i wondered about that hot smell...
December 12, 2004 by Eric Richardson
My computer freaked me out a bit a few hours ago. It started just randomly turning itself off a little while into a run. I think what happened is that when I pulled an internal hard drive this afternoon the SCSI cable lodged itself against the CPU fan, meaning that when the box got repowered the CPU was running heat sink only. Some internal temp controls were probably shutting everything down when the CPU got too hot.
Now I've got a mess I've got to get back together, and I still need to get Windows running correctly.
bottleneck identified
December 12, 2004 by Eric Richardson
In my living room I have a 10Mbit hub. It connects the computers in the living room, my room, and Chris's room. For normal traffic the fact that it's old and 10Mbit doesn't matter. But today I've been copying a partition's worth of data between my laptop and my desktop. I want to say it's around 10-12gigs worth of data. I didn't think about that when I started, but now a good two and a half hours later I can definitely say that I need to go out and buy a little 100Mbit switch. My transfer rate has been right around 1MB/sec the whole time, which is consistant with being about 80% of the potential for a 10Mbit connection (and 80% utilization is about what you expect to peak at).
If it really is 10gig, it should finish soon. If it's 12 I might still be waiting a while.
oops
December 11, 2004 by Eric Richardson
From a little blurb in the Downtown News about Ed Reyes getting appointed to the MTA board:
The MTA oversees more than 73 miles of bus and railroad lines in Los Angeles County.
That 73 miles is just about right for rail, but since what they wrote includes bus -- well, there's only so much you can include in "more than".
According to the fact sheet, the MTA has 189 bus routes, 18,500 bus stops (isn't that high? almost 100 stops per route?), and 2,100+ buses in service on any given weekday. I really hope all those aren't on the same 73 miles.
I know it's just bad editing, but that's what I expect of the Daily Trojan, not the Downtown News.
eThreads2 update
December 11, 2004 by Eric Richardson
Technical stuff to follow. Avert your eyes if you'd like...
Even though you haven't seen much change out front here, there's been some cool stuff happening on the eThreads2 backend. I mentioned earlier in the week that I had added a memory cache. Well, since then that's been rewritten and reworked to be a transparent part of my normal cache structure. There's still some work to do, but I'm going to throw that after the break.
I just got ping support working again, so now my #1 target is comments. Alan's been getting on me about that, letting me know how I've missed his wisdom without them.
Click the post title to read more...
training training training
December 11, 2004 by Eric Richardson
Don emailed me last night and accused me of having an attitude on the blog lately. Well, I'll try not to carry that over to this post, but...
I just absolutely confused some poor Cingular customer service rep. I knew so much more about how things work than she did that it wasn't funny. Here's the deal:
Kathy and I have a familytalk plan with Cingular. We've had a 1250 minute national plan to share between us, but over the last several months we've built up quite a stash of rollover minutes (1800 of them, to be precise). I figured we might as well use those instead of just letting them sit around, so I called up 611 to bump our plan down to 850 minutes (and save us $20/mon until we need to bump back). Here's where it gets complicated. I wanted to go ahead and make the change now, since why wait until our billing cycle flips on the 6th to start saving money? So I asked the CSR to check if the minutes on the pro-rated old plan would cover our usage already this cycle.
Right about there I lost her.
She said she would recommend waiting until the end of the cycle, to save some money. I asked her where that savings would come from. If I made the switch today the first 5 or 6 days of the month would be on the pro-rated 1250, basically giving us either 208 or 241 minutes (depending on if the change would pro-rate 5 days or 6) and costing either $12.90 or $15.48. The rest of the month would be on a pro-rated 850, giving us 712/685 minutes and costing $50.32/$48.39. So the effective plan for the month would be either $63.22 and have 920 minutes (pro-rate at 5 days), or be $63.91 and have 926 minutes (pro-rate at 6 days). Either way it's well under $80. So what I wanted to know was basically if right now would split at 5 days or 6, so I'd know if we'd be under the minutes for the first part of the month.
She asked if I would hold on a second while she went to check.
She came back and said they didn't do that.
"You don't do plan changes mid-month?"
"No, we do, we just don't do the pro rate and the minutes and that stuff."
At that point I cut my losses and had the change be effective 1/5/2005.