I’ve been eating at Subway pretty often recently. They have a sub-of-the-day deal, $2.99 for a 6-inch, and also have any footlong sub for $5. Incredible, I know. It’s pretty much the cheapest meal option, cheaper than anything I could cook or microwave that has any semblance to real food.
Today, I had a footlong club for lunch (where, oddly enough, I ran into my roommate). Fast forward a couple hours to dinner time, and my roommate tells me he’s going back to Subway and convinces me to go back again too. Two feet of club sandwiches in one day.
Anyway, what I wanted to share is this: I always walk to Subway, and this map shows how far Subway is from my apartment. It’s less than two blocks, probably two minutes to walk. But my roommate offered to drive there. And we drove there. We drove two blocks to go to Subway.
Just wanted to share.
Food, General
Sounds simple, you’d think doing drive burn-in for reliability is something people do everyday on Macs, but either my Google-foo is off or there’s just not an easy way to stress test disks. A drive just died from under two weeks use (note to self: don’t buy Iomega), so I’m forcing myself to put the replacement I received this morning through its paces before committing any data to it.
This external drive, for reasons of compatibility and account restrictions, needs to eventually be formatted on my Mac to ext2, using ext2fsx (another post on the bugginess of ext2fsx later). Below is a list of ways I ran across to stress the disk.
Ideas for stressing a disk on OS X:
- format the disk with “secure erase” to write dummy data to the entire disk
- just format the disk ext2/fsck it; the inode placement should give good coverage of the disk without taking SO LONG*
- run `e2fsck` (fsck_ext2) with the -c -c option which invokes badblocks to read/write each block to find and track bad blocks.
I started with the first, but realized badblocks is probably a better tool for the job (is there a native BSD equivalent?) save for the fact that you don’t get much seeking going on. The second one might address that, or maybe reading the disk’s block device while doing something else might induce the contention to give you the necessary seeking.
*A side gripe: since disk capacities (I have a 500GB external drive) have been growing faster than disk bandwidth (perhaps my fault for using 480Mbps USB2), reading or writing an entire drive takes on the order of HOURS (over two hours twenty minutes best case for my setup, and easily twice that from my experience today). It just never really affected me until now, and I’m kind of annoyed.
Computers, General, OS X
OS X
I started this entry before leaving on a two week trip to China, as a reminder to rave about American Express. I thought I should at least post it, even without the happy ending I was expecting.
The day before leaving for China, I browsed some travel websites and found out that an American Express card will get you personal check cashing services at some Bank of China branches. Of course, the internet didn’t yield much information, so I gave American Express’s Global Assist line a call. I was floored that the lady offered to call their China offices and the Bank of China to determine if my cards would work for cashing personal checks.
So, wow. The intent was great. All this nice service. I think I called on a Saturday, expected a call back Sunday night (Monday morning in China). Unfortunately, that call never came and I left on my trip.
General
I’m a diehard OS X user, but keep around a desktop for nightly jobs and file storage. I’m rather unlucky with disk drives (killed one just yesterday), so I’ve been meaning to move to ZFS. FUSE on Linux doesn’t feel too trustworthy right now (right, I’ll trust drivers not in the mainline kernel), and having finally gotten used to BSDisms, I’m not sure starting fresh with Solaris is the right path.
Long story short, I decided to try FreeBSD 7.0 (ZFS built in!). The last time I used FreeBSD was to shape traffic in a network testbed. This time, I’m looking for dead-simple usability. I want my WinPrinter to work plug and play, X to start outta the box in high res, and all that jazz.
First step, downloading the cd images and making a dvd image from that.
More later…
Computers, General
freebsd, zfs