LiveJournal Project - 2009 through 2012

2008 was the last year that I really put much of anything of substance in my LJ, so I don't see any point in going month-by month for these final years, especially since I only had one entry from 2010, nothing in 2011, and one in 2012. So, here are the few things I scribbled down from 2009 to 2012. Maybe when I'm done with all these I will track down what I can find for physical journals and digitize  - then at least everything is in one place.

Date: 2009-01-04 03:56
Subject: 2009 what?
3 days in. Not looking good so far.

Date: 2009-01-15 07:25
Subject: 15 days into 2009
And it just gets worse.
Farewell, Mika. You were always trying to kill us, but we loved you anyway.

Date: 2009-01-18 20:03
Subject: It's a cold day in hell, and pigs are flying.
That's right, kids, the Arizona Cardinals are going to the Super Bowl.

Unbelievable.
GO REDBIRDS!

Date: 2009-04-17 02:01
Subject: (no subject)
10 days ago was the 7-year anniversary of this LJ's creation.
Time flies whether you're having fun or not.

Date: 2009-05-27 16:02
Subject: Politics as usual - or, Sonia Sotomayor and the SCOTUS
Hey kids... Bet you didn't think I'd ever write anything of substance in this journal ever again. Come to think of it, I didn't either. But now that the great messiah has picked a SCOTUS nominee, I would probably be remiss in my duties if I didn't take some time to say what I think about Sonia Sotomayor as nominee.

First off, let me just say that based on what I've seen so far, Obama the President will not be getting my vote when he runs for re-election. It's almost like the guy had a split personality or something. Obama the Candidate: "we're going to do all these good things and stop doing all these bad things." Obama the President: "we're not really going to do too many of these good things, and we're going to keep doing most of these bad things, just under a different name so we can say we stopped doing them." Would McCain have been any better? Doubtful. We'd probably be at war with North Korea by now if McCain had been elected. Although with McCain, at least we knew we were getting an asshat. Obama gave us a modicum of hope that this time things might be different. Fool me once.... Anyway, I digress. Back to the issue at hand -- Sonia Sotomayor as SCOTUS nominee.

I can't say that I'm not troubled more than a little bit by this statement she made during a 2001 speech: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life." OK, so what does that mean? Does it mean that a white male cannot have richness of experience in life equivalent to a "wise Latina woman"? Does it mean that white men are generally going to be shittier (however you choose to define shittier, presumably based on your political leanings) judges than Latina women? Incidentally, how do we rate one judicial conclusion as being "better" than another? There are a hell of a lot of people in this country that think Roe v. Wade was decided the correct way, and a hell of a lot of people that think it was wrong. Did the justices in that case reach a better or worse conclusion than if they had gone the other way? Depends on your politics.

Anyway, if you read later on in the speech, she says this: "Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage." I can accept that; hell, it should be patently obvious to anyone with half a brain.

But to say that inherently one set of experiences (notably, her set of experiences) will cause the would-be jurist to "more often than not reach a better conclusion" than some other jurist is elitist, outright inane, and lacking in the precision of language that one should expect from a potential Supreme Court Justice. Just as there is no universal definition of "wise" (another point made in her speech) we cannot have a universal definition of "better." Better for whom? In what circumstances? By what scale? A decision that I think is "better" you might find to be totally abhorrent, and vice versa. And you know what? It's entirely possible that both are consistent with the letter and the spirit of the Constitution.

What about her objective qualifications? She's got a good educational background, and she's got plenty of judicial experience- more than the current Chief Justice, I believe -so I can't take issue with any of that, although whether or not she is the most qualified candidate available is certainly up for debate. I don't have detailed CV on the rest of the Federal Appellate bench, so I can't compare her resume to someone else's, but I think it's a fair statement to say that there are other judges out there that are just as objectively qualified (in terms of years of experience, exposure to cases with far-reaching implications, etc.) if not more so. The point here is that while I think Obama probably picked a qualified candidate, I don't know if he picked the most qualified candidate.

