When Truth is Partial: Horses Like Apples

Did you know that horses like apples?  Give a horse an apple, and he will eat it.  I have observed this.  Every time I have given a horse an apple, he has eaten it.  In addition, I once gave a horse a tomato and the horse did not eat it, even though the tomato looked like an apple.  A reasonable hypothesis could be made that horses dislike tomatoes, although it would require further testing.

Now, imagine a world where you do an internet search about apples, And all the leading results are about how horses like apples.  

But you know there is more to apples than horses.  So you do a search on the health benefits of apples for humans.  The results return that if you eat apple seeds it can kill you.

Then you do a search on Snopes about apples.  It returns: An apple a day keeps the doctor away? FALSE.  

In such a world, two things might happen.  First, the majority of people might conclude that apples are for horses, and should not be eaten by humans.  And the FDA could ban apples for human consumption.

But something else might happen instead.  People could decide that they do want to eat apples, and that they are smart enough to understand the nuance between eating apples and apple seeds,  In  such a world, people would start to trust less the powers that be.

That's my thought for the day. :) 

Chart Comparing the Cost of a Movie Ticket to the Federal (USA) Minimum Wage

When I was in High School (a long time ago!) I associated one hour of work as being worth about the cost of a movie ticket.  At the time I made $3.35/an hour.   And a movie ticket cost $3.50.  As it turns out, historically these values have always been pretty close.   Today, a movie costs slightly more than an hour of work ($7.96 vs $7.25).  So it looks like either movie prices should come down a bit, or the minimum wage should be raised. I'm not looking to argue here, just making an observation. :)   Here's a historical chart comparing the cost of a movie with the Federal Minimum wage.  The numbers are pulled from Box Office Mojo, and the US Dept of Labor.

Click on the chart to enlarge. I have meager excel skills, so I apologize in advance that the chart isn't that great.

How to Re-format an Eqaullogic volume

So you have a thin provisioned Equallogic volume with "dirty bits".  This can happen when you delete a vm, or vmotion it off somewhere else.  Even though you no longer have the data on the volume (as far as VMWare is concerned), Equallogic treats that space as used.

Vmware sees the volume as empty.

But Equallgic thinks it's full.  What the hey!?

But there is a sneaky way to "re-format" the volume.  You're not actually reformatting it, just shrinking it really small and expanding it again.  It accomplishes what you want though, which is to free up the dirty bits without actually deleting the volume.  Here are the steps:

1) Make sure there is no data on the volume that you need.  Check twice. :)

2) Remove the volume from vmware.

3) Log into the EQL GUI, delete snapshots of the volume

4) change the volume to "thick provisioned" ( volume - modify settings - space tab - uncheck "thin provisioned volume")

5) set volume offline (right click volume - set offline)

6) Log into the EQL command line interface (via putty or whatever), and type the following:  "volume select [name] shrink 1g".  You can't do this step in the GUI.  Here's an example where my volume name was "rld9":
 

7) Now go back into the EQL GUI, expand the volume back to the size you want, thin provision it again, and add the storage back to vmware.

Here's a screenshot of the volume afterwards.  Free space again, woot!