Thinking out loud about cars, computers and security
1996. The Spice Girls rock (pop?) the world with Wannabe. Will Smith kicks alien butt in Independence day. DVDs become commercially available. Scientists clone the first mammal. Ebay opens. Three important standards are either released or reshaped into their current form: MIME, Unicode and IPv6. 17 years later, a shocking amount of software still does not support these standards.
sigh
My Windows 7 desktop is set up to back up to a Drobo B800i (over iSCSI) every night at 04:00, using Windows Backup. Even though it only uses about 700 GB of its 2 TB mirror, and only backs up a small fraction of that, backup jobs routinely took 15 hours or more. It could have copied the entire disk in half that time!
I set about hunting for a solution. One suggestion that turned up repeatedly in Google searches was to turn off the Background Intelligent Transfer Service. BITS is basically a download manager designed to only run when there is little or no other network traffic; among other thing, it is used by Windows Update to download patches. I couldn’t understand how this could help, but I had no better ideas and nothing to lose, so I stopped BITS. The next backup job completed in 45 minutes.
Patch Tuesday came along, and I rebooted the computer. Since I had only stopped BITS and not disabled it, it started again when the machine booted. Backup jobs slowed down again. This time, I disabled BITS, and I was back to sub-hour backups.
This makes absolutely no sense. BITS wasn’t even downloading anything; as far as I know, the only program or service I have running that actually uses it is Windows Update. BITS was slowing down backups just by being there. I don’t remember having this issue when I ran backups to an eSATA drive, so there must be some network-related interaction between BITS and iSCSI, but I have no idea what.
Based om my Google Ads profile:
| Personal details | |
|---|---|
| Gender: male | No prize for guessing; it’s in my Google+ profile. |
| Age: 35-44 | |
| Languages: unknown | I’m surprised they didn’t figure this one out. English, French, Norwegian. |
| Interests | |
| Action & Adventure Films | Vaguely |
| Air Travel | I’ve booked two flights in the last 24 months. They don’t seem to have noticed that I’ve spent a lot of time recently researching ferries. |
| Banking | Who doesn’t use Internet banking these days? |
| Bicycles & Accessories | I own a bike. I’ve ridden it twice in the last six years. |
| Computer & Video Games | Yes, definitely. |
| Consumer Electronics | Depends on how you define the term. Computers, computer parts and peripherals, yes. |
| East Asian Music | No |
| Fashion & Style | You have hundreds of photos of me, and you never noticed that I always wear the exact same clothes? |
| Fiat | Try Audi. |
| Food & Drink | Yes, but not online. |
| Hair Care | You have hundreds of photos of me, and you never noticed that I shave my head? |
| Hygiene & Toiletries | I’ve used the same shower gel and deodorant for years. They’re both no-brand products sold in pharmacies. |
| Make-Up & Cosmetics | You know I’m male. You know I’m straight. Do the math. |
| Olympics | My initial reaction was “huh?”, but actually, yes. Mostly women’s handball, but also cross-country skiing and biathlon. |
| Online Video | What does that even mean? You can’t throw a rock on the intertubes these days without hitting half a dozen lolcat videos. Not that I would ever throw a rock at a cat. |
| Rap & Hip-Hop | They must have deduced that from all the P!nk and Avril Lavigne videos I watch on YouTube. |
| Search Engine Optimization & Marketing | SEO & marketing “consultants” are scum. |
| Smart Phones | Yes. |
2013-03-26 Gunnar Tjomlid skriver om at Brun og Blid bruker kvakksalveren Joseph Mercola i markedsføringen sin.
2013-03-27 Brun og Blid fyrer tilbake med et rent personangrep som de fjerner etter noen få timer (etter sigende fordi de har kommet fram til at Tjomlid bare er en synser som ikke fortjener noe svar). Tilsvaret inkluderer er reelt gullkorn der de i praksis henviser til seg selv som objektiv tredjepart i saken.
2013-03-28 PR-ansvarlig for Brun og Blid, Haakon Schrøder – en mann med grumsete fortid, som blant annet har opplevd å bli eksludert fra bransjeforeningen Norske Informasjonsrådgivere for uetisk praksis – ringer Tjomlid for å skjelle ham ut, noe som selvfølgelig fører til at Tjomlid skriver en tredje og enda lengre artikkel om Brun og Blids lefling med fakta, ulovlige markedsføring og sammenblanding av roller og interesser.
Planting Peace has acquired a house across the street from the Westboro Baptist Church and painted it in rainbow colors to protest the Church’s anti-homosexual stance. According to the Washington Post, Margie Phelps, second daughter of WBC founder Fred Phelps (and apparently the WBC’s legal counsel) called it “the sodomite house”, a clear reference to Genesis 17-19; the article also quotes her younger sister Shirley Phelps-Roper, spokesperson for the WBC, who in a bizarre case of reverse psychology claims to love the paint job because, and I paraphrase, it reminds people that God hates fags.
WBC founder Fred Phelps clearly hasn’t done a good job of raising his daughters, as they are showing no sign of performing their biblical duty, which according to Genesis 19 is to first offer themselves to said sodomites, and then date-rape their own father and bear his children.