clunkity

100

admin — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:03:54 +0000

i currently have 100 followers on @drudgingtonpost. took two months and zero effort. not bad i guess. lets see how far it goes without actually pushing it. i’ve had a couple RTs…wish there were more. its common that people follow, then unfollow quickly after. i think people think they are following the official tweets or something. i scare them away. according to twittercounter i’m at a rate of 5 followers/day. i guess? seems high. some other interesting stats at that page. actually, the graph is retarded. the spacing of dates on the x axis isn’t uniform. wtf.

how long will my flash drive last?

admin — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:02:05 +0000

so i just built a new file server. i’m trying to keep it as low power as possible. it’s quite minimal, with an atom processor, a mini itx intel motherboard and a wd “green” hard drive. that’s pretty much it. it should be drawing less than 30W and probably closer to 20W. i need to measure it. anyways, i want to keep the hard drive strictly for data, thus keeping the os separate. so i decided to install ubuntu server on a flash drive. pretty straightforward and easy. however, i got concerned about how long this flash drive would last if you run an os off of it. they only have a finite number of write cycles before being unusable.

usually this number is 10,000 to 100,000 writes per memory block (lets call them cells). luckily, many flash drives these days have built in controllers to implement “wear leveling”. this spreads its writes evenly over the memory cells so you’re not writing a single cell over and over again. it will write a different one, then another different one, and so on. knowing this, lets try to make a rough estimate of how long my 4GB flash drive will last.

first i set up my / mount with the noatime option to minimizes the kjournald writes since i’m using ext3. everything else is pretty much default. logging is still on and no redirect writes. my server is still a basic setup. just hosting a couple of sites and my file shares. given this, i used iostat to view how many writes were occurring during normal operation. from an initial boot (a lot of writes) to 24 hours of operation, it showed that there were 1.89 Blk_wrtn/s. 1.89 “blocks” written per second over 24 hours. these blocks are 512 bytes, or 512 memory cells. now ideally i would run this for a while to get a more accurate number, but i’m too lazy and i just want a ballpark number (within a magnitude). and 1.89 seems little to me (my data drive shows 78.07 blocks written/s right now). so to be a little more conservative, lets say my server eventually gets busier and writes 8 blocks per second. more than four times what its doing right now. right now my 4 GB flash drive has about 2 GB free. since my flash drive uses dynamic wear leveling, it only distributes writes over free space. so we have 2 GB to work with.

time for math. 60*60*24*365.25=31557600 seconds in a year. at the rate of 8 blocks per second, that’s 31557600*8=252460800 blocks per year or 129259929600 bytes per year (512 bytes per block). thats 129260 MB or 129 GB. with 2 GB to wear level over, that’s about 65 writes per memory cell over a year. that’s it! if they guarantee 10,000 writes per cell, then it would take about 153 years to reach that number. for 100,000 writes/cell, 1538 years! if i want to make sure my flash drive lasts 15 years, i can afford 80 blocks written per second. perhaps i shouldn’t be so worried about destroying my flash drive.

am i doing this math right? am i missing anything?

bump

admin — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 13:40:27 +0000

obama isn’t the number one word of the day for once!

Drudge Report top 24h words: ahmadinejad obama us debate election iran its plan plutonium http://tr.im/l60J

Huffington Post top 24h words: mousavi ahmadinejad house under arrest iran latest updates cell http://tr.im/l60J

heck. wasn’t even in theh top 10 for huffington post! too bad it’s always bad news…

kansas lapse

admin — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 05:24:18 +0000

about 175 miles of the 300 miles i drove one day. notice how boring it is. now imagine it 30x slower. that’s how boring it really is. i added a passion pit song. it’s fitting because i played them a lot while driving. yes, those are bug guts on the windshield.

i hate kansas

admin — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 05:10:22 +0000

i hate kansas. originally i was thinking, hey, kansas would be an interesting place to visit. it’s something different. and yea, that was true for the first couple of days. it was initially interesting seeing nothingness. but nothingness gets old pretty damn fast. “hey, it’s a big field of wheat.” whatever “hey, i can actually see the horizon.” whatever. “hey, i only drive in angles multiple of 90 degrees.” whatever. can it get any more boring than driving flat and straight miles on end? the end being falling of this flat earth. and i think the only thing people do here is go to walmart and ride jet skis. please correct me if i’m wrong.

fine, i don’t blame you kansas. i’m sure you’re just rubbing me the wrong way.

bike to work lapse

admin — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:54:09 +0000

so here’s my video of my “time lapse” of my bike to work with wes. on bike to work day. this time i actually used a video recorder, vado, that i got for christmas. turned out decent. i even added a soundtrack! haha. when i uploaded it to youtube, they were like “hey cool you used copyrighted music! but don’t worry, you don’t have to delete it. we’ll just put ads all over it and you can’t do anything about it!” it was fun.

bike to work day

admin — Fri, 15 May 2009 20:44:55 +0000

for bike to work day, i biked to work. didn’t start it until a few miles in and stopped it at the bike to work day pit stop. ha you don’t know where i work/live! i should have a video up soon too.

View bike to work day in a larger map

bike lapse

admin — Thu, 14 May 2009 02:19:11 +0000

decided to try a time lapse from my bike. tried it out on the shorter hill ride (which always destroys me). basically, it’s what my crotch sees. it worked out ok. got in the way a little which gets annoying. we’ll see if i can do better.

tweeting drudgington post

admin — Mon, 04 May 2009 01:02:12 +0000

i decided to start a twitter account for drudgington post. just to post latest headlines and what not. got to try out the twitter api. straight forward. we’ll see how much it actually works. i’m worried about duplicated headlines. need to figure out something more robust. @drudgingtonpost.

touch ups

admin — Sun, 03 May 2009 15:50:51 +0000

nice. i had a productive blog fixing session. lets see. first i made an actual about page. (but i just straight copied my previous post). changed the comment section to not be ugly. got the tag links working (this one for ‘clunkity’) so they actually display the posts. tweaked the navigation. and made a footer! looking decent!