Tag: Modern Problems

Posted on

Data Cleaning

About a year ago, the other half had a computer that malfunctioned in a particularly nasty way.

All of the data from that computer was essentially wiped because the computer itself managed to rewrite data enough times on an SSD that it killed the drive. FYI. Solid State Drives have a finite lifespan that is dictated by the number of times data is written to them.

The other half’s computer managed to kill not one but two SSD drives in 6 months. Wow! that’s a whole lot of rewriting of data. 20 years worth in 3 months.

The upshot of all of this is that I ended up digging data up from backups, and places on the network where they’d stored data. This doesn’t sound like much of an issue until you realize that the other half stores data in a completely random way.

This is not surprising since hardcopy data is stored in exactly the same way in odd little places all around the house.

After I’d consolidated all the data I could recover into a single group of folders on the server, I said, “Okay that’s all I can do, you’re going to have to sort through and delete duplicates and what you don’t need.”

That was over a year ago. Guess what? Nothing has been touched since the important documents got transferred to the new computer.

Here’s a lovely chart showing how much data is needlessly occupying space on the server.

These numbers are astounding. Gigabytes of duplicate data? Really?

Well, since none of this has been touched in over a year. I’m going to clean house!

This is going to take a really long time. I’m not even going to bother to examine files, I’m going to use a utility to merge folders and delete duplications.

Whatever is lost will probably be of no consequence since it wasn’t important enough to look through in the first place.

The fact is, there’s no reason to have 5 folders of duplicate information indexed and stored on the server. It’s not that I’m all that worried about space I’ve got tons available. It’s about the possibility of a drive crash and all of this crap would make recovering from a one or two drive malfunction in the RAID array really tedious.

I’m sure that I’ll hear about something being lost, sometime in the future, but I’ll deal with that when/if the time comes.

At this point, I’m curious to see just how the deletion of all of this crap affects the performance of the server. I’m betting that the reduction in size of the index files alone will get me a speed boost.

I just hope the utility can swallow and digest a mountain of redundant data.

I should know in another 12 hours or so.

Now off to deal with some other poop. This time it’s legitimate poo, from the dog. Strangely I don’t mind cleaning the poop from the back yard nearly as much as I mind cleaning up the poop on the server.

Have a great weekend.

Update:

260GB deleted. Probably 100GB more to sort through.

The cleaning application, got lost in the mess. This happened several times.

I finally got annoyed with the utility. I was seriously considering asking for a refund. I went in manually to do the job. Initially I was thinking, “DAMN a human brain will still be needed to do the most basic things!”

Uh Huh…

I found that the application was having a problem with folders nested within folders that all had the same names.

It looked like the image to the right.

But in each one of the subfolders, there were files. Some of these files were originals and some of them were duplicates.

This diagram shows a recursion only 5 levels deep. Something like 63 directories and what I was looking at was in some cases 7 levels deep. It was not uncommon for there to be 1000’s of files in each directory.

As you can imagine, it got out of hand very quickly. Especially when you consider that many of the file names were duplications.

I’d been annoyed at the utility for not being able to keep it all straight. But I was far less annoyed when I realized that I, (The Human,) had gotten lost more than once in this digital house of mirrors.

As a interesting aside, It took me two different applications to create even this simple representation. One of the applications flat out refused to engage in the illogic and crashed.

The second application was somewhat uncooperative but eventually allowed me to create it, then save it as a PNG.

I’m no longer annoyed at the duplicate finding utility that threw up its hands. Even trying to create the representation was harder than I thought it would be. I could picture in my head what I wanted to show, but translating that kind of irrationality to something clear was… Odd.

In the case of the utility, I very much doubt that the programmer who created it even considered that someone would do something like this. So I still think the utility was worth what I paid for it.

Looking at the recycle bin, it looks as though the utility handled 4 levels of recursion without a complaint.

It’s because of this kind of thing that I personally am a bastard when it comes to training computer users on the importance of reasonable directory structures. I’ve always said that if you need nested directories more than five levels deep, you’re doing something wrong.

Obviously, there are exceptions to this rule. Computers can keep track of much deeper nesting, but non-technical average human beings??? More than five levels down, you’re asking for files to be “lost” and setting yourself up to chew hard disk space with duplicate files that will never be accessed again.

Yet again… There’s usually a good reason for me doing things the way I do.

So that was my Saturday… I hope yours was more fun and less, uhh… interesting.

Posted on

To-Go California, You can order your meal but you’ll never eat.

Consider this a bit of a PSA.

I stumbled across this article in The Wall Street Journal about some new regulation for fast food and dine-in restaurants no longer providing plastic utensils with your order, unless you specifically ask for them.

Gone are the days when you can blow through a Taco Bell drive through and be assured that you’ll be able to eat all your meal.

You’d think, “No worries, I’ll use my hands.”

TRUE you could, but then you’ll find that the napkins you assumed would be in the bag, AREN’T.

Not to worry though, It’s not like you’ll have hot sauce in the bag either because those too you’d have to ask for.

