Author: cdwan

I don’t believe that I’ve posted about my Labor Day.

* I put my bike in my car
* I drove south for about an hour and a half to the ferry.
* I rode the ferry to Block Island
* I rode my bike up the big hill for about a half hour, to the hard-to-reach beach access.
* I locked up my bike and walked north on the beach for about an hour, scrambling over rocks and high-tide points to increasingly harder-to-reach coves.

You may have the impression that what I wanted was something like “not here” or “away.” You would be correct.

I stopped when I stumbled on about 15 surfers riding gorgeous waves, and an assortment of naked hippies sunning themselves.

I lay down on the sand and fell asleep until I woke up.

It was an awesome day.

It’s disturbing to me that even though I don’t watch TV and I avoid the standard news outlets like the cess-pits they are, I’m still somehow occasionally sucked into the political circus. Somehow, I caught myself wondering about Joe Biden’s qualifications, and interestedly poking around this Alaskan governor’s resume.

See, here’s the thing: I don’t care who the parties have put up for vice president. Honestly, even the presidential picks are sidebars to me. I think (as pointed out by ) that it’s very cool that it’s no longer possible to run a “two old white guy” ticket and expect to win. Given the choices, I am partial to Obama. I think he gives us exactly what we need right now – hope and enthusiasm for fixing what’s wrong with our country.

However, here’s my actual voting algorithm:

I will vote for the non-republican most likely to win on Nov 11. I do not care if that individual is a democrat or an independent – if they are white, black, hispanic, or of asian descent. I do not care about their gender or the gender(s) towards which they are sexually attracted. I barely care about their species.

We must – absolutely must – get the Republicans out of the executive branch. They have been there for 8 years and have done insane amounts of very long lasting damage to our very system of government, our economy, our environment, our reputation both worldwide and domestic. The mess in Iraq is the result of strategic thinking by the republicans. The current state of the economy is what the republicans promised when they were elected (i.e: CEOs and big money holders are doing great). Do what you want with the legislature – the presidency needs to not be in their hands anymore.

Do not be distracted by the media’s attempts to sell you a close race. The reason the media is selling a close race is that means another year of record setting campaign spending. That money? It goes to the media. TV, newspapers, and even media consultants have a very deep vested interest in making it a close race. Plus, that means that they get to be a critical part of the process.

Ignore them. We citizens have a very deep vested interest in voting in a non republican.

After this year, I will go back to trying to be a fair minded, independent, non-partisan voter … but for the moment I’m voting strategically. Republicans out. Now.

Picked up about 50lbs of tomatoes yesterday, and with able help from and , rendered them down into 6 quarts of sauce, 5 pints of salsa, and a couple of trays of sun oven dried tomatoes. In between, we made it one of those nights where there are more empty wine bottles than people at the party. Drinking and playing with big pots of boiling water and really sharp knives? Great idea, kids. Great idea.

If I haven’t answered email from you in a while, I apologize. I’ve been on business trips for the past two weeks with a confused and exhausted weekend in the middle. Tuesday, I depart on another of these. Business is good but *sheesh*. After this one I’m putting my foot down. Three straight weeks on the road is just no good for my brain.

I’ve declared tomorrow a “meditation retreat.” I want at least one day of summer, this summer. Given that it’s something like the end of August, I think, time is short to accomplish this goal. Therefore, I’m going to Block Island. I’m taking my bike. I plan to walk on the beach and look at the waves. Perhaps there will be migratory birds there. If so, perhaps I will photograph them.

And now, I think I’ll go get a slice of cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory.

I’ve been lately pondering the fact that overpopulation is the elephant in the room in every conversation about the environment. Six billion is simply too many people for all of us to live in the way that we might if there were only a billion or so.

Personally, I have no concept of numbers like “billion.” I can get my arms around “144.” That’s how many strands of 100 foot fibre we ran today. It took a couple of hours with three or four people working. It was a lot. Running one would have been quick and easy … but 144 was a lot. A thousand would have taken days. A million … well … here’s a decent story about that many grains of rice.

Given my personal failure to get an intuitive grip on even a couple of hundred things, I have no firsthand experience with the mystery that is a “billion people.” The conceptual difference (for me) between 3,000+ people dying in New York in September of 2001, and 250,000+ people dying in Indonesia in 2004 is primarily due to cultural proximity and the fact that I’ve been to New York. I simply don’t have a gut feel for the difference between thousands and hundreds of thousands of people dying. They both feel horrifyingly, sickeningly huge. “More people than everyone I know by name,” breaks my mind.

This, combined with our remarkable lack of intuition for the effects of exponential growth, means that it’s easy to miss the core reasons that we’re driving species into extinction and changing the weather with our growing foulness. The world is large, but an interesting world (for me) has space in it for whales and snow leopards. Both of these creatures only flourish given large swathes of unspoiled wilderness. They need hundreds of square miles of territory, with many Trophic levels supporting them. If we move all the herbivores to factory farms, or poison the krill out of the environment, we lose the whales and the tigers. An interesting world is much smaller, in terms of space for humans, than we might think based only on arable acreage.

