Entropy Reducers Amalgamated

One more year.

Son #1 is off in Times Square (you're only a teenager once) for the "celebration" with a buddy and a few hundred thousand other New Yorkers.

Son #2 has a few friends over and is watching a movie.

Sons #3 and #4 are asleep, as is my dear wife, who has to round in the nursery tomorrow morning bright and early.

Of course, I didn't get as much done this year as I had hoped. And the year brought its share of twists and turns, personally and professionally. Lots I can't (or am just not willing to) write about.

We made some great new friends. We switched to a different synagogue in our neighborhood. We made inroads in helping to create a new synagogue in a neighborhood that's not ours. And we listed our house for sale, so we can eventually relocate to a whole new town.

I'm not going to bother listing plans for this year; I'm taking things one month; one week; one day at a time. I made my real resolutions back on Rosh Hashanah. I did a lot this year; the family did a lot, and we've definitely been places we never imaged we'd be. I will say that I'll try to be writing more -- the blog feels like it hasn't seen me in months. It hasn't. Work has been totally busy these last two months, and for that, I am grateful.

I wish everyone out there a happy and prosperous 2012, during which the world probably won't end.

In 1994, I purchased, for $200, a 200 MB (megabyte) hard drive, and that was considered both spacious and a good price.

My current cell phone has more space than that in regular memory, and 16 GB of flash memory.

Today I got an email about a compute cluster I used:

...When I wrote that email, we had roughly 42TB. As of this morning, we have 20TB of space free on the cluster....

They only have 20 TB (terabytes), of space left. That's only 100,000 of my 1994 drives...

I get one "business reply mail" envelope with each monthly statement to send in deposits.

Interest bearing what it does now, it doesn't pay for me to send in the small checks as I receive them; instead I hold them until I get my monthly statement, and send a wad of them in at once. The amount of interest I lose in holding the small checks is less than the cost of a stamp (right now).

$ git
ksh: git:  not found
$ hg
ksh: hg:  not found
$ bzr
ksh: bzr:  not found
$ cvs
ksh: cvs:  not found
$ rcs
ksh: rcs:  not found
$ sccs
Usage: sccs [-r][-d path][-p path] command [options...][operands...]

Where am I? When am I?

$ uname -a
SCO_SV XXXXXXX 3.2 5.0.6 i386
$ date
Tue Aug  2 11:45:59 EDT 2011
$

Welcome to 1984! Someone please pass me the flint, I need to start a fire.

This wouldn't be so funny if the project I have to work on here didn't involve reinventing the wheel. Which it has to.

I'm liking it so far, but it has one major drawback: the server a huge memory hog. My main machine isn't so skimpy (or at least I used to think so) at 4GB of RAM (all of it usable, since I'm now running a 64-bit operating system) but...

with my machine "at rest" it's sucking up by itself almost 1/8 of my free memory (and it gets piggier, if you can believe it.)

and this is with no other "user" processes running. (It seems that my standard set of background processes isn't so small, either, but...) It easily blossoms up to over 550 MB of memory used, which of course sends my poor little laptop into a fan-spinning frenzy.

This appears to be a common enough question but support at Crashplan seems to be ... well, at least they recognize the problem, even if they don't have a good way of managing it:

Jerry,

You can reduce the amount of memory, but depending on the size of your back up you may run into issues doing this. Please be aware it is not recommended or supported in any way by us here at CrashPlan.

Edit the CrashPlan engine's CrashPlanService.ini file to allow it to use more java memory:

Stop the backup engine: http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/how_to/stop_and_start_engine
Edit the below line in in C:\Program Files\CrashPlan\CrashPlanService.ini
-Xmx512m
Edit to something larger such as 640, 768, 896, or 1024. E.g.:
-Xmx1024m

This is the maximum allowed. CrashPlan will not use that much until it needs it.
Start the backup engine.

You will want to change it to 300.

Again, we do not recommend that this is done, but if you do really see the need to reduce the memory, these are the instructions.

Nonetheless, hope springs eternal that this otherwise promising system can right itself and reduce its bloated memory footprint (it's clearly running with some java-like virtual machine, given the command line arguments).

I can't lay claim to biking all of the time, or even most of the time, but I do enjoy a bit of recreational biking around Brooklyn and some other parts of the 5 boroughs. Whether alone or with my children, I do my level best to obey the local traffic laws as they apply to bicycles, including stopping for stop signs, not weaving in and out of traffic, etc. Moreover I teach these to my children: to stop at all intersections where cars could be coming, and to be extra aware of traffic and pedestrians, and to stay off the sidewalk if at all possible.

Yesterday, while driving the family back from the Cloisters museum in Upper Manhattan, I had the opportunity to narrowly miss about a dozen bicyclists riding wildly down Ft. Washington Avenue, weaving in and out of traffic, running across and against red lights, and speeding through intersections--basically, making a nuisance of themselves.

I often see and hear anecdotes from bicyclists complaining how cars are "out to get them" and don't show them any respect. Well, let me remind you all that it goes both ways, and you should remind your fellows (repeatedly) to not be jerks on the road. Physics is a cruel mistress, and a ton+ of moving metal versus your gentle skeleton means that, even if you're right, you're still wrong.

Let's be safe out there!

After having to make an impromptu rebuild of my main machine, and watching and hearing many of my old (8+ years) outboard disks make nasty grinding noises, I decided to try one of the many online backup services. After looking through a few reviews, I decided to try Carbonite.

I installed the software on or about June 2, and waited...and waited. While I had a sizable amount of data to move (70+GiB) and was warned that it would take some time to back all that up, I didn't expect for it to hang continuously for 2+ weeks and get repeatedly stuck.

The typical methods for dealing with this problem (reboot? reinstall? turn off your firewall?) were to no avail. Customer service at Carbonite was polite, but stuck to their scripts too much. I attempted to escalate, and was in fact given an "inside track" by whoever listens to @Carbonite on Twitter. But it was too little, too late. If the backup service and software combination doesn't work "out of the box" on a freshly-rebuilt machine with very little on it.

On to try something else.