untyping

Just some quick links. It has been a busy day.

• [T]he human race publishes a book every 30 seconds. If current trends continue, by 2052 the number of people writing and publishing a book in a given year will exceed the number of people who will read one.

  From Design Observer

  . Last night I had my first foray onto eBay. As I surveyed the hundreds of professional sellers my stuff would be competing for attention against I thought I’d missed the boat on this one. Looks like I have a few years yet to impress any book-length ideas on the world, but the window is closing.

• Just everyone has linked to the Profit Calculator, which lightly skims over how a variety of NY businesses make money. Most interesting for me were the drug dealer, the yoga studio, and Nobu.
• Mark Fletcher asks if distributed development leads to better communication. Interesting idea. So far I’m undecided on the basis of our efforts.

Want to feel better? Think fast. A study shows that people forced to think quickly feel better:

[Emily] Pronin and … Daniel Wegner … experimentally manipulated the pace at which participants read a series of statements … The researchers found that regardless of the content of the statements, people felt happier, more energetic, more creative, more powerful, and more grandiose when they read the statements at a fast rather than a slow pace.

This type of behaviour is very similar to manic behaviour, so whether it is beneficial in the long term in debatable, but it’s at least an interesting result. Perhaps it explains why so many of us put off work till the last minute — we want the rush of working at a fast pace. At least we now have a plausible argument for such behaviour!

Currently, untyped lives on a virtual machine provided by Bytemark. The service they provide is excellent, and we recommend them highly. While we are building our own server we hope to continue to host with Bytemark, but instead of being on a VM, we’ll be on our own hardware. We’ll see how that goes.

Today, Christian and I spent a few hours working on the most fundamental part of a server: the filesystem. Before I go into any detail about the decisions we made, I’ll give you a sense for what we’re working with:

This server has seen use before, but we’ve replaced all the moving parts; we’re quite pleased with its condition, and think it will provide us with a number of years of good service. And, we hope that we don’t need to do a low-level install again in the next few years.

The first thing we did was to grab a Debian 3.1r1 “testing” net install CD image. We had to boot the 2.4 kernel, as the 2.6 kernel fails to load appropriate CD drivers from the install CD; this didn’t really matter. Then, we came around to our filesystem layout; what we knew was that we wanted to partition off different parts of the directory tree (/, /boot, /var, /usr, /tmp, /home); we didn’t know exactly how much space to give each part of the filesystem, however. Do we make home 40GB, or 60GB? What about usr? The list goes on and on.

We started by setting up a 4GB swap partition at the end of each drive, a 400MB boot partition at the front of each drive, and setting aside the remaining 245GB or so for the main parts of the filesystem. We then used the Debian installer to turn the 400MB partitions into one RAID set, and the 245GB partition into another. This way, both our boot partition and the main part of the drive are in RAID, but we’re guaranteed that our boot partition is at the front of the disk.

(What is RAID? I’ll stick with the Wikipedia on that one. It keeps our two disk drives in perfect sync; this way, if one of them fails, we might be able to replace it before the second one does, thus keeping our system running with little or no interruption. This is a Good Thing.)

Then, we dove into that big, 245GB space. We used LVM—the Logical Volume Manager–to partition the rest of the disk. LVM is great because it essentially ignores the physical layout of your disks, and allows you to dynamically resize partitions without any great gnashing of teeth. So, we laid out 40GB for /home and /data, 20GB for /usr, and 4GB each for /, /var, and /tmp.

Note that this is only 112GB of space; we had (roughly) 245GB of space in that big RAID set. Our intention is to grow those partitions as we need to. For now, we chose large, but reasonable values for each of these partitions. In time, we may decide to increase the amount of space allocated to /home—perhaps from 40GB to 80GB. The point is, we have around 116GB of space to “grow into”, and we can allocate it to any of the partitions we currently have… or we can create new partitions. In either case, these operations don’t require us to shutdown the machine, or even take it entirely offline—we only need to “stop” the logical volume that the partition is on.

While we could do this more quickly the second time around, this took us between one and two hours; we were careful to check our assumptions, and rehashed and discussed a lot of the decisions in light of how we might want to use the server in the future.

Once the filesystem was set up, the rest of the installation went quickly; things were pulled in automatically over the network, and we rebooted into our new machine. The filesystem looks great, and we expect that the decisions we made will serve us well in the future. Now, we’ll work on upgrading the kernel to a 2.6 series (with SMP support), and then begin replicating those services that currently exist on the VM to the server.

Links that came in handy:

• http://www.die.net/doc/linux/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO-4.html
• http://www.die.net/doc/linux/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO-9.html#ss9.9
• http://aplawrence.com/Linux/lvm.html

If you are a civilian like me (an anthropologist, that is, without much technical savvy), it’s a little mystifying. Will Internet 2.0 change everything or just some things? Is this a revolutionary moment or an evolutionary one? Is everything I know wrong, or just this, that and the other thing? Is this 2.0h! or merely 2.0. …

Here are three models that sort out the possibilities for me.

Read it, it’s good stuff.

My take: these changes will take place, but it will take another generation, that grows up with the Internet, for them to be fully realised.

A great big Happy Birthday! to Geoff, who turns 21 again today!

I’ve just discovered my old employer, LShift, have a blog. Lots of good stuff there. As usual, TonyG is producing code like the mad hacking machine he is. Now I just have to get him to put some of it in Planet.

Very encouraging to see this advertisement. The highlights:

Jane Street Capital (http://janestcapital.com) is a proprietary
trading company located in Manhattan. We’re looking for students
interested in internships for the summer of 2006…

One unusual attraction of the job is that the large majority
of our programming is done in OCaml.

It’s great to see industry adopting advanced programming languages. Finance is not an entirely new domain for functional programming. Simon Peyton-Jones wrote a paper some time ago on a combinator library for financial contracts. This work has been commercialised, with the implementation again using O’Caml. In fact there is large literature of domain specific languages for financial applications (for example Risla) so there is certainly a market for applying programming language theory in this area.

As you may notice, we have a new design that fits in much better with the design of the rest of the site. Enjoy!

I’ve just become aware that a lot of the PLT crew are keeping blogs. Worth checking out if Lambda the Ultimate doesn’t provide you with enough daily programming language theory are:

• The Little Calculist (Dave Herman)
• Keep Working, Worker Bee! (Jacob Matthews)
• Mitch’s Clippings (Mitch Wand)

Jacob’s blog is particularly interesting to me for two reasons:

• He’s talking a bit about commercial applications of PLT Scheme, something that we’re trying to do at Untyped
• He’s got a great paper showing how a pile of programming language theory can be applied to solve a problem way better than anyone else has solved it before, which is something we’re really into!