automaticable

Hey everyone, I know it’s been a while, but hopefully with this new post I can spark some enthusiasm into my dead beat brothers to start posting here again.  Have you ever wished for something and hoped that it came true?  Around the last couple times I posted, I stated that I got my extension to work in recreation.  I’ve enjoyed this new job for the most part, but as any job, it has its ups and downs.  The upside is some days I get to either work on the dock  with boats all day, or work the “gates” position, handing out wristbands and interacting with guests and kids.  The downside is that at a resort, there are “custodial” positions that I have to work as well that aren’t fun at all, very labor intensive, and the other cast members don’t treat you very well because the position has the word “custodial” in it.

Well, since the extension, a lot  has gone on.  I went home for my brother’s graduation which was amazing to say the least.  I also went on vacation for family reunion and I’m going to talk about that a little more extensively in a little bit, and lastly, I got my 2nd extension just a few short days ago to transfer into Transportation.  As most of you may have heard, there was a fatal accident recently in WDW on July 5th at 2AM involving a monorail.  Two cars were on the same track traveling different directions and unfortunately these two cars collided, killing one cast member, and minor injuries on only a handful of guests.  After about 3-5 days of investigation the monorail HAS reopened.  Am I worried about my new transfer because being a monorail driver is probably what I’m going to be doing?  Of course, but for it to be the first accident in 38 years of the monorails operation, the odds of something drastic happening are very slim.

Now about family reunion.  This vacation in general was something I was looking forward to for the last two years, and it couldn’t have gone any better.   I started out the vacation by leaving a full 4 days early to drive up to Atlanta to meet up with my brother Kyle as well as surprise my parents.  I wasn’t supposed to be able to leave for vacation until the Monday after the festivities began, but I pulled some strings and left directly after work Wednesday night and arrived very early Thursday morning into Atlanta.  My parents didn’t have any idea that I was going to be in Atlanta, so when they arrived Thursday evening, I popped out from hiding behind my brothers car and surprised them all.  It was the perfect way to start vacation.  After garage sale shopping for a day or so, we were off on vacation!  After a short six hour drive we arrived!  We hung out at one of the towny bars for a while waiting for our vacation homes to be ready to moved into, and once we all moved in the fun began!

I lucked out and stayed in the beach front home, so every night I was able to fall asleep and wake up every morning to the sound of the ocean.  The first night I hung out on the beach with cousins, and ended up fishing with them and caught a shark!!  It was so exciting!  It was about 4 feet long and about 10-12 pounds.  Put up a pretty good fight and was so exciting to pull in and hold up close.  For the remainder of the week, there was alot of just hanging out, playing in the water, fishing, and then going to the local raw bar called Eddie Teach’s.  They had THE BEST old bay shrimp and raw oysters I have EVER had, and with $4 pitchers of PBR, we made that our place for the week.  I probably ate about 20lbs of shrimp that week, all at Eddie Teach’s, so if you ever find yourself in St. George’s Island, FL, make sure to check it out!

The last day of the trip we went out on a kayaking trip in the snakelike rivers of the area, got to see some alligators, and just spent some quality time with my relatives.  Overall, the trip went really well and was something that I just really needed after 5 months of working for Disney, and not really seeing anyone that I truly knew.

That’s all I really have for now.  It’s getting late and I have to be up early in the morning.  It’s great to be posting again and hopefully we can get Automaticable back up and as lively as it was before.  Who’s with me on getting this blog awesome again?

If you're new here, you can subscribe to automaticable's RSS feed by clicking here. Or, you can get post updates through your email. Thanks for visiting!

Well folks, again last week was a very hectic week for me and I didn’t get around to posting again, but that just means I have a lot to write about!  The last couple of weeks were a real blast because I got a bunch of days off, and used that time to really treat myself to some fun outings.  I have been mainly just chilling with my roommates, but I did get a chance to go mini-golfing at a pretty sweet course during the time between my last post.  If you don’t know me, then let it be known that I LOVE mini-golfing and go-karting, probably two of my most favorite things to do to hang out with friends and such like that.  The place was kind of expensive, but I had buy-one-get-one free coupons, so it turned out to be about average price.  I also got too take some time and actually get some sun down at the pool, and let me tell you, it’s probably the most relaxing sensation in the world to just lay out in either the direct sun, or a partly overcast day and be at peace with yourself and your surroundings.

