lots of files

[Phil Hobbs]

On 1/11/2015 12:51 AM, bitrex wrote:

John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> Wrote in message:
On Fri, 09 Jan 2015 17:13:58 -0700, Don Y <this@is.not.me.com> wrote:

On 1/9/2015 4:04 PM, John Larkin wrote:

I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless
task to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few
kilobytes or megabytes per file.

You obviously don't write code!

Well, I do some, but I use languages that tend to have one single
source file per program!


For my "Software Development" (Windows) machine:
548,492 on my C: drive for ~89GB
and that's *just* executables, no "user content" (though it includes
library sources from vendors, etc.)

No idea for the "Hardware Development" machine as I'm migrating that to
new iron, currently.

The appliance that runs most of my basic services, here, shows:
303,436 in the NetBSD repository for a total of 12,103,138KB (~12GB)
134,444 in the pkgsrc repository for a total of 1,767,980KB (~1.5GB)
Note that the pkgsrc repo doesn't contain any of the *sources* for
the packages.

And, I can't look at *my* repository cuz firing up that machine would
add way too much fan noise to the noise currently being generated by
my "Reference Documents" NAS box.

So things will just grow, and I'll just buy bigger and bigger hard
drives, which further reduces the likelyhood that I'll ever clean
things up. Unless I start collecting movies or something, I'm thinking
that 2 or 3 TB might be a lifetime supply of disk storage.

grin> Silly boy. As you said originally, the problem is the effort
required to *delete* files means you never *shrink* your store to it's
current ACTUAL requirements.

Music is also a pig. I'm at about 500G for my music collection and
haven't finished ripping it all. (though if you opt for MP3 you can
cut that dramatically).

Fortunately, I don't listen to music. My life is complex enough
already.


You should! I think it really helps with creativity and workflow.

Not for me. It's silence all the way, if I'm doing any sort of hard
thinking.

EEs should like electronic music! Some of the stuff the "kids"
listen to these days is pretty amazing and obviously composed by
some very talented folks. This tune is one of my favorites for
doing EE stuff:

[Dubstep] : MitiS & MaHi - Blu: http://youtu.be/Vd56kEmWqMc

My taste is more along this line:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbczcKGgcwM

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

 

[bitrex]

John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> Wrote in message:

On Sun, 11 Jan 2015 00:51:59 -0500 (EST), bitrex
bitrex@de.lete.earthlink.net> wrote:

John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> Wrote in message:
On Fri, 09 Jan 2015 17:13:58 -0700, Don Y <this@is.not.me.com> wrote:

On 1/9/2015 4:04 PM, John Larkin wrote:

I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless
task to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few
kilobytes or megabytes per file.

You obviously don't write code!

Well, I do some, but I use languages that tend to have one single
source file per program!


For my "Software Development" (Windows) machine:
548,492 on my C: drive for ~89GB
and that's *just* executables, no "user content" (though it includes
library sources from vendors, etc.)

No idea for the "Hardware Development" machine as I'm migrating that to
new iron, currently.

The appliance that runs most of my basic services, here, shows:
303,436 in the NetBSD repository for a total of 12,103,138KB (~12GB)
134,444 in the pkgsrc repository for a total of 1,767,980KB (~1.5GB)
Note that the pkgsrc repo doesn't contain any of the *sources* for
the packages.

And, I can't look at *my* repository cuz firing up that machine would
add way too much fan noise to the noise currently being generated by
my "Reference Documents" NAS box.

So things will just grow, and I'll just buy bigger and bigger hard
drives, which further reduces the likelyhood that I'll ever clean
things up. Unless I start collecting movies or something, I'm thinking
that 2 or 3 TB might be a lifetime supply of disk storage.

grin> Silly boy. As you said originally, the problem is the effort
required to *delete* files means you never *shrink* your store to it's
current ACTUAL requirements.

Music is also a pig. I'm at about 500G for my music collection and
haven't finished ripping it all. (though if you opt for MP3 you can
cut that dramatically).

Fortunately, I don't listen to music. My life is complex enough
already.


You should! I think it really helps with creativity and workflow.

Not for me. Music mostly annoys me. Ref: the Horatio Hornblower books
by C S Forester. Horatio hated music; maybe Forester did, too.

"He [Horatio] suffers from chronic seasickness, especially at the
start of his voyages. As a midshipman, he was once sick at the
sheltered roadstead of Spithead. His embarrassment haunts him
throughout his career. He is tone-deaf and finds music an
incomprehensible irritant (in a scene in Hotspur he is unable to
recognize the British national anthem)."


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

I guess it's a diagnosable "thing" now:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/03/06/286786987/for-some-peop
le-music-truly-doesnt-make-them-happy

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki Anhedonia#Specific_musical_anhedonia

--


----Android NewsGroup Reader----
http://usenet.sinaapp.com/

 

[Tim Williams]

"Don Y" <this@is.not.me.com> wrote in message
news:m8rq04$n1b$1@speranza.aioe.org...

Set her camera resolution down, to a couple megapixels maybe. Without
a tripod and a really good lens, vibration and optics limit resolution
to far less than modern cameras can theoretically do.