Consider just me: I could poop anywhere. When there are a village of us, we need to poop downriver. With a city, we need sewage treatment. With a state or nation, we need water use policies … and as a world … we might realize that there is simply no more place for our crap to go. Or we might not realize it. Most people who “disagree” with global climate change (and evolution), do so with intuitive and abundantly commonsense arguments that make perfect sense if time is approximately the length of a human life, and if there are maybe a couple of hundred humans in the world. 100 humans would have a lot of trouble changing the weather. Species don’t segregate among populations of 200 within a single lifetime. Six billion over millions of years do either without even trying.

So what to do? Nature knows how to handle overpopulation. I don’t think that we’ll like selection criteria that plague or starvation use as the means of reducing our populations. With sufficient economic opportunity, families shift from the third world model of “short life, many children” to the first world “long life, few children.” However, the economic realities of giving all six billion of us the same lifestyle I have mean that – I think – we won’t have very many snow leopards or whales left when we’re all eating Arby’s and wearing Nike. Hell, we’re well on our way to jellyfish sushi instead of tuna or salmon as it is. Thanks medyani.

We might also cull ourselves. What other creature could? How to do it, exactly? How to avoid falling prey to the usual flaws of eugenics – blinded by my own biases?

This is why I ask about things about which we might be wrong. Someday, my beautiful and intelligent group of friends, we are going to be making decisions that affect a lot of people in very profound ways. Some of you already are. Doing it without self-awareness is a short road to horror.

Then again, making no decision at all is also a short-road to horror. It’ll be 10 billion in no time.

Caveat: To those of you who have decided to have kids – I love you and I love your kids. I think your kids in particular are awesome. I do not think it’s irresponsible for any particular individual to have a child or three. I’m talking about all of us at the same time steadily increasing our population until there are no whales or healthy people left.

This week is a bigger geek milestone than last week. I’ve spent the past two days sitting next to a truly monstrous storage system. Each disk tray contains 16 750GB disks. Each rack contains 10 racks and two controllers. We have SIXTEEN racks. Theoretically, that’s 1.9 petabytes of raw space. In reality, depending on how we divvy it up, we’ll have somewhere between 1.2 and 1.5PB of usable space. Enh! Enh!

That’s more than 10 times bigger than the system from last week. Fortunately, I don’t have to bleed and lift heavy crap on this one. There are vendor people, local sysadmins, and very interested customers working feverishly just to get the damn thing wired up. We’re still testing basic connectivity and power. Next week is the OS install and filesystem build. It doesn’t go “live” for customers until December, so we’ve got time to “do it right.” A rare luxury in this world.

I’ve been writing crap-loads of documentation. My role is to capture how it’s being built, what the options were, and why we’re doing it the way we are. The hope is that I’ll produce the cheat sheet that serves as a guide through the various manuals diagrams, and pictures being produced by each of the sub-unit teams. Along the way I’m learning all about really big storage. For example, the core fibre switch currently tops out at 308 ports. We’ve got 8 connections per disk rack, so that’s 128 right there. Throw in the compute cluster (yeah, baby!) and the three 64 way SMP machines (YEAH!) … plus the GPU processors from Tesla (Unf! Unf!) and I’m basically walking around with vague geeky arousal the whole time I’m here. Anyway, I believe I was about to mention that we had to order another 48 ports of fibre overnighted … or else fail to use all the available ports on the systems.

On a sadder note, I saw one of the first clusters that I ever built, sitting turned off and unused. There have been troubles with power and storage, leading the users to wander off and find other ways to do their thing. This filled me with sadness, and a vague desire to stay up all night making the damn thing bulletproof again. I was stopped because I don’t have time to do the job I’m here for now … much less back out and make systems from three years ago work again.

I am now the proud owner of a Wii. Does anyone want to be my Wii friend? I see that my Mii can wander the world and travel to other Wii’s, but I have no idea how that would work. Does anyone actually do that?

Pictures from the 100TB storage build are up. Lots of infrastructure porn.

Interesting facts:

* Half of the system is powered down right now because the electrical power wasn’t ready when we got there.
* One big filesystem: 87TB of usable space.
* 70 CPUs of linux compute cluster, plus the old 24 CPU apple cluster.
* Tape backup, with a spare set of tapes for offsite storage.
* All three of us bled at least once for this project.

Built a GFS volume today with an actual capacity between 85 and 90TB. It’s part of the badass nature of this project that I honestly don’t care whether it was exactly 87.5TB, or whatever. 5TB? Who cares? It’s huge. Go find a bucket for the slop in my measurement. Can’t? Too big? That’s right, that’s because you suck.

