I recently tripped over someone complaining that there was no good tool to test external disks for OSX.
As usual, because OSX is a superset of BSD unix, the tools are built right in; a few minutes with apropos and man gets you all you need to accomplish the task.
We simply want to do a raw sequential read of the device, tossing the results, but detecting any failures. Assuming the device is the second drive mounted, enter the terminal and type:
sudo dd if=/dev/disk1 of=/dev/null bs=1m
This serves to do a nondestructive read of the entire physical device. For details on the command type ‘man dd’ into a terminal window or browser search field: man dd
For a more aggressive data destructive write test use Disk Utility’s secure erase features, either against individual partitions or the whole device.
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“They said that they wanted me to come in and help them turn the place around, help them reinvent themselves. Be nimble. Shake things up. But it’s like wrestling a tar-baby. You push, you get stuck. You argue for something better and they tell you to write a report, then no one reads the report. You try to get an experimental service running and no one will reconfigure the firewall. Turn the place around?” He snorted. “It’s like turning around a battleship by tapping it on the nose with a toothpick.”
“I hate working with assholes.”
“They’re not assholes, that’s the thing, Perry. They’re some really smart people. They’re nice. We have them over for dinner. They’re fun to eat lunch with. The thing is, every single one of them feels the same way I do. They all have cool shit they want to do, but they can’t do it.”
“Why?”
“It’s like an emergent property. Once you get a lot of people under one roof, the emergent property seems to be crap. No matter how great the people are, no matter how wonderful their individual ideas are, the net effect is shit.”
“Reminds me of reliability calculation. Like if you take two components that are 90 percent reliable and use them in a design, the outcome is 90 percent of 90 percent—81 percent. Keep adding 90 percent reliable components and you’ll have something that explodes before you get it out of the factory.
“Maybe people are like that. If you’re 90 percent non-bogus and ten percent bogus, and you work with someone else who’s 90 percent non-bogus, you end up with a team that’s 81 percent non-bogus.”
“I like that model. It makes intuitive sense. But fuck me, it’s depressing. It says that all we do is magnify each others’ flaws.”
“Well, maybe that’s the case. Maybe flaws are multiplicative.”
“So what are virtues?”
“Additive, maybe. A shallower curve.”
“That’d be an interesting research project, if you could come up with some quantitative measurements.”—- From “Makers”, by Cory Doctorow—-
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There have been occasional false security alarms about iDisk, dotmac and me.com. My favorite was ‘OMG, huge security hole in me.com services; If they know the URL, anyone can see your iDisk Public Folder!’ Obviously this was NOT a security issue. OTOH there have also been legitimate reports of flaws in the system, which apple has fixed in a timely manner.
But always lacking was a definitive statement about what is, or is not, encrypted on the wire. I’m here to report that your iDisk data travels the internet encrypted. Using Wireshark I was able to assure myself that updates to your stored iDisk files travel encrypted.
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Every time I make ribs, everyone says they’re yummy, but when they ask me to make them again, I’ve no idea how I made them. So this time I’m writing it down as I cook!
(addendum: Kids, don’t try this at home, it was a fail; either because of the brining, or just overcooking during braising, this batch of ribs was completely undistinguished. I’ll have to cross out some recipes in my cookbooks, and try something different. :(
(addendum to the addendum: Standing in the kitchen, musing while nibbling on leftovers, I decided: pretty tasty, but still too dry. OTOH, a few hours sitting had made my sauce really good, too bad I tossed most of it in disgust after dinner. :(
Before I forget:
Onions, garlic, raisins,
water, balsamic vinegar, orange juice,
paprika, red pepper, black pepper, salt,
Chicago hot sauce, worsteshire, soy. )
Brine ribs : (Deprecated, skip to Braise step.)
Qt water, Coarse salt to fully saturate water at room temp
Soak ribs with brine in stainless or glass pot. ~10 min. The brining is intended to force moisture into the meat, draw off a little fat, and reduce the sometimes bitter off flavors of pork. Pour off brine, making sure to rinse off any excess undisolved salts.
