Avocado Vichyssoise

I just made a soup that's really good: Avocado Vichyssoise. It's a cold thick soup, perfect for sunny summer days like today. Well, it's not very hot in Seattle today, but this weekend has been absolutely beautiful. It feels like spring. Some of the flowers in my garden are in full bloom and the rest are budding. And it's the middle of February! In fact, my tulips started coming up the first week of January. I have one rose that's almost ready to open up, and that's even more interesting considering the fact that the last rose bloomed in late November.

The last time I was in Miami Beach I went to a restaurant called Wish that served an Avocado Vichyssoise which was perfect for the hot weather there. Well, since we have Seattle's version of that hot weather I might as well make food for it. I found a recipe for it on the internet and tweaked it a bit to taste like Wish's version. Here's what I tried:

• 1 white onion, julienned
• 4 garlic cloves, slivered
• 1 Tablespoon olive oil
• 2 cups Yukon potatoes (peeled and cut into ¼ pieces)
• 1½ quarts chicken stock
• 3 avocados
• Juice of one lime
• Salt and pepper, to taste
• Green, red, and orange bell peppers.
  

In a sauté pan, sweat onions and garlic in olive oil over low heat for five minutes. Add the Yukon potatoes and chicken stock. Simmer until potatoes are tender, and then puree in blender, strain and cool.

Once the soup is fully chilled, pour it into a large blender and add the avocados and limejuice. Season the soup with salt and pepper, to taste.

Chop a total of a teaspoon of the bell peppers into tiny ity-bity pieces (I'm not sure what the official term is) and place them in the center of your bowl after you've poured in the soup. They add a really nice fresh crunch to it.

I know a Spammer

This week I found out that one of my friends used to be a spammer. It was very surprising. I've always said that if I ever met a spammer I'd kick his ass. If you know me, you know that I hate motherfucking spammers. I fucking hate them sooooooooo much. They are pieces of shit, the scum of the fucking earth. When I found out that my friend was a spammer I didn't know what to do. To be fair he wasn't a really evil spammer. He 'only' sent out 800,000 emails over the course of a year, he didn't try to hide his business or get past filters, and he only sent out the mails once per address. And this was back in the late 1990s before spam really took off and before people really hated it with a passion. That's not so bad. So, I'm not actually going to kick his ass.

It really surprised me that someone who I consider to have pretty much the same world view as me, someone who I respect a lot, would come to a completely different conclusion to the question of spam than me.

I've come to believe that people who believe in different things than me (e.g. Republicans) have a completely different brain structure than me. I don't understand how Republicans can believe that it's ok to let poor people starve and that it's ok to kill people as long as they're not American and white. But my friend doesn't normally have different beliefs than me. We almost always agree. I doubt that his brain is structured differently from mine.

So how did we come to different conclusions to the question of spam?

Printing from a Mac to a Linux server

I finally figured out how to print from my Mac. Screw the normal printing wizard from Systems Preferences, it doesn't work. I found out that I'm actually running cups locally on my Mac and I can go directly to http://127.0.0.1:631/ and configure it normally. It works pretty well. Why is it that engineers always try to make something simpler but end up making it not work? Well, at least I can print now.

Loud TiVo

For the last couple of months my TiVo has been very loud. I'm always aware of loud constant noise around me. I wouldn't look at houses within two blocks of I-5, I gave up the speed of my P4 in favor of a much slower but almost silent Mac Mini, and I wouldn't spend time in the living room after the TiVo started becoming louder. It was getting very very irritating. I couldn't put up with it. But I wasn't sure whether it was getting louder or I was just becoming more aware of it. If it was the latter I was basically screwed because I love my TiVo and I would need to spend a lot of money to build out a silent system.

At first I thought it was the fan but I opened it up and noticed that all of the noise was coming from the harddrive. I then put it back together, reconnected it and did some research about hard drive. I couldn't find anything. The hard drive sound was a "Woo Woo" kind of like the deer horns on the front of cars. That didn't seem normal to me but I wouldn't really know because the only computer I had with a normal hard drive was my PC and it had so many fans that I had no idea what was making the noise. Then Laurel got her iMac. It was pretty frickin' quiet and it had a normal hard drive so I decided to try changing the hard drive.

