Link dump: Part Deux

I’ve made an effort not to talk politics on this here blog.  To be perfectly frank, I’ve made an effort to not discuss politics at all lately.  It’s too vitriolic, and too damn pointless.  I’m burned out on the election a year before the election itself, and I’m 99% sure that no candidates I like are going to get the nomination anyway.  Nobody really cares.  The media tells them Hillary is a lock, so they don’t pay attention to anybody else.  Guiliani or Romney will probably win the Republican ticket, and it’ll be another “lesser of two evils” election.  In reality, I’ll probably end up voting for a third party candidate.

Unless, of course, Kucinich wins.  Surprisingly (to me), he stands for everything I give a damn about in politics.  Even before his congressional career, his two-year tenure in Cleveland is impressive.  Nigh-impeccable voting record, and he actually votes based on an analysis of the bill rather than partisan lines or the like.  He will be the only candidate (other than Gravel) that I’ve bothered donating to.  Gravel, though, frankly has no chance of winning.  Kucinich topped a recent poll, Gravel came in last.  It’s amusing that Gore placed second purely on write-in votes alone.  I must say that much as I may like Gore, the Economist and the Times are absolutely correct.  Everybody clamoring for him to enter the political bear pit now would excoriate him once he got in, and the compromises that inevitably must be made in politics would brush aside the notion of a populist Messiah that people seem to have about him.  At the very least, buy a pocket Constitution.  Donating would be a good idea also. 

On the other side, we have candidates who don’t read The Guardian, The Economist, The American Prospect, or anything that I’m aware of.  Clinton (the only upside to her is Bill back in the White House), Biden (no chance), Edwards (likely VP nominee), and Obama are all talking Social Security.  It’s just not a “crisis.”  The American Prospect and The Guardian both ran the numbers, and both came up with a very good point.  If Social Security is solvent until 2042 even under the worst economic projections, and endlessly under moderate and higher estimates, why are we so concerned about it?  Raise the cap.  Tax the rich more.  Problem solved, and that’s precisely what some of the candidates have suggested.  What boggles my mind is why they bothered suggesting it at all.  It’s just not the major problem. 

Here’s a total breakdown of the system by Krugman.  The Congressional Budget Office sees a different crisis (warning: PDF).  What the hell is wrong with this?  Because the lack of healthcare in this country isn’t problem enough, and people avoid getting preventative care already due to the ludicrously high costs (which just makes it worse when they finally do go in for $problem), let’s now charge them incredible interest rates on their debts.  Would it be so difficult to just get rid of the bureaucratic mess?  I truly don’t see the point of HMOs at all.  Break it down to a single-payer system backed by government money.  Fund it through taxes.  Tax me more.  Don’t care.  Tax the rich more.  It’s not as if the income gap is getting better, contrary to the belief of some. 

Misdirection is the name of the game right now.  This will never make it to the news media.  It’s not like the Fed knows anything.  I mean, the news anchors are telling me that the subprime crash is almost over!  Get in while you can before it recovers!  I’m really not sure if people are buying that line of reasoning or not, but if so, I wish them the best.  At least until the ARMs reset in a year and their mortgage payments jump by 30%.  That won’t affect the housing market or the economy at all as the effects ripple through bonds and funds that were deemed to be safe.  Everything will be a-ok.  You’ll see.

As always, I find some things ridiculous.  I feel like Kissinger is running for president, minus ~50 IQ points.  The man has absolutely no knowledge of intelligent foreign policy, is a warmonger, supports nepotism and protecting his cronies, etc.  How the hell do you run on a platform of “I was the mayor of a city during a major tragedy?”  It sure as hell wouldn’t work for Ray Nagin.  I bet Guiliani finds things like this to be prescient.  Academia has a liberal bias is part of the headline?  Really?  I’ll take that to mean that real life has a liberal bias.  Perhaps that’s the clearest example of the disconnect pundits (on both sides, true, but I see this a lot more often from one of the two…) have from reality. 

