Author: cosmo

It was another fun Christmas. As we waited for everyone to get situated, I took a few “artistic” shots of our gifts.

Kyra ended up with the most gifts, but only by one. Laralee of all people had the second-most. I suspect it was partly because both of them bought and wrapped gifts for themselves.

‘Twas the year for toilet seats. Back in 1995, for our first Christmas together, Laralee gave me a toilet seat wrapped in a box that was probably 4x4x5 feet. She’d taken it home from a white-elephant party a few days earlier and thought my apartment could use a nicer seat. Well, this year I decided to return the favor because there are some seats in our house that are well-worn. I bought her a three-pack, thinking I was terribly clever, but she had the same idea and gave me one as well. Now we actually have too many toilet seats! I suppose one can be a spare in case of emergency.

Alex ended up with a few practical gifts, like an SSD drive, an electric razor, and a computer (gaming) mouse. But he was pretty happy about them.

Zack scored a bunch of toys, of course, and was thrilled.

After the dust settled and the wrapping paper cleared away, Laralee settled in for her usual pastime: playing Hay Day. Gotta keep those chickens fed!

The boys have left to play with friends, so I guess that means it’s time for me to crack out my new Dominion expansion game and play with Kyra. Woo hoo!

Today was our annual Zing Christmas party, and it was fun as always. I came to work wearing a Santa hat (of course) but Nick outdid me with a full Christmas suit:

We all spent the morning finishing up a few projects, and after waiting for Nick to finish a conference call with a client, we ordered some pizzas and got down to business. We chatted and ate, and then it was time to open gifts. The whole team surprised me with a really nice box containing a dozen Jinux 64 install DVD’s. It was, of course, a big joke related to my blog post a few weeks ago celebrating the completion of a 64-bit version of my custom Linux operating system, Jinux.

The second big box for me was an even bigger surprise: nice polo shirts for the whole Jinux 64 launch team! Yep, there was a shirt for everyone, custom printed with what I guess is the new Jinux 64 logo.

Mike had gifts for everyone. He said he’d found them on a gag gift web site called stupid.com. Who knew?

Ben scored a little box of “emergency underwear” that you can pull out of an easy-to-use dispenser in dire need. He modeled a pair of them, and you can see that it would indeed have to be quite an emergency to get these bad boys out:

Nick came away with a set of rain goggles: glasses with actual working windshield wipers and a bright LED to guide you on those rainy nights. It’s hard to see the wipers in this blurry phone-camera shot, but trust me when I say they were as amazing as you’d expect.

Brent was happy to end up with a headband mullet. Too bad the hair color didn’t quite match.

And Brian is proud of his gigantic fist cupholder:

I shudder to think about what Mike’s family will receive for Christmas.

We all pulled on our Jinux 64 Launch Team shirts and started the annual ping-pong tournament and foosball tournament.

We also played some games: Munchkin and Settlers of Catan came out, along with a six-pound bag of peanut butter M&M’s. All in all, you really can’t go wrong with that kind of lineup.

A good time once again. Merry Christmas to Zing!

We keep hearing that sitting all day is pretty much killing everyone. A little over three years ago I decided to look into the fad to use a standing desk. The project didn’t work out; after a few days of standing all day, my legs and lower back weren’t very happy.

I think the trick might be to ease into a standing desk; rather than going from sitting all day to immediately standing all day, it makes sense to do it a few hours at a time. To accomplish this, I’d need an adjustable desk so I could bounce between the two positions. Cinder blocks were out.

Luckily Noah (in the office across from mine) is out on Christmas vacation, and he said I could borrow his adjustable desk. I moved it to my desk, and it took just a few minutes to set it up. Basically it’s a platform for keyboard and monitors, and it has several positions between flush with the desk and full standing position.

I’ve been alternately standing and sitting most of the day, and I must say it’s been pretty good. It’s nice to get off my feet for a little while, and then to stand and stretch for a bit. I’ll keep at it for a few more days to see how it goes, and then decide whether it’s worth the investment…

On Saturday we decided to visit a local furniture store to look for some banana chairs since ours are wearing out. Right inside the front door were three massage chairs that practically begged someone to sit in them. Unless, of course, that someone was a child. There were yellow signs on each chair that said ADULTS ONLY. So naturally Zack, Kyra, and Laralee plopped down.

Laralee really enjoyed it.

Kyra was in ecstasy. Or maybe dead.

Zack’s chair was the most advanced and included some sort of arm massage device:

His legs were also clamped in, and when he started pushing buttons the clamps closed on his limbs and started working the muscles. One wonders what might happen if there was a malfunction in the master computer– you could be trapped in this thing while it slowly crushed you. Our planet won’t be conquered by killer robots; our AI overlords will trick everyone into massage chairs and then knead them to death.

