Derek Bodner’s Blog

I hope I’m not the only one to get a chuckle out of this:

November 24, 2007 · The MS Explorer, a small cruise ship strikes an iceberg and sinks hours later in icy waters off Antarctica.

Here are things I think I think through 9 games of the NBA season.

* This team really, really struggles in the half court set. When Kyle Korver’s not on the floor, there’s absolutely no spacing. Jason Smith helps a little, but his impact’s not enough, and his playing time’s not long enough, to truly fix the problem. The team’s filled with guards who like to go 1-1 and drive, and forwards with no discernible offensive abilities. Bad combination.
* This team has a hard time taking advantage of Andre Miller’s skillset. Miller’s best with cutters, shooters, and big men who can finish. We have none of the above. Andre Iguodala’s gotten better at catch and shoot, but it’s not his strong point. Opposite him we run Willie Green and Rodney Carney, who offensively are very similar. Both tend to be better at 1-1 situations, neither are really catch and shoot threats (although they sometimes try to be), and neither move all that well without the ball (either coming off of screens or cutting to the basket). And the big men? Let’s not get started. Reggie Evans is a nice piece to have coming off your bench, but he really clogs things up offensively if in there for an extended period of time. Some might say Andre Miller’s not playing well, and he probably isn’t. But he also doesn’t really fit this team.
* Andre Iguodala’s pressing a bit, and it’s been showing recently. The turnovers are a real problem, and are part him not having the ballhandling to be a #1 option, and part because he’s trying to do too much and doesn’t have the necessary pieces around him. His jumpshot, both midrange and longrange, look like they’ve improved, and he’s considerably better at shooting off the dribble than he’s ever been in the past. The real thing holding him back from being a #1 scorer at this point in his career isn’t his jumpshot anymore, but his body control. If he had the body control of Louis Williams he’d be a 25 point per game scorer in this league. He’s great at getting in the paint, and gets to the line a lot because of that. But he’s not a great finisher after contract.
* Louis Williams, on the other hand, has tremendous body control. The regularity and percentage at which he completes difficult drives in traffic is astounding. This is the reason (combined with his sick first step) that he looks like he can be a legit scorer in this league. I wasn’t completely sold on Louis last year, but I’m really warming up to him. His offensive game isn’t just ripe with potential, but it’s very advanced for a 21 year old. Deep range, great first step, good finisher, hesitation moves, midrange game. And what impresses me the most? While he’s obviously a scoring point guard, he doesn’t look like the type that’s either going to habitually shoot early in the shotclock or take shots out of the rhythm of the offense. I would definitely like to see him get a more prominent role.
* Willie Green and Rodney Carney are both very disappointing. I suppose I’m not disappointed in Willie, because he’s the same player he’s always been. They’re both black holes offensively. When they touch the ball, if they don’t pass it back immediately, they’re going 1-1 with their man. Neither of them contribute much else. Getting to the line? Rebounding? Passing? Not so much. When their shots are off, they’re liabilities. I give Rodney a little more slack because he seems to be playing solid defense.
* Can’t fault Reggie Evans. He’s doing what he’s asked to do. Problem is he’s asked to do it as a starter rather than a 15-20 minute per game sub.
* I’ve warmed up to Jason Smith. I was worried about his release point on his jump shot and drives, but that’s turned out not to be too much of an issue. With his mobility, hustle, and range, he’s going to be an asset. Not convinced it’s as a starter, but an asset nonetheless.
* Sammy started off really playing well, but has come back to earth the last few games. I have little hope for Sam, and he’s made some plays this year (fouling Bargnani in 3 pt range, not boxing Bosh out on a free throw) that remind me why he frustrates me more than any player since Derrick Coleman was here the first time.
* Thad Young is…..well….Raw. But I believe he’s our best fit, skillwise to play next to Iguodala and is our future starting 3. Right now he’s got a place on this team just by hustling, rebounding, playing defense, and being an opportunistic scorer. The effort is there, and that’s going to make him a contributor even when shots aren’t falling. Just try not to do too much, and limit putting the ball on the floor to when you’re by yourself. Please.

In the end, this is still a bad team. They play hard, and they’re a good group of guys, but they’re overmatched from a talent perspective nearly every time they step on the court. They’re fun to watch, and they probably won’t end up with one of the five worst records in the league, but they’re not in a real competing state yet, and probably won’t be for a few years.

I have a server at home that I used as a Samba server, so I can access my stuff from my desktop/laptop, as well as share stuff with Elyssa. I have it setup with two drives, one that I store the primary stuff on (shares, home dir’s, etc), and the other that I rsync the data to every night. I don’t want to set this up as a RAID1. The server only has 2 drive slots, so I don’t want it to be a RAID 1 in case there’s corruption, or in case of the “oh shit” deletion. Now if either of these happen, I have until the wee hours of the morning to catch it and restore from last night’s sync.

