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WHAT'S UP
<13:41 EEST>
Here's an interesting technical reminder I got last night. If you are
merging adjacent drive partitions, and your /etc/fstab uses UUID to identify
them, the first old partition may still be mounted, with its old size.
I actually ran into this, as I wanted to merge swap + old portage into a bigger portage. The swap was half a gig on a machine with 2 GB RAM, so it would not help anyway. I could just as well use this new, bigger partition as a bigger swap. The crucial, irreversible step was deleting and making partitions with fdisk. Then I rebooted to get the new partition names/numbers active. But after the boot I could not mkfs on the new partition.
It turned out the old swap was still in use. Even after the merge, the new partition contained only half a gig of designated swap area, as made by mkswap. So to fix this I simply had to turn off the swap, and now I have a bigger portage, as intended.
The crux of this experience is that an UUID does not identify a drive partition. It defines a filesystem or a swap area, or whatever you put on a partition. I have been somewhat confused about this before, having changed filesystems on existing partitions, thereby changing the UUID (as found by the blkid command).
This makes me wonder if you could use one big partition with several filesystems. Of course it is what happens if you merge partitions with old filesystems, but generally only the first one is accessible. I guess this is what people have done with tools like LVM for years, which I have stayed out of, for a good reason. I want to be able to mess up a partition with low-level tools in other operating systems, while being sure that the other partitions are not affected.
<10:13 EEST>
Well, another great day of walking half an hour in the rain, in order to sit
down by a computer and get bored. Not that it isn't boring at my minimal
'student apartment'. I guess there is some change in being bored in slightly
different ways. If only there were be some net income involved. These days I have less money than when I started work last autumn.
One of the working conditions on which I have yet to file a complaint is the price of food at the cafeteria. At my current location of Microtower (aptly named as it is the tallest building in town), the nearest cafeteria has vegetarian lunch at € 6.70. The next nearest is 6.50, and being operated by the same business, it has pretty much the same quality and selection. The actual student cafeteria further away had lesser student-quality lunch at 4.20, but that one is closed for the summer.
So in addition to the extra 700 a month for housing and transportation, I'm paying about 140 for food I'd rather not. Actually, the quality is great and there are no limits on quantity, but I could get by with something much simpler.
It's funny and sad how much one can spend simply to be able to work. Even when none of this is going to business suits and an expensive lifestyle, which seems to be required in certain 'prestigious' professions.
Am I working to live, or living to work? The balance is slipping further and further from the sensible. Of course, the work is also suffering from these fucked-up ruins of a life.
<20:37 EEST>
Actually being at work isn't really so bad. It's fairly peaceful and quiet,
and occasionally, by chance, I even get some work done. Not that it's an
easy thing to spot while doing research ;)
It's being on the way to work or back again where I feel like the world champion of stupidity. Here we have the so-called information superhighway, which you may have hear of. But in order to get something information-related done, you head out on the highway. Incidentally, today I was walking from work straight to the city library. In this day and age, you have to loan out rare and precious copies in order to get your hands on some free information.
Adding to the incredible feeling of stupidity, it's no fun being a male with long, curly hair, in a moist, windy weather. I often wonder how women manage it. For starters, they don't have facial hair, which tends to have a stiction coefficient of at least 1.0 to other hair. With a little tail and cross wind, you soon have a persistent web of hair all over your face, as if you were the queen of a spider bukkake. Clearly the smartasses who use 'fair wind' as a metaphor of success, do not have long hair.
<17:52 EEST>
Welcome to this week's episode of "Waste and Stupidity". Taking the train to
my second apartment, walking half an hour in heavy rain to the workplace, in
order to do some work via the Internet. I am a somewhat environmentally minded
person, and this kind of waste makes me ashamed of my employer, the
Department of Environmental Science.
Perhaps I am repeating myself. Maybe some day I will look back at this period of mindless frustration, and laugh.
There is probably something I have missed about the concept of "mobile lifestyle": with improved communications, people can spend much more time on the move. It is not like you could actually telecommute, and use that new and fancy communication infrastructure to save time, energy and the environment. Of course I hope some people do just that, but it does not appear to be happening in the large scale.
I am sure many people share the general pattern of frustrations I have had with several employers. The core of the work that we actually signed up for is great, but there is a shitload of waste and stupidity to bear in addition. Of course every job comes with its dark sides, but I am referring to things like bureaucracy, that have little to do with getting the actual work done.
Note that I am not simply looking after a personal enjoyment; I have an issue against waste and stupidity, whoever is doing it. There are limited resources of time, energy and sanity, and it would be just great if we could choose wisely.
<22:02 EEST>
As anticipated, this week I conjured up the requisite backup space for
Icebox, my 500 GB Firewire drive, and made a fresh JFS filesystem on it. A less than obvious results is that the drive feels cooler, because it can stay idle for
longer. One of the annoying things about Ext4 with spindown is that it often wants to do something in the middle of spindown, prompting a change of plans for the drive mechanics. This probably contributed to
some problems that required a fsck every now and then.
As an aside — not to sound desperate or anything ;—) I am still looking for a job in Jyväskylä. Just today I was reminded of the fact that a majority of job openings are never publicly announced. This may be aggravated by the economic slump, in which jobs still need to get done, but there is less money for recruiting efforts.
<16:57 EEST>
Now this is a little weird. I have a blister at the very tip of my right
index finger, and it announces itself at every keystroke, whether computer
or synth. It came to be last night at a party, while playing bass parts on a
steel-string acoustic guitar. It's been a long while since I had played any
kind of guitar, and I expected some damage to the left hand fingertips, so
this was somewhat surprising. The bass parts seemed appropriate, as we were
improvising with another guitar, a mandolin, and assorted percussion.
On another note, my quest for the perfect filesystem continues. I have a large Firewire drive full of music, movies and other stuff, that was initially ext3 and recently converted to ext4. This is the only drive where I have noticed problems with ext4, and it is likely due to the spindown. Actually the problems ext4 has with spindown in general is quite well covered in other media by now. Fortunately it is not a huge problem, there are no lost or corrupted files ($ touch wood) but it sometimes needs a remount and a fsck to be usable again. So if I find the space for backups, I will probably switch to another filesystem. In addition to ext3, JFS seems fine for external drives in my experience. Here are some more general experiences of mine: