Yes, all Chinese people know Kung Fu.

I used to be able to fly as a kid, and my family was so poor, we frequently fought over the last Chinese style chicken nugget, which we often ate with chopsticks.

I suppose that this stereotype will help me out when I end up in the wrong neighborhood. “Don’t mess with that chink! He knows Kung Fu!”

TURN THE FRIGGIN’ INDEXER OFF!

After I upgraded my machine from Gutsy, I noticed that my load average seemed to climb, and my CPU spiked. What really stood out was when I moved some new photos off my camera, and the load got even worse. For some reason, a process was spawning multiple ufraw-batch processes that would eat up so many resources.

Turns out the process trackerd was the culprit. This is part of the new Tracker technology Ubuntu put together recently. It’s a great little tool, but unfortunately, it’s set to eat up all your system resources by default.

What can you do to salvage your system without having to revert back to 7.10?

1. Kill the tracker before it renders your system useless!

   killall -9 trackerd

   No need to sudo. trackerd runs as a user process.

2. Disable the indexer on startup by going to System->Preferences->Sessions and unchecking Tracker and Tracker Applet under Startup Programs.
3. If you want to use indexing but would also like your system to not lock up, ignore the previous step and throttle the indexer instead. Go to System->Preferences->Search and Indexing.
4. Select the Performance tab and move the slider under Throttling all the way to the right (towards Slower). Also, select Minimize memory usage under Resource Usage.
5. *Optional* Have the indexer ignore all your RAW camera images (if you have a DSLR camera). In my case, I selected the Ignored Files tab and added ‘*.NEF‘ to the Ignored File Patterns list. Change ‘NEF’ to whatever raw files your camera produces.

What is a bad dream for you? Mine used to consist of whatever horror movie I saw the night before, which is why I never see horror movies because it keeps me awake at night. Other times it’s a loss of loved one (just in the dream), or one that I realize I’m not wearing pants in public.

Last night, I dreamt that I had my ’sudo’ privileges revoked at work.

The story goes something like this:

I’m logged into a test environment machine at work, and I realize I can’t install my app that I’ve been working on for the past few months. I ask around and make a phone call to our help desk. I find out that an audit had occurred of all superuser privileges in our department, and I had been caught in the net. Great, I say. (In real life, we had a network security admin come by and chew us out not long ago for not using the latest and greatest Microsoft product because it was “enterprise-ie” in flavor. Might have something to do with my conjuring of this dream.)

Of course, be dramatic in nature, I escalate this to my manager, some people who used to be my manager, and some people who I knew where still sudoers. Someone else looks into the matter, but the answer is still no.

In passive aggressive fashion, I tell everyone, “Screw it. I don’t need it. Just don’t come crying and screaming to me when there’s an issue with the production servers. I can’t do anything about it.”

Then I woke up. The problem is that this dream is so entirely plausible that I’m afraid to go into work today. I mean, what’s the point if I don’t have root anymore?

I’ve always liked air travel (well, that is after I was able to stop throwing up from air sickness as a child) because things look differently from up there. Even the sky and horizon look new compared to the view on the ground.

My photostream.

I did this awhile ago, and decided to add to my eeePC wallpaper collection.

I decided to go out this past weekend and try to shoot the sunset. I think I did alright. I did also try an HDR shot, but I came to this realization: when shooting an HDR, you’re trying to capture two or more differently lit subjects. In order for the HDR shot to work, all of the subjects must be interesting in their own right. Sunsets: very cool. Suburban houses: not so cool to photograph. “Look! Roof shingles!” No, that doesn’t work. I’ll just have to find another sunset setting I can use.

My photostream

While I’m on this anger trip, I might as well tell the anecdote of a person at the head of the line.

Some work buddies and I had went over to one of our favorite establishments for a meal. There was only one or two people in front of us in the line to order, so it seemed like it would be a quick outing. Then the lady in front of us started her order.

I should have known that something was wrong when she began her order with, “I was here two days ago….” Congratulations, you’ve joined the repeat customers’ club. Are you looking for your prize and picture on the wall? Just tell the girl behind the counter what you want.

She then began describing her order in detail: two hot dogs, cooked specifically the way she liked them, with the right amount of condiments in the exact place she wanted them. This is when I began to tie an imaginary noose and hang myself. The guy serving drinks saw me do it, but he dared not change his expression, lest he faces whatever wrath that woman was unleashing upon the poor register girl.

“I’m sorry, but we don’t have that last thing.” One of the side orders she wanted, she couldn’t get. That’s something she would have realized if she bothered to read the menu while someone else was ordering. As the persnickety woman continued to leisurely peruse the menu in search of a suitable replacement, my dining party had grown visibly and audibly agitated. We groaned, made gestures, even suggested violence out loud. Still, the woman did not seem aware that the once short line had now reached the door (okay, it wasn’t that far away from the register, but I’m trying to make a point).

