Josh's Not-a-Blog

When I finally rolled into Laurium last night, with the rental car's computer showing a trip total of 3100 miles, I was happy to see that there were not four feet of snow in my driveway and yard. There were probably six inches on the ground, but it was too late to wake up my neighbors by firing up the plow truck, and besides, its battery was flat.

So, this morning I drove to the airport to drop off the car rental contract I had forgotten to bring with me when I returned the car last night (oops), charged, gassed, and aired-up the plow truck, and made short work of the snow in my yard. Later, while flipping through images captured by my webcam, I found that some of the exciting snow plowing action had been recorded. So, for the benefit of those who don't have snow right now (Hi, family!) I put up the pictures.

Michigan Tech will soon have a shiny new campus CMS (Content Management System). Ever since the buzz started (I imagine a visiting vendor gave a particularly flashy dog&pony), web development and maintenance has ground to a halt. Nobody wants to invest time or effort in maintaining or creating web content, because "we'll just have to do it again when the CMS goes live".

This doesn't make any sense.

CMS is a tool, not a solution. CMS is not a silver bullet. CMS will not write your content, it won't design your site hierarchy, it won't create a pleasing layout. These things are necessary regardless of the tools used; I can write content on a notepad, I can draw a page layout on a whiteboard, I can design a site hierarchy using sticky notes. These are the difficult things. The things a CMS or any other tool can't do for you. The things so often done poorly.

This misunderstanding of the capabilities of information technology is very common, and I see it in my job every day. It's not something that bothers me much any longer. But the bigger annoyance here is the "let's wait" attitude. It's analogous to holding off on writing your novel in anticipation of the purchase of a new printing press.

My hope is that someday, we will all (university administration included) have the perspective to see information technology for what it really is, a tool. Only then will we really have the power to use it effectively.

This might be a little ambitious as a summer motorcycle trip (especially since 6000 miles is about two rear tire's worth, given the speed and terrain). One of the most interesting parts of that route is the Trans-Labrador Highway. Though it is the primary road across Labrador, it's still largely gravel and very remote.

My curiosity was piqued when Google Maps seemed resistant to plotting a route from Lodge Bay, NL to Québec, QC. Zooming in turned up this solitary road, and my next stop was ADVrider to see if anyone had ridden it and posted pictures. This guy had, and now I really want to go. Or at least I think I do. It's a long way away, especially on a dual-sport bike.

One interesting thing I found is that the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador has purchased satellite phones for free emergency use by travelers of the TLH. You can pick up a phone from any of several places along the highway, leave your credit card information, and drop it off again as you leave the highway. So there's really no reason to worry, Mom...

In planning a route for the trip to Georgia in a few days, I remembered about the Great Smoky Mountains Expressway, which is Highway 441 from Gatlinburg, TN to Cherokee, NC.
I drove this route on my way home from my sister's college graduation in Toccoa, GA, in 2004. It was the middle of the night, in my not-so-trusty Jeep Cherokee, with my new kitten, Scout, in tow.

I stopped for a picture of one of the road signs that night. This was just before a loop that crossed over itself. Here it is on Google Maps, though Google's a little confused on the correct way to traverse the spiral.

Driving 441 in my Jeep was fun, but not nearly as fun as it would be on a motorcycle (and in daylight). So it goes on my lists of roads I must ride before I die. James informs me of two others: Pigtail Bridge and Tunnel and Needles Highway. Add to that the Blue Ridge Parkway, suggested by Tori.

In this post, I had a heck of a time with the boolean AND operator (&&) because Blogger insisted on helpfully substituting & for each ampersand every time I edited the post in the Blogger composer. This happens even inside code and pre blocks, for some reason.

To make matters worse, on every edit (or even change between HTML and WYSIWIG modes), Blogger would replace its own &s with &, and so on, and so on. Yech.

It made me want to kick Blogger and take all its cookies. Okay, I'm sorry I said that, Blogger. I was mad. I didn't mean it.