Doesn't work. When you later try to enlarge and crop the photo to
isolate *just* the hawk (in the above example), you end up losing
all the detail. She's not interested in "lots of sky" with a speck
of a bird in it, etc.

That's not what he meant, but her camera is probably also not what he
meant.

I have an old Canon S1-IS, barely 3 Mpx, which takes pretty good pictures.
Meaning: the blur inherent to the optics exhibits a PSF (point spread
function) of maybe 3-5 pixels.

This is the direct spacial equivalent of an antialising filter in front of
an ADC: for good step response, you want a good gradual filter, like a
Bessel or Gaussian.

In the optics case, the aperture defines the reciprocal width of the PSF,
and tweaks in lens design and focal position act to smooth the edges (from
a radial sinc shape -- a brick wall filter -- to something more gentle).

Bad cameras (like, who would even want 20Mpx in a cell phone anyway?)
can't possibly have good enough optics to matter: the result is comparable
to a 24 bit 100MSa/s ADC driven by LM324s!

Exposure also matters (since we're still sampling in the time domain as
well as the space domain!). Which is like aperture duration on an ADC.
If the camera moves during the ~20ms or whatever it's forming the image
in, the PSF is smeared by that motion. This isn't intractible, because
for many years now, sensors have been designed to compensate for this (the
"IS" in my camera's name -- something about a piezo or voice coil
compensating based on accelerometers -- it's real, and it works!).

Or if the "smear" is known, it can be deconvolved from the image in
software (with suboptimal -- likely speckled and lumpy -- results). The
equivalent of having a not-optimally-flat filter characteristic in front
of your ADC, and adjusting the gain with DSP so it reads correctly.

Astronomy has been doing even better for years, and it continues; can you
imagine the outrage if your oscilloscope took "lucky" exposures? --
Namely, if, from the 1 million or so waveforms/sec modern scopes acquire,
they were sorted histographically by noise level, and the 10% lowest RMS
waves averaged together and displayed -- you can already imagine the
result will be pretty damn sharp, but also somewhat lacking in real
features. Difference being, us engineers want to see the signal as it is,
whereas astronomers have to do it through the layer of vaseline that is
our atmosphere, and they aren't interested in analysing *that* part of
their signal.

Tim

--
Seven Transistor Labs
Electrical Engineering Consultation
Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com

 

[John Larkin]

On Sun, 11 Jan 2015 14:24:04 -0500, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

My taste is more along this line:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbczcKGgcwM

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Gosh. I don't even like music, but that sounds nice.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[Don Y]

On 1/11/2015 12:52 PM, Tim Williams wrote:

"Don Y" <this@is.not.me.com> wrote in message
news:m8rq04$n1b$1@speranza.aioe.org...
Set her camera resolution down, to a couple megapixels maybe. Without
a tripod and a really good lens, vibration and optics limit resolution
to far less than modern cameras can theoretically do.

Doesn't work. When you later try to enlarge and crop the photo to
isolate *just* the hawk (in the above example), you end up losing
all the detail. She's not interested in "lots of sky" with a speck
of a bird in it, etc.

That's not what he meant, but her camera is probably also not what he
meant.

I have an old Canon S1-IS, barely 3 Mpx, which takes pretty good pictures.
Meaning: the blur inherent to the optics exhibits a PSF (point spread
function) of maybe 3-5 pixels.

This is the direct spacial equivalent of an antialising filter in front of
an ADC: for good step response, you want a good gradual filter, like a
Bessel or Gaussian.

In the optics case, the aperture defines the reciprocal width of the PSF,
and tweaks in lens design and focal position act to smooth the edges (from
a radial sinc shape -- a brick wall filter -- to something more gentle).

Bad cameras (like, who would even want 20Mpx in a cell phone anyway?)
can't possibly have good enough optics to matter: the result is comparable
to a 24 bit 100MSa/s ADC driven by LM324s!

This is a *camera*, not a phone! :>

Exposure also matters (since we're still sampling in the time domain as
well as the space domain!). Which is like aperture duration on an ADC.
If the camera moves during the ~20ms or whatever it's forming the image
in, the PSF is smeared by that motion. This isn't intractible, because
for many years now, sensors have been designed to compensate for this (the
"IS" in my camera's name -- something about a piezo or voice coil
compensating based on accelerometers -- it's real, and it works!).

Yes, hers has "in lens" stabilization. Note she's NOT a photographer.
The camera was selected (many years ago) because it was small, reasonably
priced, decent "resolution" (I think she shoots at 5MP) *and* had an
electronic viewfinder (something that is becoming scarce on all but
more expensive, larger body models).

But it still boils down to how many *dots* you can actually get out of
the portion of the framed image that is of interest to you.

E.g., if she is photographing a patch of grass with water flowing over/through
it from *across* the stream, she can take her sweet time setting up a shot,
calling on optical zoom to maximize the "area of interest" in the viewfinder.
Etc. The grass isn't going anywhere. And, the water flowing over it *now* is
largely the same as the water flowing over it 30 seconds hence.

Similarly, she has some shots of Gila Monsters in which you can *feel* the
texture of their skin (slow moving so you can get up *real* close!).

