Dazed and confused in the age of new media

We've all been talking for a long time about how the old media establishment of a few astronomically popular bands will crumble and give way to a plethora of smaller acts. That's all well and good, and you can see evidence of it in the declining record sales and the rise of music blogs like discodust.blogspot.com and discoworkout.com. The trend is more and more people are spending more time listening to music and searching for talented artists and sharing them with their friends.

However, my experience is that I discover an artist I like, and I'm unable to purchase their music through the large channels I'm familiar with. Let's take Kill the Noise, for example, who is a DJ somewhere in California who happens to have made a remix I like. I go to his site, and it's all about booking information for getting him to come and perform for you. He has several of his tracks in a Flash music player at the top of the page. I'm listening to it as I write this post, and it's good. There are even links to a handful of downloads, some for free and others for pay. But I can't find a single link to an album for purchase.

It makes sense: the album isn't a format that fits the model of new media. Why should an artist release 8 or so tracks all at once in a seemingly arbitrary collection? Why not publish as soon as each track is finished to keep the buzz alive, rather than waiting two years for new music? However, here I am with my wallet, trying to figure out how to purchase roughly $10 worth of music without spending too much time looking for it. I guess there's no place for this in the new media regime. In order to find all the new hip stuff, you've got to have boatloads of time to comb the music blogs and download hit singles.

How to configure smartmontools on an Ubuntu system

So I'm having some hard drive troubles, and I'm not sure what the cause is. I've had two incidents so far, each of which is precipitated by my music hanging and the Amarok UI freezing and then unfreezing up to 30 seconds later. The first time was quite catastrophic, and I had to restore from my previous night's backup. However, I took the opportunity to do a complete system reinstall, which blew away my cron backup script configuration. So unfortunately, this time around, I didn't have a backup to restore from.

When I noticed the symptoms, I immediately made an incremental backup and rebooted to run fsck. Predictably, fsck reported a few nasty filesystem errors, but it mostly had to do with some unmodified files checked into version control and some system fonts.

Anyway, this experience prompted me to finally setup smartmontools so I can keep track of drive errors and identify if the failure is a controller problem, a connection problem, or a drive problem.

There are many ways to configure smartmontools/smartd, and you can read about them in the man page and across the Internet. These instructions are, in my opinion, the ones that require the least modifications to what Ubuntu sets up for you by default.

So first, do the usual sudo apt-get install smartmontools .

This installs postfix, which I configured as an Internet Site, and left with most of the defaults filled in.

The package comes with an init script that lives at /etc/init.d/smartmontools and is set to run at the defaults runlevel when installed. However, if you try running it manually via sudo /etc/init.d/smartmontools , you will notice that it prints nothing and fails to start a smartd background process. It turns out that you need to edit /etc/default/smartmontools and uncomment the lines they have there, as shown below:

# Defaults for smartmontools initscript (/etc/init.d/smartmontools)
# This is a POSIX shell fragment

# List of devices you want to explicitly enable S.M.A.R.T. for
# Not needed (and not recommended) if the device is monitored by smartd
#enable_smart="/dev/hda /dev/hdb"

# uncomment to start smartd on system startup
start_smartd=yes

# uncomment to pass additional options to smartd on startup
smartd_opts="--interval=1800"

Especially without start_smartd=yes, nothing will work!

Now, before we're off to the races, we want to go check out /etc/smartd.conf, where most of the real configuration we care about happens. Here is the relevant section of my configuration, with comments about each option.

# DEVICESCAN: Scan for ATA and SCSI devices.  All lines after this one are
#   ignored.
# -o on: Enable online data collection.
# -S on: Enable automatic attribute autosave.
# -s (S/../.././02|L/../../6/03): Do a short self-test every night between
#   2-3am and a long self-test every Sunday between 3-4am.
# -H: If the device says it's not healthy, send mail.  This occurs if any
#   prefail attributs are past their thresholds.
# -l selftest: Send mail if, since the last check, a self test has found
#   additional errors.
# -l error: Send mail if the error log has new errors.
# -f: Send mail if the disk has "failed", ie it's total usage is above the
#   threshold set by the manufacturer.  Indication of age, not check failures.
# -m: Address to which to send email.
# -M...: Script to run to send mail and do other things.

# This line is broken up for posting, but I would remove it from the actual
# config file.
DEVICESCAN -o on -S on -s (S/../.././02|L/../../6/03) -H -l selftest -l error -f \
  -m reid.kleckner@gmail.com -M exec /usr/share/smartmontools/smartd-runner

The idea behind this configuration is to be a little bit less verbose than the default of -a, which monitors changes in various parameters, but still generate an email when things go wrong. The results of the self-tests are stored on the hard drive, so if you're having trouble with a drive later, you can check out its bill of health and test record with smartctl -a.

Portable Native Client

Hey, this is cool:

http://blog.chromium.org/2010/03/native-client-and-web-portability.html
http://nativeclient.googlecode.com/svn/data/site/pnacl.pdf

This is the first I've seen it disclosed publicly, but the summary is that Google plans to make Native Client (NaCl) portable with some kind of verifier on LLVM bitcode. Now, if you're familiar with LLVM, then you may have heard the claim that LLVM bitcode from a C compiler is not platform neutral. The argument is that you always have things like #ifdefs that check for the target architecture and that most C compilers (maybe including Clang? I'm not sure) lower things like sizeof(int) in the frontend. Therefore, they claim, it is essentially impossible to compile C and C++ down to a portable representation.

However, it seems doable for NaCl, because you're not dealing with arbitrary programs. In their writeup, they explicitly say you should eliminate things like architectural #ifdefs. They also state up front that sizeof(int) == sizeof(long) == sizeof(void*) == 4. I'm not sure how that fits in with x86_64. They also state that the data model assumes that integers are little endian, which isn't exactly portable either.

Still, it's a cool project.