I found a good doc describing how to do it and I had a spare 120 gig hard drive so I went for it yesterday. I burned the image from the site, added my Tivo drive to the PC, booted up, and ran the following commands:

  % mkdir /mnt/dos
  % mount /dev/hdb5 /mnt/dos
  % mfsbackup -f 9999 -6so /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdd
  % mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdd | mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hda

The last command took all night to run. When I got home from work today I put the new hard drive into the TiVo, turned it on, and it worked. No noise! And it was faster since I went from 5400 RPM to 7200 RPM and it was bigger since I went from 80 gigs to 120 gigs.

Suki

No personal blog is complete without some pictures of a kitty. Well, here's our new kitty Suki (it's Japanese for 'Beloved').





We got her about two weeks about from the Humane Society. She's between 8 and 12 years old and very sweet. She has a squeak instead of a meow, it's very cute.

My Mac Mini is Fast Now

Holy shit, I just installed a Firefox build that was optimized for the PowerPC 7450 and it's really really fast. I finally don't feel that my new computer is slow. It's weird that a G3 build would run so slowly on a G4. I guess the G4 has a bunch of optimizations that aren't automatically used. Maybe new instructions?

Well, I'm very very happy right now. I was worried that I'd have to buy an iMac G5 to get comfortable surfing again. If you do have a G5 you can get your optimized builds here.

RAID

When I started having problems with my PC last November and I thought I had lost all of my data I knew I had to come up with a better backup plan. I really don't have that much data that's irreplacable: My photos and some documents or code that I've written. And I wouldn't want to try to rip all of my CDs again but I could certainly do it. I had been making backups of my photos on CD whenever a folder would get to about 700 megs. But when I got my LC1 and my gig SD card I started using a hell of a lot more space. After just one day of shooting I could have more than a CD's worth of pictures and I'd have to break it up into multiple folders of about 700 megs each. Needless to say it was a pain in the ass and I didn't do it very often. What I needed was more space on another computer. My home linux server didn't work at first because it had a 4 gig HD, 3 gigs of which was used by the OS. I soon upgraded the disk to 80 gigs, which was the biggest drive I could get for the same cost of a night out at a restaurant. That was my temporary solution.

The real solution, of course, was a RAID file server. My friend Ryan built a 1 terabyte RAID file server a few years ago. He had eight drives and they kept on dying because his case couldn't disapate the heat that they were generating. He also said that it used a lot of electricity. That was way out of my price range a few years ago but when I bought an 80 gig drive recently I realized that storage was really cheap now and I could easily built a server myself. But what do I really need? Having about a hundred gigs of RAIDed storage would be cool, I could use it to back up the photos from my main computer. But, then you look at the prices of drives and you talk to your friends and they all have huge RAID fileservers and they rip their DVDs to it. And then one of your friends builds a two terabyte fileserver. And then you say to yourself: "Man, I'm such a pussy if I don't have that kind of capacity at my house". Ok, I'm sorta kidding, I don't really think I'm a pussy but it would be so much more fun to have a lot more space. Think about how cool it would be to setup MythTV with that kind of diskspace.

So, I've been doing a lot of research (research is half of the fun). Should I go with hardware or software RAID? Should I do RAID-5 or one of the other RAID levels? Should I run it on my regular linux server or should it run on a separate box? Should I use my old PC or buy a new rackmount case? Should I go with IDE or SATA? Should I buy a lot of drives or fewer? Should I try to get as much space as possible or should I just get whatever's cheapest and upgade in two years when disks four times larger cost half as much?

The first thing I did is find out how RAID worked. In particular I wanted to know how RAID-5 worked because it seemed like magic that you could give up just one disk and gain redundancy. Magic Math? No, it's actually really simple. Let's say that you have 4 disks and you want to store the numbers 5, 12, and 8 (pretend that those numbers are part of your favorite digital photo from your last vacation). Then on the fourth disk you put the sum of the numbers on the previous disks (they actually use the XOR operator but it's easier to understand with addition):

Disk 1	Disk 2	Disk 3	Disk 4 (parity disk)
5	12	8	25

Then, let's say that Disk 3 fails and you lost all of your data there:

Disk 1	Disk 2	Disk 3	Disk 4 (parity disk)
5	12		25

You know that the only number that could possibly be on disk 3 could be 8 because those three numbers have to add up to 25. Pretty clever, no? When a disk fails you just pop in a new one and your RAID software reconstructs the lost data.

