iphoting's Sink

Contrary to what many people say about learning how to park in Driving Schools with poles, I believe it is quite useful in grasping the principles and concepts of how to park a car. Having learnt the basics of using poles which act as imaginary lines from the ground where you can see through the passenger windows, you can then apply and imagine lines from various objects that demarcate the outline of the car parking lot.

For vertical parking, no explanation is required. The headlights / pillars can represent outer poles of the training lot. The techniques used in parking is still the same. It works for any type of car, big or small, and any type of lot, as long as it can fit the car reasonably.

Parallel parking, on the other hand, is even easier. Just take the headlights and taillights of the vehicles between the lot as poles and apply the same technique. It will definitely work, as long as you remember the principles to the techniques.

I was glad that my private instructor gave me time to learn parking via the first principles. He gave me the broad concept of where to look at what and left the finer details of correcting mistakes to myself to pick up. He didn’t tell me how to fix bad parking due to turning mistakes — he let me figure out myself.

It all turned out very useful when I was looking for a parking space around SingTel ComCentre to get my mother’s iPhone repaired. The building’s carpark was full and there fortunately was an empty parallel parking lot in front. The last time I parked in a parallel parking lot was in my instructor’s car, taking my practical test. The car was different then, the lot was more spacious, and the situation was less stressful. Naturally in a single-lane, bi-directional road, cars from both directions will pile up when anyone attempts to parallel park along one of the lots. When car piles, the stress naturally increases.

No way I’m going to let them agree with what the probationary plate meant — n00b driver.

I followed the first principles from what I’d learnt 5 months ago and it worked flawlessly.

My mother was impressed. So was I. It was my first try outside the driving circuit after all and I didn’t cause an embarrassing road-block.

It’s been nearly two years since my enlistment and I’m glad that I’m on my last mile. Throughout these 2 years, some people would claim that it has been a thorough waste of time, others would say that it’s an experience of a lifetime.

I’ve experienced a fair share of both claims and can testify that 50% of the outcome lies in my hands. There are certainly some sights to behold, trials and tribulations to endure, friends to be made, time to be wasted, problems to be solved, along the way of ORD.

The trick to your time being wasted is to make good use of the time when people are wasting your time. Although I am working in an organisation that prides itself for being timely and decisive, people are routinely late for meetings. I fit books in my iPod Touch or paperbacks in my side pocket. If I were to forget or be bored by rumbling drones, I’ll take out my mobile phone and look up the latest from Reuters and Google Reader. Of course, having the secret to prevent people from wasting your time should mean that you’ll be mindful of taking up the time of others.

Another trick to a time waster in another context is that people would insist that you do certain things using primitive and time consuming methods. I’ve learnt to give equally lengthy forecast of completion, use modern methods, and use the time saved to do my other more important things. I’d learnt this cool trick from one of my school teachers.

That’s the gist on the time savers I’d learnt and employed.

As my work moved into the HQ, time wasters are no longer the biggest enemies. The new and powerful word in use is Politics. Putting it upfront, I thoroughly hate it. Navigating through the minefield of politics is a skill to be learnt and polished in any office environment.

I’ve learnt how to smile when you’re boiling furious, make friends and be friendly toward deadly enemies, capture and understand the nuances of intent and sentence structure in instructions, reading the truth of smiling lies, and most despicable of all, cleaning up after people’s defecation. Sometimes I wonder, am I working too much and hard for what I’m paid? Then again, it’s the price for the development of alternative mental faculties.

On the other hand, I’ve learnt a lot more about myself that I could ever have. I’ve noticed that my subconsciousness is like a sponge, soaking up everything around me — the good, the bad, and the ugly, slowly assimilating collated information into my behaviour.

I avoid certain people only because I don’t want to pick up their traits.

As with all politics, I have to deal with lies, half-truths, and white-lies. Knowing how to distinguish between them is important as it gleams significant information which can be of great use.

Lies are rather easy to detect from non-compulsive liars. What’s written in body language books aren’t very useful, as I believe, every person has ‘fingerprint actions’ when he’s about to lie. Taking reference from an obvious lie, one can capture the ‘fingerprint’ and hence match it to whenever it occurs again. To be especially effective in finding the truth and to identify lying, use binary questions while watching out for the ‘fingerprint’.

Nevertheless, I will sorely miss my fellow mates whom I’ve met in one way another, having tried my best to know (and make friends with) as many of them as possible.

Yesterday, I was given an interesting problem to tackle.