Work’s getting tougher and tougher with longer hours, early mornings, late nights, and redeployment folks that don’t really want to be in their new location and learn how the new location works. I’m being placed as a point person more and more now, which is amazing.  I love being the leader of a stand and being able to control the flow of how things work, because I have definitely worked in stands where there’s no control or direction.  Now that I’m a point/run I am able to help my team work as a well oiled machine within at least 2 hours.  The start of the shift is usually a little rough because people don’t want to listen to me, just because I’m a college program student, or they’re extra hours or redeployment people and feel they’re exempt from learning anything new, but as soon as I inform them that they can either A) listen and work as a team or B) go home and lose the hours they’d be working that day, they usually choose option A and are glad they did.  I let them know that if it’s a new position for them that they’re on, I’ll be right there next to them to help them if they have any questions, as well as train them on how to work that position effectively and efficiently as possible.

I have also decided that I’m going to extend my program.  I just submitted my application to extend about an hour ago, and I’m really excited to hear the results back from them soon.  I either want to stay in my location doing QSR F&B (Quick Service Restaurant Food and Beverage) or move on to Attractions or even Parking.  We’ll see how things play out.  If I am accepted to extend my program, I’ll be down in Orlando until August 14th.  This is another 3 months added onto my program, which will be perfect because with work and classes right now, I have no time to really network myself and try to get myself into the professional internship, but this extra time on my program will put me in a position to where I can do that.  There’s just so much going on right now, and all of it good and that excites me!  Well, as the excitement continues, I’ll try to keep better track of what’s going on and keep all you kids back home updated!  Take care everyone and I hope you all had a wonderful St. Patrick’s Day!!!

Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackelope” is set for release in less than two months, and is currently in the “Alpha 6″ testing stage.  Arguably the hottest new feature is stable support for Linux’s new filesystem, ext4.  The new filesystem has been shown to have significant performance gains over any other Linux filesystem to date.  But think twice before you upgrade to ext4–many users have been reporting considerable data loss.  From a user’s comment:

This has happened to me twice, the first time erasing Firefox settings, and the second time erasing gnome-terminal settings. Both cases were caused by a kernel panic locking up the system. Also, both times the program whose settings were affected was in use during the kernel panic.

This has been a wide-spread problem, particularly for Ubuntu users testing the new Jaunty alpha releases.  It manifests itself after a system crash, where open files will simply be emptied and erased.  It is particularly prevalent in users’ settings files, such as those used for GNOME or KDE.  Fortunately, there cause of the bug is relatively well-known, as kernel developer Theodore Ts’o explains in his detailed comment:

OK, so enter ext4 and delayed allocation. With delayed allocation, we don’t allocate a location on disk for the data block right away. Since there is no location on disk, there is no place to write the data on a commit; but it also means that there is no security problem. It also results in a massive performance improvements; for example, if you create a scratch file, and then delete it 20 seconds later, it will probably never hit the disk. Unfortunately, the default VM tuning parameters, which can be controlled by /proc/sys/vm/dirty_expire_centiseconds and /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centiseconds, means that in practice, a newly created file won’t hit disk until about 45-150 seconds later, depending on how many dirty pages are in the page cache at the time. (This isn’t unique to ext4, by the way — any advanced filesystem which does delayed allocation, which includes xfs and the in the future, btrfs, will have the same issue.)

Essentially, the data for truncated and overwritten files is often cached in memory before actually hitting the disk, for performance reasons.  However, the file truncation doesn’t get cached, and if there is a system failure between the two operations, your files will simply be wiped clean with all previous and new data gone.  This happens frequently for desktop settings because hundreds of small hidden files are updated to maintain user preferences.  As a result, there is a relatively high probability that a truncation and rewrite operation could be happened at any time– including during a system failure.