[As she's not interested in photography for the sake of photography but,
rather, just carries the camera as she hikes the mountain trails in the hope
of catching something worthwhile "on film", she doesn't bother carrying lots
of kit -- tripod, filters, even spare batteries! She's "out hiking" not
"out taking photos"]

OTOH, when trying to frame a distant object with plenty of "room" around it
(e.g., so when the hawk or hummingbird darts out of the CENTER of the photo,
you still manage to capture it "in frame") you've got much less of the sensor
(and lens) to play with. Given that the camera will also process that data
(lossy compression), detail can vanish relatively quickly.

As "memory card" space is essentially free (unless you never intend to
move the files off the card!), its silly to throw away "signal" at the
point of capture and then fret later -- when you get home and review those
shots on a *real* monitor (instead of a dinky little screen).

And, once you've taken the photo, there's little desire to sit at a computer
and figure out just how aggressively you can down-sample it -- esp if you've
no idea of which portions of the image you may ultimately want to reference
(she uses these as source material for paintings)

Or if the "smear" is known, it can be deconvolved from the image in
software (with suboptimal -- likely speckled and lumpy -- results). The
equivalent of having a not-optimally-flat filter characteristic in front
of your ADC, and adjusting the gain with DSP so it reads correctly.

Astronomy has been doing even better for years, and it continues; can you
imagine the outrage if your oscilloscope took "lucky" exposures? --
Namely, if, from the 1 million or so waveforms/sec modern scopes acquire,
they were sorted histographically by noise level, and the 10% lowest RMS
waves averaged together and displayed -- you can already imagine the
result will be pretty damn sharp, but also somewhat lacking in real
features. Difference being, us engineers want to see the signal as it is,
whereas astronomers have to do it through the layer of vaseline that is
our atmosphere, and they aren't interested in analysing *that* part of
their signal.

 

[John Larkin]

On Sun, 11 Jan 2015 00:51:59 -0500 (EST), bitrex
<bitrex@de.lete.earthlink.net> wrote:

John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> Wrote in message:
On Fri, 09 Jan 2015 17:13:58 -0700, Don Y <this@is.not.me.com> wrote:

On 1/9/2015 4:04 PM, John Larkin wrote:

I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless
task to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few
kilobytes or megabytes per file.

You obviously don't write code!

Well, I do some, but I use languages that tend to have one single
source file per program!


For my "Software Development" (Windows) machine:
548,492 on my C: drive for ~89GB
and that's *just* executables, no "user content" (though it includes
library sources from vendors, etc.)

No idea for the "Hardware Development" machine as I'm migrating that to
new iron, currently.

The appliance that runs most of my basic services, here, shows:
303,436 in the NetBSD repository for a total of 12,103,138KB (~12GB)
134,444 in the pkgsrc repository for a total of 1,767,980KB (~1.5GB)
Note that the pkgsrc repo doesn't contain any of the *sources* for
the packages.

And, I can't look at *my* repository cuz firing up that machine would
add way too much fan noise to the noise currently being generated by
my "Reference Documents" NAS box.

So things will just grow, and I'll just buy bigger and bigger hard
drives, which further reduces the likelyhood that I'll ever clean
things up. Unless I start collecting movies or something, I'm thinking
that 2 or 3 TB might be a lifetime supply of disk storage.

grin> Silly boy. As you said originally, the problem is the effort
required to *delete* files means you never *shrink* your store to it's
current ACTUAL requirements.

Music is also a pig. I'm at about 500G for my music collection and
haven't finished ripping it all. (though if you opt for MP3 you can
cut that dramatically).

Fortunately, I don't listen to music. My life is complex enough
already.


You should! I think it really helps with creativity and workflow.

Not for me. Music mostly annoys me. Ref: the Horatio Hornblower books
by C S Forester. Horatio hated music; maybe Forester did, too.

"He [Horatio] suffers from chronic seasickness, especially at the
start of his voyages. As a midshipman, he was once sick at the
sheltered roadstead of Spithead. His embarrassment haunts him
throughout his career. He is tone-deaf and finds music an
incomprehensible irritant (in a scene in Hotspur he is unable to
recognize the British national anthem)."


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[Phil Hobbs]

On 1/11/2015 3:56 PM, John Larkin wrote:

On Sun, 11 Jan 2015 14:24:04 -0500, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:



My taste is more along this line:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbczcKGgcwM

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Gosh. I don't even like music, but that sounds nice.

I used to think that I was missing the lobe of the brain that connects
music to the emotions. Then I discovered polyphony, and realized that
it was just that stuff from after about 1700 AD didn't do it for me.
I'm a huge fan of earlier stuff, both sacred and secular. Machaut,
Tallis, Palestrina, Victoria, Desprez, some Vivaldi, that crowd.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

 

[John Larkin]

On Sun, 11 Jan 2015 19:25:27 -0500 (EST), bitrex
<bitrex@de.lete.earthlink.net> wrote:

John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> Wrote in message:
On Sun, 11 Jan 2015 00:51:59 -0500 (EST), bitrex
bitrex@de.lete.earthlink.net> wrote:

John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> Wrote in message:
On Fri, 09 Jan 2015 17:13:58 -0700, Don Y <this@is.not.me.com> wrote:

On 1/9/2015 4:04 PM, John Larkin wrote:

I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless
task to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few
kilobytes or megabytes per file.

You obviously don't write code!