The best part? The control panels were almost certainly more advanced than the computers that ran the Space Shuttle. There were about 30 buttons (no kidding) and a full display showing different massage zones. Crazy. Laralee couldn’t figure it out but after pushing enough buttons she was able to get the chair to work her over.

Despite how amazing these chairs were, the cheap model was in the neighborhood of $1,900 so we decided we’d have to pass.

Last weekend we all sat down as a family to figure out what we wanted to do for our Christmas card this year. It’s tough because our cards are pretty well-known, and it’s becoming more difficult to be creative with the goofy photo we put on the front. After some brainstorming, we came up with an idea and went to a local park to work on it. I won’t give away the card just yet– I’ll post that after Christmas– but as long as we were all at the park, we thought it might be nice to take some family photos.

Our last “formal” family photos were taken when Zack was less than a year old. Laralee has refused to have any photos taken with her smiling in the past three years because of her braces, but now that the braces are finally off she’s not as bashful. I suppose one of these days we should do something “nice”, but in the meantime we’ll just keep taking the candid shots.

Here’s a nice photo of the Schroeder Clan on the playground at the park:

Then, of course, we have this:

And I couldn’t resist putting together an animation. Notice how Alex and Laralee are the stoic ones:

Zack looks like a special needs child sometimes:

On our way home, we passed by a big concrete-block wall and thought it would be fun to take some pictures where we looked like punks. Kyra definitely has the sneer perfected:

Too cool for school:

And finally, showing off gang signs… or maybe peace signs?

Here’s another example of why science is awesome.

We now have a crazy cool camera that can take photographs at the rate of 100 billion frames per second. That’s down in the realm of picoseconds. Here’s one of the photos from a series– it shows a pulse of laser light bouncing off a mirror.

That blobby thing at the top right is a bundle of photons. That’s right: we can actually see the photons in motion because even light moves slowly when your clock is ticking in picoseconds. That’s absolutely freaking amazing.

Here’s a little artistic shot of one of our Christmas decorations. These little guys are about an inch tall.

Okay, that thing I said the other day about not posting goofy internet memes… well, I can’t help it. This one struck my fancy today.

I have a client who’s been hosting a lot of sensitive files on a dedicated server that’s co-located at a major provider. We did some juggling and were able to move the files to a different server, and as a result it was time to decommission the old one. Because of the nature of the files, as well as recent high-profile news about security breaches at big companies, he wanted to be sure the files were truly gone. I have no idea how most co-location providers decommission servers and what happens to the old hard drives, but I figured it would be safer to assume the drives could be reused for another client at some point. Someone malicious or just curious would have a treasure trove of information, so I thought about how to completely destroy the data and in fact the server itself.

This isn’t something I do very often (obviously) but after a little thought I came up with a few things that would take care of what was needed. In escalating severity:

Delete all of the files.  This is simple, but on a modern filesystem a delete command really just removes an entry in the folder that “points” to the file data.  The data itself remains on the disk and can be recovered with advanced filesystem tools.  Mac, Windows, and Linux all work this way, so deleting a file is really just superficial.  This can be good if you do it on accident and want to spend the time to recover the file, but bad if someone is malicious and wants to find data.

Delete the disk partition table.  This ensures that the system won’t reboot because it won’t know how the disk itself is structured.  The system can still run without a partition table, but once it’s rebooted it’s toast.

Delete user accounts and access keys.  This prevents anyone from being able to login to the server.  I could continue working on it in this state, but as soon as I logout I wouldn’t be able to get back in.

Nuke the operating system.  I removed all of the boot programs and the operating system “kernel”, so nothing that’s not already running will be able to start.

Zero the disk.  There’s about 900GB of space on the disk, and the files are somewhere in there.  As mentioned above, a determined person could scan the disk looking for data and reconstruct the files.  I created a single massive 900GB file that contains nothing but binary zeros.  This will take a while and eventually fill up the disk, but it’s basically erasing all of that hidden file data because the operating system needs to use that space for all of its exciting new zeros. It took about four hours to consume the disk:

Nice! That’s a big file. Now for the final step:

Nuke the disk.  Once the disk filled up with zeros, I simply removed every file on the server.  I’d already wiped out the file data with the zero-file; this step will make sure no one can do anything at all on the server. Here goes…

I don’t know how far the delete got– since it’s typically alphabetic, it probably wiped out all of the programs in /bin, then the hardware devices in /dev, configuration in /etc, shared libraries in /lib, and at some point couldn’t continue supporting my remote shell connection. It kicked me out, and that was that.

Fun stuff. I don’t often get the opportunity to think about destroying stuff.

Tonight’s lesson: solid state disks don’t like to be crushed.

I was installing some SSD’s in servers at my datacenter tonight, and one of the metal cabinet doors (about the size of a regular door) fell out of the cabinet and landed squarely on my backpack. Amazingly, my ultrabook wasn’t damaged, but one of the SSD’s was destroyed. Ugh.