Tonight I installed a new system disk in the main feep.org server, in response to these ominous warnings:

(da0:sym0:0:0:0): WRITE(10). CDB: 2a 0 0 30 1 1f 0 0 20 0
(da0:sym0:0:0:0): CAM Status: SCSI Status Error
(da0:sym0:0:0:0): SCSI Status: Check Condition
(da0:sym0:0:0:0): Deferred Error: HARDWARE FAILURE asc:19,0
(da0:sym0:0:0:0): Defect list error field replaceable unit: 2
(da0:sym0:0:0:0): Retrying Command (per Sense Data)

The spare disk was already in the server (it was being used for staging backups, but I moved that elsewhere for now), and was identical to the failing one. So all I really needed to do was duplicate the boot block, partition table, disk label, and filesystems. I was able to do most of this while the system was running normally, which kept downtime to a minimum. In the examples, da0 is the failing disk, and da1 is the new target disk.

First, initialize the disk by creating a DOS partition table (mine already had one):

fdisk -I /dev/da1

Install the boot block:

fdisk -b /boot/mbr

Duplicate the disklabel:

disklabel da0s1 | disklabel -R da1s1 -

Create file systems:

newfs /dev/da1s1a
newfs -U /dev/da1s1e
newfs -U /dev/da1s1f
newfs -U /dev/da1s1d

Copy data:

mount /dev/da1s1a /mnt
cd / && tar -cf - --one-file-system --exclude /mnt . \
   | ( cd /mnt && tar -xpf )
umount /mnt
mount /dev/da1s1e /mnt
cd /tmp && tar -cf - . | ( cd /mnt && tar -xpf )
umount /mnt
mount /dev/da1s1f /mnt
cd /usr && tar -cf - . | ( cd /mnt && tar -xpf )
umount /mnt
mount /dev/da1s1d /mnt
cd /var && tar -cf - . | ( cd /mnt && tar -xpf )
umount /mnt

Now I intended to boot into single-user mode to finish with a final rsync on a very quiet system, but I couldn't boot from da0 any longer; it seemed to be getting worse. So I booted from FreeBSD 5.5 Disc 1 and used the Live CD feature to finish up with a few rsyncs (using the rsync binary from da1, since the Live CD doesn't include it).

mkdir /da0 /da1
cd /da0 && mkdir root tmp usr var
cd /da1 && mkdir root tmp usr var
mount /dev/da0s1a /da0/root
mount /dev/da1s1a /da1/root
mount /dev/da0s1e /da0/tmp
mount /dev/da1s1e /da1/tmp
mount /dev/da0s1f /da0/usr
mount /dev/da1s1f /da1/usr
mount /dev/da0s1d /da0/var
mount /dev/da1s1d /da1/var
/da1/usr/local/rsync -avx /da0/root/ /da1/root
/da1/usr/local/rsync -avx /da0/tmp/ /da1/tmp
/da1/usr/local/rsync -avx /da0/usr/ /da1/usr
/da1/usr/local/rsync -avx /da0/var/ /da1/var
umount /dev/da0s1a
umount /dev/da1s1a
umount /dev/da0s1e
umount /dev/da1s1e
umount /dev/da0s1f
umount /dev/da1s1f
umount /dev/da0s1d
umount /dev/da1s1d

That done, I yanked da0, put da1 in its place, and a fresh disk in da1's place. Everything came up with no problems.

Sarcastic quote of the day (by me, for a change):

"It's only through uniformity that we can truly achieve diversity."

The surrounding conversation was a result of a discussion about an article in Tech Today.

I've been postponing actively weblogging for a long time now (uh, two years, I guess), because I never have enough time to set up the "ideal weblogging solution". I always start with wanting something simple just for myself, but then the plans evolve into a giant multi-user CMS for the entire site with Gallery intergration oh crap I have to upgrade Gallery too and webmail integration would be good because Squirrelmail is getting a little long in the tooth but I'd have to move to the new server because this one's too slow but I have to build that first where can I find a cheap good RAID adapter...

So, for now, Blogger is a good, quick solution. It took me 30 minutes to activate the Blogger part of my Google account, get SFTP working (nice lack of documentation, Blogger), and manually convert all of the "content" from my old weblog. Not too bad, and it'll work for now. Whew.