While the science behind what’s going on at LHC may be overwhelming for some, the quest to explore the origins of our Universe is something everyone can understand and enjoy. Now we just need to wait three months to run a 0.000000001 second experiment.

The long story:

As I was pulling into the Jamba Juice parking lot this morning, a white Dodge Neon sped diagonally across the parking lot, cut me off and parked in the space I was going to use. I pulled into the next spot instead. I guess he didn’t like that, since he had to wait for me to park before he could open his door. Guess I should have followed my usual advice and “if you see stoopid, go the other way”. While in Jamba, after I ordered, I look out the window and see he’s getting in his car, closely watching my door. I assumed he was trying to avoid hitting my car, but it turns out he was admiring his handy work.

I am often amazed at how mean people can be towards other people. I know I’ll leave this world having given more than I took, which seems to make more sense than the opposite.

To increase the open file limit for all users on pam-based Linux:

$ ulimit -n
1024
$ sudo bash
$ echo '* - nofile 65535' >> /etc/security/limits.conf
$ echo 'session required /lib/security/pam_limits.so' >> /etc/pam.d/login
# logout. login.
$ ulimit -n
65536

The LA Lakers won The NBA Championship last night, to the surprise of none. These NBA Finals were simply boring to watch. This is what the NBA has become. Having been a never-miss-a-game NBA fan throughout the 80’s and 90’s, the NBA has lost me over the past decade. It’s clear the corporate ‘make money’ attitude has overshadowed any interest they may have had in competition. Starting last year, when the Lakers surprised the league and gave The Finals to The Celtics, it was obvious the NBA wanted The Lakers to win this year.

I watched every minute of every playoff game this year. The NBA has built their game to give both sides a chance of winning. Note that this doesn’t mean the better team wins, but rather, sometimes the luckiest team, and others the chosen team. This is great for ratings (ie. money), since close games keep fans of both teams watching longer. As small as a 5% edge given to either team is usually enough to produce a victory. The Lakers get that edge just for being the most popular team. Watch every play if you don’t believe me. P.Jackson (Laker’s coach) has built a team of complaining, whinning, cry babies … and it works. They get the calls, they get to cheat the rules, they get to push the edge of the rules. The benefit is slight, but more importantly, consistent. Its enough to hand them the win.

The Lakers are a great team, and they may win without this league-given edge … but we’ll never know.

Tiffany and her new 2009 Suzuki SX4 Crossover (in Sunlight Copper Metallic)! Time for a road trip!

The Tivo Community has always been large and strong, and the Series3 users are no different. They quickly found that the Series3 units could be setup to use an external eSATA drive, extending overall capacity. This was originally intended by Tivo to be a service/developer setting, since they didn’t want to deal with the support calls, but eventually made everything plug-n-play (but still call it “unsupported”).

After some research, I found the maximum workable size for the external capacity is 1TB. Some more research pointed me towards the Fantom GreenDrive II (1TB USB2+eSATA). I ordered one from buy.com and quickly received my drive.

Installation was plug-n-play; simply power-down the Tivo, connect the drive, power-up Tivo and soon after you’re walked through the setup for the external drive. The result is 179 HD hours, a net gain of 144 HD hours!

At least now I can save some programs for more than a day and not severly affect new recordings.

Comcast setup my new digital tv/internet/phone today. I don’t really need the phone, but adding it to the package lowered my overall price. Of course, once the net access was up, the first thing I did was run DslReport’s Speed Test. Looks like both up (3Mb/s) and down (18Mb/s) speeds are at the upper-end of the range, which is a relief. There’s nothing worse than getting slow net access.

Once I get the rest of my equipment setup, I’ll connect my servers.

A loaded top-of-the-line MacPro tilts the scale at over $14,000! This is a killer system, with dual quad-core processors cranking at 2.93GHz, 32GB RAM, and 4TB of drives connected to the MacPro RAID card. But $14K?!

Apple will tell you this is not a “home computer”, but rather a Professional (ie. business) system. I suppose, if you’re looking to build a 3D rendering farm, this may be a on our shopping list.

As for me, I’ve wiped my PowerMac and getting ready to sell it (if possible?). I posted it at work, but nobody has shown any interest. I’m looking to get about $1000, which I think is a good value, especially considering the installed software. It’s actually a great system, but being PowerPC-based lowers the usefulness for most. Not sure what I’m going to do, I guess I’ll list it, with a bunch of other stuff, over the next couple weeks on craigslist. I couldn’t even think of anyone in my family that I would want to give it to.

Regardless, I think I’ll look at getting a new MacPro in about a month. No, not the $14K version.

I’ve been using Time Machine with my Time Capsule for over a year now, and while the system has some great features, some flaws make it nearly useless.

On the good side, Time Machine is automatic. You basically turn it on and forget it. You get daily backups (incremental) which you can browse, allowing you to restore any file or folder from any previous date. So far, so good.

Now the problems. Backups are done to a disk, with no more level of detail given. There is no way to drill down to individual backups. This causes a problem because it appears the connection between host user data and backup can be easily broken. On three separate occasions now, Time Machine has lost my credentials, and thus my backups. When I reconfigure to continue backing up, Time Machine starts over (assuming I’m a new user), losing my backup history.

Well, the history is not lost, just not accessible. The destination disk continues to show more and more data used, but my backup history is gone. My assumption is Time Machine does some type of session/user connection to the backups, allowing multi-user use of the same destination disk. The critical problem, tho, is that there is no way to chose a specific existing backup to continue using. If your credentials are lost/recreated (which you really don’t control), you get a new session, and thus lose your history.

What is needed is a way to go one level deeper than the disk. The user should be able to chose an existing backup within a disk and authenticated to that backup. I see no way of recovering a lost backup session, only start a new one.

At least I’m able to create manual images of my disk, which I know is reliable, albeit manual.

It’s fairly amazing to me that Time Machine has this flaw, but the history of backup software is horrible, so there is nothing better at the moment.