I am running Ubuntu 08.10 (yeah, i know, waiting for 09-10) and just got a Rosewill RSV-S8 to replace my Drobo, and want to run ZFS on the disks in it, because ZFS is badass. I thought I had to run OpenSolaris or at least Nexenta (ubuntu on top of the solaris kernel, and yes, it’s real) but it turns out there’s a project called zfs-fuse which lets you run ZFS on Linux. FUSE is the “Filesystem in Userspace” project, which lets you run any filesystem as a regular system user. Fuse is necessary because ZFS licensing prohibits the GPL’d linux kernel from using its code, and normal linux filesystems need to be made a part of the kernel.

Now that the background is out of the way, I thought I’d start to pastedump the warnings I run into along the way, so that the greater googlenet may be able to search for them. I’m assuming you’ve already downloaded the zfs-fuse code and built / installed it, because that’s bog standard and well documented.

NOTE: all the following is incorrect. I assumed you would make a ‘zfs’ user and run as that, but it seems it really wants to run as root, as I keep running into rooty things. Seeing as it’s a filesystem, I don’t have a problem. So, you need to do some of the following, but run as root.

First, the zfs and zpool commands will just tell you to run the zfs-fuse daemon. Well, trying to do that gives this warning:
"WARNING: Error binding UNIX socket to /var/run/zfs/zfs_socket: No such file or directory." This means you need to

1. sudo mkdir /var/run/zfs
2. sudo chown :fuse /var/run/zfs
3. sudo g+rwx /var/run/zfs

And add yourself to the fuse group if you haven’t already! ;)

You’ll need to do this for /etc/zfs as well.

This should get you set to start using the zfs commands.

I’ll be editing this post as I get things running… especially reading the ZFS on Linux starter post.

I think by now it’s common knowledge that bike seats can cause Erectile Dysfunction (henceforth “ED”) in men, or at least the pop-science mythology is prevalent enough. That “fact” was one of the reasons I was apprehensive about biking in the first place when I started to work in SF two years ago. My esteemed and highly bike-knowledgeable coworker Mark Palange laid my fears to rest by explaining that a seat won’t hurt you so long as you’re sitting on your ischial tuberosities and not your perineum (henceforth “sitbones” and “taint”). Otherwise you’re gonna be crushing nerves and blood vessels, doing nerve damage and greatly reducing bloodflow to your genitals (henceforth “junk”). So I got a bike and looked for seats…

And I went with the cheapest seat I found that said “ergonomic” and had a hole down the middle. Cut to two years later!

Baby’s First New Saddle

I just started noticing perhaps a little too much pressure from my “Planet Bike” ARS saddle, (with a somewhat gelly top, perhaps softer with age). There’s a whole cottage industry of “ergonomic” bike saddles, and I’ve generally heard that a harder seat makes it more likely that you will be sitting on bone, and less likely that materials will bunch up and press on your junk. This means gel seats are bad for manbits, and I was starting to suspect that despite favorable saddle geometry, the gel was pressing in the wrong spots.

So I bought a “Terry” brand “Liberator Y” seat. It’s pretty great on the first blush; harder seat, wide empty channel running down the middle, wide seat back, and it feels a lot better for a bit. I’m still adjusting to it, and I’m curious if I made the right choice. Many online say this saddle is the best they had, but I decided to consider the saddle a stopgap and to research a bit more.

Paging Doctor Science

Turns out that groove in ergonomic seats may make things worse:

Bike saddles that feature a groove down the middle or holes in the center to alleviate pressure can actually make the problem worse by increasing pressure on either side of the groove.

Well fuck you too, facts and doctors. What next?

There is a reasonably decent study of bike cops showing that noseless is the way to go with bike seats, as far as ED is concerned. There’s even a CDC report to go along with it, and a Yale study for the ladies indicating that racing impacts vaginal health.

But what is the methodology? Turns out a bike-seat makin’ doctor Roger Minkow, MD met up with penis-oxygen-level-testing sexual researcher dr. Frank Sommer, MD and they started researching. But some disagreed (well, basically said it’s not the final word).

And that’s all the hard research I can find about specific methodologies for testing bike seats.

So the course seems to be:

1. finding the perfect variant of the ergonomic seat that gives the taint room to breathe without having the edges dig in
2. finding yet another variant of bike seat beyond the traditional “ergonomic = hole down the middle” variety

I’m a fan of challenging the status quo, so I dug right into path #2.

Crazy Seats

So what kind of crazy seats have we got? Noseless saddles, recumbents, and weirder shit.

Veteran cyclist Ed Pavelka evidently tried a noseless and had a terrible crash, and others online complain of this as well: when riding one- or no-handed, steering control is done with thighs pressing on the saddle nose. I do often need to signal, and often need to hold, carry, or grab something. But the Bike cops did it! The bike police had a long adjustment period, and were also riding mountain bikes which provide greater leverage with their longer handlebars. I’m assuming bike police have their hands full far more often than I do what with the walkie talkies and 9ers and roger thats, so perhaps there’s more to it.

There are a lot of noseless saddles. Thanks to an article or two and some searches, I’ve found these manufacturers:

• MoonSaddle
• Spiderflex
• Spongy Wonder
• Hobson Associates
• ByCycle Inc
• Dimar International
• ERGO, LLC
• ISM

So which one is the one to go with? Let’s google for reviews…. oh wait! There’s almost no thorough review of noseless saddles, and there aren’t any significant comparative reviews. Shit. Well, here are some reviews:

• great article about trying the spiderflex seat (some say cruisers only unless you can’t otherwise ride)
• Ergo’s “The Seat” sucks, EasySeat II not as good as original
• moonsaddle sucks, feels like cruiser only

Recumbents have full on chairs in them. There is an attempt to bring this tech to upright “diamond frame” bikes with the Real Seat. Yeah, it’s basically that folding chair nylon stretched over a weird tube frame, suspended over a seat post. But it has the same sitting properties as a recumbent it sounds like, except you’re not so reclined. Which sounds like you’ll fall forward, as the Q&A seems to hint. There’s also the possibility of getting an actual recumbent, but they’re a lot less visible on the road. Admittedly, they do seem pretty cool to me.

Oh, there’s some fun stuff. Like the manta.

More in the Ergonomic vein

There are also some “extreme ergonomic nose” saddle manufacturers (notably ISM and Selle). They do look to address the concerns of more road-minded bicyclists. There’s also the sitbone classic, Brooks, who have the B17 Imperial saddle which features a perineal hole. Allegedly the best leather saddle is the Selle An-Atomica due to the precise (and patented) hole cut in it. Check out their buttcam.

Great articles I ran into

There was a lot of researching and obsessing on this article. Here are some of the better and more informative articles I found that I didn’t already link to above:

• grumpy but great article on best and worst saddles, and myths about ED
• grumpy reference
• freaky weirdo site but has good pics
• great LA Times overview
• bike mag editor gets the minkow / sommer test
• thudbuster shock absorber
• Chainless bikes with internally geared hubs (neat, not ergo related)
• Google Books “Bike for Life: How to Ride to 100″ section on Bicycle Sex
• blurb about bike saddles from a couple who toured the world on bike on the very cheap
• ISM saddles get higest rating from Dr. Sommer

Conclusion

Sounds like noseless/hornless bike seats are worth a try, and otherwise that people have been swearing by hard leather seats for touring for a long time, and the Selle An-Atomica cut (whether on their sub-contracted leather saddle or a Brooks) appears to make sense for nose-having saddles, but the Specialized Body Geometry are designed by the master of the field, Dr. Minkow. Regardless, the trauma from bumps can be mitigated with a shock absorbing seatpost, and the Thudbuster seems to be the highest rated.

All of this could be wrong; the science is limited, and most products aren’t lab tested with open results anyway. Time will tell, but the exercise from biking puts you at lower risk for ED than being sedentary!

This isn’t the best written blog post I’ve ever made, but I hope it’s got enough links to valuable and well written information, and that I give enough context for you to make more progress and hopefully make a saddle decision. Let me know what you try and how it works for you!

