Never been one to let the carrier drop

Occasionally I feel like I’m pretty much one of a kind.

I would guess that there are a lot of zeros after the decimal point for the percentage of the U.S. that is as far left as I am. I’m so far left that sometimes I meet myself coming back from the right. I really would like us to figure out ways to give everyone everything – and I’m serious about it. I think it can be done. I think it can be done just by creating the right software to run on our minds.

Of course, since we don’t live in matrix-world, loading software into our minds is a challenging thing. I don’t have any real suggestions yet about how to achieve this. But I don’t see any reason why the reality we experience has to be that connected with what our bodies are doing, and we have processor power to burn. Simultaneously giving us everything we’ve ever wanted and having our bodies arrange for care and feeding of ourselves looks immanently achievable from where I sit.

While sites are in development, they often only have a few users and can go many, many minutes without being accessed. When being used this way, you will notice that some sites take a inordinately long time to come up when using IIS 7

The reason for this is that the app server for those sites is timing out. Going into advanced settings for the application pool and setting IdleTimeout to 0 will solve this problem nicely.

The downside? You’re using some RAM to run the app server. My theory is that it’s actually caching the CLR translated to native bytecode. But for most sites, this is not a meaningful amount of RAM compared to what a modern server has available – maybe 100 megabytes. And the performance improvement is well worth it.

Below is a email I would have sent to HP – had they not given me a fake email address when I asked for a address to send them the solution to.

I’ve worked tech support. I know how hard it can be. And I know that no tech support person would *ever* want to walk someone through the steps I outline below. But you shouldn’t lie to your customers. I’m sure the person I talked to knew it was possible. He could have told me “I’m not allowed to answer that question because HP would rather not spend money on my time to walk you through this.” Which would have been the truth, and I would have been all right with.

The company I worked for doing tech support had a policy of lying to customers. They would commonly tell them they needed a special type of printer cable for “bidirectional” support, when in fact the majority of the problems the customers were having had nothing to do with that.

They also lied to vendors.. but that’s another story. Anyway, I don’t really blame the individual I talked to, and while I started to vent my frustration at him for either A: lying to me or B: not knowing what he was talking about, I quickly reined myself in because I realized I had zero interest in hurting him or making his day worse, and he was the victim of a much larger system as much as I was.

That said.. if anyone else out there is trying to do this migration, here’s how I made it work. Took me about a hour and a half to figure this out – if I can save someone else the trouble, great!

——-

I called tonight (from XXX-XXX-5701) to ask how I could install Windows 7 from the system disk that the computer shipped with (1.5T) to a high performance SSD (Smaller. But much larger than the 40G in use). Your technician, while very polite, was pretty much clueless. He was able to identify that the reason I wasn’t able to use your recovery utility was that the disk geometry was wildly different, but he couldn’t tell me any solution other than purchasing windows install disks for $200.

I thanked him for his time, and offered to email him the solution once I found it. (I’m a career sysadmin and programmer. I knew it was possible. Just not how, yet.) Here it is.

Next I did what I really should have done first, and googled for my problem. The first hit was http://sonic-media.dk/?p=103, which describes how to do exactly what I’m doing. Of course, there are caveats.

To do this, you need a external USB disk with enough space to fit all the bloatware that HP installs on the system. 64G is probably the minimum I would do – but I had a 1T lying around, which let me keep several instances of the backup to try out.

In order to make the NTFS partition *fit* on the SSD, it needs shrunk. This can be done from inside disk manager (see http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/2672-partition-volume-shrink.html), but first you have to disable system protection, virtual memory, and hibernation. (links to how to do all that included)

(optional) You also have the option to delete the system restore partition. I know, tech support is groaning at me about this, but remember your average person bright enough to know they want a SSD is also bright enough to write that data off somewhere else first. Remember that SSDs are *expensive* – you want every gigabyte to go to something you’re going to use, if not every day, at least occasionally. So yes, obviously, make a backup first. (In fact, that’s kind of the whole point of the first article. You’re using the Windows Image Backup tool to make a backup and restore it onto your new media). Then delete it. You can always restore to your original system disk with that partition once you’re done with this exercise.