And that brings me to part 3.... If you don't think that Obama isn't playing politics and pandering to the Hispanic vote with this choice, you're a fool. The GOP is already on the ropes; imagine the fallout they're going to get hit with if they actually try to actively oppose this nominee, and you can bet your ass that Obama knows this. Not that they'll be able to; if the Dems march in party-line lockstep, barring some sort of major catastrophe (like we find out that Sotomayor is an illegal alien - which, of course, she isn't) it's going to be next to impossible for them to do anything about it other than make themselves look whiny and petulant. It doesn't even matter if they have legitimate gripes with Sotomayor's nomination and aren't just playing the party of NO - an en masse "no" vote by the Republican bloc is only going to fuck them up in the next election.

So, bottom line.... I do not like what I have seen so far of her judicial and personal philosophy, and I do not like Obama's obvious pandering to the Hispanic vote - so on those grounds, I would vote NO as a matter of principle. However, whether or not she's the most qualified, I think she is more than adequately qualified, so based solely on that, I'd have to vote YES. Put it all together, and what do you get? I'm on the fence. Hopefully, the American people will get a legitimate confirmation process rather than another donkey-shaped rubber stamp.

Date: 2009-06-03 00:47
Subject: two in one week?
So maybe I am going to start posting in this thing again with a little more regularity after all. Here's this week's commentary, which is less about anything going on out there as it is stuff going on in here.

1: Cory got a job, and then proceeded to summarily be fired. Why? Not because of anything she did wrong, but because the owners basically decided that they didn't want to pay another person. She was offered the job towards the beginning of May. Her first day was last week. She worked Saturday night, and they told her to come back Monday for the dinner shift. Monday, when she went in to work, she got the boot. WTF? The head sushi chef (who is also one of the owners) offered her the job because he knew she had been out of work and they had two people leaving. They had three weeks between when she was given the job and when she started working. If, collectively, they wanted to keep the extra profits that would result from having fewer people on staff, why offer her the job in the first place? Why wait three weeks until she starts working and only then decide to change their minds? If there was some kind of communication breakdown between the owners, why didn't they talk it out during those three weeks?

As if this isn't all bad enough, this is a restaurant that we've been regular customers at since they fucking opened. We have spent thousands of dollars in there, and we have told all our friends to go there as well, and we'd even talked to the head chef about possibly going out to Myst or somewhere (he's into electronic music). And this is what happens? So much for support those that support you, huh? And it's not the fact that they fired her that I have a problem with - it's the way they handled it which seriously pisses me off. From where I sit, it looks to me like she got stabbed in the back. I find the whole thing entirely dishonorable, and I can no longer, in good conscience, continue to give them my hard-earned dollars. Now, of course, losing me as a customer won't make a rat's ass worth of difference in their bottom line, so I'm asking all of you to do the same. If you live in the Phoenix area, and you eat sushi --DO NOT EAT AT SUSHI EYE IN TEMPE. Tell your friends and family not to eat there, either, and tell them to tell their friends, too. Find somewhere else. Anywhere else. Kobe, right across the street, actually has some pretty decent sushi. Teharu, at Priest and Warner, is not as good, but it's cheap. Sakana, over at 51st and Elliot, is pretty good, too. If you absolutely have to, go to the Sushi Eye in Chandler - it has different owners.

2: My own business is doing OK. The biggest problem I have is that I tend to be inconsistent with my work hours. Some days I just don't feel like doing jack shit, and other days I'll put in 12-16 hours. It seems to balance out, though. Out of a theoretical 120 hours that I could have worked last month (4 weeks @ 8 hours per day, minus 1 day for Memorial Day and 4 days we were on vacation) I had 134.5 billable hours. Hooray! However, the majority of those hours are for projects or clients that are billed at less than my standard rate due to a friends-and-family discount or some other special arrangement, so that 134.5 hours translates into considerably less than $16,812.50. Boo!

3: Went to the gym a couple hours ago. That was depressing. I mean, yeah, I figured I'd have gotten weaker since I haven't lifted for shit in like two years, but I didn't think it would be quite as bad as it was. Time to get back to the era of protein shakes and creatine and moving heavy objects around. I've made a lot of progress on my cardio - I finished the couch-to-5k program in early May, and now I can run three miles non-stop - something that I've never been able to do before, but I've neglected the other half of a good exercise program, and now I have a lot of work to do. I used to be able to bench close to 300 pounds, and I could squat 450. Now I don't even know if I could bench 200, and jeebus only knows how bad my squat has become.