So, Taco Bell, and other fast food options will kinda be a no option without a checklist. I’ll attempt to help by providing my personal Ordering checklist. I’ve got it on my phone, but I’m thinking a post-it note stuck to my car dashboard might be better.

Fast Food ordering:

  1. Food
  2. Drink
  3. Condiments (Ketchup, Hot Sauce, etc.)
  4. Straw
  5. Napkins at least 5 (More depending on type of food)
  6. Necessary utensils (Spork, Knife, etc.)
  7. Pull up to window. Pay.
  8. CHECK that meal is correct and necessary Utensils, Napkins, and condiments are present.
  9. IGNORE HONKING of impatient people waiting behind you!

Yet again The State of California is working to make your life better, through unintended consequences.

Most of the time, If you’re a working stiff, perhaps hourly you’ve maybe got a 30 minute lunch. If the company you work for is exceptionally generous you might even have 45 minutes or a whole hour!

With traffic in most areas around California industrial parks, for a working stiff, it works out like this;

5 minutes to get out of the building, 5 minutes to get out of the parking lot (due to everyone else trying to leave for lunch) 10 minutes to navigate the rest of the lunch hour traffic from all the other companies in the industrial park.

5 minutes at traffic lights and turning into the nearest strip mall or gas station parking lot.

Pull into shortest line for for one of the fast food places, (Wendy’s, Mac Donalds, Taco Bell, Starbucks, Panda Express, etc) wait in line 5 to 10 minutes (By which time you’re already late if you’re on a 30 minute lunch.)

Place your order, 5 minute wait for food, then mad 10 minute dash, (You’re late at this point if you have a 45 minute lunch,) back to the industrial park.

5 minutes waiting at lights, 5 minutes to get into parking lot and find parking space, 5 minutes to get back into building. (You’re on the raggedy edge of being late at this point if you have an hour lunch.)

You get back to your desk, ready to resume work and eat your meal while you’re working…

You open your bag of cold soggy burger & fries or tacos that started out as crunchy but which are now, anything but. Voilà you discover that the whole exercise was pointless because even though you could eat without the condiments, or perhaps even the utensils, you have nothing to wipe your hands with.

Your lunch sits in the bag, not getting any fresher until finally it smells disgusting and ends up in the trash. Thereby contributing to food waste and spewing CO2 into the air, in the dash to get lunch that was also a pointless waste of energy.

So tell me again how wonderful it is that you’ve eliminated basic necessities to protect the planet? Huuuummm?

I swear to God, all of these jackass politicians should be under mandatory orders to live with their proposed laws for six months before they can put them into action.

Not ONE of the political elites in any California city has ever had to punch a clock or be screamed at by an overbearing manager over their lunch break being 2 minutes too long.

All one need do is look at the distribution of restaurants in and around industrial parks in San Diego, Irvine, Victorville, Huntington Beach, The San Fernando Valley, Ventura, or Los Angeles to see that most of the “working class” lives what I’ve described above daily. Or they bring their lunch so that they can at least have a real few minutes of rest during their lunch break.

Now, thanks to the politician brain trust, this new anti utensil or condiment law will ultimately slow the food ordering process down even further.

Not that these Politicians give a shit. After all, if the workers aren’t spending money on fast food, after skipping breakfast to get the kids off to school, it means the workers will have more money that can collected as taxes.

Obviously the low wage earner who collects $12 a week in unspent lunch money doesn’t need it now do they?

Plus, the Arch Ministers of Public Health can chalk up a “Win” because obesity will be less of a problem. Who cares if the workers are starving while they toil away to earn enough to pay their tax burden? That just means they’ll die sooner and a whole new group can be imported from wherever.

Maybe the Politicians are hoping it’ll be mostly white people!

Posted on

I rewatched Elysium the other night…

I’d seen the movie a while ago. It’s from 2013.

Matt Damon, Jodie Foster.

The first time I saw it, It was pure science fiction.

Now, well, it was unsettling to rewatch.

The premise is that the elites of the world live in a marvelous space station. They have the highest technology and medical devices that can instantly fix whatever ailment someone might have. The elites living on the space station live in opulent luxury and ease.

The folks left on Earth, not so much. That’s the set up.

It’s a typical underdog makes good despite the odds, scenario. Complete with an abusive supervisor and shitty worker safety. The movie depicts abusive police and parole officer robots and a criminal element that is generally criminal out of desperation, not any particular desire to commit crime.

The folks left on Earth are treated as if they’re unclean and generally left to squalor and hopelessness.

At the time the movie was made, It was probably a commentary on wealthy countries ignoring the poor.

Eight years later, with our current political situation, the movie has a somewhat different tone.

I’ve noticed that a lot of the older movies in my collection are changing. It’s not that the movie is being re-edited, it’s that my perspective is changing.

What was once escapist fantasy and easy to dismiss as unthinkable is becoming more thinkable, perhaps even possible.

GATTACA from 1997 springs to mind.

That movie was pure fantasy when it came out. Entry to workplaces and venues was restricted based on DNA “purity” testing. But watch it now with vaccine passports needed to enter certain venues or travel, and it’s suddenly not so fantastic.