Well, I do some, but I use languages that tend to have one single
source file per program!


For my "Software Development" (Windows) machine:
548,492 on my C: drive for ~89GB
and that's *just* executables, no "user content" (though it includes
library sources from vendors, etc.)

No idea for the "Hardware Development" machine as I'm migrating that to
new iron, currently.

The appliance that runs most of my basic services, here, shows:
303,436 in the NetBSD repository for a total of 12,103,138KB (~12GB)
134,444 in the pkgsrc repository for a total of 1,767,980KB (~1.5GB)
Note that the pkgsrc repo doesn't contain any of the *sources* for
the packages.

And, I can't look at *my* repository cuz firing up that machine would
add way too much fan noise to the noise currently being generated by
my "Reference Documents" NAS box.

So things will just grow, and I'll just buy bigger and bigger hard
drives, which further reduces the likelyhood that I'll ever clean
things up. Unless I start collecting movies or something, I'm thinking
that 2 or 3 TB might be a lifetime supply of disk storage.

grin> Silly boy. As you said originally, the problem is the effort
required to *delete* files means you never *shrink* your store to it's
current ACTUAL requirements.

Music is also a pig. I'm at about 500G for my music collection and
haven't finished ripping it all. (though if you opt for MP3 you can
cut that dramatically).

Fortunately, I don't listen to music. My life is complex enough
already.


You should! I think it really helps with creativity and workflow.

Not for me. Music mostly annoys me. Ref: the Horatio Hornblower books
by C S Forester. Horatio hated music; maybe Forester did, too.

"He [Horatio] suffers from chronic seasickness, especially at the
start of his voyages. As a midshipman, he was once sick at the
sheltered roadstead of Spithead. His embarrassment haunts him
throughout his career. He is tone-deaf and finds music an
incomprehensible irritant (in a scene in Hotspur he is unable to
recognize the British national anthem)."


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com



I guess it's a diagnosable "thing" now:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/03/06/286786987/for-some-peop
le-music-truly-doesnt-make-them-happy

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki Anhedonia#Specific_musical_anhedonia

Or maybe it's addiction to music that should be diagnosed.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[Don Y]

Hi Jeff,

On 1/11/2015 7:10 PM, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

On Fri, 09 Jan 2015 15:04:38 -0800, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless
task to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few
kilobytes or megabytes per file.

"A larger trash can does not make for a cleaner office."
- Me, in about 1977 when my office was blessed with 5 additional
trash cans by my boss as a not very subtle hint to clean up
my mess.

Of course not! Just another BIG THING taking up space, needlessly! :>

So things will just grow, and I'll just buy bigger and bigger hard
drives, which further reduces the likelyhood that I'll ever clean
things up. Unless I start collecting movies or something, I'm thinking
that 2 or 3 TB might be a lifetime supply of disk storage.

I keep the live stuff mostly in NAS (network attached storage) boxes
and in various online cloud storage system. The biggest disk hog is
my collection of CD and DVD images of OS distribution media and
installation CD/DVD ISO files. I find it easier to create a CD or DVD
from the saved ISO file, than to find the original CD/DVD.

Yup. Or, mount the ISO and let it be accessed "in place" (obviously
doesn't work for fresh installs)

Making backups of NAS storage is tricky and copying file by file takes
too much time. Therefore, I suggest either a mirrored RAID array to
deal with potential drive failures, or a duplicate NAS storage machine
with some kind of mirroring software. The biggest problem so far has
been theft, fire, and PG&E. Therefore, I recommend that the mirrored
NAS boxes be located in different parts of the building.

I'm in the process of migrating all of my NAS's to use external drives
(USB, FW, SCSI, etc.). This lets me control individual spindles (why
spin up a drive if you aren't going to access its content?) as well as
quickly/effortlessly move drives to other boxes (e.g., if a box dies
*or* if a particular box needs "direct access" to that drive without
the intervening network fabric -- like when I have to lug it to a
client's place of business, etc.)

I mirror *across* devices, not *within*. So, updating a mirror means
I need two boxes up and running. I'm currently using these little
Atom SBC's (about 9W total) as they are plenty fast enough to just
*store* stuff.

I've been offered several SnapServer 410's (four hot swap SATA bays)
which, if I can get some *other* (FOSS) software running I can move
more of my SATA drives into "permanent" enclosures (still having the
possibility of swapping out the drive sleds from each Snap NAS)

[I don't have good feelings towards the folks supporting the Snaps so
would never tie myself to them for "support"]

http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/crud/backup-drives.jpg
Most of those are 1TB drives. There are now about twice as many in
the office, and 5 more at home. They mostly hold image backups of
customers machines as they arrive and as they leave repaired. Image
backup speed is between 1GB/minute for USB 2.0 and a P4 machine, to
5GB/minute for USB 3.0 and an i3/i5/i7 type machine. Unlike file by
file backups, the speed of an image backup is not affected by the
number of files.

For imaging, I use bare (3.5") SATA drives in a "dock". Label maker
lets me tag a pretty sticker on the drive so I know what it's for/from.

I've a shoebox full of drives in a desk drawer that allow me to restore
any of the individual machines, here (of course, any changes since the
image aren't covered in that process).