By POSIX definition, this isn’t really a bug in ext4.  The state of a file after this type of crash isn’t clearly defined.  According to Theodore, it’s really a bug in the way desktop environments are writing their settings files:

[...] If your application is stupid, and has hundreds of dot files in your home directory, each one taking up a 4k disk block even though it is only storing 4 to 12 bytes of data in each singleton dot file, and you have to [write to disk] for each of your one hundred dot files — and worse yet, your application for some stupid, unknown reason is writing all of these hundred+ dot files every few seconds, then [writing to disk] will be very painful. But it is painful because the application is stupidly written — not for any fundamental filesystem fault. It’s like if you had a robot which was delivering mail to mail box numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and crossing the street for each mail box; on a busy road, this is unsafe, and the robot was getting run over when it kept on jaywalking — so you can tell the robot to only cross at crosswalks, when the “walk” light is on, which is safe, but slow — OR, you could rewrite the robot’s algorithsm so it delieveres the mail more intelligently (i.e., one side of the street, and then cross, safely at the crosswalk, and then do the other side of the street).

Regardless of what a permanant solution should include, there are a series of patches which are set to be included in the final Jaunty kernel to address this issue.  The patches are set to handle the crash situation similar to ext3– keeping the original version in-tact.  However, it comes at a price of performance.  Ext4 won’t be any slower than ext3, but the patch will negate many of the performance gains that ext4 previously achieved.

Once again, ext4 will likely be patched and fixed by the official Ubuntu Jaunty release.  However, it isn’t present in Jaunty Alpha 6, and hasn’t been pushed as an update yet (as of 3/12/09).  There is lengthy and ongoing discussion in the original bug report about possible long-term solutions.  In conclusion, be very careful if you choose to test out the new ext4 filesystem until it is patched.

After much anticipation, my new netbook (which I got a screaming deal on) was delivered this afternoon. It’s a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 Netbook with Ubuntu Linux, though this version of Linux is slightly different than your standard install. While it is technically Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy), it has its own interface which I will do a walkthrough of below, outlining all the differences I can find between this Dellbuntu (my own term) and a standard Ubuntu install.

This screen shot walkthrough will look at the unedited, uncustomized Ubuntu install on my Dell Mini 9. I’m sure I will do plenty of customization down the road, but for now you get the virgin version.

The Standard Desktop

The desktop is very clean and appealing to start off with. There are no folders or icons on the desktop itself, which will be quite a surprise for anyone coming from a Windows environment. The large bar across the top is called the Launcher and presents most of the essential programs in a graphical interface. Below are shots of each tab individually.

The Entertainment Tab

While this menu has the typical Music Player (Rhythmbox) & photo manager (F-spot), this is the first time we really see the net-focus on the netbook. Having a specific icon for LastFM shows the imporantance of working in the cloud…which is essential since the Dell Mini 9 comes with only 4GB of memory standard.

Also, notice how I had to specify that the music player and photo manager have actual names. Dell has completely debranded most default programs, which we will see more examples of soon.

The Games Tab

The games tab has many of the typical Ubuntu games so there isn’t a whole lot to discuss here, however there are a few things to note. First, and most disappointing, is that Wormux, my favorite of the Ubuntu standard games, is not included in this install. I’m not sure why they would do that while adding Potato Guy instead! Let me tell you, potato guy is one of the most annoying and pointless “games” I’ve ever run across. Stay away!

The Learn Tab

I don’t know who came up with the Learn tab, but I don’t think I’ll ever seriously use it. I guess the Japanese Study Tool and Stellarium might be good for a handful of people, but these do not seem like programs that were worth including in a default install. Actually, more interesting than that is the fact that all of these programs have Kubuntu-style names in the normal programs menu. What this means I’m not sure.

The Productivity Tab

The productivity tab includes all the default OpenOffice.org programs, plus a handy folder called “Dell Contract.” Of all things I want in a quickstart menu like the launcher, I DEFINITELY want fast access to my Dell Contract at all times. Thanks Dell!

The Web Tab

The web tab is probably the most interesting of all, which is to be expected from a netbook. Can you tell who Dell partnered with to bring netbook services to the Mini 9? Let me spell it out for you…Yahoooooooooo! Not only do they have an entire quicklaunch section dedicated almost entirely to Yahoo pages, but the “Web Browser,” or Firefox, defaults to Yahoo.com for the home page, has the Yahoo Toolbar installed, and defaults to Yahoo search from the quick search bar. While I have no problem with companies partnering with each other to do promotions, Mozilla is largely funded by Google search which is shown by defaulting the Firefox home page & quick search bars to Google. Without this funding, development for Firefox in general would be at risk. But this is an issue for a separate post.

