c0t0d0s0.org

You can smile about the sterotypical weirdnesses of Japan as much as you want (like the rumour, that they just get into other countries to carry around their camera and make vacation at home by looking at the images they made), but when they do something, they do it right. One example: One would consider that that an 10 minute film music would be edited down in length and complexity to play it live. Well ... not really. Just listen to the studio version and the live version of Kenji Kawais "Kugutsuuta kagirohi ha yomi ni matamu to" from the "GitS2 - Innocence" soundtrack. They simply played the studio version - live. Virtually identical. Awesome.

Wenn man sich die ganze Diskussion anguckt, die jetzt Google mit den versehentlich mitgeschnittenen Paketen, muss man sich sich fragen wer da Fehler gemacht hat. Sicherlich Google, allerdings halte ich das nach wie vor für ein lässliche Sünde, so lange das jetzt irgendwann mal gelöscht wird. Die politische Kaste unseres Landes die "Verbieten!Verbieten!Verbieten!" statt "Nachdenken!Nachdenken!Nachdenken!" predigt. Allerdings gebe ich auch mir die Schuld, jetzt nicht so direktpersönlich, sondern als Mitglied der technischen wissenden Kaste, der Gruppe, die im Schubladisierungwahn als "Digital Natives" bezeichnet, wird.

Given the start of the day, it had all ingredients needed for a horrible day. I was able to reach an urban train by running through the already closing door today. I was in the train after the door had closed behind me,, however but by laptop bag was outside of it. I'm really glad that the train driver saw this and unlocked the door again.

Nevertheless my talk about Deduplication at the GUUG Spring symposium was much better than the tutorial on Wednesday. For interested parties you cane download the preso, but it's just in german language and the voice track is missing.

However i've learnt a thing today: At the last GUUG Spring Symposium in 2009 i've held a two day tutorial about less known solaris features. I got the usual CeBIT cold ... the extra strong variant that put me out of order for almost two weeks. What i didn't knew until today: The people considered to make bets when (not if) i would collapse in front of the class. My appearance must have been really horrible.

Ich hab mein Blog betrogen und hab fremdgeschrieben - als Gastautor bei der lieben Local: Die Hölle - die ist man selbst.

A reader asked for a simple rule when to use the multithreading friendly memory allocatorlibumem. I'm not that convinced of the need of such a simple rule. Given that plockstat is part of Solaris 10 and it gives you a extremly good insight into lock holds and lock contentions, just use it with your application. The more and the longer lock contention events you see with plockstat -C -p <PID>libumem. But there is a simple rule-of-thump to find processes which are worthwhile targets for such an closer inspection: Whenever you have an application with more than one thread on a system with more than one core, it's worth a try.

Of course the effect varies: When you have an application that allocates and frees memory all the time, the effect can be very substantial. I just found an application sitting 1,7 seconds of 10 time seconds in the libc_malloc_lock. But when you have an application preallocating large areas of memory at the start and doing only a few malloc/free calls further down the road, it won't yield that much additional speed. Java (especially at minheap=maxheap) is a good example for a such preallocating environment, however this is just half of the story: Your java application may use native libraries and those ones may benefit from libumem and the reduced lock contention on libc_malloc_lock.

At the end: libumem is easy to use (LD_PRELOAD=libumem.so), it's in Solaris since Solaris 9 (so it's a matured piece of software), so it's worth a try in any case.

Additional information:

docs.sun.com: libumem(3LIB) - man page
c0t0d0s0.org - Less known Solaris error messages: "open failed: No such file in secure directories"

What's so difficult to understand at the concept of a boarding by seat row. Rows 1-11 are definitely not between 12-24 and interestingly there are much more people sitting in front of me as people sitting behind me shortly after boarding. And i'm sitting row 15 (as there is no row 13 in LH aircrafts, that's just 2 rows ahaed of me with people that were actually asked to bord first). Was the same this morning.

I can just assume that some people consider themself as that important that they has to sit first. The last time i thought about it, i came to the surprising conclusion that all people will arrive in hamburg ... independent when you enter the aircraft at the location of your departure.

It's even stranger with intercontinental flights. The larger aircrafts need half an hour to board, you have already an reserved seat, even when you are late they will call you out at least two times and you will sit in this small aircraft seat for hours anyway ... why the heck is there such a crowd at intercontinental boardings right after the first call for boarding.

BTW: There seems to be a strange habit with occassional flyers. It looks like they all have bought something new right in front of their journey. Shoes that look totally new, small backpacks without any sign of usage ... strange ....

It's May 26, it's my birthday and as a birthday is a special day nothing can go wrong. Well ... nope not really ... but at first i want to thank you all for your kind greetings and congratulations.

Nope .... at first i was in Cologne today, giving a tutorial about creating a fileserver with OpenSolaris. But that was by choice. I like to fly as you know . After being grounded for months due to no opportunity to fly this was really welcome. As i wrote before ... if i get a job some day in the future flying around and doing presentations i would be a luck man.

