Fat Head

Just finished watching Fat Head (watch for free below, via Hulu). A few takeaways: The food pyramids are based on a congressional committee, not scientific research. Eating according to the food pyramid (low fat, high grains) will kill you. Whole grain bread will cause your blood sugar to spike more than eating raw sugar. Eating a lot of grains will … Read more

Who’s locking up those tables?

Here’s a simple query that reports SQL Server locks along with the program name, host, sql process id, and the user that went off to lunch in the middle of their transaction…  select * from sys.dm_tran_locks l join sys.dm_exec_sessions s on l.request_session_id = s.session_id join sys.sysobjects o on l.resource_associated_entity_id = o.id

Crashplan Deduplication slowing you down?

I’ve noticed that Crashplan isn’t saturating my 400kbps uplink (Northland Cable… just barely faster than satellite) even though I’ve given it no upload restrictions… I think the problem is with Crashplan’s De-duplication running too intense of an algorithm for my mere AMD Phenom II black quad core processor to handle efficiently. Setting data de-duplication to minimal allowed … Read more

Crashplan can’t see your ZFS pool on Nexenta? Here’s how to fix it…

NexentaStor 3.1 uses OpenSolaris kernel with Debian userland so neither the Solaris or Linux version of Crashplan works out of the box.  But Chris Moates wrote an excellent post (removed link since it’s dead) on getting Crashplan on Nexenta  by combining files from the Linux and Solaris version of Crashplan.  This works except Crashplan can’t … Read more

Solaris 11, OpenIndiana, and NexentaStor benchmarks

Purpose: Determine fastest small NAS/SAN OS/Appliance software solution for home running under ESXi.Constraints: Candidates must support ZFS, be relatively stable (I narrowed down my candidate list by only choosing solutions that other people have used successfully), and be able to run CrashPlan for data protection. If you’re not familair with ZFS (Zettabyte File System), read ZFS … Read more

Nearly five months later…

Finally finished my 189.7GB backup to Crashplan’s servers.  Started uploading on July 25th and completed on December 17th.  Didn’t notice too much of an internet slowdown thanks to Tomato’s QoS routing to prioritize traffic during the process. Outbound QoS rules  

Thermostats

This is a great example of someone recognizing something we all hate and making it better.  We all despise our thermostats.  And for good reason.  A simple task like changing the temperature shouldn’t be very confusing, but the thermostat designers have made it complicated. My first apartment had this Energy Star programmable thermostat.  I think … Read more

New Credit Card Strategy

Sadly, my favorite credit card, the Schwab 2% Cash Back (and no foreign transaction fees) is being discontinued.  I loved being able to get a straight 2% back on everything without being concerned about which card I was using… so time to re-consider our credit card strategy. We already have the Costco Amex and Amazon … Read more