Ever want to take a massive tree of files and rename them all lowercase? (Ever work between case-sensitive and case-insensitive systems? :\) Here’s my first attempt:


find . -type f -and -not -type d -print0 | xargs -0 -n 1 echo | while read line; do target=$(echo $line | tr A-Z a-z); echo mv \"$line\" \"$target\"; done | less


which looks fine, until you realize that the path is made lowercase too, despite only looking at files. So I googled, and found a StackOverflow page: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/152514/how-to-rename-all-folders-and-files-to-lowercase-on-linux with this bit:


for SRC in `find my_root_dir -depth`
do
DST=`dirname "${SRC}"`/`basename "${SRC}" | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`
if [ "${SRC}" != "${DST}" ]
then
[ ! -e "${DST}" ] && mv -T "${SRC}" "${DST}" || echo "${SRC} was not renamed"
fi
done


which isn’t careful about spaces in the filename. But otherwise, it’s on to something with dirname and basename. Revisit mine!


find . -type f -and -not -type d -print0 | xargs -0 -n 1 echo | while read line; do target=$(basename "$line" | tr A-Z a-z); target=$(dirname "$line")/$target; mv "$line" "$target"; done


Another nerd post! Turns out I’m using my blog as more of a script repository. Oh well!

If you’ve ever imported an svn repository into hg, then you may have discovered you need to keep the *exact* repo around… unless you know some magic! (thanks bos!)

The secret comes in knowing that hg convert uses a hidden, unversioned file to do its thang, .hg/shamap. The bigger secret is revealed when you run hg tip --debug – the same information is versioned, you just need to squeeze that metadata format back into a file. Because this involves string manipulation, and because I’m old school like that, I used perl to do this.

poppy@host:~/project$ hg log –debug | perl -e ‘my (@x,$l); while(){if(/extra: convert_revision=(.*)/){$l=$1.” $l”;push(@x,$l);}if(/changeset: \d+:(.*)/){$l=$1} }; print join(“\n”,reverse(@x)).”\n”;’ > .hg/new-shamap

poppy@host:~/project$ mv .hg/shamap .hg/old-shamap # if you have one…

poppy@host:~/project$ mv .hg/new-shamap .hg/shamap

BAM! Now you can clone and re-sync your code anywhere, and push it around however you like. It may be dirty but it’s expedient and works for me! Let me know if it works for you.

I’m not sure it’s a he. But I made a thing! With a light! I am so excited, I wanted to share my simple code. The tweet:

I made the first “Getting Started with Arduino” example into the “breathing LED” on sleeping apple laptops. I like this little thing.

and the code:

// Example 01 : Blinking LED
//
// Copy and paste this example into an empty Arduino sketch

#define LED 13   // LED connected to
                 // digital pin 13
int i = 1;

void setup()
{
  pinMode(LED, OUTPUT);    // sets the digital
                           // pin as output
}

void loop()
{
  double i_f = i;
  double max = 12.0;
  double val = (cos(i_f/30.0)*.999 + 1.0) * (max/2);
  digitalWrite(LED, HIGH);   // turns the LED on
  delay(val);               // waits for a second
  digitalWrite(LED, LOW);    // turns the LED off
  delay(max - val);               // waits for a second
  i++;
}

It’s nothing fancy, especially if you code all day (at which point this is probably less than you have to type to even setup coding for the day), but the important thing to note is that this shit turns on a LIGHT.

On my DESK.

…

OK, stop making fun of me.

I’m not gonna lie; this is pretty dry and mostly here for google fodder. Still, this might tickle your nerd-bone.

Not-so-recently I bought a Drobo for storage. I was tired of fake on-motherboard RAID, and I didn’t want to spring for a 3ware RAID card and the associated learning curve. I heard about the Drobo from a friend, and got it and the DroboShare. After having a poor experience with the DroboShare (I wrote a review on NewEgg but the short version: it does less than a linux server) I decided I’d get rid of my existing file server and use my desktop and the Drobo as the server.

Eventually. I was about to move, had projects at work that needed love, and had some planned / unplanned time off. I did the rsync when I had the DroboShare, and didn’t get to play again on my linux box until recently.