Which leads us to… The Heritage Foundation, that beacon of reason.  The Democrats are the “party of the rich?”  That’s fantastic.  Really, it is.  Neither party is really for the people, but there is a difference between “party of the rich” and “party for the rich.”  What baffles me is that The Heritage Foundation is (nominally) populated by people with fairly advanced degrees.  It’s a think tank, and they couldn’t bother to look up the demographics which clearly show an increase in education leads to an increase in the likelyhood that you’ll vote liberal.  Beyond that, the inner city poor and a large percentage of the middle class also votes Democratic.  Immigrants traditionally vote Democratic.  There’s more to it than “party of the rich.”  What they’re really trying to say is “we have no powerbase left other than religious nutcases, sociopaths, greedy people, and those who we can fearmonger to about illegal immigration (read: racists).”  It’s not really fair to say you’re a racist if you’re concerned about immigration, but it is fair to say that our current immigration policy is idiotic, and that the statistics (not cherry-picked examples) on crime just don’t agree with the notion perpetuated by Tom Tancredo and others.

Other than that, just a few neat things to buy:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/lights/9c4a/
http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/gear/8122/
http://www.nerdkits.com/

I’ve got way too many tabs

It’s been a while since I’ve made a post, not that I (seemingly) give a damn about that.  I keep collecting links, and it’s time for a dump.  It’s doesn’t really feel like a hell of a lot has changed in the gap between the last post and this, but it probably has.  I’m set to go back to school in January.  Actually, I’m registered at two schools (which I’ll be attending concurrently), and depending on how the coursework goes, I may end up taking classes at one of the colleges around here as well to ram myself through as quickly as possible.  I simply don’t see a point in delaying the inevitable, nor in taking an extraordinary amount of time to complete it, given that I’m doubting if it’ll pose a challenge.  The only real problem (as always) is the financial aspect.  I’m not keen on taking out thousands of dollars in student loans, but I make too much to get federal aid, seemingly.  This particular aspect of life I don’t take issue with, as it’s something that I’m doing on my own terms and which amounts to a commitment of ~6 months (a semester) should I determine to do something different in the middle of it, which is doubtful.

I don’t intend to be the average college douchebag who treats it as an extended four years of drinking and vacation from real life, on somebody else’s dime (largely because I have little regard for college students), but then, I don’t think anybody would expect that from me anyway (and I already got something closely approximating that in Georgia, anyway).  In other ways, though?  Not nearly as comfortable with the way things are headed.  Moving into a 30-year mortgage which locks me in my current geographic location (and for the moment, job) is just screaming “mistake,” and I can’t explain why.  Admittedly, neither the Economist nor the Financial Times would indicate this as a good idea.  If the market isn’t predicted to bottom out for a year (give or take), why buy now? There’s no sense of urgency for me in removing myself from my current living situation, and the only reason to do so that I can see is that FHA loans are going to have higher interest rates as of Jan 15th if your credit isn’t virtually perfect (mine is not).

Is a (maybe) 2% rise in interest rates going to counteract a (maybe) $20,000 drop in price?  It’s about the same as near as I can tell, at least in the short run. Sure, in the long term, the interest rate hike would end up costing me a lot more, but refinancing is not an impossible objective, and the short run is the only goal for now.  Presumably, when I’m done with going back to school, the person I’m with will actually have an income, and mine will increase.  I don’t particularly care whether or not she has an income, but it is a factor.  Qualifying for a $170,000 dollar house by yourself just isn’t much fun, and I have little interest in being mortgage poor.  If my projected bills are $number, I’d like to have some leeway with extra money so I can take vacations, put money in an “oh-shit” fund in case of sudden job-loss, car-loss, or the like, et al.  What I like least about it is being rushed.  To find somewhere in the next two weeks or so, get approved for that home, and all the rest so it’ll clear before the 15th.  To look for a while and find something you really like is one thing, but to be railroaded into it on a needlessly short timeline is something else entirely.  Sure, I found something that would be acceptable, but who’s to say that the homes which are just out of my “I can afford this and still have a reasonable lifestyle” price range won’t drop precipitously in the next year?  To note, I’m fine with compromising on some issues with a home, but I’d rather have more discretion.

