I’ve been accused of being critical of my former employer in the past. However, I would instead characterize my attitude as being skeptical of their ability to continue to exist at their current size as the print advertising industry has dramatically declined as a result of a general economic slowdown and a marked decrease in magazine circulation rates.

On the other hand, I don’t think PhotoShelter is playing with a full deck of cards. I mean, who says things like “we’re in this to beat [our competitors] by standing up for [our suppliers]” with a straight face?

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Originally uploaded by hookjaw

In case you were wondering, this is what I do for Eye-Fi.

Sometimes I forget this.

Scott, Reed and I grew playoff beards to support the Sharks this year. These pictures were taken just a few hours before the Sharks lost in one of the longest playoff games in NHL history.

Oops, the iGoogle translate gadget has some issues. It seems like they’re trying to use their massive powers of indexing and such to do automatic translation, with some odd results.

For example, combinato is defined by the iGoogle translate gadget as “I got very little done today” which doesn’t really make any sense at all. Combinato is the past participle of combinare, which means to combine, to organize, or to achieve. I did some searching and the problem seems to be that google has indexed and taken as authoritative a bebo profile with a smartass comment (”Oggi ho combinato poco. Meaning I got very little done today. Ha ha.”) missing a modifier (poco meaning little).

The regular Google translate page seems to do the right thing, perhaps because of the “suggest a better translation” feature which the iGoogle translate gadget lacks.

sadly, i missed the naughty librarian convention. i need more advanced warning, people!

(no fat jokes plz)

we had some visitors a few days ago.

sunday afternoon by jon lajoie.

Now is a great time to give to Planned Parenthood. An anonymous donor is matching all contributions made to PP until December 31, 2007, up to $250,000. I strongly urge you to give today. This is a great holiday gift that you can give to the millions of people worldwide who depend on Planned Parenthood for their reproductive health needs.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to resize an XFS partition on linux. xfs_growfs can handle growing the filesystem live just fine, so what I really need is a live partition expander, and I haven’t found a great solution. The scenario is something like expanding a hardware raidset, expanding a volume on that raidset, and then wanting to expand the partition and filesystem on that volume, all without taking the filesystem offline.

fdisk doesn’t resize, only deletes and recreates, won’t work on an actively mounted filesystem, and doesn’t support partitions larger than 2T. parted (with a GPT disklabel) will work on > 2T partitions, but doesn’t support live resize operations on xfs filesystem, even though all I want it to do is resize the partition. gparted should work according to the docs, but I haven’t gotten it to recognize an XFS filesystem (even though again, all I want to do is resize the partition) and I don’t really want to install X on this system.

The best solution I’ve been able to come up with so far is to unmount the filesystem, delete and recreate the partition using parted (accepting the request to move the backup GPT table to the end of the grown disk), remounting the filesystem, and then running xfs_growfs on it. Unfortunately, this does require some downtime. Any better solutions? LVM seems like it might be a way out, but parted doesn’t seem to work with LVM either.