We were given a bunch of laptops, 8 of them to be exact, already cloned but missing almost 15 GB of important user-end data. There’s no way to re-clone all these machines, as the source image is not available to us. The only way is to copy the 15 GB of files to each machine, no two ways about it. The 15 GB of files lie on a 500 GB external USB harddisk. I have Ethernet cables and 2 Ethernet switches.

The big question is how?

Of course, copying from the harddisk onto each laptop one after another, manually, or via Sneakernet, is the favourite answer, but no. I can only call that desperate, physically constrained, or intellectually apathetic.

I’m a person who loves processes, systems, and automation. Having to copy a bunch of files serially and manually, and onto so many computers repetitively is unacceptable, especially when you have to rinse and repeat a whole 8 times. Suffering a little pain to get any infrastructure up, just to let it copy automatically painlessly is what I’m looking for. 先苦后甜.

Out of ideas, I pinged a few people via sms, “Hey, what is the most efficient way to transfer 15 GB of data onto 8 different laptops, without cloning.”

Portable Harddisk / Sneakernet, Samba CIFS were the few answers that came in. Someone suggested copying from one to two, two to four, four to eight, but that’s too tedious and not scalable, equipment wise. But what if the media used is the Ethernet?

I probed further, “multicast network solutions?”

“BitTorrent”. Bingo. Thanks to cflee for that great suggestion! That’s the term and I knew it would certainly work. I did read up on the BitTorrent protocol some time back and am quite disappointed that this didn’t occur to me earlier. He also mentioned that uTorrent provides a built-in tracker, and that there’s a handy guide available.

Spent 10 minutes reading through and successfully managed to give it a trial within my home network between 2 computers. Conceptually, a prototype has been demonstrated and there’s no way it can fail the next day.

Spent the following morning with a few co-workers digging up rarely used networking equipment and proceeded to wire-up the machines. The two 4-port switch cum wireless APs were miserable — they only leave us with 6 usable LAN ports. The other 2 machines had to do with 802.11G wireless. It’ll work, but just a little slower. I was hoping to complete this whole ordeal before the day is to end, i.e. 5.30 pm, and go home on time. After all, copying 15 GB from the portable harddisk onto one of the laptops already took a grand total of 60 minutes. If I had to do this serially and linearly, it’ll take no less than 8 hours. Portable harddisks are rare too, especially for filesizes that huge.

I configured the DHCPd and got the whole network running nicely and proceeded to install uTorrent on all the machines (skipping the rubbish, ad-supported nonsense). That took hardly 10 minutes as Samba CIFS came into play. It’ll be cool if there’s a automatic install distributor but I’ve not got time for it.

Created the initial seeding torrent according to the guide and that process took almost 15 minutes. Thousands of tiny files, coupled with gigantic files, whatever you can imagine, the limits of the filesystem are being tested here.

Started the seed on the tracker, turned on ‘Initial Seeding’ while I distributed the newly created .torrent to the rest of the machines.

Changed back to standard Seeding once all the machines have entered the swarm.

Thinking about the 8 hours that I would have to take, going by the conventional advice, I grinned and went on to do other work, while giving my forecast of completion to ‘End of the Day’.

The seeding started at around 9 to 9.30 am. I drove out to buy breakfast for everyone and came back at around 10.30 am.

I took a peak at the progress and I got a shock of my life.

All the wired Ethernet clients are now seeding! 100% download complete! With only the 2 miserable wireless clients left struggling with the slow connection. I exchanged the wire and wireless connection with 2 other computers and I saw the download speed race to the roof.

12.2 MB/s. It works out to ~100 Mbps.

Every 30 seconds, the download speed will slow a little and a uTorrent would pop a warning at the status bar, “Harddisk overload 100%”. Wow, a solid harddisk LED.

I’m impressed.

Darned. I thought the transfer would take the whole day, giving me time for a well deserved break, but little did I know, the transfer had completed before I even had lunch!

So, now you know. BitTorrent is extremely efficient in one-to-many, many-to-many, and many-to-one distribution tasks. As long as the overhead of installing and running uTorrent on every machine is well distributed and / or paid for, this is an extremely useful piece of software to add into any sysadmin’s arsenal.

Some other hidden benefits of BitTorrent are that it is resumable, repairable, distributed (many to many, any seeder / peer can enter or leave the swarm without much disruption nor require any human rectification), lightweight (300k installer), and automated (once past the initial start, and handles disconnections gracefully).

Really, BitTorrent has its legitimate use as above, quod erat demonstrandum (Q.E.D.).