And raise it one further.
I saw this on the hood of a car near my neighborhood today…
I see your 3wolf shirt
June 6th, 2009a dirty new filesystem I like the name of: NILFS
June 3rd, 2009sounds dirty, don’t it? here’s how dirty:
One of the most noticeable features of NILFS is that it can “continuously and automatically save instantaneous states of the file system without interrupting service”. NILFS refers to these as checkpoints. In contrast, other file systems such as ZFS, can provide snapshots but they have to suspend operation to perform the snapshot operation. NILFS doesn’t have to do this. The snapshots (checkpoints) are part of the file system design itself.
One of the really cool features of NILFS is that these checkpoints can actually be mounted along side the primary file system. This has many, many uses, one of which is to mount a checkpoint to recover files that were unintentionally erased.
In addition to being able to recover recently erased files and extremely fast crash recovery times, there are a number of other features of NILFS that are very attractive:
* The file size and inode numbers are stored as 64-bit fields
* File sizes of up to 8 EiB (Exbibyte - approximately an Exabyte)
* Block sizes that are smaller than a page size (i.e. 1KB-2KB). This can potentially make NILFS much faster for small files than other file systems.
* File and inode blocks use a B-tree (the use of B-trees in a log-structured file system stems from the implementation which use something called segments)
* NILFS uses 32-bit checksums (CRC32) on data and metadata for integrity assurance
* Correctly ordered data and meta-data writes
* Redundant superblock
* Read-ahead for meta data files as well as data files (helps read performance)
* Continuous check pointing which can be used for snapshots. These can be used for backups or they can even be used for recovering files.
Geez. Why haven’t I blogged lately?
June 3rd, 2009Um, could be that I spend my life in a mad dash between work, family, drink and sleep!
Oldies: Chinese Drop
June 2nd, 2009So I wrote this song probably in 1996 or 1997, in my living room. I recall coming up with the chord progression while sitting on my couch, my bong on the coffee table, skipping class from college. The first time I recorded it was with planet zorn, tho I played it for many years prior to this recording with several bands.
The lyrics are a play on rhyming schemes. I wanted to have an artificial AAAAA BBBBB CCCCC rhyme scheme, where for each verse, there is only one repeating rhyme. The subject is a general paranoia song about fear of the Chinese and their nuclear missiles, their suppression of the Falun Gong, and their menacing of Taiwan. Next I move to the police and their fun practices with mace and smashing faces. Then I move on to the hypocrisy of America’s obsession with fame and giving passes to famous and/or powerful people.
The chorus was written as a separate song, which I cut up and inserted into the middle of this song. The song that the chorus comes from was a silly tuning song that was literally following the progression of the strings, which we played so everyone could tune without the normal choatic, boring tuning that most people do. The lyrics in the chorus refer to how hard it will be for us to get to the ideal, an impossibility.
I have played many, many roles in bands throughout my ‘career’: Keyboardist in my first band, and from there, bass player, singer/bass player, guitarist, singer/guitarist, singer, singer/keyboardist. I’ve played drums, as well as singer/drummer. One time I was a singer/guitarist/bassist, but we won’t get into that.
In this first track, it’s all guitars. I don’t like the production, but that is merely amateur work - and who plays the guitar solo? me, that’s who:
The next recording is from a live show:
You can hear me talking like the fool I normally am on stage at the beginning.
And finally, the latest version, recorded with a beautiful Wurlitzer organ for the main track:
This last track is definitely my favorite version. The third time is a charm, as they say.
wow, time flies by
May 19th, 2009see title
going to france
April 13th, 2009if you wanna know what’s goin on, we’re headed to the cote d azur, then to provence for a week.
Astroboy
March 23rd, 2009
Oldies: Solarx, Tomorrow
March 4th, 2009
So I formed a band called Solar X (yes, I have abysmal taste in band names. so sue me. you come up with a good band name), and we had a female singer, who goes by the name of Rola, a 19 year old Lebanese (I think) girl with a really nice voice. The recording was made out at the bassist’s, (Brandon Simpson) house, which was out in the Hill Country southwest of Austin, recorded and produced by yours truly. Which would explain the terrible production quality. I learned not to produce my own music with this experience. I still like the way the song turned out, nonetheless. Chris McNelis, guitar, me, keys and backing vocals.
The chord progression for this song was written by Chris McNelis, and I wrote the vocal melody and lyrics. It was the first really successful collaboration that I had done with any other musician up to that point.
Wear your heart upon your sleeve
Show the world what you believe
what’s your blog worth?
February 28th, 2009Here’s something neat, I put my blog and my mom’s blog in this neat blog estimate tool, and look at the results:
My blog is worth $14,113.50.
How much is your blog worth?
and here’s mine, which speaks volumes:
My blog is worth $0.00.
How much is your blog worth?
my visitor stats by browser this month
February 28th, 2009I found this interesting. Look at Firefox’s huge percentage. I doubt this is representative of real world stats, but still. Wow.
| Browsers | Hits | Percent |
| Firefox | 7942 | 59.1 % |
| Unknown | 3015 | 22.4 % |
| Explorer | 1733 | 12.9 % |
| Safari | 358 | 2.6 % |
| Mozilla | 242 | 1.8 % |
| Opera | 106 | 0.7 % |
| Netscape | 19 | 0.1 % |