nice reliability.
Seagate Constellation ES - We've just begun to test this drive model, but the online reviews seem to be good. So far, we haven't had any issues other than spurious error counters in the SMART data that seem to be specific to all recent Seagate drives. Unlike the WDC drives, the constellation ES is 512 byte sector only which may give a performance advantage to the RE4. Summary: Still in testing, but good so far.
Overall, from current data the Seagate Constellation ES and the WDC RE4 are good and safe choices. The constellation seems to have better legacy support and a more conservative firmware w/ no idle power issues. The RE4 has a slightly better performance and may be better suited for newer workstations w/ software raid.

Revising Social Security

Posted the following as a comment to a recent WSJ story: One thing I disagree with - letting current social security recipients off the hook with respect to reducing government spending - if anything these are individuals most responsible for the current mess...social security has been known to be in need of major reform for at least the last 30 years so individuals retiring now or recently should have been the people to have addressed it earlier. Instead, I'd recommend that those 80 or older be the only ones unaffected. Those between the ages of 50-80 should be able to retire if they have not already at the currently defined ages, but their benefits should not be adjusted for inflation until the federal debt is paid off. That seems generous. Those between the ages of 20-50 should have their retirement age increased by 3yrs (~70yrs?) and have benefits tested for income (receipt of income over 50K/yr for individual or 100K/yr for couple after retirement from any source should reduce benefits gradually until it is zero at either 150K/individual or 300K/couple). Those under 20yrs old would have the same restrictions, but their retirement age would be 1 year higher(~71?). Note that newborns currently have a life expectancy around 77yrs, but social security could end up paying out for 20+ yrs for those who live into their nineties. Who knows how health care will increase expectancy over the next 50 years?