For a boot disk (the windows backup tool asks you if you want to make one) I suggest using nonvolatile media like a DVD, as I discovered to my chagrin that if you pull the USB drive while shutdown is occuring using USB restore media, you don’t have USB restore media any more. I like my restore media to stay restore media.

Obviously, this is not something you want to walk Grandma through over the phone. But for advanced users, you could forward this email to them rather than telling them that it’s not possible to do what they want to do. SSDs are a great improvement over spinning disks, speed wise, because they have zero seek time – and as the cost drops, you’re going to see more and more people wanting to do what I just did. (Of course, eventually the capacity will be large enough that this issue won’t come up)

Finally, the Vertex SSD I had purchased came already formatted NTFS. For some reason, the system restore utility – even though it said it would partition and format the disk.. got very upset about this. So, I followed the directions in http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-system/no-disk-that-can-be-used-for-recovering-the-system/e855ee43-186d-4200-a032-23d214d3d524 to use the recovery console to wipe the disk.

Also, of course, most of us can figure this stuff out. 😉 I just hoped that calling tech support would save me having to run down all the information myself.

P.S. the computer now takes longer to go through the BIOS stuff than it does to boot the OS. 😉 Windows 7, from 0 to fully online in 6 seconds. Now perhaps you understand why I bothered?

Recently, one of the sites I admin for came under what I would refer to as a DDOS attack by http://www.80legs.com/webcrawler.html.

This claims to be a ordinary web spider, but it does some things that other web spiders don’t:

1) It makes between 20 and 100 connections to the server, from different IP addresses
2) It makes requests as fast as the server will answer

Now, for a web server with flat files, this is fine. But this particular web server had very complex database content that involved a lot of joins and multiple queries to build each page. It runs on a fairly powerful box – four of them, actually – but it still wasn’t up for 100 connections querying as fast as it would respond. I think probably most database-driven sites would have some problems with this.

As 80legs points out on their web site, blocking them by IP will not work because they are a distributed engine spanning thousands of IPs. Kind of like a botnet. And their indexing is user-driven.. that is, you can pay them to index a particular site for you. Good way to mess with your competitors. 😉

Anyway, my solution was simple and elegent. We already use haproxy to distribute load among the web servers, so I just pulled out the ‘tarpit’ and wrote a quick regex. For those of you not familiar with haproxy, it’s a single threaded non blocking daemon (Oh, i love those! Just like ew-too!) that proxies web requests to servers, automatically adjusts when servers go down, and has a bunch of neat features. It’s free software, and it has worked extremely well for us.

Anyway, I stuck the following in haproxy.cfg:

reqitarpit ^User-Agent: .*www.80legs.com.*

Goodbye, 80legs. Have fun hanging out in 30-second-delay-for-any-request land 😉

For those of you who haven’t set up haproxy before, it’s pretty trivial. It can run on the same box as your web server and just attach to a different interface (i.e. bind the webserver to localhost and it to the outside interface) or a different machine, or whatever. It’s a very lightweight load, as STNB things tend to be.

Random factoid for those of you not familiar with ew-too – the reason ew-too was written STNB is that it was originally designed to run on university computers, and be such a light load that the administrators never noticed it – on machines that were the equivalent of a 486. With a hundred people or more connected. STNB is a very clever approach for situations that it works for.

A confusing problem I’ve run across several times. I wanted to share it with you, because it has me occasionally in mental agony and every once in a while you send me responess that are pure gold in clearing my confusion or building me up.

Let’s say you have person A and person B. Person A is a friend. Person B might be their parents, their spouse, another friend, or any number of possibilities.

Person B tells you not to talk to person A. They might tell you to delete their phone number from your phone, or to never email them again.

In the past, I have always complied with these requests from Person B. Today, I decided to respond to a email from a Person A who has been friends with me for years, despite the Person B request six months ago that I not talk to Person A because Person A was having delusions about who I was and what I represented.

Now, I have a specific case in mind here – although I’ve seen this pattern many, many times in my life – and I want to talk more about this case. I don’t agree with person B. If Person A was confused and thinking I was going to marry them and solve all their problems, I think I *should* talk to them.. to kindly and gently explain that that’s not my path right now.. I love them, I hope they get what they need, but I can’t be that person for them. I wouldn’t want that person to just cut me off with no explanation. But, I complied with Person B’s request because I was afraid of what person B might do.