The Keyboard

While the entire set of hardware behind the Dell Mini 9 Netbook is interesting and generally super high quality, what is worth sharing the most is the keyboard.

This keyboard is super tiny, but also extremely functional. My one problem, which I have yet to get over, is the positioning of the apostrophe/quotes key. Dell moved it from its normal position next to the colon key to the bottom row next to the left arrow. See it? Yeah, that will take some getting used to.

That’s it for now. I’ll update if I find anything else that stands out from typical Ubuntu installs. Until then, let me know if you have any questions in the comments and I’ll get back to all of them asap.

Shiver me timbers, tis be I, sir Brian of Orlando, here to drink your rum and leave you with the tab!  No, but seriously, I’m sorry for my hiatus, I’ve been VERY busy.  Since I last posted, I have done so much I can’t even remember it all!  All I remember is I’ve gone go carting at an awesome go-cart track with live gators, gone to Hollywood Studios MANY times, met up with my cousins while they were visiting, and even got the chance to meet up with my old band directors at Epcot while they were down here for Magic Music Days.  It’s been a crazy couple weeks and I’m getting so excited because Braves Spring Training has begun and that means pro athletes everywhere and lots of hours of working and more money!!!

Today was a fun day though.  I had the day off because of class this morning, so I decided to go to the Braves game afterwords.  I lucked out in it being Braves vs Yankees today which made it even more so exciting.  I took a special direct bus to Disney’s Wide World of Sports around 12:00 and went straight for the merchandise store and grabbed myself a jersey and a new Braves hat because I noticed I don’t have any Braves apparel to support them with.  When I finally got inside the stadium I grabbed myself a beer, a spicy chicken sandwich, and headed off to my comfy lawn seats to enjoy a wonderful day in the ball park.  I was surrounded by Yankee’s fans which kind of surprised me, but understandable cuz it’s way too cold in New York.  It started out to be a very brisk cool day, but by the end of the game, I took of the shirts I had under my jersey and was laying down in the grass, drink in hand, and enjoying the beautiful sunshine.  It was a pretty quick game, but an exciting one because the Braves won 3-2 when it was all said and done.

I’m really enjoying my stay down here, but as time goes on, I’m becoming more and more home sick and I miss my friends and family.  This scares me because I’m going to be turning 23 soon, and need to move out on my own eventually.  I still feel like I’m too young to be making adult choices, but too old to “party like a rock star” like I used to do.  Oh well, I’m sure I’ll come to terms with this eventually.

Wow, it’s already 12:30, where has the night gone?  Looks like it’s bed time!  Take care readers, I’ll post again soon!

It has been a while since I’ve posted on automaticable, so let me catch the world up on a few things.

First, I’m still doing SEO at BKV in Atlanta. And by that, I mean it is taking over my life. Because of the life-takeover problem BKV graciously hired me an assistant, Tom. He is brand new to the SEO world (just as I was) but will become an expert shortly since I’m kind of throwing him in the deep end. Sink or swim, baby.

Not only am I (and Tom) working on SEO, but we’re also in charge of everything social media at BKV. That means we get to spend most of our day on Twitter, Facebook, and every other site most companies ban access to. Sweet deal. If you have Twitter and want to follow me, you can find me at twitter.com/kwegner. Make sure to @me so I know you are automaticable fan.

I don’t usually like to pump work stuff on personal posts, however we are doing social media work for a non-profit right now that is totally awesome. We are working on promoting an event for the March of Dimes called “March for Babies.” It is an event to help raise money to support research into premature birth & other birth problems. If you want to help out the cause, check out www.marchforbabies.org or follow March for Babies on Twitter at twitter.com/marchforbabies.

That is it on the update. Expect more posts from me in the near future, as I’ve recently been reinvigorated by the fact that automaticable just suprassed 100,000 total views.

