Facebook.com/TedCarnahan
LinkedIn.com/in/TedCarnahan
Twitter.com/TedCarnahan
The Worst Show in the History of Television: Cop Rock
Jennifer was in the break room at work today when VH1 was showing “I love the 90s” for the year 1990. Apparently there was a show that ran for 11 episodes in 1990 called “Cop Rock.” This show fused a gritty television drama about police work with campy original musical scores to create the hideous love child of Cannibal: The Musical and Cops. (Another site describes it as “part ‘Real Stories of the Highway Patrol’ and part Broadway musical.”) It sounded too good to be true – at first I couldn’t believe that something this awful had actually been made, let alone broadcast.
Without further ado, I give you “Let’s Be Careful Out There.”
Dwell on this: Someone paid money to make this. Someone thought this was a good idea. Just let that sink in. There. That’s better.
Mothers be cryin’, man. Life in the hood really isn’t no piece of pie, is it?
If anyone can find me video of the purported scene where the courtroom jury turns into a Gospel choir singing “He’s Guilty!” I will give them $5.
Air 1 and the Copyright Royalty Board
I wrote earlier on the injustice of the Copyright Royalty Board’s recent retroactive ruling regarding internet radio. I just heard back yesterday from Kenneth Turner at EMF Broadcasting, the corporation behind Air 1 and K-LOVE. Here’s what he had to say:
I appreciate your concern. At this time, it’s too early to tell what, if
any, impact this would have on Air 1. That said, we are working
diligently with the various parties involved and hope to come to an
reasonable solution.If this ruling goes through in its current state, it is entirely
possible that many webcasters would have to shut down due to the high
costs involved. We hope it doesn’t come to that and would appreciate
your prayers for a favorable outcome so that Air 1 can keep on
streaming.
Most people’s concern about the Copyright Royalty Board ruling is for small internet radio stations, not a corporate giant like EMF. Nevertheless, it sounds like even large terrestrial broadcasters like EMF might be forced to shut down their internet radio feeds unless something is done soon.
Freezing Hard Drives Really Does Work
I always thought that it was a bit silly that some people tried putting their mostly-broken hard drives in the freezer to get them working to rescue the data, but I’m a believer now. I had some important data to get off of an old drive, and with the help of 24 hours in the freezer, the Ubuntu alternate install CD (which doubles as a rescue CD) and some patience, I have emerged victorious! In the process, I learned…
- Cold hard drives work better.
- The Ubuntu install CD doesn’t have
scp, so don’t plan on it being there to transfer files over the network. - Having a spare disk with a small vfat partition is really handy when you need to copy data someplace locally and you don’t have much time.
ddis not invincible – it gets hung up on I/O errors just like lots of other tools- Don’t stop just because the drive started clicking again – I was about to give up, but then I tried one last time and got all of the data off cleanly. Of course, Your Mileage May Vary.
Sandbagging in Rocheport
Rocheport, MO is on the Missouri River, and the river is rising fast. It’s expected to rise another 15 feet, and it’s already 5 feet above flood stage from what I’ve heard. Boone County Fire Protection is asking for volunteers to report to the firehouse in Rocheport to fill sandbags, so if you’re not doing anything, they’re going to be out there working 24 hours a day until the threat has passed. Jennifer and I and some other friends will be out there tonight.
Speed up laptop boot & resume times with large MySQL databases
I’m in the interesting position of using my laptop for both programming work and day-to-day web surfing. I’m the lead developer for SAGrader, a web-based computationally intelligent essay grading system. We use MySQL for the database, and naturally I run a copy on my laptop to develop with. Unfortunately, MySQL and laptop power-saving goes together like chocolate and arsenic.
Ubuntu solves this problem by stopping MySQL on each suspend and starting it again on each resume. This is horribly bad for performance if you have a large database like I do because each MySQL server startup incurs almost a minute of mysqlcheck running. Rather than disable this, here’s a way to make it hurt less.
- Install the schedutils package:
sudo aptitude install schedutils - Modify /etc/mysql/debian-start and change the “MYCHECK=…” link to this:
MYCHECK="ionice -c3 /usr/bin/mysqlcheck --defaults-file=/etc/mysql/debian.cnf" - Restart the MySQL server to observe the effects
As long as you are using the CFQ kernel scheduler (default on Ubuntu Edgy and newer kernels), ionice can set mysqlcheck’s IO priority to idle, which means your laptop is much more responsive much sooner. Well worth the effort in my opinion!
Crank up your Ubuntu
I just read this article on xsol.se and tried out a few of the changes on my Ubuntu Edgy system. The results were impressive! Just changing the boot process to run in parallel (idea #2) improved my time from power-on to a login screen from 40-ish seconds to about 15! I can probably do better if I don’t start my rather large MySQL server (used for development at work) on every boot too.
I also recommend disabling Java from OpenOffice – that alone improved startup time of Writer from 10-ish seconds to about 2 seconds.
Any other creative tips to make Ubuntu even faster?
Edit: – I’d also recommend trying prelink. Prelink links your applications to their runtime libraries in advance so that they start faster. It’s not for everyone – it’s not necessary in Feisty, and it might break your system (but if it breaks, you do get to keep both pieces!) but it has made a tangible improvement in application startup speed for me. This guide has a quick tutorial on enabling prelink.
Edit 2: – If you run a large MySQL database on your desktop / laptop, you might want to check out my post on using ionice to de-prioritize mysqlcheck
Copyright 2006-2010 Ted Carnahan. Except where noted, the content of this site is licensed under CC-SA-BY.