I hate iPhotos

When I got my first Mac, which is the alum MacBook, I got really excited on using iPhotos and imported nearly 10,000 photos from different collections. The default setting is to use a single library file to manage everything. Importing is very simple and that's why it's deadly. Now the problems I have with iPhotos: very inconvenient when sharing with PC, exporting does not write EXIF tags so your taken time are not preserved, which is really terrible. Now I cannot search on how to switch existing photos from using an iPhoto database to an external source (photos are stored as their own files). There are some photo workflows to do this but it's very tedious and not practical for the number of events and photos I have. From my experience, I find that Mac software have huge hype that attract users, like me, but they're not the best or perfect by any measures and filled with bugs, defects, and feature requests. I guess I was led into believing that software on Mac somehow just works, like many Mac fanboys would like you to believe. I should know from my own experience as a software developer, no software is perfect, no matter on which platform.

rrdtool and No font found

Recently we did an upgrade to CentOS 5.3 and rrdtool stopped working, specifically, rrdgraph. The reason is that there is no font installed in the system (not sure why, you can check it via "fc-list"). To fix this, do an "yum install xorg-x11-fonts-Type1" and make sure you see some fonts listed in "fc-list". Also assume you already have fontconfig.

apf vs. newly assigned IP address

If you try to ping/traceroute and got this message, there are several places to look. First, disable the firewall and if it works again then you know it's the firewall. In this case, APF. An call to "iptables -L -n" might be able to narrow down the root cause.

PING 173.x.x.x 56(84) bytes of data.
ping: sendmsg: Operation not permitted
ping: sendmsg: Operation not permitted
ping: sendmsg: Operation not permitted

Edit conf.apf

Switch this off (from 1 to 0) and "service apf restart".

# Block all ipv4 address space marked reserved for future use (unassigned),
# such networks have no business talking on the Internet. However they may at
# some point become live address space. The USE_RD option further in this file
# allows for dynamic updating of this list on every full restart of APF. Refer
# to the 'internals/reserved.networks' file for listing of address space.
BLK_RESNET="0"

Will WolframAlpha make the lazy lazier?

WolframAlpha is launching right now. I just tried a few and see the cheat sheet. The interface is nice and the results were presented beautifully and logically. I'll definitely use it for its designed purposes and Yahoo for the rest of search queries.

If this type of computational search engine were widely available like it is now when I was in school, I probably would not spend any time trying to solve the problem manually and just punching numbers instead. For example, why should I know one gallon is 128 ounces, 1 acre = 43560 sqft? I suspect the same question can be asked for other search engines, including generic engines like Google and Yahoo. Stupid people will become stupider because of the vast amount of information that is available to consume without any thoughtful digestion.

However, on the other side, the argument can be made to reduce the time we spend on low-end or fundamental computations and focus our effort into solving a bigger problem. This is true when you have a good foundation and already been trained or knew how to get the information. Knowing what is possible is more important than the steps to implement it.

In summary, each generation has a new set of tools that help (or prevent, depending on who you talk to) them to solve problems. My suggestion to kids, students in highschool and university undergraduates is to learn the formulas, the theories and practice them manually with pencil and paper. Then once you really understand them, you can use tools, software to solve them for you. Conversely, if you depends on the tools too early, you will never bother to understand the basics and when a more challenging problem that is beyond the scope of these tools, you'd be screwed and at lost for any direction toward a solution.

Getting started with EC2 tutorial

I just start playing with EC2 today and these are some useful notes and observation. The small standard instance is quite slow, only scores 50 under Unixbench-WHT. Our quads E5405 are around 410+, Q9550 is at 650-750. I also was confused about S3 versus EBS. The console management makes life much easier, but could be improved even further. This is what you do after attaching a EBS volume to an instance:

mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdx mkdir /mnt/data-store mount /dev/sdx /mnt/data-store

For CentOS AMI (ami-0459bc6d), you need to run this to be able to customize the AMI and build your own

depmod -a modprobe loop

As for performance, it's pretty disappointing indeed. I ran Unixbench WHT 4.1 and small instance only got 51 (CentOS 5 32-bit) and the large instance got 111 (CentOS 5 64-bit). If you run an instance 24/7, it's much more expensive for the same performance of a dedicated server. Our quad core servers usually get 600+ on the same test. The price you pay for EC2 is "on-demand", meaning that you need to automate it to the point scaling up during peak is seamlessly and not having to run a single or even multiple instances all the time.