There are different reasons you would want to use RAID and they are discussed in the research paper that first described RAID. The reason I want RAID is for redundency, but I'm not totally paranoid about losing two disks so I'm pretty sure I'm gonna go with RAID-5. Well, I take that back, I'm extremely paranoid about losing my data but that leads me to want to have it on multiple computers too. I'd rather run RAID-5 on one computer and have a complely separate copy of the data on another than a completely redundent copy on one computer.

Now, I think the biggest decision to make is whether I want hardware RAID or software RAID. Hardware RAID would make me feel cool because that's what we use on our servers at work, and having a setup at home like a multi-billion dollar business is cool (I'm a geek, I know). Hardware RAID would also make it much easier to run with a lot of disks. They usually support 8 drives right out of the box. And if I wanted to have more than two drives I would need to buy at least one more adapter card anyways. And if I wanted to go with SATA I would probably need to buy at least two SATA cards anyways. Um, lemme just check that assumption out. Hey, I was wrong, my motherboard already supports two SATA drives. Hmmmm.... Well, let's see. I don't want to go with a cheap hardware RAID card. I've heard really bad things about them like you losing your data because they couldn't keep up. Most of discussions I've read debating the merits of hardware vs software RAID were written several years ago when people had slower processors and little RAM. I'm absolutely sure my P4 2.4 GHz with a gig of RAM is gonna out perform any cheap RAID controller doing all those XOR operations. And good hardware RAID cards cost like $400-$500. Hell no! I'm not going to spend that much on my first RAID server. Also, software RAID is cool because you will always be able to recover the data. If you choose hardware RAID you won't be sure your be able to get the same RAID card that you had. I'm pretty sure that each company writes stuff out to disk in their own format. With software RAID I'll always be able to get my hands on a linux distrabution.

I want to stick with as few drives as possible because I don't want 8 drives running in my closet. My guess is that they would be pretty loud but more importantly I would feel really really bad about wasting electricity on 8 drives that are spinning 24 hours a day. Three drives
on RAID-5 work but with that I'm wasting 50% of my capacity. With 4 drives I only waste 33% of my capcaity which is easier to live with. I would say that 4 or 5 drives is probably the sweet spot for me.

The second biggest decision is which drives am I gonna buy. I'm probably gonna buy them from NewEgg, cuz that company kicks ass. I've never had a problem with them and I don't have to pay sales tax. Also, I'm probably gonna stick with OEM drives since I can get them cheaper and I hate dealing with those stupid rebates that you need to almost always deal with when you buy a consumer drive at a resonable price. But, I've never been to Fry's so I'll at least make a trip there to scope out the situation. I keep on hearing that that's the place to pickup cheap drives. As of February 4, 2005 here are the prices (with shipping) for SATA drives on NewEgg:

$344	400 gig	86 cents/gig
$200	300 gig	67 cents/gig
$140	250 gig	56 cents/gig <-- sweet spot
$120	200 gig	60 cents/gig
$98	160 gig	62 cents/gig
$86	120 gig	72 cents/gig

And for $25 I can supposedly get another SATA card to support two more drives. So for my cheapest SATA setup I can get three 120 gig and with the new SATA card it comes out to $283 which would provide 240 gigs of effective space. The most cost effective drives are the 250 gig drives and with the SATA card and three drives it would be $445 which would provide 500 gigs (half a terabyte!) of effective space. For $585 I could get 750 gigs. It would be really nice to get a terrabyte of space since it's such a psycological barrier, but I don't know what I would do with that kind of space. [at future date insert comments making fun of how stupid this statement sounded, e.g. 640k is more RAM than anyone could possibly need]

Now, with IDE I can make it even cheaper. I already have a 120 gig IDE drive that's not being used. And for this discussion I'm assuming that I can't mix SATA and IDE in RAID, but I probably can with the software RAID.