 

[Phil Hobbs]

On 1/11/2015 8:50 PM, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

On Sun, 11 Jan 2015 19:38:47 -0500, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

I used to think that I was missing the lobe of the brain that connects
music to the emotions. Then I discovered polyphony, and realized that
it was just that stuff from after about 1700 AD didn't do it for me.
I'm a huge fan of earlier stuff, both sacred and secular. Machaut,
Tallis, Palestrina, Victoria, Desprez, some Vivaldi, that crowd.
Phil Hobbs

That would be the middle of the Baroque period (1600-1750).

My favourite stuff is 16th C and earlier, especially Tallis.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

 

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Fri, 09 Jan 2015 15:04:38 -0800, John Larkin
<jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless
task to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few
kilobytes or megabytes per file.

"A larger trash can does not make for a cleaner office."
- Me, in about 1977 when my office was blessed with 5 additional
trash cans by my boss as a not very subtle hint to clean up
my mess.

So things will just grow, and I'll just buy bigger and bigger hard
drives, which further reduces the likelyhood that I'll ever clean
things up. Unless I start collecting movies or something, I'm thinking
that 2 or 3 TB might be a lifetime supply of disk storage.

I keep the live stuff mostly in NAS (network attached storage) boxes
and in various online cloud storage system. The biggest disk hog is
my collection of CD and DVD images of OS distribution media and
installation CD/DVD ISO files. I find it easier to create a CD or DVD
from the saved ISO file, than to find the original CD/DVD.

Making backups of NAS storage is tricky and copying file by file takes
too much time. Therefore, I suggest either a mirrored RAID array to
deal with potential drive failures, or a duplicate NAS storage machine
with some kind of mirroring software. The biggest problem so far has
been theft, fire, and PG&E. Therefore, I recommend that the mirrored
NAS boxes be located in different parts of the building.

<http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/crud/backup-drives.jpg>
Most of those are 1TB drives. There are now about twice as many in
the office, and 5 more at home. They mostly hold image backups of
customers machines as they arrive and as they leave repaired. Image
backup speed is between 1GB/minute for USB 2.0 and a P4 machine, to
5GB/minute for USB 3.0 and an i3/i5/i7 type machine. Unlike file by
file backups, the speed of an image backup is not affected by the
number of files.

--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

 

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Sun, 11 Jan 2015 20:17:51 -0700, Don Y <this@is.not.me.com> wrote:

>Of course not! Just another BIG THING taking up space, needlessly! :>

Ah, but there's an advantage to having wastebaskets. The interval
between having to haul them out to the dumpster for emptying is much
longer for large and numerous wastebaskets. Invariably, I manage to
accidentally throw something important in the wastebaskets. Instead
of having to dumpster dive to recovery the item, I have sufficient
time and a smaller mess to sift through in the wastebasket.

Yup. Or, mount the ISO and let it be accessed "in place" (obviously
doesn't work for fresh installs)

That works most of the time. However, most of my ISO's are OS install
CD's. It's not unusual for me to need an ancient Unix or Linux
version, or some proprietarized mutation of Windoze overly enhanced by
an OEM.

I'm in the process of migrating all of my NAS's to use external drives
(USB, FW, SCSI, etc.). This lets me control individual spindles (why
spin up a drive if you aren't going to access its content?)

Because I can access them remotely. Often, I just need one file
that's stored in the middle of an installation CD. I mount the ISO
drive using one of several virtual drive programs, find the file, and
extract it.

Another reason is drive life. My NAS boxes, that burn power 24x7 have
disk lives of mover 10 years. I just decommissioned a homemade NAS
box that's been up and running on the original Hitachi drive since
about 2004. However, with portable USB drives, I've been getting 3-5
years. If I bounce it around in my car, subtract 1 year.

as well as
quickly/effortlessly move drives to other boxes (e.g., if a box dies
*or* if a particular box needs "direct access" to that drive without
the intervening network fabric -- like when I have to lug it to a
client's place of business, etc.)

"The bigger the disk drive, the harder they crash".
- Me, after having about 40 GB of important data trashed
after I plugged my portable USB drive into a virus infested
customer's machine.

I carry two 16GB USB 3.0 flash drives for utilities, one 32GB USB 3.0
drive for ISO images, and a 1TB drive which has the customers image
backups on it. However, in the house and office, NAS is more
convenient.

I mirror *across* devices, not *within*. So, updating a mirror means
I need two boxes up and running.

Correct.

I'm currently using these little
Atom SBC's (about 9W total) as they are plenty fast enough to just
*store* stuff.

Nice. I've built my own but with the price of NAS drives with gigabit
ethernet on the decline, I just pay the price and be done with it.
Generally, I prefer Buffalo Tech products.

[I don't have good feelings towards the folks supporting the Snaps so
would never tie myself to them for "support"]

I've noticed that companies with great products usually have miserable
support, while companies with mediocre products have great support.
There are a few that can do both, but not for extended periods. Too
much entropy I guess.

>For imaging, I use bare (3.5") SATA drives in a "dock".

Retch. The number one failure that I see are dead or dying hard disk
drives. I buy new drives, do pre-emptive drive replacements, demand
that customer do image backups, and have spares on hand. Putting
image backups on old or pull-out drives is just asking for a problem.
I do have plenty of old drives floating around the office, but those
are for quick tests, donation machines, and paperweights.

