Tip for the day: when you’ve arranged for a professional computer moving company to relocate 30 critical servers from one state to another, and the driver shows up alone in a bare panel truck, without even a blanket to keep the machines from bouncing around on their way to the warehouse, do not let him take them.

The driver was as surprised as I was, perhaps more so. He thought we had a shrink-wrapped pallet of boxes that could be popped onto the truck and dropped off after he made a few more stops. The dispatcher tried to talk him into loading the stuff loose. The dispatcher tried to talk me into letting the driver load the stuff loose, swearing that it would be fine for the short trip to the warehouse.

Things went downhill from there.

[update: to no surprise, the rights-holders in Japan have finally caught up with Youtube, and forced the removal thousands of video clips. I’m not upset with them about it, particularly for things available on DVD (I own import copies of all of the concert and PV footage I linked below); I just wish it were possible to legitimately watch the ephemera.]

This is just a placeholder for links to random videos on Youtube:

• Aya Matsuura sells shampoo
• Ayaka Kimura gets relaxed
• Mari Yaguchi explodes into action
• trailer for the first episode of Gal Circle
• Mini Moni wa chicchai
• No, really, they are
• Aya Matsuura's Dokki Doki Love Mail, PV and live
• Nozomi Tsuji covers DDLM, with extra Nya's.
• Biyuuden and Tsuji want something
• Biyuuden gives their all
• When idols attack
• ...each other
• Mini-skirt-wearing Mini Hams

More:

• Hitomi Yoshizawa does impressions
• Aya Matsuura sells structural support

Pardon me while I point and laugh:

High water intake reduces fat deposits and rids the body of toxins. Simply drinking eight 16 oz. glasses of water throughout the day, cooled to 40 Fahrenheit, will burn 200 calories; that's equivalent to running 3 miles!

I have no words.

東京特許許可局許可局長今日急遽特許許可却下

[last update: the root cause of the Linux loopback device problem described below turns out to be simple: there’s no locking in the code that selects a free loop device. So it doesn’t matter whether you use mount or losetup, and it doesn’t matter how many loop devices you configure; if you try to allocate two at once, one of them will likely fail.]

Panel discussions at LinuxWorld (emphasis mine):

"We need to make compromises to do full multimedia capabilities like running on iPod so that non-technical users don’t dismiss us out of hand."

"We need to pay a lot more attention to the emerging markets; there’s an awful lot happening there."

But to truly popularize Linux, proponents will have to help push word of the operating system to users, panelists said.

... at least one proponent felt the Linux desktop movement needed more evangelism.

Jon “Maddog” Hall, executive director of Linux International, said each LinuxWorld attendee should make it a point to get at least two Windows users to the conference next year...

I’m sorry, but this is all bullshit. These guys are popping stiffies over an alleged opportunity to unseat Windows because of the delays in Vista, and not one of them seems to be interested in sitting down and making Linux work.

Not work if you have a friend help you install it, not work until the next release, not work with three applications and six games, not work because you can fix it yourself, not work if you can find the driver you need and it’s mostly stable, not work if you download the optional packages that allow it to play MP3s and DVDs, and definitely not work if you don’t need documentation. Just work.

[disclaimer: I get paid to run a farm of servers running a mix of RedHat 7.3 and Fedora Core 2/4/5. The machine hosting this blog runs on OpenBSD, but I’m toying with the idea of installing a minimal Ubuntu and a copy of VMware Server to virtualize the different domains I host. The only reason the base OS will be Linux is because that’s what VMware runs on. But that’s servers; my desktop is a Mac.]

Despite all the ways that Windows sucks, it works. Despite all the ways that Linux has improved over the years, and despite the very real ways that it’s better than Windows, it often doesn’t. Because, at the end of the day, somebody gets paid to make Windows work. Paid to write documentation. Paid to fill a room with random crappy hardware and spend thousands of hours installing, upgrading, using, breaking, and repairing Windows installations.

Open Source is the land of low-hanging fruit. Thousands of people are eager to do the easy stuff, for free or for fun. Very few are willing to write real documentation. Very few are willing to sit in a room and follow someone else’s documentation step-by-step, again and again, making sure that it’s clear, correct, and complete. Very few are interested in, or good at, ongoing maintenance. Or debugging thorny problems.

For instance, did you know that loopback mounts aren’t reliable? We have an automated process that creates EXT2 file system images, loopback-mounts them, fills them with data, and unmounts them. This happens approximately 24 times per day on each of 20 build machines, five days a week, every week. About twice a month it fails, with the following error: “ioctl: LOOP_SET_FD: Device or resource busy”.