I re-ran the rsync to get it back up-to-date. I noticed the rsync had file errors – all of the filenames with non-ascii characters (a not-insignificant amount of my music) always showed up in the transfer list. That was bad news, but I blamed the DroboShare. Who knows how it formatted the Drobo disk pack? Charset could be some obscure ext3 option, and I didn’t care to invest the time to find out. I reformatted using droboview in the linux drobo-utils package. For good measure, I set the LUN size to 4 (meaning the max size would be 4 TB, instead of segmenting into many virtual 2TB disks).

I mounted with errors=remount-ro and ran an rsync. After a couple dozen GB, I started to see “transfer failed – target is read only” and had a looksee in dmesg. Here’s what I got:


[131174.845284] kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
[131174.817576] EXT3 FS on sdb1, internal journal
[131174.817778] EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
[136948.130539] journal_bmap: journal block not found at offset 12 on sdb1
[136948.130545] Aborting journal on device sdb1.
[136948.140801] EXT3-fs error (device sdb1) in ext3_new_blocks: Journal has aborted
[136948.140895] Remounting filesystem read-only
[136948.143414] __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_committed_data
[136948.143438] __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_committed_data
[136948.143454] __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_committed_data
[136952.123413] __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_committed_data
[136952.123672] __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_committed_data
[136952.123755] __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_committed_data
[136952.123831] __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_committed_data
[136952.123906] __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_committed_data
[136952.123975] __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_committed_data
[136952.123992] __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_committed_data
[136952.124006] __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_committed_data
[136952.124016] __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_committed_data
[136952.124030] __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_committed_data
[136952.124043] __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_committed_data
[136952.124191] __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_committed_data
[136952.124208] __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_committed_data
[136952.124280] __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_committed_data
[136952.124335] __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_committed_data
[136952.124345] __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_frozen_data
[136952.124350] __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_frozen_data
[136952.124354] __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_frozen_data

and this on re-mount:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so


Aww, dammit. What did droboview do wrong? So i googled for EXT3-fs error dmesg drobo and got an authoritative sounding page with command-line instructions. I can get down with the hands-on version so I can scope out where breaks happen. But lo and behold, it worked just fine. The rsync ran fine, and it unmounted and re-mounted correctly. We’ll see how it goes in the long run, but it’s lookin good for now! If you hear nothing, then I heartily endorse this.

There’s something going on with AIM as described here and here, and as I saw firsthand:

(13:47:52) UnstoppableCoho: Happy Birfday!
(13:49:47) poppylinden: thanks!
(13:49:50) poppylinden: who is this?
(13:51:05) UnstoppableCoho: hello
(13:51:55) poppylinden: hi!
(13:52:15) UnstoppableCoho: who is this?
(13:52:27) poppylinden: you should know, you messaged me.
(13:52:39) poppylinden: is this you? http://forever-alone.livejournal.com/1104468.html
(13:53:12) UnstoppableCoho: definitely not
(13:53:30) poppylinden: what screen name does AIM say I have?
(13:53:45) UnstoppableCoho: pulsingcoho
(13:53:50) UnstoppableCoho: you mesaged me
(13:53:55) poppylinden: interesting, that is not my sn
(13:53:56) UnstoppableCoho: maybe its an AIM fluke
(13:54:09) poppylinden: sounds like someone’s got an exploit out there
(13:54:19) poppylinden: that sends the initial message
(13:54:37) poppylinden: are you in the USA?
(13:54:38) UnstoppableCoho: well, have a great day.
(13:55:02) poppylinden: i’m going to try to figure this out and report it to AIM
(13:55:36) poppylinden: but it’d help to know how you’re on the internet – at home? at work? at a cafe?
(13:56:48) poppylinden: you there?

Anyone familiar with the AIM protocol have any idea what the bug / exploit is that sent the initial message?