Old photo. The current pile is about 3 times as large, plus about 200
drives that are ready for recycling in boxes on the floor.
<http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/pics/drivel/slides/disk-drives.html>
I'll replace that with an updated photo after I clear off the other
debris from the table.

Label maker
lets me tag a pretty sticker on the drive so I know what it's for/from.

Yellow Post-It notes with additional scotch tape.

I've a shoebox full of drives in a desk drawer that allow me to restore
any of the individual machines, here (of course, any changes since the
image aren't covered in that process).

In between image backups, I use one of several "continuous backup"
products. Favorites for Windoze are Acronis True Image Home and
Memeo. When I do an image backup, the "continuous backup" files on
the NAS box is cleared and I start over. The major problem with this
scheme is that files that I erased on the drive, still appear on an
image restore. I deal with that by having cron or Windoze scheduler
do a dir /s or ls -r directory list of the drive along with the
"continuous backup".

--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

 

On Sun, 11 Jan 2015 13:52:36 -0600, "Tim Williams"
<tiwill@seventransistorlabs.com> wrote:

"Don Y" <this@is.not.me.com> wrote in message
news:m8rq04$n1b$1@speranza.aioe.org...
Set her camera resolution down, to a couple megapixels maybe. Without
a tripod and a really good lens, vibration and optics limit resolution
to far less than modern cameras can theoretically do.

Doesn't work. When you later try to enlarge and crop the photo to
isolate *just* the hawk (in the above example), you end up losing
all the detail. She's not interested in "lots of sky" with a speck
of a bird in it, etc.

That's not what he meant, but her camera is probably also not what he
meant.

I have an old Canon S1-IS, barely 3 Mpx, which takes pretty good pictures.
Meaning: the blur inherent to the optics exhibits a PSF (point spread
function) of maybe 3-5 pixels.

This is the direct spacial equivalent of an antialising filter in front of
an ADC: for good step response, you want a good gradual filter, like a
Bessel or Gaussian.

In the optics case, the aperture defines the reciprocal width of the PSF,
and tweaks in lens design and focal position act to smooth the edges (from
a radial sinc shape -- a brick wall filter -- to something more gentle).

Bad cameras (like, who would even want 20Mpx in a cell phone anyway?)
can't possibly have good enough optics to matter: the result is comparable
to a 24 bit 100MSa/s ADC driven by LM324s!

There are various tradeoffs between optical and electronic domain. One
way is to use a small cell with a variable length zoom objective. A
zoom object typically have quite a few lenses and a small aperture,
hence requiring long exposure times.

The other alternative is to use a large cell like the 41 MPix sensor
on Nokia PureView, so that a high quality, large, wide angle single
fixed focal length lens and do the zooming in electronic domain by
cropping the picture.

Of course there are tradeoffs and don't expect to enlarge a picture in
the C.S.I style

 

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Sun, 11 Jan 2015 19:38:47 -0500, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

I used to think that I was missing the lobe of the brain that connects
music to the emotions. Then I discovered polyphony, and realized that
it was just that stuff from after about 1700 AD didn't do it for me.
I'm a huge fan of earlier stuff, both sacred and secular. Machaut,
Tallis, Palestrina, Victoria, Desprez, some Vivaldi, that crowd.
Phil Hobbs

That would be the middle of the Baroque period (1600-1750). Prior to
that, during the renaissance period, the human ear hadn't become
accustomed to large leaps in pitch. That's because the main form of
music was choral which is vocal and not instrumental. Getting a choir
of local vocals together that can sing effectively over an octave is
difficult. The accompanying instruments could easily do huge leaps in
pitch, but were condemned to follow the lead of the choir.

A transition occurred somewhere in the Baroque period, where
instruments became more important than choirs. Although Handel and
Bach were contemporaries, their music is very different. Handel
continues with an orchestrated version of the previous choir music,
with all its limitations, while Bach uses huge leaps of pitch,
typifying later trends in the Classical period. However, even Bach
was stuck with the limitations of the choir, and had to use fugues and
other overlapping mechanism to disguise that it wasn't the same
singers making the drastic changes in pitch. Incidentally, a side
effect was a large increase in the size of the choirs as not everyone
was singing at the same time.

In general, we usually favor the music we grew up hearing. I father
played and like mostly Classical music. Therefore, I now like and
play classical music. I suspect sometime in your childhood, you were
heavily exposed to Renaissance music, with small leaps in pitch,
monotonic tunes, and minimal harmony, which you now favor.

Sorry, but I don't do polyphony very well:
<http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/music/Liebermann-Choral%2003.mp3> (3:38)

I usually have Pandora playing New Age music when working in the
office. It helps me relax and remain calm when my natural urge is to
strangle the customer and defenestrate his broken computer.

--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

 

[Lasse Langwadt Christense]

Den tirsdag den 13. januar 2015 kl. 01.02.08 UTC+1 skrev Sylvia Else:

On 13/01/2015 10:58 AM, Tom Miller wrote:

"Sylvia Else" <sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote in message
news:chj520F6votU1@mid.individual.net...
On 10/01/2015 10:04 AM, John Larkin wrote:


I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless
task to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few
kilobytes or megabytes per file.