Now I agree if Person A says please don’t contact me, I shouldn’t contact them. I have a hard time with these some times for a long list of reasons that I’d love to go into with you at a later date, but, I at least agree that I shouldn’t be contacting them.

My struggle is this: The aforementioned incident left a Person-A shaped hole in my life. Person A is my friend, and we share many common interests and I didn’t want them gone.

The angry part of me is saying, What business is it of Person B (their parents, in this case, but Person A is of age) whether me and Person A are friends. They may feel that my friendship is hurting person A, but if so they should explain that in enough detail for me to understand how, not just say “Don’t talk to person A”

I think I hear a threat where there isn’t any. My irrational fear side sees.. weell, are they going to take out a restraining order against me, have me arrested, come gun me down.. all sorts of things that in the real world do not seem to happen to me.

It’s just upsetting. I don’t know the “right” thing to do, and I am conflicted between that part of me that says complience with any request is the “right” thing to do and the part of me that says treating Person A in the way I would choose to be treated is the “right” thing to do.

We’re all just kids from
Around town and so we know
That outside in the real world
It doesn’t matter what we do
We know for us there’s nothing new

So drop your hesitation and come with me
Nothing that we say can hurt us now
Take this night and make it remember us
There’s nothing stopping us now, so come with me

Singing, singing
[Incomprehensible]
Singing, singing
What is the meaning?

Singing, singing
[Incomprehensible]
Singing, singing
I might be singing

I know you’re only here to kill a few more hours
I could be somewhere else but
Now I’ve got my reasons not to go home
I don’t want to be there alone

You know you’ve got to stop
Thinking about right and wrong
Tonight it’s you and me, it’s now or never
We’ve got nothing to lose
We can do whatever we choose

So drop your hesitation and come with me
Nothing that we say can hurt us now
Take this night and make it remember us
There’s nothing stopping us now, so come with

Reach out with music
(Music)
Reach out with music
(Music)

Reach out – music
(Music)
Reach out – music
(Music)

So drop your hesitation and come with me
Nothing that we say can hurt us now
Take this night and make it remember us
There’s nothing stopping us now, so come with

So drop your hesitation and come with me
Nothing that we say can hurt us now
Take this night and make it remember us
There’s nothing stopping us now, so come with me

So, today I’m doing sound for a small venue and a blues band. I’d forgotten how much fun it is (although a fair amount of heavy lifting is also involved). I need to make friends with some bands.. I remember looking at the sound for the Comet Club and being amused that I have a better system sitting in storage.

I didn’t bring the whole system – that would be way overkill for this venue.. I’ve just got one 1801 and 4 450s, two of which I’m planning on using as stage monitors.

After the event:

Well, it could have gone better. 😉 It also could have gone worse. I screwed up and paused the recording, and then when I unpaused it didn’t rearm the record tracks even though the record light was still on on the UI. Grr, digital performer, annoying bug, grr.

But, we got about ten minutes. Available at http://www.sheer.us/stuff/030712-jam.mp3

I had a couple of feedback problems.. I want to get another driverack PA to run the floor monitors through.

Still, I had a really good time and am hoping that more chances to do live sound will be coming my way.

So, I have a really interesting problem.

Everyone in the external world.. Oops, not everyone, but a majority of people.. caution me repeatedly about sleep deprivation and how much damage it will do to me / my life / etc. About half the times that I have experimented with sleep deprivation – either because of the effects of drugs I was using, or because of a concious choice to go down that road.. I have ended up in a psych hospital.

Now that I have heard the conditions for why one would end up in a psych hospital, I know that in fact for most of my life I have qualified for one of the conditions. “A danger to myself”. I had a really bad habit. I participated actively in my own ego-destruction because I didn’t want my ego to get too large, because I found people with excessive egos to be annoying.

At this point, I’m no longer participating that way. I believe that I’m sane enough and a good enough judge of myself that I do not need to insult myself / tell myself that various friends don’t want to spend time with me / tell myself that people who have never given any evidence of hating me hate me / doubt people who have shown over time to be trustworthy. My mind is a much quieter place since I made the irrevocable decision not to hurt myself in this way any more.

