ext4 ... data loss, what? why?

Somehow this passed me by over the years because I never liked ext3 either and avoided it but boy is ext4 shit. Apparently it wont flush anything to disk unless f(data)sync() is called which means on a system that I crash as much as the parallella i'm often left with empty files all over the place - from a compile i ran 20 minutes ago. Fortunately emacs must be calling fsync and so i haven't lost any "real work". Running "sync" often takes ages too since it's decided to leave all the writes since boot-up lying around in ram.

Despite any arguments to the contrary it's pretty obvious why ext4 was broken in this way: blah blah ... benchmarks look better ... blah blah.

I just can't believe the distro "community" or any sysadmin actually puts up with this sort of nonsense given there are so many other (excellent, stable) filesystems to choose from. For a so-called meritorious-based "community" this reeks of the same type of following the "industry default" that lead to the disastrous wintel-fucked-over lost-decade of the 90s.

Come on, it's just shit, use something else. There's no excuse. And rather than focusing on benchmarks, isn't it about time the filesystem writers focussed on robustness? I mean come on, why the fuck do I still have to unmount a removable disk before taking it out? That's some other fucked-up-shit that was introduced in the 90s.

I got sick of it so a few weeks ago I changed to developing on the parallella via a nfs disk. Since the TOD clock on my rev0 board is out of whack since changing to the rev1 distro (drifts about 1s per minute) i'm usually editing and compiling on my workstation as well; which makes everything quicker and easier as a bonus. I have a rev1.1 board but haven't tried it yet because the rev0 is working well enough for what i'm doing and my desk is a bit cramped (hmm, but should do a burn-in test soon).

I was looking into a NAS box to just centralise all the "bulk" filesystems of all my computers but couldn't decide on one to buy and then thought that since they were probably running gnu/linux anyway I could at least see if it would be workable (it is). I probably don't even need that magnitude of space anyway: I had another workstation just running to record tv using mythtv for the last few years - but I stopped watching any of it months ago and last time the power went out during a storm I just left it turned off (mysql is another piece of shit so it usually requires some massaging to work after a reboot too, so i saved myself some hassles). It wasn't the original goal/use of the machine it's just that it's in a poor location and then I got other computers.

I did get a usb drive instead, which was probably a bit pointless in hindsight and it's just sitting on the other one I barely use, collecting copious amounts of dust infront of the telly. It seemed like a good idea at the time; I guess i'll get a nas box one day although not for archiving movies or tv series i'm just not going to end up watching.

Commercial TV here is almost unwatchable now with a recording and even with a recording it's a hassle skipping through the ads - there is almost more ads than tv and it's often the same annoying ones over and over again. I'm barely watching the footy this year either - which is normally something to have in the background at least during a wintry weekend: when channel 7's "a-team" are commentating it's just too hard to watch with the sound on at all - fuck fuck bruce macevaney[sic] and all his fucking inane and repetitive one-liners - and i've had more than enough of bunnings "team members" telling me about their shitty cheap imported junk every time a goal gets kicked. And since channel 7 bought the SANFL rights they barely show any games - ABC at least had one match of the week every week, with no fucking ads (actually 7 are showing less national games too, pushing people to their paytv stuff). Most of the rest of the "content" is pretty crap anyway (dumbed down way too much, and/or based on idiotic premises), or repeated to overload. Lately the thing on commercial tv seems to be to show a series as fast as possible by showing 2 or 3 (or more) back to back, once a week until they're all shown. Must be some marketing junk about 'captive' audience but I can't see that working for long if they then repeat the same short series every 6 months and when tv's come with video recorders built in.

I guess on the plus side ... it means i've been doing a lot more hacking.

It's my weekly RDO today, not sure what to do. Should get a quote for solar hot-water or new stove-top or a good number of other things to do around the house but, well, I just don't want to deal with it. Too cold to do much outside - i think the storms have cleared up but a full day of still grey overcast sucks the heat out of the world. Should at least run the vacuum around a bit and load the dishwasher. After that I might do some hacking if i can think of anything interesting to hack on although my brain is still a bit fried from ezetime and work. I've been cranky as hell this week from work and interrupted sleep so maybe I should just do a bit of fuck all.