So things will just grow, and I'll just buy bigger and bigger hard
drives, which further reduces the likelyhood that I'll ever clean
things up. Unless I start collecting movies or something, I'm thinking
that 2 or 3 TB might be a lifetime supply of disk storage.




You're positing the existence of "enough disk space".

There ain't no such animal.

Sylvia.

Five years from now we will be saying "remember back when JL said 3 TB
is all the memory anyone will ever need".

Just kidding John.



I can remember opting for a 256 Mb disk, because the more expensive
320Mb offering seemed an unnecessary extravagance.

Sylvia,

I remember when the choice was 2Mb or 4Mb RAM and 80Mb or 120Mb disk


-Lasse

 

[Lasse Langwadt Christense]

Den tirsdag den 13. januar 2015 kl. 01.14.52 UTC+1 skrev Don Y:

On 1/12/2015 5:09 PM, Sylvia Else wrote:

I remember when the choice was 2Mb or 4Mb RAM and 80Mb or 120Mb disk

2Mb of RAM? You had it soft. When I was a gal,

--------------------------------------^^^ recent sex change operation??

:

or very old, apperently in the 13th century girl just meant young,
knave girl for a male, and gay girl for a female

our dad gave us 16k if we were lucky.

I recall having a 512KB (RAM) CP/M box and thinking it was greased lightning!

I had a commodore128, it could boot CP/M from a floppy, I think I did it twice

-Lasse

 

[Don Y]

Hi Jeff,

On 1/11/2015 11:43 PM, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

On Sun, 11 Jan 2015 20:17:51 -0700, Don Y <this@is.not.me.com> wrote:

Of course not! Just another BIG THING taking up space, needlessly! :

Ah, but there's an advantage to having wastebaskets. The interval
between having to haul them out to the dumpster for emptying is much
longer for large and numerous wastebaskets. Invariably, I manage to
accidentally throw something important in the wastebaskets. Instead
of having to dumpster dive to recovery the item, I have sufficient
time and a smaller mess to sift through in the wastebasket.

That's the root of your problem -- you should never throw things away! :>

Yup. Or, mount the ISO and let it be accessed "in place" (obviously
doesn't work for fresh installs)

That works most of the time. However, most of my ISO's are OS install
CD's. It's not unusual for me to need an ancient Unix or Linux
version, or some proprietarized mutation of Windoze overly enhanced by
an OEM.

Yup. Mount, burn, install, discard. Media is cheap enough to not
bother trying to keep CD/DVD's lying around.

I'm in the process of migrating all of my NAS's to use external drives
(USB, FW, SCSI, etc.). This lets me control individual spindles (why
spin up a drive if you aren't going to access its content?)

Because I can access them remotely. Often, I just need one file
that's stored in the middle of an installation CD. I mount the ISO
drive using one of several virtual drive programs, find the file, and
extract it.

I power up <whichever> box has the drive(s) of interest, pull down
(or push up) what I need, then power things back down again. Only
real exception is when I do periodic tests of the archives (comparing
one to its backup, etc.). But, those things can happen overnight, etc.
(takes a long time to move TB's of data even at Gb speeds!)

Another reason is drive life. My NAS boxes, that burn power 24x7 have
disk lives of mover 10 years. I just decommissioned a homemade NAS
box that's been up and running on the original Hitachi drive since
about 2004. However, with portable USB drives, I've been getting 3-5
years. If I bounce it around in my car, subtract 1 year.

I don't like the small (~2") drives. They're slower and tend (IME) to
not be as durable. I still treat drives with the "tenderness" that was
*required* decades ago. So far, that has served me well -- three bad
drives in 30+ years (two "laptop" drives and one desktop drive that
developed a bad boot sector -- worked fine until you shut the machine
*off*! :< )

as well as
quickly/effortlessly move drives to other boxes (e.g., if a box dies
*or* if a particular box needs "direct access" to that drive without
the intervening network fabric -- like when I have to lug it to a
client's place of business, etc.)

"The bigger the disk drive, the harder they crash".
- Me, after having about 40 GB of important data trashed
after I plugged my portable USB drive into a virus infested
customer's machine.

My worst experience came with a bug in a SCSI driver that tickled a
"problem" in some 4G drives I had (back when 4G drives were $1K/ea).
OS update caused the drive to get scrambled. (WTF???) No problem.
Thinking the drive had *died*, I installed it's cold backup in its
place -- and watched it suffer the same fate! (Yikes!!) Rolled
the OS back to previous release and restored both drives from MO
backups... Not an experience I ever want to repeat!

I carry two 16GB USB 3.0 flash drives for utilities, one 32GB USB 3.0
drive for ISO images, and a 1TB drive which has the customers image
backups on it. However, in the house and office, NAS is more
convenient.

I mirror *across* devices, not *within*. So, updating a mirror means
I need two boxes up and running.

Correct.

If you roll your own boxen (instead of COTS), you can build this sort of
functionality into the boxes directly. E.g., as I effectively operate
all as JBOD's, verifying two boxes have the same content requires
pulling data from *each* onto a *third*, performing the compare, then
moving on to the next file, etc.