Guess that's it. Time to make the donuts.

Date: 2009-07-09 04:29
Subject: vSphere, OpenFiler, and Linux kernel >= 2.6.29
I've been messing around with VMware's vSphere 4.0 (VMware ESX/ESXi 4.0) these past couple of weeks, and I've also been messing around with OpenFiler as a SAN/NAS storage solution, both for the home network as well as some production servers. So far, I've been pleased with both, and of course, the next step would be to put OpenFiler on a VM. The kernel version that comes with the stock OF 2.3 install is a branch of 2.6.26, and the VMware Tools package (which includes, among other things, the new vmxnet3 network driver code) compiles and builds just fine with the standard tarball and vmware-install.pl script (provided that you make sure to delete any rogue VMware modules that may be present in the OF modules directory). Unfortunately, after running an update on the OpenFiler VM, you end up with kernel 2.6.29-X, and now VMware Tools only partially compiles. In particular, the HGFS, VMXNET, and VMXNET3 modules don't build. That sucks.

I Googled around for a solution and couldn't find one, but I did find someone on the OpenFiler forum who was having the same problem. After digging into some of the kernel source, I found that there were some differences in some of the task scheduling structs between 2.6.26 and 2.6.29. Also found some differences in the netdev_struct which led me to wonder why VMware's developers used "dev->priv" in a bunch of places when they could have just used the netdev_priv() macro. Of course, I don't know when the netdev_priv() macro got introduced - but it is in both 2.6.26 and 2.6.29.

Anyway, I've patched the three modules to work with OpenFiler's latest 2.6.29.x kernel, and you can download that patch from here: (no, you can't)

I suspect that this patchset will work with any other Linux distro that uses kernel 2.6.26 or higher, but I haven't tested it with anything except the latest OpenFiler kernel (2.6.29.5-0.2) and the stock VMware 4.0.0 tools build 164009. When VMware comes out with the next version of VMware tools, odds are that this patchset will either need to be updated, or maybe it will just be unnecessary.

Date: 2009-08-29 13:16
Subject: On birthdays, n' shit.
Turned 34 yesterday, so I suppose now is as good a time as any to post something in here. Things are, for the most part, going well, but they could always be better. I've been doing consulting work for a company in North Scottsdale that I think is going to turn into a full-time gig. Right now I'm doing some general system architecture, setting up some database clusters, and working on overall performance optimization, but I'm in a bind with that last one because I don't have enough knowledge of their code. It's obvious that some of their schemas are poorly designed and they're doing some stupid shit, query-wise, but I can't go in and change stuff myself out of fear of breaking some unknown script somewhere. The developers are competent, but they could all use a 1-hour crash course in "Top 10 things NOT to do with MySQL." Given that their primary database is about 350M rows and ~150GB on disk, they really need to pay attention to things which don't matter so much when your database is only 100M rows and fits entirely into RAM. On the plus side, working this gig has gotten me interested in technology again. I'm so ridiculously burned out on development it's not even funny. I can't get excited about "take this data, slap it on a webpage, and then take that data and put it back in the database" when my other option is to build a 3-box cluster for high availability and then see how fast I can make it run.

Speaking of running... I haven't been running in about a week and a half, and that really sucks. I can't seem to get my schedule adjusted to where I'm going to bed at the right time so I can get up at 4am and get out there before it gets too hot. I had intentionally taken a few days off because I felt like I was getting overtrained, but my rest days are over and I really need to get back at it. I think I actually get depressed if I take too many days off. Also, I have this bat-shit crazy goal of running the PF Chang's half-marathon in January, and if I'm really going to do it, I have to add another 8 miles to my endurance between now and then. Can't do that if I'm sitting on my ass. If it could just cool off enough so that I could go run at 6am or go run at night, I would be a happy person. That doesn't happen for at least another month, though. =(

Going to Santa Clara next month for a few days. There's a training class on the 14th that I'm registered for, so Cory and I are going to head up on Saturday (12 September) and come home on Tuesday (15 September), so if any of you Northern California folks want to meet up for dinner or drinks or general mayhem, let me know. ioerror, artkiver, and/or malice_bd - this means you.

Date: 2009-11-01 03:40
Subject: strange vmware network issues
Update... SOLVED.

