So here’s WordPress 3.0.1, which didn’t break anything, and seems pretty nice, and comes with a default theme that I think is better than other (free) themes I’ve tried in the past.

I really appreciate not having to maintain my own PHP. WordPress is good.

The first thing I got to enjoy was disabling peer-to-peer in the Blizzard Downloader so my network connection wouldn’t repeatedly die. Still don’t know what that was about, but it definitely made for a long downloading experience.

Wait for the paint to dry, then install, patch, fire it up, start the tutorial, SPLATCRASH *@!*#&!

My steps for fixing this problem:

1. Whined about it on Twitter and Facebook.
2. Updated video drivers.
3. Crash.
4. Updated audio drivers, which immediately forgot about my front panel audio in.
5. Reverted audio drivers.
6. Ran the Windows 7 built-in memory diagnostic. Waste of time, but it felt like doing something.
7. Crash.
8. Ran CHKDSK with surface scan. Waste of time, but it felt like doing something.
9. Crash.
10. Whined about it on Twitter and Facebook.
11. Added these settings in Documents/StarCraft II/Variables.txt:

    frameratecap=60
    frameratecapglue=30

12. Disabled 3D portraits through the menu settings.
13. Works!

Actually, I should probably hold off on “Works!”, since my test was “Does this run the first tutorial for more than 10 seconds?” For now, it feels like doing something.

For the dorks, some specs of my entirely mediocre PC, which largely meets the “Recommended Specifications” listing I read the other day:

Operating System: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit (6.1, Build 7600) (7600.win7_gdr.100226-1909)
Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: System manufacturer
System Model: P5K
BIOS: BIOS Date: 10/14/08 13:59:09 Ver: 08.00.12
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E6750 @ 2.66GHz (2 CPUs), ~2.7GHz
Memory: 2048MB RAM
Available OS Memory: 2048MB RAM
Card name: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT
Manufacturer: NVIDIA
Chip type: GeForce 8800 GT
Driver Version: 8.17.12.5896

Can’t pre-order an iPhone 4 from the Apple Store, AT&T, or on the new Apple Store iOS App. The dorks (like me) are awake, and they are hungry for Meat.  I suspect the conference bridge, already hopping overnight, is about to turn seriously Thunderdome ugly.

A First World Problem of the highest order.

Two observations:

1. I am a bad person. Change your passwords more often than this, especially those that aggregate access to lots of things. Don’t use the same password for everything. If this hurts, get a Mac.
2. I have been using things at Yahoo! off and on for over 14 years. That’s a mighty long time, if you stop and think about it.

I wonder if I’ll remember the new password by lunchtime.  I give myself 2:1.

I’ve got a loaner from the school to test out the user experience with a web app version upgrade I’m working on. The WordPress iPad app is pretty nice, hence this “Hello, World!” post.

It’s impossible to touch type on the virtual keyboard, at least for me, at least at the moment. Rage.

Not 100% convinced that it’s useful for my set of First World Problems, but it’s certainly an interesting device. Molly went from hating iBooks to thinking it was kinda nifty in just a few seconds, and some apps I’ve seen are nice, so there’s a chance I will break my “No Revision A” rule.

The new iPhone (putting G_____o criminality aside) is where I’m really looking for something awesome. Try as I might, I can’t fit this iPad in any pocket I have. The most useful device is the one you have with you.

On my Mac Pro at work, I installed it with MacPorts (`sudo port install pbzip2`). It is this kind of awesome:

$ ls -lh original.tar
-rw-r--r--  1 jmcmurry  staff   2.4G Feb  4 13:47 original.tar
$ time bzip2 -k -v original.tar
original.tar: 36.215:1,  0.221 bits/byte, 97.24% saved,
2604288000 in, 71911733 out.

real	13m3.313s
user	12m50.536s
sys	0m3.773s
$ mv original.tar.bz2 bzip2.tar.bz2
$ time pbzip2 -k -v original.tar
Parallel BZIP2 v1.0.5 - by: Jeff Gilchrist [http://compression.ca]
[Jan. 08, 2009]             (uses libbzip2 by Julian Seward)

# CPUs: 8
BWT Block Size: 900k
File Block Size: 900k
-------------------------------------------
File #: 1 of 1
Input Name: original.tar
Output Name: original.tar.bz2

Input Size: 2604288000 bytes
Compressing data...
-------------------------------------------

Wall Clock: 119.369207 seconds

real	1m59.612s
user	14m39.090s
sys	0m44.840s

Sweet. 6.57x faster by adding a “p” to my command line.

The resulting compressed .bz2 files aren’t exactly the same according to md5 (the pbzip2 output is a little larger, which makes sense due to the splitting of the work), but when they decompress, they’re both identical to the original .tar file.

See also: mgzip.

I’m always writing emails containing computer hostnames, and sometimes I want to include the full DNS name and IP address in those emails.  That’s especially handy when you’re writing about firewall rules, as I just was.

I created this simple Automator Service workflow in about 60 seconds.

When I select some text in a text editor and run this Service (context click, select the Service name), this happens:

“foo” -> “foo.domain.com [192.168.1.200]”

A few notes:

1. “Get Specific Text” is grayed out because it’s disabled.  As you’ll find when writing Automator Services, you have to have some dummy text available to substitute for the selected text when developing your workflow.  You just disable this when you save the Service.  Easy, but confusing if you don’t know what’s going on.
2. Be sure to check “Replaces selected text” at the top.  That means whatever you have selected in your text editing window will be replaced with the output of this script.
3. Be sure to change “Pass input” in the “Run Shell Script” task to “as arguments”.  That makes $1 become your selected text.
4. There is zero error checking.  You will probably blow up your computer and the Internet.

It actually took much longer to write this post, especially because WordPress didn’t want to create an image link for me.  Thanks, WordPress!

A big ass chunk of tree fell down and took my phone line with it.

jmcmurry@lemon $ cat /etc/release
Solaris 10 10/08 s10s_u6wos_07b SPARC
Copyright 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.
Use is subject to license terms.
Assembled 27 October 2008
jmcmurry@lemon $ zfs receive -u
invalid option 'u'

This could’ve been brought to my attention before I decide to create my ZFS export streams recursively. One at a time, I’d have been fine. What seemed to be an awesome way to retrofit a metadata slice for an SVM volume into a whole disk ZFS root install turned out to be a miserable trail of heartache and pain.

But I can take it; I am a Unix guy.

UPDATE: “-u” seems to be in Solaris 10 update 7, but even there, it’s not in the man page for zfs(1M). Thanks so much for updating the docs without indicating that the “recover your root storage” function only works on the OS release that you made available for download today.

/grrr

First I created the new dataset:

# zfs create rpool/zones
# zfs set mountpoint=/zones rpool/zones
# zfs create rpool/zones/foo
# zfs set compression=on rpool/zones/foo

I thought I should halt the zone, update the zonepath property for the zone, move the files to the new place, and start up the zone. Nope:

zonecfg:foo> set zonepath=/zones/foo
Zone foo already installed; set zonepath not allowed.

Great, now I’m going to have to search through a bunch of docs and maybe remove the zone and redo it all and why can’t they make this easy for me, argh.

Well, they did:

# zoneadm -z foo move /zones/foo

I like a lot of the changes in Solaris 10, especially the usage and man pages for things like zfs(1M). These commands tend to do the annoying things for you and the man pages have lots of examples. Nice.

And hey:

# zfs get compressratio rpool/zones/foo
NAME               PROPERTY       VALUE              SOURCE
rpool/zones/foo  compressratio  1.44x              -