Kernel Mustard

I use GMail a lot. I love it. One thing that I really love is the fact that you can create spam-resistant e-mail addresses like by adding a + sign after the user part.

So, if your e-mail address is example@gmail.com, and you have phone service from AT&T, you could give the AT&T website this address: example+att@gmail.com. This way, if the evil overlords in the AT&T marketing department ever sell or otherwise leak your address to undesirables, you can simply redirect all mail to the special AT&T address to spam and never have to worry about it again. Besides, it adds an audit trail, so you can easily trace the leak to its source.

The problem is that waaaaay too many websites think that the + sign is an invalid character in an e-mail address. This is not true. So, if you are a website owner with a broken site, please fix your validation checks!

[Incidentally, at&t is used only as an example here; I'm not complaining about them.]

Lots of people around the world spend a good chunk of time learning languages, but in the US, it’s rare to find someone who grew up speaking English who can speak anything else. I have long enjoyed studying languages, and I think the best courses ever made for development of actual fluency in the language were the ones made by the US Foreign Service Institute several decades ago.

These courses are not subject to copyright, being works made by the US government, so they should be free for download. Well, now they are, thanks to the Glen D. Fellows and the rest of the wonderful people at www.fsi-language-courses.com. These courses are very long, very hard, and ridiculously repetitive, but they really do work well.

Anyway, if you’re interested in languages, this is an amazingly valuable resource.

It’s fun to see something gain critical mass right before your eyes. I’ve been using LinkedIn for a while now, but I’ve really seen a ton of new people using in the last couple of months. LinkedIn raised a bunch of money this week, on a pretty significant valuation, and I’ve seen guys like Guy Kawasaki and Jason Calacanis blog about it recently, with very favorable opinions.

At any rate, I’ve been spending some time fixing up my LinkedIn profile and adding connections. If you want to connect on LinkedIn, send me an invitation to my last name at positivenetworks.net.

I went to Micro Center this week to buy a new external hard drive; my 120G internal laptop drive is too full. I thought I’d try to get the fastest one I could, so I got a FireWire 800 enclosure and a new Segate 320G 7200RPM drive with a 16MB cache. Since I spent a little extra on fast parts, I thought I’d benchmark a bit. After timing some drag-and-drop operations, I was coming out with around 30MB/sec, which seemed too slow for this equipment.

I’m not a storage guy, but I seem to remember 33Mb/sec as an old transfer rate speed to ATA drives. A great Wikipedia article confirmed my hunch. I was instantly irritated with the vendors of this drive enclosure, so I wrote up a quick program to benchmark this thing.

The program confirmed that I was getting right about 30MB/sec copying a 2G file from my laptop to the external drive. So, just for the sake of comparison, I changed the program to simply writing 1GB worth of 0’s and pointed it at my internal hard drive.

30MB/sec.

I use a 17″ MacBook Pro for most of my dev work; I work in one of several VMs depending on the environment I’m developing for. My System Profiler tells me that I have a 1.5Gb/s (192MB/s) SATA controller with an attached Segate 120G 5400RPM drive. No obvious reason it would come in at 30MB/s sustained write.

I then tried my program on my new external drive. 57 MB/sec. Waaaay better. This is about what I’d expect out of this drive.

So, I have no idea why my internal drive’s sustained transfer rate is roughly 1/2 of my external drive’s. The data sheet says it should be capable of 42MB/s. Sure looks like it’s clipped at 33 though.

The true performance story, of course, has little to do with max sustained transfer speeds; seek time and bursts tend to dominate performance. Still, with a SATA controller and a reasonably fast hard drive in my laptop, I’m curious to know what’s up. The inescapable truth here is that it’s going to take 2x the amount of time to back up my iTunes repository that it should, or to copy VM’s around, which annoys me.

Mike Arrington confirms something I’ve always suspected: CarsDirect is a pretty good way to buy a new car. I’ve never gotten to use them because they haven’t had dealers in my area for the car I’ve wanted.

Ken and I have arrived in Seattle and are staying at the Paragon Hotel in Bellevue. Not bad, except it’s about 5 feet from the highway. They even offer free wi-fi service for the entire hotel. But, there’s one problem.

When you connect to the network and open your browser, it goes right to their portal page and asks you to create a free account. You get to pick a username and a password. When you’re done registering, you get a friendly prompt:

Please check your e-mail to get a message with your password from our administrator.

Wow. Seriously. I’m at a hotel. I don’t have Internet access with which to check my e-mail, or else I wouldn’t need theirs.

So, I’m now borrowing Ken’s Verizon EVDO service to get my password. POOR DESIGN.

Incidentally, if these brainiacs e-mail me the password that I just typed in, I’m going to go nuts. That is (was?) a secure password! Sigh…

UPDATE: They didn’t mail the password, just a link to click on.