The default set of IPS rules configured in the router interpreted my testing as a DoS attack and reset the connection. Grumble. Just one more reason why it's cool that my job is paying for me to go take two weeks of CCNA training over the next couple months.

I've been trying to debug a weird message in some Apache logs lately... "software caused connection abort at INSERT_NAME_OF_MOD_PERL_SCRIPT here at line XXX" - and in my travels, I've run into something really, really odd. I have a static HTML file - we'll call it "test.html" - that's identical on two servers. Server A is a low-end server machine on a decent network with no firewall or NAT in front of it. Server B is a VMware guest on a 10.0.0.0/24 network that IS behind a NATed and behind a firewall (Cisco 1812). Server B's network is decent, too. The host hardware for server B is much better than that of server A.

I'm running "ab" (ApacheBench) against both boxes, with the following command string:
ab -n 500 -c 100 http://www.my.server.name.example.com/test.html

500 requests, 100 concurrent, retrieve me a simple HTML file.

Server A has no problem with this, as you can see below:
Concurrency Level: 100
Time taken for tests: 2.392 seconds
Complete requests: 500
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 977832 bytes
HTML transferred: 833974 bytes
Requests per second: 209.01 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 478.450 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 4.785 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 399.17 [Kbytes/sec] received

Server B, on the other hand, says "apr_socket_recv: Connection reset by peer (104)" and doesn't even complete a single request. WTF? So, I start poking around. First, I check netstat. There are no connections at all from my test box. Then, I check the Cisco's NAT table. There are a shit-ton of connections. There is no NAT rate limiting configured on the router. Watching the router's CPU while these 100 connections come in shows no spike in load. The router has over 50% free RAM. I've tried this test from different boxes on different networks so as to try to rule out any potential issues with my home ISP. Same result.

So, what's left? It has to be something with VMware, right? But let's think about what that might mean - VMware ESX/ESXi 4.0, their flagship product, cannot handle 100 simultaneous connections to a single VM? That can't possibly be true - if it were, ESX would be useless for anything more than hobby applications.

The VM in question is a 32-bit VM (CentOS 5.4), using the VMXNET virtual network adapter. Going to try a 64-bit VM running VMXNET3. If that still doesn't work, I'm going to need to take a machine down to the data center that's not virtualized and see what happens there. If I can't figure out how to get ESX to accept and route more than 100 simultaneous HTTP connections, that's going to really put the brakes on some virtualization stuff we're planning to roll out at work.

Update... 64-bit VM with E1000 == no good. VMXNET3 == no good.

Update 2... can't blame VMware. Tried a similar test hitting a VMware guest on a host on another network. No problems:

Concurrency Level: 100
Time taken for tests: 2.607053 seconds
Complete requests: 500
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 143500 bytes
HTML transferred: 9500 bytes
Requests per second: 191.79 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 521.411 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 5.214 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 53.70 [Kbytes/sec] received

What's left? A: Server B's host hardware. B: the router. C: the switch. I'm pretty sure it's not A.

I just found on Netgear's website that there's a firmware upgrade for the
GS724TR, so I've applied it, but still no joy.

Date: 2010-04-12 08:14
Subject: Even GWB Didn't Go This Far
Due Process? 5th Amendment? Bueller? Anyone?

Whether you love Obama or you hate him, this is worth a read.

Date: 2012-07-14 07:02
Subject: IT'S ALIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE!!!
Hi Livejournal!

It's amazing the things that happen when you disappear from LJ for 2 years and delete your FB account for 8 months. malice_bd - congratulations... not that you'd even remember me, since we only met once, several years ago - but still, I wish you all the happiness in the world.

As for me... I still bitch about all the same shit in this world that I've always bitched about, even though, overall, life isn't too bad. Planning a move to the SF area before year's end. Going to a psytrance festival in Hungary next month. DEFCON 20 this month. Job is good. Cats are alive and well. Cory and I still like each other. Hair is purple. Still the same height, still weigh about 100kg. I've taken up running and don't lift that much anymore. That's about it.

Maybe I'll start posting here again. Or maybe I'll see you all in another two years. Who knows?

Well, as you can see, since this is the last entry, I never did start posting to my LJ again. Didn't write much of anything for about 4 years, in fact, until this blog materialized.