There’ve been a number of references to Orwell’s 1984 but there are a lot of other science fiction stories & movies that are equally unsettling against the backdrop of events we’re living through.

The weird thing is that a lot of my personal collection deals with these themes. Okay, so perhaps I’m a sick puppy. Whatever!

I suppose it’s proof that whatever we as humans can imagine, we will be able to achieve.

Jules Verne in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea imagined a submarine that was powered by some mysterious power source.

We named the first nuclear submarine after Captain Nemo’s Nautilus. Verne had no knowledge nuclear power but he imagined a dangerous and unending power source.

Later, Forbidden Planet from 1956, explored the price of hubris.

The Krell, learned everything and then turned inward. They destroyed themselves in a single night accidentally, because they forgot about the darkness within their own souls.

Arthur C. Clark explored the human condition in many of his stories, I like his books, but I like his short stories more.

All these stories have at their core, kernels of much older stories. Human stories, from cultures across the planet.

Stories that at one time were teaching stories designed to instill values into whatever culture they existed in.

These stories explored right and wrong, good and evil, and I think we should listen to those ancient voices as much today.

We can and have modernized many of those stories but somehow the lessons contained in them don’t have the same impact in today’s society.

The notion that greed is a trap is explored in the story of King Midas and also in a Native American story of the eagle who became imprisoned by man because the eagle would not let go of a fish.

Two entirely different cultures separated by thousands of miles and years, and yet the message is the same. Greed leads to ruin.

We, Humanity, can no longer afford to allow hubris to blind us.

Our technology is marvelous and magical. A thousand years ago steel was the metal of the gods. Technology at any point in time is always the most advanced.

Human drives though, remain just as primitive as they were before we ventured out of the Olduvai Gorge in Africa.

I think it’s time for us to rediscover the stories our ancestors left us. There are lessons to be had, and enjoyment in learning those lessons.

Go grab a copy of Greek Tragedies. Look to Shakespeare, read Verne, or Clark, or Orwell, or rewatch any of the old movies in your library. Enjoy the entertainment and take a moment to consider the meaning behind the story.

Be warned, your pride might be bruised when you find that you’re different from your ancestors only due to your iPhone.

Posted on

Apple got the message

At least for now.

Over the weekend, I noticed an article reporting Apple had decided to delay their roll out of CSAM scanning.

The report dropped on Friday and it’s unclear if Apple will push forward at a later date but for the moment Apple has put it on hold.

I think it’s a good thing.

It’s also unprecedented.

Apple never backs away from something they’re planning to release. At this point they’re saying that they’ll invite opinions from privacy protection groups and the “feel” is they’re going to be inviting input from developers in the privacy arena.

This doesn’t mean that they’ won’t push forward at a later date, but it does mean that for now, our devices won’t be spying on us, (any more than they do already,) I’m calling it a win.

That being said, I’m going to be watching privacy settings very closely and being a lot more alert to any changes.

I don’t have anything to hide but at the same time I’m not willing to just leave my digital doors and windows open all the time either.

After all, who doesn’t from time to time get a naked photo of a friend? LOL!

Posted on

Readers, Please pardon the Sidebar

It seems that WordPress decided to NOT tell me on opening the widgets panel, (Which I had carefully arranged the way I wanted them,) would result in a royal fuckup. This fuckup encompassed not only of the widget that I wanted to add a single line of HTML to, but destroyed every widget, including those that WordPress supposedly maintained.

Hey, THANKS GUYS!

Now I get to figure out the “New” damned widget system, and honestly my first take is this:

I DON’T LIKE IT!

I was perfectly content to use HTML to do what I wanted to. I was perfectly content to have a simple widget bar down the left side of my blog that presented information the way I wanted it.

I didn’t ask for a visual editor that randomly throws <SPANS> and Font changes, paragraph to paragraph. I didn’t ask for an HTML editor that apparently doesn’t actually like some of your <!– wp:paragraph –> tags in certain arrangements (even though YOU WordPress are adding those elements).

I ESPECIALLY don’t like the fact that you’ve created and released a buggy widget editor that incorrectly converts some HTML and chokes if there is a <Space> between the last character of text in a line and a <Line End>.

This is especially annoying, since there’s no way to see either, within the editor. Attempting to post such a line will result in an error that prevents the user from making any changes. Although, apparently this is an editor problem, not an underlying system problem since the badly converted text is displayed in the first place.

So what should have take 2 seconds has now taken at least a couple of hours to learn how to manipulate, partially reconstruct, and of course debug. (See Above)

Sometimes… making changes is not in the best interest of anybody. Sometimes making changes just creates more work. But I suppose it gave some coder 6 more months of work on a work visa.

Hey, here’s an idea… if you can’t save a chunk of something, how about providing something more descriptive than an error occurred? Better yet, HOW ABOUT HIGHLIGHTING the element you’re having a problem with?

Grrrr.

Just as a point. I’m not even particularly pleased with your new visual blog editor.