My name is Scott Wegner, and I’m a Computer Science major at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

I’ve had Linux installed as my primary OS for about 3 years, and as a computer science major, it’s certainly my environment of choice.  Not only does Linux deliver a rich desktop environment, but also the command-line and its vast number of utilities are indespensible for any sort of development.  It still suprises me, then, when I see other CS majors at my university who are so unfamiliar with Linux, and who cringe when any programming assignment requires Linux for one reason or another.  It got me thinking.

Our computer science department also has a number of computer labs with Linux machines, accessbile remotely and for physical access.  There are also a few Windows machines for those who prefer Visual Studio, although these machines are generally inferior when it comes to speed and stability.  So why do students still flock to them?  I think it’s because the courses at our university only give a terse introduction to Linux and the utilities that the course will require.  What we need is something that will really show students the ease and the power of Linux.  Maybe a 1-hour tutorial, perhaps a half-day workshop, or even a 1-credit hour introductory course.  Yes.

This wouldn’t be the sort of tutorial you see on the internet that praises Ubuntu for it’s robustness and claims that users should never need the terminal.  CS majors need to embrace the terminal and its utilities.  I asked earlier on identi.ca / twitter what people would talk about, and received a number of great responses.  There’s a whole list of tools that students need to be familiar with to really be productive.

• grep, less, head, tail
• vim, emacs
• make
• svn, cvs
• ssh
• man
• awk,  sed
• diff,  sdiff, colordiff

There’s also a lot of tools that would simply make their experience more pleasant, such as screen, rsync, latex, etc.  Having an understanding, or at least a crude familiarity of these utilities would certainly improve a student’s experience on projects which require them.  It may even convince them to try the faster Linux machines next time they visit the computer labs.

But how would one structure such a course?  I think a 1-hour weekly lab workshop would be the best setting.  The course could revolve around some simple in-class project that utilizes each of these tools.  Each week could introduce a new command, looking into it’s basic syntax and functionality, as well as providing links and resources to explore its advanced usage.  The majority of class time would be spent working on the project, trying each new command and using it to solve some basic problem.  The hands-on section would be crucial, as this is will instill the basic familiarity that students will hold with them for later courses.  I also think it would be useful to have extra time after class for “install-fests”.  This would give students the opportunity to install Linux at home and see if they would like it– either in a virtual machine, via Wubi, or on a physical drive.  They should be offered, optionally of course, once at the beginning of the semester, half-way through, and towards the end.

So what do you think– could something like this work?  Would it be helpful?  Have you heard of a university that provides something similar?  And what applications would you add to the list?  Let’s hear it in the comments.

So within the last couple days I’ve really been reminiscing about the past and I’ve come to the conclusion that I truly miss my childhood.  All this growing up and making adult decisions really isn’t something that I want to be doing.  I’m sitting here drinking coffee out of a mug the size of my head that’s decorated like Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas and watching my roommate and my neighbor putt in my family room.  This sort of relaxation and carefree lifestyle reminds me so much of when I was 10 years old and would gather all my friends on the street to play hide-and-go-seek or flashlight tag.  Twelve people all around the age of ten gathering around a cul-de-sac at 8 o’clock with a curfew of 10:00.  Being a seasoned veteran of the game, I knew exactly where to hide, when to pop out, and when to run like hell to try to tag safe.  Of course people began to catch onto my plan and began to look specifically for me, but that’s when I would start working as a team with the other hiders and tell them to all hide together and where, and they would all come out like thirty seconds after the seekers pass them up.  Oh I miss the old days.

Wow this coffee’s strong….

But yeah, that doesn’t really keep you updated with what I’m doing down here, but that’s alright, because I don’t even remember what I’ve done within the last couple days.  I know I went to the theme parks and saw more of Hollywood Studios than I’ve ever seen before, I started up my new classes (they were just general information days, no real work yet), but other than that, it’s been a pretty mellow week.  I’ll try to see what I can do about posting more often, or waking up earlier to post, because so far it’s looking like I’m only really going to be able to post on days that I have off, just because I’m too busy otherwise.  I’m off to go bake in the sun, rotisary style, catch ya’ll later!