With home-grown boxes, you can implement the comparison *on* the NAS
box so you only pull *one* copy of the content over the wire. It
also lets you store the "state" of your compares locally. So, you can
resume them later (instead of having to leave both boxes "up" until
the operation completes).

I picked up four more 4-drive, 1U boxes today to see if I can put some
of these bare drives "on-line" (or, at least, "one power switch away").

(and I still have to finish copying files onto the box I built last night...)

I'm currently using these little
Atom SBC's (about 9W total) as they are plenty fast enough to just
*store* stuff.

Nice. I've built my own but with the price of NAS drives with gigabit
ethernet on the decline, I just pay the price and be done with it.
Generally, I prefer Buffalo Tech products.

I've been discarding all of my COTS NAS kit. Too hard to keep track of
"how do I recover the files from *this* NAS if it dies". With the roll
your own approach, I can ensure I have a consistent disk format from
one box to the next: box dies? move disk and keep running.

[I don't have good feelings towards the folks supporting the Snaps so
would never tie myself to them for "support"]

I've noticed that companies with great products usually have miserable
support, while companies with mediocre products have great support.
There are a few that can do both, but not for extended periods. Too
much entropy I guess.

I think it is more an issue of "greed". AS IF their products were somehow
"worth" more than they really are. C'mon, guys... there's nothing magical
about this *functionality*!

For imaging, I use bare (3.5") SATA drives in a "dock".

Retch. The number one failure that I see are dead or dying hard disk
drives. I buy new drives, do pre-emptive drive replacements, demand
that customer do image backups, and have spares on hand. Putting
image backups on old or pull-out drives is just asking for a problem.
I do have plenty of old drives floating around the office, but those
are for quick tests, donation machines, and paperweights.

Using a dock doesn't force you to use old (or new!) drives. Rather, it
allows you to get the modularity of "external USB drives" *without*
having to keep a stack of enclosures, power supplies, etc. -- one for each
"packaged" drive.

I've a shoebox full of drives in a desk drawer that allow me to restore
any of the individual machines, here (of course, any changes since the
image aren't covered in that process).

In between image backups, I use one of several "continuous backup"
products. Favorites for Windoze are Acronis True Image Home and
Memeo. When I do an image backup, the "continuous backup" files on
the NAS box is cleared and I start over. The major problem with this
scheme is that files that I erased on the drive, still appear on an
image restore. I deal with that by having cron or Windoze scheduler
do a dir /s or ls -r directory list of the drive along with the
"continuous backup".

I email ls-alr.gz from each box to my "admin" account (on a server that
runs 24/7/365 and provides my core network services -- DNS, font, tftp,
etc.).

As I run four primary OS's, I can't rely on a COTS "product" to handle
all of my needs.

I used to take images just during the building of the box (i.e., an image
after the OS is installed; another after drivers have been added; another
after "core utilities" and "essential configuration"; etc.).

But, I've since developed a "portable" imaging tool that lets me image
drives without regard for the OS running on the drive. It compresses
the "unused" portion of the medium so the images are only as large as
the "need to be". Then, I update a restore partition on the disk
so I can effectively roll the machine back to that "snapshot" in a matter
of a few minutes.

This is a real win when I tweek something (or install something "new")
that breaks the machine...

 

[Sylvia Else]

On 10/01/2015 10:04 AM, John Larkin wrote:

I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless
task to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few
kilobytes or megabytes per file.

So things will just grow, and I'll just buy bigger and bigger hard
drives, which further reduces the likelyhood that I'll ever clean
things up. Unless I start collecting movies or something, I'm thinking
that 2 or 3 TB might be a lifetime supply of disk storage.

You're positing the existence of "enough disk space".

There ain't no such animal.

Sylvia.

 

[Tom Miller]

"Sylvia Else" <sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote in message
news:chj520F6votU1@mid.individual.net...

On 10/01/2015 10:04 AM, John Larkin wrote:


I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless
task to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few
kilobytes or megabytes per file.

So things will just grow, and I'll just buy bigger and bigger hard
drives, which further reduces the likelyhood that I'll ever clean
things up. Unless I start collecting movies or something, I'm thinking
that 2 or 3 TB might be a lifetime supply of disk storage.




You're positing the existence of "enough disk space".

There ain't no such animal.

Sylvia.

Five years from now we will be saying "remember back when JL said 3 TB is
all the memory anyone will ever need".

Just kidding John.

 

[Sylvia Else]

On 13/01/2015 10:58 AM, Tom Miller wrote:

"Sylvia Else" <sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote in message
news:chj520F6votU1@mid.individual.net...
On 10/01/2015 10:04 AM, John Larkin wrote:


I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless
task to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few
kilobytes or megabytes per file.

So things will just grow, and I'll just buy bigger and bigger hard
drives, which further reduces the likelyhood that I'll ever clean
things up. Unless I start collecting movies or something, I'm thinking
that 2 or 3 TB might be a lifetime supply of disk storage.




You're positing the existence of "enough disk space".

There ain't no such animal.

Sylvia.

Five years from now we will be saying "remember back when JL said 3 TB
is all the memory anyone will ever need".

Just kidding John.

I can remember opting for a 256 Mb disk, because the more expensive
320Mb offering seemed an unnecessary extravagance.

Sylvia,