Corporate Evil.

So, it seems that new evidence has emerged that Merck knew all along that Vioxx increased risks of heart attacks, and suppressed the information.

Why Web 2.0 Matters.

I think that many of the folks thinking about the next version of the web are thinking too simply. If what they want is called 2.0, then what _sps_, hendrikboom and I have been talking about is Web 3.0. Still, this article goes a good way towards explaining why its important. If I could do any job I wanted right now, this is where I would be working.

From the "It Figures" department.

With the rise of podcasting we now find a new phenomena, podjacking, where criminals can hold a podcast hostage. *sigh*

Reiserfs et al

So, as I type this entry, the raid5 on webigail is resynching. Not sure how it got OUT of sync, but that seems to be the last thing to fix before bringing the server back up. It appears that the reason it stopped booting was a minor (and trivially correctable) bit of file corruption on the main raid partition. Still this is the second time in as many weeks that we've had integrity problems with Reiserfs. I'm beginning to think that those (like pphaneuf) who advised that it isn't ready for prime time may be right.

On the other hand, the server worked flawlessly for the two previous years, so I'm not sure if this latest glitch is really Reiser's fault. It may be that I have some sort of version skew or something in my current distribution that has introduced an instability. (I had to recently update half-a-dozen libraries in order to fix a problem, and should now upgrade everything to the same level -- I've just been waiting to have an up-to-date backup first).

Anyway, if I DO decide to junk Reiserfs in favor of something else, what should it be? Two years ago, there were stability issues with ext3 and it was a lousy performer, which is why I avoided it. I have since heard lots of good things about XFS as well, but don't know anyone who has had practical experience with it.

So, any suggestions? I would like to use a journalling filesystem, and I would like it to be fast, robust, and stable. What do folks think?

Fixed.

Its been a productive night for me. I've managed to get webigail working again (I guess it gets easier with practice...) and I've managed to find a way to produce a pair of .bin/.cue files from which one can reproduce an Audio CD.

It turns out that a .iso and a .bin file generally have the exact same contents. In each case they are just a dump of the data blocks on a CD. In the absense of a .cue file, the blocks are assumed to be contiguous and form a single track. For data CD's this is correct, so they are distributed just as .iso files.

For an Audio CD, you need to specify where each track begins and ends, and that's what the .cue file does. Some folks also produce a .cdt file which contains metadata like track and artist names. Of course, it took a number of hours of searching to find this out, because it turns out that these are all de facto standards and are documented nowhere. To make it worse, there are competing extensions to .cue files and some programs like cdrdao output the track info in a .toc file instead which has a completely different format.

Anyway, I will mail the URL for the .bin/.cue/.cdt files to whoever is interested (as soon as they finish transfering to the server, that is). I know thebabynancy is interested, but is anyone else? If you just want the CD so you can rip it to .mp3 format, its easier just to grab the individual tracks here.

Silly Mouse Game.

Yeah, its another of those addictive online game thingies.