I want to formally apologize to all loyal readers of Automaticable for my lack of post last week.  It’s been a very crazy past couple weeks for me with lots of work, very little down time and crazy parties that last ’till all hours of the night I just haven’t found time to sit down and just be able to collect my thoughts.  I’m in the process of trying to remember things, and really, all that’s coming up is a giant blur. I know on my days off I went to Blizzard Beach and had a blast.  There were next to no lines for any of the slides, so I was able to do the entire park with my roommate in under 3 hours.  It’s nice being a Disney cast member because you get free admission to just about everything, and when you tell people that you’re a cast member, you notice their eyes light up in a special way that you don’t really see in many other cases.  Immediately following this you’re bombarded with questions about the parks, your job, your experience and how many Mickey’s are there?  (There’s only 1 by the way)

The other days were all work days, and there was either a softball game, soccer game, or some sort of dance competition going on where they stuck me in the Stocker position.  Being a stocker you do exactly that, stock.  You make sure that the stand, and possibly surrounding stands, have completely full stock, and if they’re running out, you have to go get it.  The only problem with this is you’re either stuck at a stand completely too far away from the stocking kitchen, or stuck at a stand where people only tell you one thing at a time, so you’re running back and forth to a kitchen all day.  That’s all I’m going to complain about with that, because frankly? I love my job.

I would much rather be working at the Wide World of Sports any day then one of the main theme parks because last week I was stuck at Hollywood Studios (formally MGM) for a day, and I was kicking myself in the ass because of how difficult the job was.  I give major props to all the concessions people in the main parks because of how many people they have to deal with on a regular basis, as well as dealing with the stress of doing no less than four things at a time.  I have to work there again tomorrow and possibly wednesday (I’m trying to get it off because I have class earlier that day and won’t have time between class and work).

So, tonight I made enchiladas for dinner and, basically, they were very delicious to say the least.  I fed about 8 people with them and each and every one of them all agreed that I need to cook for them more often.  I tried a few new things with it that I haven’t tried before, like using a canned Enchilada sauce than just making it from scratch, as well as adding a few spices in there that I’ve never thought of putting in there.  All in all, I was very pleased with how they turned out.

Again, I wish to apologize to you all for the late update, but trust me, you’ll get another one by Sunday morning!  Enjoy the snow Chicago!

Well, the first week of my vacation/internship has concluded, and I still have a smile on my face!  My first day of training at the Wide World of Sports was cool, but trying to get home was a pain in the butt.  It takes me an hour and a half to get to the park by a double bus transfer, but if I had a car to drive there, it would only take half an hour.  Going home is where the real problem is, because the bus doesn’t stop at the Wide World of Sports very often to pick up cast members (that’s what they call Disney employees).  So I called the bus before I went out to wait, which I then waited an hour, called the bus company AGAIN then preceded to wait another half hour until the bus came.  Once it arrived we rode to the Pop Century cast back lot to go over to Costuming to get our Disney Regulated uniforms (costumes).  We were there for about a half hour, and were pushing our luck on trying to catch the next bus (which left at 4:00), and we arrived outside at 4:01 and JUST missed the bus and had to wait ANOTHER half hour to catch the next bus.  Once that one came it was a half hour ride home, and a fifteen minute walk from the bus stop to my apartment.  All and all, it was about three hours from the time I clocked out until the time I stepped back into my apartment.

Other than that little fiasco, work has been pretty good and very enjoyable.  The rest of my training has consisted of stocking condiment shelves, stocking ALL of the concession stands, and then yesterday was our first day of event work, and I worked in a very non-busy tent selling Soda, Water, Power aid, Turkey Legs, Hot Dogs, Hamburgers, Pretzles, Nachos, and Candy.  Right now the event is the College Cheerleading, Dance and Mascot National Championships, so that should be alot of fun, I’ve already ran into a bunch of the cheerleaders and mascots so it was quite exciting.

On my days off that I had last week I did alot of shopping as well as went off to the amusement parks with with my roommates and that was alot of fun.  This week has also helped me create alot new friends around the apartment complex and find people to hang out with when I have nothing better to do.  Well, it’s getting to be around lunch time around here, and I have to start getting ready for work as well, so I hope you all have a wonderful week and I’ll write again next week!

P.S.  Hope everyone in the Midwest is doing okay with all that snow and and cold weather you guys have been having.  Stay warm, stay safe, and stay up to date by subscribing to our RSS!