Want to know why? Because mount -o loop is an unsupported method of setting up loop devices. It’s the only one you’ll ever see anyone use in their documentation, books, and shell scripts, but it doesn’t actually work. You’re supposed to do this:

LOOP=`losetup -f`
losetup $LOOP myimage
mount -t ext2 $LOOP /mnt
...
umount /mnt
losetup -d $LOOP

If you’re foolish enough to follow the documentation, eventually you’ll simply run out of free loop devices, no matter how many you have. When that happens, the mount point you tried to use will never work again with a loopback mount; you have to delete the directory and recreate it. Or reboot. Or sacrifice a chicken to the kernel gods.

Why support the mount interface if it isn’t reliable? Why not get rid of it, fix it, or at least document the problems somewhere other than, well, here?

[update: the root of our problem with letting the Linux mount command auto-allocate loopback devices may be that the umount command isn’t reliably freeing them without the -d option; it usually does so, but may be failing under load. I can’t test that right now, with everything covered in bubble-wrap in another state, but it’s worth a shot.]

[update: no, the -d option has nothing to do with it; I knocked together a quick test script, ran it in parallel N-1 times (where N was the total number of available loop devices), and about one run in three, I got the dreaded “ioctl: LOOP_SET_FD: Device or resource busy” error on the mount, even if losetup -a showed plenty of free loop devices.]

17 Egyptian exchange students, all headed to Bozeman, Montana. Six show up as scheduled, the rest are eventually located in: Richmond, Virginia; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Manville, New Jersey; Dundalk, Maryland; O’Hare International Airport; and Des Moines, Iowa.

Money quote:

"None of the students is considered a terrorism risk."

I’d feel a little more confident about this statement if they’d been found in, say, a Las Vegas casino hotel in a room filled with booze and strippers.

So where’s Dundalk, anyway? Why, it’s the home of the Dundalk Marine Terminal, whose major clients include the National Shipping Company of Saudi Arabia. Lots of bulk cargo coming in through there, from all over the world.

Manville just seems to be a wide spot in the road that’s half an hour away from the Newark Liberty International Airport and McGuire Air Force Base, the sort of neighborhood where one death every two-three years changes the murder rate from 0.0 to 9.7.

I’d like to think that there’s an innocent explanation for all this. I just can’t think of one.

The most coherent explanation I’ve found for understanding the difference between the “wa” and “ga” particles in Japanese comes from Jay Rubin’s book Making Sense of Japanese (originally titled “Gone Fishin’”). Namely, use “ga” when you want to emphasize the previous word, and “wa” when you want to emphasize the following words. Which to use depends on what kind of question you’re asking or answering.

For example, he gives the following answers:

1. Ikimashita. "I went."
2. Watashi wa ikimashita. "Me? I went."
3. Watashi ga ikimashita. "I went."

And these matching questions:

1. Dou shimashita ka. "What did you do?" Or: Ikimashita ka. "Did you go?"
2. Soshite, Yamamura-san wa? Dou shimashita ka. "And now you, Mr. Yamamura. What did you do?"
3. Dare ga ikimashita ka. "Who went?"

And that’s why 「私はケーキです。」 does not mean “I am the cake”, no matter what BabelFish says. Except when it does, of course, but for that, you’ll have to read the rest of the book.

Driving home from class tonight, someone hit my car. His lane was closed ahead due to construction, and I guess he decided that he’d rather merge in front of me than behind me. Sadly, he ended up trying to merge through me at about 75-80 MPH, and then decided to run for it. I caught up to him long enough to get his license plate number, and then he was gone (making a fast exit from 101 South to 85 South, then running a red light to turn onto Central Expressway South).

Worse news for him: a witness pulled over and stayed to make a statement to the police, and his memory of the incident was a good match for mine.

The damage? Several deep, long scratches along the driver’s side, from about the side mirror forward to the front of the wheel well, with the finish scraped off of the tire rim in several places. The witness said my car was pushed to the right about a foot and a half by the impact, and he was surprised that I wasn’t hurt. No apparent mechanical damage, and it drove home fine.

I’m fine, and I have excellent insurance, so even if the sorry bastard is uninsured, all will be well. It could have been a lot worse. In the cop’s experience, an impact like that at that speed could have easily caused my front tires to lose traction with the road, sending my car rolling sideways down the highway. He figured that the relative size and mass (my “small” SUV versus his smallish hatchback/whatever) are what saved me.

The (surprisingly small) damage. Aside from the scratches, the door rubs a bit when you open and close it:

[update 10/11/2006: My insurance company ran the license plate number and came up with a 2000 four-door Volkswagen in Sunnyvale, color unknown. Given the location of the accident, that suggests that I got the number right.]