Anywho, I wanted to do a re-install, for various reasons (not the least of which was my growing dislike of CentOS). So I did one final sync over to the backup drive, booted off a livecd, and formated the primary drive (as I’ve got everything on the backup drive). Booted into my new environment, set everything up, went to mount the backup drive, only to see that I didn’t notice that CentOS had originally formated both as LVM’s. I haven’t used LVM’s much before, but didn’t think it would be a problem. I ran lvscan, saw the volume was being recognized, went to mount it, and it yelled at me to define the partition type. o_O. It was an ext3 partition … it should have mounted just fine. So I tried to defined the ext3 type, and said it couldn’t mount it (bad superblock was the error, I believe). Ah crap. I just formated one copy I had to re-install the OS. If this copy was toast, I was screwed. I had everything on this server. Music. Family Photos. Important documents. I just sat there staring at my computer for a good two or three minutes.

After the shock wore off, I took an external drive I had, and immediately created a mirror with dd, just to be safe. I then ran PhotoRec on the drive, just to see what I could recover if all else went bad. I was actually impressed with how much PhotoRec did recover, as it was most of the known file types. It was in completely random names, and I would have spent months going through the Photos figuring out what’s what (there are plenty of programs to rename mp3’s/music from the tags, so that wouldn’t have been a problem). But at least I had my data (for the most part).

Then I went back to playing with the ‘bad’ drive. After a while of trying various things, I just ran an fsck on it. Boom. logical volume mounted no problem. Copied data back to the primary drive, formated the backup drive, sync’d the stuff over, and I was back in business. Turned out to be nothing major, but it certainly had me scared for a little while. A drive failure immediately after I removed the redundant data would just be my luck.

After getting the new OS up and running, I installed smokeping on it, and have it testing google, and my 2 personal external servers I have. Comcast has been having some really high latency in the mornings, and whenever I call them up to complain, all I ever get is “we’re not seeing anything on our end”. Now I have something I can verify it with.

I also then installed vmware-server on my newly installed server. I was going to install VirtualBox, as it kinda irks me that vmware can’t run truly headless, as it is dependent on various X11 libs, but it turns out VirtualBox is as well. I guess I could have gone the Xen route, but I haven’t used it in quite a while, and I wanted something I could setup quickly. OpenVZ was out since I wanted both windows and linux. I currently setup a windows vps that I run 24/7, both for applications I use that may require windows, and for my family to login to so they can access the samba share and see any pictures I place on it. I then setup a ‘gentoo server’ for my brother so he can get his feet wet with Linux (without breaking anything of mine). I have gentoo server in quotes because I really just created the virtual environment, and booted it off a minimal install cd iso. If he’s going to learn, he should do so from the ground up.

A few weeks ago gmail began rolling out IMAP support. As I previously mentioned, this was a show stopper for me. I previously signed up for hosted gmail to host my personal domain on, changed my MX records to point to gmail, but then forwarded a copy to my personal server so I could still read/respond/organize via an IMAP client. I basically used gmail as a spam filter and backup, and the the IMAP server as my primary. Now with gmail offering IMAP, I’ve now completely eliminated my server, and use gmail exclusively. That’s not to say there aren’t still a few problems I have, but they’re relatively minor.
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I ran into this little tidbit today while browsing OSNews. Apparently, Nintendo has decided to officially end support for the NES after 24 years, as supplies for replacement parts have as become depleted. I’m sure everyone’s reaction is pretty much the same as mine. They still support the NES?

I really do have to commend Nintendo here. Supporting a product over a 3 decade span is an achievement, especially in today’s day and age. I’m impressed, at least.

I ran into this discussion on a mailing list, and it really shows the problem I have with Theo de Raadt. I’m not going to go into too much technical detail, as it’s not all that relevant, but basically somebody vaguely mentioned the security benefits virtualization can provide. He didn’t really go into detail about his scenario, but it got the following response from Theo:

You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a
worldwide collection of software engineers who can’t write operating
systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around
and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes.

Now, it’s clear what happened. The original poster was commenting on the security benefits of running different services basically in their own Sandbox, if you will. Taking one physical machine, slicing it into a few Virtual machines, then running bind, apache, mysql, etc in their own virtual machine is inherently going to be more secure than running them all on one server. However, Theo’s viewpiont was that each service on its own physical box is always going to be more secure than running it on virtual machines on one server. Neither side is wrong, it was simply a misunderstanding.

However, the problem is Theo immediately runs off into name calling and belittling the original poster, as you can see from the quote above. There is no misunderstanding with Theo. You either agree with him, or you’re an idiot. To Theo’s credit a majority of the time he’s right, but it’s the attitude that costs him support. Theo would be a much more likable figure if his debates progressed past the 5th grade level of maturity. It’s not bravado he’s displaying. It’s not tough love. It’s arrogance, which absolutely drives me nuts.

That’s not to say I don’t like OpenBSD. It’s a great product, and Theo does a great job. That’s not even to say Theo’s a bad person. But it’s definitely a character flaw, IMO.

I recently installed Gentoo on my desktop at home. The installation went fairly easily (although obviously time consuming), but as I sat there watching lines fly past my screen during an emerge, I realized how much I have a complete love-hate relationship with Gentoo.
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Dropped Elyssa off at 30th street station. As I was walking through the station to go back to my car, I walked by a newsstand, and noticed a magazine (I forget which one), which had Tom Cruise on the cover and said:
“Tom and Kate: 1 year!
Working through things”

Well, congratulations. What an amazing accomplishment. I mean, 1 year. You really deserve an award.