The day started with a nice "<insert a lot of suppressed curses>" in the aircraft as a was able to spill a cup of airline tea into my lap. Thank god it wasn't my tea at home so it was hot but not hot enough for really significant burnings.

Such a day starting that way can't get a positive ending and it didn't got one. I don't know what happened to my demo installation but stuff i did a day before without problems threw interesting error messages, nothing went the way i want it and and the end i couldn't even remember how to diskpart iscsi devices on windows ... damned ... i will create a written tutorial to give the attendees the information planed for this part.

I hope my Deduplication talk on Friday will be much better ...

However i'm sitting in the Frequent Traveller Lounge now, waiting for my aircraft and i hope there will be no delays ... i wouldn't wonder about that ...

Wenn Roland Koch am Towel Day das Handtuch wirft

With the ARC case PSARC/2010/181 PRIV_SYS_RES_BIND privilege there is a change in discussion that would make my life a little bit easier. At the moment it isn't possible to bind a process to a CPU from within a zone, as the zone doesn't have the nescessary privileges. This ARC would enable an admin within a zone to bind processes from her or his zone to a processor.

At some times even a experienced guide in the land of Solaris runs into a trap, even when the guide is aware of this trap.

The Flightblogger reports about a problem in the 787 programme:

Shear ties, which affix the fuselage frames to the skin of the aircraft, now require replacement or rework, after the initial design failed to take into account thermal fatigue loading of the parts.
[...]
The problem, which was discovered in December, found that repeated cooling and warming of the unpressurized Section 48 and 48 Aft, the shear ties, those of which are made of aluminum, can pull away from the skin of the fuselage, potentially compromising the structural integrity of the aircraft.

Schüler-VZ laesst sich Daten von 1.6 Millionen User abspidern, die Privacystrategie von Facebook ist nebuloes. Loyality-Karten werden noch und nöcher benutzt. Kreditkarten sowieso. Millionen Deutsche tragen ein Trackingdevice mit sich rum, das es dem Staat leicht macht, sie zu orten (Es gibt Leute, die nennen dieses Teil Mobiltelephon).

Aber trotzdem regen sich die Medien darüber auf, das Google Daten versehentlich (und das glaube ich ihnen "Cool, hier hat schon jemand code geschrieben, der Beacons rauswirft. Muss ich das nicht tun ....") mitgeschnitten hat, die zu nichts nuetzen (zu wenig Daten um die Verschluesselung zu cracken, zu gering die Wahrscheinlichkeit beim Durchfahren zufällig irgendwas sinnvolles zu lesen, und wer in einem WLAN ein unverschlüsseltes Protokoll benutzt, gehoert eh ausgepeitscht), meist verschluesselt sind, ohnehin öffentlich sind und meines wissens keine Reidentifizierbarkeit zulässt (Wer sein Netzwerk schön selbstbeschreibend beispielsweise "JoergMoellenkampsWLAN" nenn, ist selber schuld, ansonsten wäre mir keine Liste bekannt in der WLANs mit MAC-Addressen auf Personen gemapt werden).

Ich sehe da nicht mal einen Fehler von Google. Die Rohdaten sind nicht öffentlich, sowie vermutlich gefiltert und gereinigt (naemlich reduziert auf Koordinaten und MAC-Adresse, alles andere wäre wohl Platzverschwendung) und nur über eine API verfügbar. Es sind Daten, die jeder x-beliebige Computernutzer auch hätte abgreifen können.

Man muss hier Google zugute halten, das sie einen Fehler zugegeben haben, der keinerlei praktische Bedeutung hat. Die Kristik ist eher der unreflektierte, aber übliche Google-Profilierungsbeissreflex, der da mittlerweile andauernd an den Tag tritt.

Wir haben andere Privacy-Probleme ... alle wichtiger als die Traffic-Fragmente, die ihren Weg auf die Festplatten der Streetview-Autos gefunden haben.

Eine Frage am Rande übrigens: Was glauben die Leute eigentlich, wie die Geschwindigkeitssymbole und Strassenschilder in die Navigationskarten ihres bevorzugten Navigationssystems kommen?

The musician Apparat is known for his soundscapes, he is able to paint landscapes with melodies. Modeselector on the the other side is a band known for their beats. Now mix both up, and you have great electronic music and the band "Moderat".

At the moment their eponymous album "Moderat" is a heavy rotating guest on my MP3 player. It's electronic music, so it may not hit everyones taste of music. I would suggest to "Rusty Nails" and "Slow Match" as some easy starter, try "Les grandes marches" and "A New Error" just to approach the rest of the album afterwards.

In this installment of the "Meet the Stats" series i want to talk with you about the mpstat. In my opinion, mpstat is one of the most useful tools to find what your processors are really doing.