$147	250 gig	59 cents/gig
$110	200 gig	55 cents/gig
$84	160 gig	53 cents/gig <-- sweet spot
$80	120 gig	67 cents/gig

Theoretically I could build a 240 gig server for only $180 (assuming 20 bucks for a second IDE controller). That would get me up and running pretty quickly. And if I can run both SATA and IDE on the RAID I could get the two 120 gig SATA drives for $172 and not even need to buy a new controller since my current IDE drive will be still running off of the motherboard's IDE controller. Then I wouldn't need to feel like I'm wasting money on drives that run on an interface that won't be used in a couple of years. The most cost effective IDE drives are the 160 gigs but I'd need at least three since I can't use my current 120 gig drive. I'm not even going to calculate the price because I can see that it's not going to be much different than the SATA drives.

So, what am I going to do? I don't know yet. I just recently got two new computers (a Mac Mini and an iMac) so I have stuff to play with. I think I'm gonna wait a little while until I need something new to play with.

Google is a Truely Amazing Company

Google is amazing. They just released Google Maps and I'm stunned. They've taken something that has been around for years (internet maps) and really inovated on it. Mapquest hasn't done shit for years. They cornered the market on internet maps and stopped inovating. They're fucked!

Go to Google Maps and type in your address. Check out the drop shading. Now remove your address from the form and type in "grocery". Fuckin' amazing. Think about how useful that would be when you move. On my first night in Seattle I had to drive around in circles looking for a grocery so I could buy the essencials: Pop Tarts and milk. Google Maps would have been a big help. Now press down your left mouse button on the map and move it around. It moves.

This is what Google always does. They take something that other people have done and make it what we've always wanted. We used to have webcrawler and altavista and they didn't so great of a job. I didn't even know good search was possible until I used google. Hotmail and Yahoo had the web based free email market cornered, they came Gmail. And Gmail wasn't about the gig of space. It's so much better because the interface is so much better. They created a great experience. Hotmail is fucked!

This is all great but the first time I saw Google Maps I was sorta pissed off. We had just launched A9 Yellow Pages, which is innovative in its own right, but Google Maps is so much more polished. We still use the same old crappy MapQuest images and in normal Amazon.com fashion the page is as fucking busy as every to try to divert your attention to buying something. Let's see: Shop in Sporting Goods, Most Wished for Items, Recently Viewed Items, List Mania, So You'd Like To, Where's My Stuff, Shipping and Returns, Recently Viewed Products, Recently Viewed Categories, Recent Searches, give me a fucking break.

Amazon is Microsoft and Google is Apple. There it is.

One reason to hate Apple

I finally figured out why my AirPort Express has never worked: You need a wireless card in your computer. I've had it for months and never been able to get it to work. I was just assuming that the PC setup would work so I was waiting until I bought my first Mac. I suspected that this might be the case but I assumed that Apple wouldn't lie to me. I was wrong. This was one of those cases of lying by ommision. Do they just assume that everyone has a laptop? Why would you have a desktop with a wireless card unless your computer was situated in a weird stop. I always assumed that you used ethernet by default and went wireless only when you had to. Errrrrrr. This pisses me off. Right now I'm going to amazon to sell this sucker.

The democratic party might still have a future

It looks like Dean will be taking the Democratic Party chairmanship. Oh my god is that good news. It admit that I was late to see what everyone else saw in Dean. I didn't want him to win the primaries because I didn't think he could win the general election. I now know better. The American people don't really care about Dean being more liberal than the others. They only care about passion. Dean has passion, Kerry doesn't. I really believe now that we keep on losing because we keep on leaning to the right. The American people see that and think that we don't believe in what we talk about. We need to stand up for ourselves. When the Nazis call us liberals we need to say "hell yeah I'm a liberal". With Dean at the helm of the DNC we'll finally have someone who is passionate about our beliefs. After Dean officially takes over we should head over to 4th and Union and flip off that muthafuckin' republican flag guy.

Joe Bar

Today while screwing around del.icio.us I came across a review of Joe Bar. I miss that place. Laurel and I used to live in the apartment right above it. On weekend mornings when I started hearing stuff going on downstairs I knew it was time to wake up and get some coffee. It has such a great atmosphere. It's the only coffeeshop where I really felt welcome. Looks like they have new mugs. I guess I gotta make it over to Capitol Hill to pick one up, and say hi to Wiley of course.