(addendum: What was I thinking! I went WWWsurfing for ways to get that bitterness out of pork and found this advice. I should have realized the clown didn’t know what he was talking about; we learned about osmosis in chem or bio 101, the salty environment draws moisture through the cell walls. Doh! )
Braise ribs:
Add barely enough fresh water to cover ribs.
Add
Several onions chopped
Handful of garlic clovess, chopped
Salt half teaspoon, or as desired (Don’t be tasting the raw porkwater!)
Peppercorns, a dozen
Rosemary, sage, bay, paprika, as desired
Cup raisins, or as desired.
(addendum: I’m the only person in the family that likes raisins in BBQ sauce…never mind…)
Bring all to boil, then reduce to covered simmer for 1 – 2 hours, ‘till tender enough to pull apart.
(addendum: Don’t cook them that long, they get too dry. )
Oven or Grill stage:
Preheat whatever you got.
Put the ribs into a lightly greased baking tray and shake them down with a mixture of red & black pepper and paprika.
Either toss the tray in the oven, adding a cup of the cooking liquor, or put your ribs out on a medium grill, close the top, but watch for flames, and turn regularly.
Taste the cooking liquor. If it’s tasty, and not bitter, leave it to reduce. If it’s bitter, strain to retain the chunky bits but discard the liquid, and add some fresh water.
Add a bit of wine or vinegar, fruit or fruit juice, paprika, and your favorite BBQ spices, continue to reduce, while watching the grill or oven.
Regarding BBQ sauces and rubs:
Every region of this country has a few styles, my personal favorites for cooking sauces are those without ketchup, or much sugar, instead spicy, with black & red pepper, onions, garlic, paprika, mustard seed, vinegar or wine, and fruit or fruit juice to provide a little sweetness. I think table sauces are best when chunky with cooked onions and fruit, but not very sweet in themselves.
I’ve no idea what region might claim this variant. I developed my BBQ tastes while working at the Old Hickory on Bird road and 75th Ave in Miami. Walter kept his recipes secret, so I had to work this out via experiment, years later. I’ve no idea whether I actually got mine like his or just developed my own taste, overriding the memories of his yummy style.
More steps to come later, once I decide what the next steps are :)
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There’s much debate in minority communities about terminology and meanings, especially in those communities that are targeted for lots of hate speech. This article, and the comments, left me as unsure of meanings as before I read it. Sex Reassignment: What’s in a Word?
But it forced me to think and write again on an aspect of mammal behavior that has seemed inevitable, but sad….
Véronique wrote:
“I think we face discrimination more because we violate some fundamental beliefs about the immutability of the sex of human beings. We are profoundly disturbing not because of any association with sexual intercourse but because we break what people think are rules, and some of them think are rules given by a deity.”
Whether the ‘rules’ come from a deity, or from the nature of human thought process, it’s certain that Véronique has touched on a core issue for most humans. By nature we are organizing creatures, we say, ‘animal, vegetable, mineral?’, ‘Black, white, brown, yellow?’, ‘Top or bottom?’, ‘Male or female?’
On the most immediate level, all sexual creatures, when meeting one of their own species during a mating cycle, must immediately ascertain ‘competitor or mate?’. Genetic survival demands that these questions be answered quickly and correctly. For humans, which are fairly unique in our ‘constantly-in-heat’ physiology, that physiologic gender classification of concave or convex is probably the most primal classification we make of other humans. That classification is more primal than friend or enemy, tribemate or stranger, race, age, anything… Remember that same-gender sex play and attraction is common in all sorts of species, but I think that sexual attraction is not nearly as primal as gender identification.
This then is the quandary faced by the transgendered, their bodies lie about their very identity, and that identity is the most important measure of one human to another. This is hateful, and I wish it weren’t so, because it forces us to feel like the animals we are first, only thinking with compassion after the fact.
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