the birdhouse in my soul

In the aftermath of the previous post, I ended up monitoring the progress of several huge pvmove and md RAID1 resync operations. Running "vmstat 1" however only shows pvmove block I/O activity, but not md RAID1 resyncing. Fortunately, "dstat -d" shows the reads and writes of both pvmove and md RAID1 resync. ("-d" is automatically included in "dstat -a" by the way.) N.B. This only affects block I/O measurements, you'll still see the impact on interrupts and CPU statistics in vmstat.

When the SATA standard was introduced in PCs, I'd read that the electrical connections of both the data and the power connector had been designed with hotplug in mind. But just as with many hotplug-able technologies, I never actually tried it (hotplug PCI, anyone ?). Until now, that is. Job at hand: replace the software-mirrored SATA drives in high-end Dell workstations with bigger ones. Without losing the data, of course. A perfect opportunity to test how Linux handles SATA hotplug ! Actually, adding the drive was a breeze, Linux automatically detects the drive, and I could sfdisk, and mdadm --add. Next step was hot-removing the old drives: mdadm --fail and mdadm --remove, then physically unplug the drives. I didn't expect it to be so easy, to be honest. Great technology !

The familiar packaging of a product gets replaced (or upgraded), the old packaging is no longer available, and the new packaging is priced almost double the original. Example of the week: 20cl cream at Carrefour. Old brick container, <40c. New brick container with "easy screw-off opening": 69c. The old packaging must have been easier to recycle and cheaper to make, right ?

I had used audacity before, to record a couple of old audio cassettes, cut them into tracks, and burn them on CD (and convert them to .ogg or .mp3). But that was years ago. Last week, I needed audacity again, and had to crawl out of two pitfalls before succeeding. don't export to a filename that you used or imported while editing. When you open a .wav file, use it in editing, and export, audacity needs the original file to produce the end result. So overwriting the original while audacity still needs it, does not work. exporting one stereo audio track will convert it to mono for some reason. You'll be left with sound on the left channel, and silence on the right channel. When you split the stereo audio track into two mono audio tracks, you can export the result as a stereo file (.wav, .mp3, whatever you choose). The rest of the operation was rather simple, and I now have an enhanced digital version of my late grandfather singing, recorded more than 30 years ago !

a website pretending to be a search engine, uses your input to fabricate results. Luckily, the ones that I've seen aren't doing much to hide this practice, and searching for "made_up_hokey_pokey" or another randomly invented string will make it very clear. Example of the day: torrentreactor.to. Every search result under "recently added" is being faked especially for you.

the minimal unit used for pricing is actually larger than what you use 99% of the time. Example of the week: Proximus mobile internet invoiced per 100KB, and my invoice says: 70 connections this month, 7 MB used.

...the new packaging of a product is physically larger, but contains less. Check the price, and I bet you it hasn't gone down. Example of the week: new Duyvis crac a nut packs are 175g, old packs were 200g, but were physically smaller.