Couple that with my extreme job dissatisfaction.  It’s getting kind of boring (rollouts and deployments are done for now, and there’s not much for me to do other than the day-to-day stuff which takes about two hours out of my 12 hours here), my hours have been fucked up forever, and they’re rearranging the upper management so I’m now directly reporting to somebody who, frankly, has no idea what we do here (IT at the corporate office) and how our methodologies work.  I want to take a position with a different company, but I’m not able to do that until said mystical approval is done.  There’s a glut of interesting jobs here right now, and I have no idea if there will be in two months or whatever it takes.  Maybe if I had somebody who actually understood what I do?  I don’t exactly have forty-five minutes in a block to speak with a broker or call a credit card company for which I have no information and no authorization to get myself removed as an authorized user from the account of somebody whom I’ve not spoken with in a year.  I actually have -gasp- work to do!  Last Friday when the city cut all of our copper (fiber was thankfully intact, but we still lost 4 T1s and all of our phone lines), I had other things to do.  Even on a regular day, the nature of the work is such that somebody could walk in at any moment and have a problem which needs to be solved immediately because it affects production.

While I’ve got a lot of leeway here, and a lot of freetime, I’m just not comfortable trying to make those phonecalls while I’m here, and that shouldn’t be hard to understand.  All in all?  I’m fine having a “joint” life, but I need to have some control over my aspect of it.  If you had been talking about getting a different job for the last three months and you saw some things you were interested in pop up recently, I wouldn’t tell you that you “needed” to wait because $thing, unless that need (emphasis on that word because it has a meaning which is not “want”) was urgent.  Well, what’s urgent?  I don’t know. Pregnancy? Current roommate is selling the house and you have nowhere to live unless…? Moving your business and you need somebody who you can lean on (if necessary) financially for a little while? Medical bills? Needs to get a new car because your old one is somehow unusable, stolen, or whatever? Legal problems? I don’t know. Just, y’know, needs. On some level, I’m utterly convinced that this’ll be the end of things if I don’t acquiesce, which is galling, and a big part of the reason I’m hesitant about moving forward. Nothing says that things are stagnating merely because they’re not progressing at a breakneck pace. Still, something feels… wrong. Then again, I always feel that way around this time of year.

Enough about me, though.  Onto the tab unload.
First off, Solaris kicks Linux’s ass:

-bash-3.00$ ./bonnie++ -d /tankWriting with putc()...done
Writing intelligently...done
Rewriting...done
Reading with getc()...done
Reading intelligently...done
start 'em...done...done...done...
Create files in sequential order...done.
Stat files in sequential order...done.
Delete files in sequential order...done.
Create files in random order...done.
Stat files in random order...done.
Delete files in random order...done.
------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
-Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP
alucard 6648M 81021 74 134971 28 97563 23 87675 94 213019 21 805.2 3
------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
-Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
files /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP
16 31624 99 +++++ +++ +++++ +++ 32376 97 +++++ +++ +++++ +++
-bash-3.00$ ./bonnie++ -b -d /tank
Writing with putc()...done
Writing intelligently...done
Rewriting...done
Reading with getc()...done
Reading intelligently...done
start 'em...done...done...done...
Create files in sequential order...done.
Stat files in sequential order...done.
Delete files in sequential order...done.
Create files in random order...done.
Stat files in random order...done.
Delete files in random order...done.
------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
-Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP
alucard 6648M 109277 99 129352 27 95762 23 88443 96 214448 21 632.2 2
------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
-Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
files /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP
16 181 1 +++++ +++ 182 1 180 1 +++++ +++ 184 1
#zfs set compression=on tank
-bash-3.00$ ./bonnie++ -d /tank
Writing with putc()...done
Writing intelligently...done
Rewriting...done
Reading with getc()...done
Reading intelligently...done
start 'em...done...done...done...
Create files in sequential order...done.
Stat files in sequential order...done.
Delete files in sequential order...done.
Create files in random order...done.
Stat files in random order...done.
Delete files in random order...done.
------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
-Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP
alucard 6648M 97067 92 195806 42 144370 33 84743 91 432407 43 10006 31
------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
-Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
files /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP
16 17807 99 +++++ +++ 13575 99 31412 99 +++++ +++ +++++ +++
-bash-3.00$ ./bonnie++ -b -d /tank
Writing with putc()...done
Writing intelligently...done
Rewriting...done
Reading with getc()...done
Reading intelligently...done
start 'em...done...done...done...
Create files in sequential order...done.
Stat files in sequential order...done.
Delete files in sequential order...done.
Create files in random order...done.
Stat files in random order...done.
Delete files in random order...done.
------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
-Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP
alucard 6648M 108341 98 179270 41 141544 38 83036 90 428718 46 1756 7
------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
-Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
files /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP
16 186 1 +++++ +++ 180 1 179 1 +++++ +++ 182 1

Take that, Linux software RAID (note that he’s got a few more drives in there than I do.  I’m running 4 U320 drives and 2 SATA drives, and he’s got 7 ATA drives.  The second option forces Bonnie++ to sync ever ywrite, so the cache on the controller isn’t netting me any extra performance there. 430MB/s? I can live with that. Given protocol overhead, that’ll cap the aggregated GigE card.