It astonishes me how easy this change was. Several of the previous changes that I have made in myself have been very difficult – ceasing using drugs, making the irrevocable decision to not think about or talk about suicide any more. (I did so recently despite my best inclinations on the matter, and I ended up regretting it)

But sleep deprivation is complicated. I’ve seen amazing things, heard amazing things, and seen measurable growth in my dream life and my inner life every time I engaged in it. On the other hand, there’s no doubt that there is some period after 72-ish hours where my decision-making skills become poor, my ability to navigate is seriously diminished, and in general I’m not tracking as well as I normally do. However, I can’t shake the feeling – even though no one I’ve talked to has agreed with this – that there is some plateau hanging out after 100-ish hours at which I will return to my usual level of competency and just, well, no longer need sleep.

One of the possible ramifications of being lost in plato’s cave – which I will readily admit that I am – I have no idea how much of the reality I experience is internally generated (“the map”) vs how much is externally generated (“the territory”). To put it another way, I’m pretty sure that a fair amount of what I experience is at least somewhat under my control, but it’s not under my *conscious* control.

To add to the fun, I am not at all whether my subconscious mind is pro me getting the experiences I want, or against. It seems pretty clear that whatever part of my mind that is responsible for creating my dreams has a history of not liking the part of my mind that is experiencing those dreams as subjective reality, since the dreams that I have are often nightmares. I’m not sure what to take from the fact that most of these nightmares are about unsolvable problems.. I recently had a dream in which people were slamming cinderblocks against my head. One advantage of not sleeping is not having to deal with the dreams I have when I sleep. I have a few good dreams.. and a much higher percentage than I did a year ago, so I see improvement, and improvement is a good thing..

Anyway, back to the debate.

Here are some of the pros and cons:

Pro: Intense and very good visual experiences (including starbursts, pretty lights, hallucinating the muppets)
Permanent improvement in my ability to visualize
Temporary improvement in kinesthetic abilities i.e. skating, dancing, playing the keys
Temporary periods of fearlessness which enable me to investigate the folly of most fear
Permanent improvement in number of nightmares I experience
Permanent improvement in my ability to think outside the box

Con: Risk of harm? I haven’t yet been harmed by any of my adventures in sleep-dep land but large numbers of people keep telling me this is luck and could change at any time
Risk of incarceration (Mental hospital or jail, it’s basically the same animal)
Lowered considerably by my learning that mental hospitals do not in fact help me get better (although they can be fun) and understanding my legal rights in WA regarding
being placed in such places for more than 72 hours
Poor decision-making skills
Risk of losing friends (?)
Frightens my friends (:()
Do not always correctly respect other people’s bounderies. <--- BUG, must fix Basically, when I look at the cons, what I'm saying is that it's high risk behavior. Apparently considerably higher risk than, for example, taking a hit of acid. On the other hand, I've never found drugs to be anywhere near as mind-expanding as not sleeping. If this does turn out to be a addictive behavior with only bad effects, or with more bad effects than good ones, I expect I can get free of it using the same process that got me free of my other addictions. There is also the question of what would happen if I didn't sleep but also used a antipsychotic or other psych med to help compensate for whatever issues I have. There are people who claim that sleep deprivation will cause death, but then, you can find people who claim that just about anything will cause death, and thus far I haven't died, not even once. 😉 [In point of fact, if quantum immortality is true, I've died many, many times and just not experienced that death because as the subjective observer, I can never die]

Is it possible that we’re living in a beta version of Earth?

If so, is it possible there’s a release version available, and we just need to ask someone for help upgrading?

No, I’m not using any drugs, nor have I been. Apparently I’m capable of off the wall thinking even sober. 😉

I thought I’d post this just in case anyone else has the same problem I did with 10.04 hanging on ssh login (it also hangs on telnet login, but control-C will fix that. SSH users are not so lucky)

The problem would seem to be that /usr/lib/update-notifier/update-motd-updates-available is trying to access the network and failing – or just taking a very long time to succeed. I seem to especially have problems with this on nodes running on Amazon’s EC2 network.

The easy solution is to edit /usr/lib/update-notifier/update-motd-updates-available and add a ‘exit’ at the top of the script. Of course, this disables checking for updates whenever you log in, but personally I’d rather be *able* to log in. 😉

You will also need to edit /etc/update-motd.d/90-updates-available and similarly add ‘exit’ to it, so that the next time these files are generated this fix continues to work