To Mikron 64 – Was Ich Weiß:

And check the robolicious lyrics:

Was ich weiß von dieser Welt
ist daß sie sich dreht
bis der Strom ausfällt

Ich weiß nicht wirklich viel von dieser Welt
und wie man sich mit ihr unterhält
Doch wenn du hier bist kann ich Ich selbst sein
Wenn du bei mir bist ist alles ganz leicht

Durch dich weiß ich wo ich hingehöre
Weil du mein Inneres nach Außen kehrst
Wenn du bei mir bist kann ich Ich selbst sein
Wenn du bei mir bist ist alles gnaz leicht

Was ich weiß von dieser Welt
ist dass sie sich dreht
bis der Strom ausfällt
Und daß du mich nie allein läßt
wenn sie still steht
Du wirst immer da sein

Wenn du bei mir bist ist alles ganz leicht (x4)

Was ich weiß von dieser Welt
ist daß sie sich dreht
bis der Strom ausfällt
Und daß du mich nie allein läßt
wenn sie still steht
Du wirst immer da sein

Was ich weiß vondieser Welt
ist daß sie sich dreht
bis der Strom ausfällt
Und daß du mich nie allein läßt
wenn sie still steht
Du wirst immer da sein

Du wirst immer da sein (x4)

And if, like me, you don’t speak German, here’s the robotic translation:

What I know from this world
is that it turns
until the electricity fails

I really do not know much about this world
and how to deal with it maintains
But if you’re here, I can be I myself
If you’re with me, everything is easy

Through you I know where I belong
Because you are my foreign affairs after kehrst
If you’re with me I can be I myself
If you’re with me, everything is easy gnaz

What I know from this world
is that it turns
until the electricity fails
And that you never alone makes me
if it stands still
You’ll always be there

If you’re with me, everything is easy (x4)

What I know from this world
is that it turns
until the electricity fails
And that you never alone makes me
if it stands still
You’ll always be there

What I know vondieser World
is that it turns
until the electricity fails
And that you never alone makes me
if it stands still
You’ll always be there

You’ll always be there (x4)

Awesome. (Love to qdot for the pointer)

I’m in the process of deleting my own install of wordpress and moving to wordpress.com. Unfortunately I have the markdown plugin installed in my personal install, and all my posts are in that syntax, so they all look broken right now. All the info is still there, but it’s not gonna be all hyper or linked. Sorry fans!

There is a great SciAm [article on the cognitive science of what makes experts](http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-expert-mind). Some gems:

Dutch psychologist Adriaan de Groot, himself a chess master, confirmed this notion in 1938, when he took advantage of the staging of a great international tournament in Holland to compare average and strong players with the world’s leading grandmasters. One way he did so was to ask the players to describe their thoughts as they examined a position taken from a tournament game. He found that although experts–the class just below master–did analyze considerably more possibilities than the very weak players, there was little further increase in analysis as playing strength rose to the master and grandmaster levels. The better players did not examine more possibilities, only better ones

Chess memory was thus shown to be even more specific than it had seemed, being tuned not merely to the game itself but to typical chess positions. These experiments corroborated earlier studies that had demonstrated convincingly that ability in one area tends not to transfer to another. American psychologist Edward Thorndike first noted this lack of transference over a century ago, when he showed that the study of Latin, for instance, did not improve command of English and that geometric proofs do not teach the use of logic in daily life.

Even so, there were difficulties with chunking theory. It could not fully explain some aspects of memory, such as the ability of experts to perform their feats while being distracted (a favorite tactic in the study of memory). K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University and Charness argued that there must be some other mechanism that enables experts to employ long-term memory as if it, too, were a scratch pad. Says Ericsson: “The mere demonstration that highly skilled players can play at almost their normal strength under blindfold conditions is almost impossible for chunking theory to explain because you have to know the position, then you have to explore it in your memory.”

Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but “effortful study,” which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one’s competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time. It is interesting to note that time spent playing chess, even in tournaments, appears to contribute less than such study to a player’s progress; the main training value of such games is to point up weaknesses for future study.

Although nobody has yet been able to predict who will become a great expert in any field, a notable experiment has shown the possibility of deliberately creating one. L�szl� Polg�r, an educator in Hungary, homeschooled his three daughters in chess, assigning as much as six hours of work a day, producing one international master and two grandmasters–the strongest chess-playing siblings in history. The youngest Polg�r, 30-year-old Judit, is now ranked 14th in the world.