Secondly?  This.  It’s hard to imagine what kind of dick classifies himself as a “seduction artist,” but after seeing this on the front page of (of course) Digg, I think I have a pretty good idea how to become one.

1. Be desperate for other people’s approval.  So desperate, in fact, that you’re willing to make up anything at all in order to get comments from people who exist (or don’t) on your blog.

2. Pretend every conversation with a member of the opposite sex is flirting, regardless of whether or not they’re involved with somebody else, a lesbian, much older/hotter than you, playing cockblocker at the bar, etc.  In fact, that bartender who talks to you and spends time near you?  I’m sure it’s not because you spend a shitload of money on drinks and she wants bigger tips.  Nope.  She wants to bed you.  As a rule (and I’ve gotten bitched at for this enough times), people in the service industry are friendly because their income depends on you being pleased with them.  Sociable does not mean interested.

3. Give myself a dumbass nickname.  It seems that “Mystery,” “Shark,” “Style,” and other similarly-awesome monikers are taken.

4. Post sycophantic comments on other people’s blogs.  Clearly the guys who claim “triple-digit lays” are worthy of emulation and rimming.  No women would find that digusting.  In fact, if I find it digusting (and I’m not exactly a pillar of morality), there’s something very wrong with it.

5. Buy a shithole that doesn’t have a bathroom mirror and in such disrepair that the mailman will not come to my house.  Proclaim it a “babe lair.”  As a general rule, by the time you bring somebody back to your house from the bar (or wherever), it’s not going to matter much what the interior looks like unless it’s a total shithole (see: his house).

6. Be a mysogynist.  This step is key.  If you’re going to treat women as objects or toys whose only purpose is your own amusement, having any respect for the opposite sex whatsoever would kill my chances of being a “seduction artist.”  Maybe if I had a long history of rejection by women, I’d grow to loathe them enough to become a “seduction artist.”  Especially if I happened to be a virgin in my late 20’s who went home to cry after a girl at a party went home with one of my friends.

So, instead, here are some rules:

1. Don’t be a dick.  This precludes anybody who would ever call themselves a ”seduction artist.”

2. People are people.  Some people are vulnerable, some people are vengeful, some people just want sex. There’s nothing complicated about it. Ugly people, attractive people, old people, young people, they’re just people.  Talk to them as you’d talk to anybody else, and it builds rapport, or you have a two minute conversation or whatever.  If you’re out for blood (or sex), it’s not that hard to tell from a glance.  You’re better off having no expectations whatsoever.

3. Maybe it’s willful ignorance, but I can’t recall ever being rejected.  Ever.  Why?  See above.  Also, I have interests and goals other than adding another notch to my bedpost, which may interest people.

4. Stop giving a shit about sex.  Why?  See above.

5. Stop being a piece of shit who desperately reads idiotic books and internet posts about how to pick up women from the comfort of your basement/bedroom/whatever in hopes of avoiding another tear-soaked pillow because your friend (who you should be happy for, I guess) got sex and you didn’t.  Talk to people and see what happens.  People are attracted to confident, not cocky.  For that matter, people are attracted to those who don’t come off as fake.

6. When people talk to you, they are being human.  It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re attracted to you.  Babies can distinguish between good and bad socialization, much less adults.

It seems that this cottage industry (i.e. teaching people how to be more selfish and regard other less) is worth a fair amount of money. I’m going to publish a book.

Next:  college students are worthless.   Not much else to say about that, really.  Maybe we should take away their right to vote.  It’s not like they bothered in the last election.