She selected her substitute and confirmed her order again: two hot dogs, three orders of onion rings, and a couple of other things I didn’t bother to catch. While the register girl was ringing the order up, the woman went off on a tangent about the horrible service she got last time. Apparently, she and her party did not receive mugs to go with their beers. “We had to drink the beer out of the bottles!” she exclaimed. Now, imagine that! This time, they gave her the clear disposable plastic cups they usually reserve for children. Very classy way to drink beer.

“Your total comes out to be $22.49.” Finally, we can move this line along. “Wait a minute, it should be $19.20 before tax.” OH COME ON! At this point, I’m turned around and beating my head against the wall. Literally. She had to have heard the thumping sound coming from behind her. Everyone behind her was making either some type of gesture or displaying a look of disgust. She soldiered on, demanding that the girl tell her exactly how much she charged for each of the hot dogs.

I blacked out with rage for a moment, but I managed not to show it. One of the order takers was fed up with it and began taking my order before the lady in front was even finished negotiating the price of her meal. From start to finish, her order took about five minutes to place. I signed my credit card receipt about fifteen seconds after, “What can I get you?”

A little epilogue: when her order was called, she made them take everything out of the bag and prove to her that the order was complete, and that everything was in its own separate container, as to not cross contaminate the sauces. I don’t know if she did a spit check; she really should be more wary of that.

As Matt commented, “Now imagine being married to her….”

I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.5, so I thought I’d bring in the fanfare with a new theme. Hope you like it!

What is Moore’s Law? Bottom line is that computers will continue to get better and better. Unlike some other technological trends, the performance of new machines are consistently faster while maintaining or even declining in price. If you take the automotive industry and the analogue metric of miles per gallon, you’ll notice that that measurement has fluctuated instead of following a steady, predictable pace. It’s amazing that computing has maintained such a trend.

That being said, ANYONE WHO USES MOORE’S LAW AS A COP OUT FOR BAD SOFTWARE HAS NO BUSINESS IN SOFTWARE.

There, I said it. As soon as I hear someone mention “Moore’s Law” in any serious discussion, I immediately disregard anything that person says. Why? I’ll tell you.

• Your problem exists today. Waiting 18 months to solve your performance issue isn’t a solution that most customers are willing to accept.
• Different pieces of hardware advance at different paces. For example, the processor/memory gap is something that many people will overlook: the performance of RAM improves at a much slower pace than that of CPUs. This means that if you have an algorithm that fetches from an array n-teen times more than you need per element, that extra couple of gigahertz in your new shiny quad-core processor might not put that jump in your app that you were expecting because your RAM is still fetching that data out slower than paint can dry. Now imagine if you’re fetching from disk.
• It’s just bad practice. Those extra cycles could be put to better use. Would you make three trips to the kitchen to get a glass of water? Don’t make the computer do the same.
• Moore’s Law isn’t a real law! Gravity? Yes. Thermodynamics? Yes. Moore’s Law? It’s a marketing scheme. It’s one of those self fulfilling prophecies that ran wild. Moore himself (who did not coin the term) had said that this is a trend that can’t go on forever.

I blame Intel for releasing this scourge upon us. Why did the Pentium chips have that FPU problem? I’d say it was marketing pressures brought on by Moore’s Law.

So really, don’t ever use Moore’s Law as a bullet in your presentation and expect to be taken seriously.

It’s not a secret that I’m not enamored with the Apple lifestyle, though I did at one point think it was the coolest thing in the world. I own an iBook that I now feel like installing Ubuntu Linux on, and I’ve already reflashed my iPod to run Rockbox. So my recent incident with my MacBook Pro left me cursing the sky and tearing my cube apart.

About a month ago, I discovered that the light on the power adapter started blinking amber and green. After browsing around for a bit on the interwebs, I thought it had something to do with the SMC or PRAM units. I tried resetting it; no go. The impact was that the battery would not charge all the way up to 100%. Furthermore, after letting the battery drain down, the battery monitor would read 30% remaining, but it would just shut itself down coldly.

Around this time, applications started crashing intermittently. It started out with just being Firefox, then Adium, Komodo, and most annoyingly, Finder. The Apple hardware tester came up with nothing, but I swapped out the RAM with some spare sticks I had laying around, and it seemed to have stopped.

Luckily, this was a work laptop, so the kids down in the support desk are taking care of this for me. In the meantime, my temporary replacement Linux workstation is running like a charm. None of my apps crash, and I have more graphical goodies than I know what to do with. Probably too much….

For those of you looking for the San Antonio Sports Car Association Motor Cross on January 20, 2008, those pictures will be up in the next few days. Be patient, as I’ve got about 1000 shots to weed through alongside a day job that allows me to do this without charging you an arm and a leg just to see them.

In the meantime, please look through the April 15, 2007 Auto Cross set:
http://flickr.com/photos/edmao/sets/72157600085618156/