My camera is fixed…

…thanks to Camera Tech of Anaheim (1347 S Anaheim Blvd, Anaheim, CA 92805; just south of Ball). $95 out the door. As I'd suspected, a connection between the main circuit boards and the card reader had failed.

I'd recommend this place. Sole proprietor, and an Englishman to boot; he's a Londoner, been here 30 years. The tiny shop is full of ancient and modern cameras. Behind the counter are piles and piles of cameras and bits of cameras.

Despite being an old-school camera guy, he's also au fait with digital technology, and has a bunch of old digitals for sale, immaculately CLA'd and in nice shape indeed. When I was there the first time, he was espousing the quality of a Sony F717, and the second time, he was taking in a flash to repair from a wedding photographer. Seems to know his stuff, and there are a bunch of online reviews that like him as well.

Finding the umask of a running process in Solaris…

…is inordinately difficult. This seemingly basic piece of information is not available through /proc, nor through dtrace, nor any other supported way. It can only be retrieved by crawling through the kernel's data structures, either with mdb(1) or through using libkvm, an even uglier way to do it.

Chad Mynhier provides the way to do it on his blog, as well as pointing to a thread on comp.unix.solaris about the same topic, showing how to do it in C using libkvm.

My camera is broken

My Konica-Minolta Maxxum 7D "felt weird" yesterday when I inserted a CompactFlash card. It then didn't recognize the card, offering to format it, but the format failed. Same with other cards I inserted.

It's out of warranty, and I suspect a fix is going to be over $200. Is it worth it, when it's probably only worth $350 or so? I'm not sure. But a new camera is $500. Ugh.

Update: it's now at a local independent camera shop being looked at. Hopefully it'll prove to be something simple.

Update 2: Fixed at Camera Tech of Anaheim for $95. Recommended to anyone.

Today's boneheaded Solaris admin move

I converted the /var filesystem of a host I was installing to be a DiskSuite mirror, but forgot that I shouldn't attach the other side of the mirror until the filesystem was mounted through the metadevice.

Further compounding the problem, I didn't restart the system until after the mirror had resynced and I'd done a bunch of other work. After the reboot, a flood of errors from fsck; unsurprisingly, since everything I'd done to the system since I added the mirror had only been written to one half, but DiskSuite (Solaris Volume Manager, I guess, to give it its modern term) thought both mirrors were good, and was randomly reading from the good side or the bad side …

What makes it even more stupid is that I know better.

Given that I'd just installed the system, it was quicker to just re-jumpstart …

Changing the world via Wikipedia?

Too many people come to Wikipedia in order to change the world, to set things right, to tell The Truth about something. I think it's one of the root causes of dissatisfaction among new editors, and one of the things that sets some people on a course to consider themselves an enemy of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia's policy of Neutral Point Of View (NPOV) is an explicit statement that Wikipedia is not out to change the world's opinions. Some have even stated that it's Wikipedia's true innovation, differentiating it from other encyclopedias and reference works. Wikipedia does not attempt to judge the truth of anything; instead, Wikipedia reports accurately on what the state of current belief is.

If there is disagreement, Wikipedia gives space to all sides in proportion to the prevalence of each. (This latter is the prescription against "Undue weight", and is what differentiates Wikipedia's NPOV from journalistic even-handed neutrality. Wikipedia does not have to give equal time to members of the Flat Earth Society against scientific consensus of Earth's rough sphericity.)

Wikipedia doesn't care if you think you know the Truth or even if you can prove it—unless that proof comes in the form of solid citations to respectable sources. This, I find, bothers people who are sure they know the Truth about a subject—any subject.

New Macbook Pro ...

My 2-year-old 17" MacBook Pro was getting a little old and tired and flaky, especially recently — the dark spot on the screen it had had since new, and the dark screen pretty much the same, and the problems waking and sleeping had been there from the beginning, but the instability, the crashes and hangs — those were new. As were the occasional USB problems in the right-hand port and the issues recognizing the external screen when connected.

It's been a great computer, overall — one of the best systems I've ever used — but it was from the third week of production of the MBP 17" and had the issues expected on an early production model. Time for a new one.

Got it on Thursday and transferred my stuff. I do have to say that using Time Machine as the transfer medium works really well. The only problem is once you're done and try to do a Time Machine backup; you can't, because there's no space left. Time Machine will not recognize the old system's backups as being in the same set; it must embed the serial number or MAC in the backup set. I basically had to prune my backups down manually to give some space for the new system to back up.

It is way faster — faster than the 2.1 GHz to 2.6 GHz processor speed bump would suggest. For one thing, I think the improvement from Core Duo to Core 2 Duo is actually fairly substantial. Moreover, I think the memory boost (2 GB to 4 GB) makes a big difference, and the video card is quite substantially faster, with twice the VRAM. I suspect having more space free on disk makes a difference to filesystem performance too; this also got a doubling, from 100 GB to 200 GB.

Aperture, in particular, is substantially faster. I've had the system less than a week and I couldn't go back.

The Governor Ames

The Governor Ames was a five-masted schooner launched on December 1, 1888 by the Leavitt Storer shipyard of Waldoboro, Maine, United States; named after Adelbert Ames (former Governor of Mississippi), the vessel was the first five-masted schooner and was the world's largest cargo vessel in the late 19th century.

I've been improving its Wikipedia article. There are two nice pictures of the vessel available from the Library of Congress archives, which I've added to the article; I'm also grateful for the New York Times' opening of its archives, which has provided quite a few fine sources.

It's rather disturbing to the modern mind to realize just how much loss of life was involved in the coastal shipping trade back then. For example, all eleven six-masted schooners that were built were lost at sea, and so was the Governor Ames, off Cape Hatteras on the North Carolina coast in 1909, with the loss of fourteen lives and only one survivor.

It's also made me a lot more aware of the economics of shipping and what truly killed off the sailing ship. It wasn't speed; sailing ships were generally faster. The increasing cost of skilled labor was a big part of it. The schooner lasted much longer than other types of sailing vessel because it required only a small crew. Interestingly, such large and economical sailing vessels could only be built because of the steam engine; steam-powered winches were used to hoist the sails, haul the anchor chains, and operate pumps to keep their leaky hulls afloat. With steam winches, a small crew could handle a huge sailing vessel.

These huge sailing vessels were bulk carriers; most were built for the coal trade, taking huge cargoes of coal from the Southern ports to the industrial North-Eastern United States. The Governor Ames could carry 3,000 tons of coal in its giant holds. Similar vessels were built for the timber trade, and in fact the Governor Ames spent about five years hauling timber, including passing Cape Horn twice and visiting Australia and Argentina before returning to the coal trade for which it was built.

What finally killed these ships off was their greater risk of sinking compared to a steamer, their unpredictability since they were dependent on the winds, and the difficulty of building a sailing ship as large as the bigger steamers. Furthermore, good crewmembers saw the future coming and wanted steamer experience, not sail.