Tomorrow, we activate the backup robot. The robotic handler of tapes. The thing without a name. The thing that God forgot. The thing that slings data like you sling compost … you … you … compost slinger.

When it begins, you will hear the sound of children screaming – as though from a great distance. A smoking orb of nothing will grow above your bed, and from it will emerge a thousand starving crows.

That’s exactly what it’s going to be like when we fire this machine up. Just like that.

Then (as if it wasn’t clear by now) we went to the bar. Bars. In Dupont Circle. To the Brickskeller (1,000+ beers on the menu). Then to a place where models from Maxim were cavorting … or sulking … or whatever they do while wearing tube socks with stripes on them. We played pool. Then, to the Russia House where Snow Queen vodka was consumed. Finally, to the Barking Dog to watch the US Women’s Beach Volleyball team DEMOLISH their Chinese overlords opponents.

There was some conversation about the Chinese team wearing hats that said, in English, “China” on the brim. I mean, seriously, if the olympics were in Chicago, do you think we’d wear the Chinese characters for “USA” on our hats? No, we would not.

returned from Salmon this morning, bearing 12 pounds of Seattle (which is, like, the whole fish or something).

Wait, something like that. It was pre-7am, I may have mixed up the details.

Anyway, I froze 11 pounds of salmon in little baggies with water, and we cooked the remainder for dinner. Mmmmm. Ahhhh. Smack. Grummmmmm. MmmmMMMM!

Dinner

Sautee chopped onions in oil and salt until aromatic.

Add chopped lemon grass, ginger and pepper. Sautee until the spouse comes sniffing around asking what it is that smells so good. At that point, put the corn in the boiling water. Yeah, you heard me.

After the spouse wanders off with a glass of riesling, pour about another glass in the pan. Top off your own glass while you’re at it. Add coarsely chopped dill and capers. Let it all come to a nice boil and then put the unbelievably fresh salmon steaks in there.

Dish up the gazpacho that was just chillin’ waiting for you.

Check the fish. Not even close to done yet. Set the table. Top up the wine. Decide, on a whim, to tear up the fresh farmers market lettuce and make a little salad. What the heck.

Check the fish again. Wine should be down to maybe 1/8 of an inch by this point, and a bit cloudy with fish juice. Cover the pan with a lid if the fish isn’t perfect yet. Pull the corn out of the boiling water. Garnish the plates with a lime. Again, what the heck? Why not?

When the fish is perfect, place on plates and spoon the wine reduction over it.

Serve.

I spent the morning and early afternoon training with Noriyasu Kudo. He’s an 8th degree black belt in Judo, and is also ranked in Kendo and Karate. In the 1964 Olympics (the first year when Judo was an Olympic sport), he represented Japan. Prior to that he had been “all Japan” champion twice. This was before weight classes came into the competition, so he was just straight-up the best Judo player in Japan at the time. He told the story of his promotion to 3rd degree at age 18 … how they didn’t really feel comfortable promoting him again so young, but he beat 11 3rd degrees in a row and they sort of had to concede the point.

I’ve got a bit of hero worship going on. Forgive me.

He’s in his mid 70’s now, and if this is “old and slowing down,” then he must have been just terrifying in his prime. There were perhaps 40 of us there, and he taught for 3 hours. He touched on a whole bunch of things … training drills, footwork and balance, chi (by which he meant ‘breathing exercises’), grappling, and even a bit of Buddhism. He talked about the competitive phase of his life, when he would wake up acutely aware that someone, somewhere was training right then … and it would motivate him to work harder rather than to sleep. He shared the fact that when you don’t have a training partner, it’s not unreasonable to tie your belt around a tree and practice throwing the tree. “You might lose a little skin. So what.”

There was also the gem, that if you hit someone and they cry out “they’re not a judo player.” Judo players fight hard, and then come home and wonder how they got so bruised up … because the focus during the match is on your opponent, not on any pain or injury that you may sustain. Apparently I’ve been doing that part right. Where did these bruises come from again? What the hell happened to my shoulder?

He talked about the fact that if someone teaches you something and you just learn it from them … then if they’re not around you feel a little worried. What if they were wrong? What if there was something more they didn’t teach you? On the other hand, if you figure something out for yourself then it’s yours forever. Then you have your coach with you in your own heart when you go out on the mat. He called people who get all worried when their coach isn’t around ‘momma’s boys.’ That amused me.

All of this might have been just talk had he not been taking people who I know to be stronger than me and saying things like “no no, really try to throw me,” and then just standing there with his feet rooted to the ground while they struggled … or locking up a series of 20 and 30 year olds on the ground to demonstrate some subtle point of foot placement in a pin. “no no, get out if you can. Really.” Yeesh.

Suffice to say, I had a good time.