Bag search on Metro

I read today that metro is starting to do random bag searches, this reminds me of my recent trip to Beijing where all bags had to be x-rayed before being allowed onto the station platform. I am not sure what they were looking for but they weren’t looking very hard. I don’t think I ever saw anybody getting a secondary bag search.

I doubt that this will add much to the safety on the metro other than to generally slow everyone down. Bruce will probably comment about on this as part blog postings on security theatre and the TSA and their security procedures. At least they are going to have a bomb sniffing dog so that they are one step above the useless checks at the Smithsonian Museums.

Never Ending quest for more disk space

First I had mirrored 80 gig hard drives, then it became a mirrored 120 GB pair, when that ran out of space I tossed another 120 in and made it 3 in raid 5. When I had filled that I moved to twin 320 GB mirror, then one failed so I bought a 500 GB. That has morphed into 3 500 GB in raid 5 and 3 320 GB disks, 1 for backup and the other 2 mirrored.

I am now looking at 1tb hard disks wondering if I should continue buying 500 GB hard disks at $69 or start buying 1TB disks for $129

Bad generic_ata with ubuntu on another computer

So I noticed another of my ubuntu boxes was running slow so I did a

Host:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 8 MB in 3.72 seconds = 2.15 MB/sec

so it looks like it has the same issue as my other machine

so I did
Host:~$ sudo lspci |grep -i ide
00:0f.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
Host:~$ lsmod |grep -i ^libata
libata 159344 4 pata_acpi,pata_via,ata_generic,sata_via

and added the following to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

blacklist ata_generic

and the following to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules

pata_via
blacklist ata_generic

then rebuild initramfs


sudo update-initramfs -u -v

After a reboot I now get

sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 164 MB in 3.02 seconds = 54.38 MB/sec

Amazing what this little tweak will do for performance.

Day 4 Photos

Beijing National Theatre

We made a special trip to the Beijing National Theatre to take some sunset photos. The sunset was a little disappointing but I did take some photos to try out with HDR, I haven’t bought a copy yet which means I get the watermark

HDR Beijing National Theatre
HDR Beijing National Theatre

Here is are some unprocessed ones

Beijing National Theatre
Beijing National Theatre

Beijing National Threatre

Beijing National Threatre

This Chinese girl came up to me and asked in good english, “can you take my photo” I couldn’t work out how to use her grandmothers cellphone, so while HY looked at it’s chinese menus I took this photo. Turns out she had been learning english since she was very young and her english is definitely far superior to my chinese and she was there to listen to a concert.

The Great Hall of the People
The Great Hall of the People