And to conclude this (I’ll just end up writing another post with rants on economics anyway), here are a few Daily WTFs, including the one I think looks like code from U-haul. A gem I’ll probably use:

if (Jack.WorkQuantity == "All" && Jack.PlayQuantity == "No")
  {
      Jack.BoyType = BoyTypes.Dull;
  }

/sigh

I’m fed up with Dreamhost’s performance. Well, to be fair, I’m not entirely sure it’s Dreamhost’s fault. Part of it could be the god-awful slow Javascript parsing of Firefox. It doesn’t help that Firefox takes 450MB of memory for 56 tabs (yes, it’s a tad ridiculous, I realize that), when Opera takes 170MB for the same. I haven’t really touched Opera in a while, since I’m too attached to Greasemonkey, Firefox’s Javascript console, and the DOM inspector. Opera seems to have have reasonable alternatives for those now (other than Greasemonkey). My one gripe at this point is Opera’s tab handling, which was a plus before. I’m finding myself preferring Firefox’s “endlessly scroll through your tabs” option (or the dropdown), just because I can see what they’re titled, and easily check whether or not I have new GMail.

I suppose now that GMail supports IMAP, I should just set up Opera to poll that, and the windows widget is pretty good, when it comes to it. At least it doesn’t slow to a crawl when Slashdot loads an animated ad (I refuse to use AdBlock for sites I actually like. Slashdot’s whitelisted, and I find myself occasionally clicking their ads). The RSS feeder wipes the floor with Firefox, it doesn’t peg the CPU when I open it up (along with however many tabs I left last time I closed it), it remembers page and window positioning between instances. I kind of wonder why I ever switched.

It doesn’t help that the clueless dipshit who wrote one of our monitoring applications has no idea how threading is supposed to work. A program with a 20MB footprint should not soak 50% of a 3Ghz Xeon every 4-5 seconds while it polls. I haven’t looked at the source, so I have no idea what’s happening there, but it can’t be right. One of my Perl scripts (which totals HTTP hits) chews through 4GB of logs every day in about 6 seconds, at 30% CPU. I find it hard to believe that a non-forked Perl script is somehow more optimized than the C# threading library. It also doesn’t help that Outlook takes an extraordinary amount of memory to do anything, nor that Windows aggressively swaps programs you haven’t used in a little while. That’s nice, except that I have, at any given time, 9-15 programs open. Putty’s fine to swap. Outlook, WINWORD (which Outlook still calls for composing messages, even plaintext), IE, Citrix, and the like are not. A 10 second delay when I click on Outlook again? Nuts to that. If I could convince our Exchange admin to turn on IMAP/POP, I’d just move to Linux. MAPI sucks, and I’ve never gotten Evolution’s Outlook Web Access plugin to work properly.

VMware is a possible solution, but it’s ridiculous to virtualize Windows just so I can run Outlook. Similarly, I’d like to get our AD admin to enable LDAP spanning so I can get our *nix systems on the domain and stop replicating the forest to an internal LDAP server just to keep accounts synced.

As it turns out, it’s not just a problem at work. Dreamhost’s response times are pitiful from home, too. Nine seconds to respond to a HTTP request? Pass. I’m seriously considering migrating to Joyent’s OpenSolaris hosting, even though it may cost more. However, they only let you run one Mongrel (the server Rails works best with) instance. That’s fine, and Rails should respond in virtually no time. However, I need to more closely research Apache reverse proxying. I could move to Typo, Mephisto, Radiant, or some other system for blogging, but one Mongrel instance isn’t going to cut it if I’m running a few Rails apps, and Mongrel doesn’t handle PHP. Maybe FastCGI performance is better at Joyent. I don’t know. Just that I can’t handle this pitiful performance anymore.

I’ll likely see what sustained performance is like on the Intellistation (which will be a web server) via a redirected subdomain monitoring a SNMP daemon (realtime CPU/network graphing). I know my home connection holds up really well via FreeNX, but it remains to be seen whether or not Comcast decides to block port 80 if they see a lot of traffic.

As a total aside, I feel like it should be “an HTTP request” and “an SNMP” daemon, though all proper rules of English say it should be “a HTTP request” or “a SMTP” daemon. IETF (SNMP) and w3 (HTTP) both have websites which agree with the usage of “an” (via a Google search for “an SNMP” vis-a-vis “a SNMP” and likewise for HTTP), but I’ve yet to find definitive rules for usage with regard to acronyms. Instinct tells me it should only be used when it’s referring to a singular adjective phrase versus a predicate or plural, but I can’t establish why. Any thoughts, grammar Nazi?

Also, I highly recommend A Fine Frenzy’s CD.