Dr. Dobb's Journal January 2008
There are four-dozen rooms, give or take a couple, here at Summer Jo's Farm, Garden, and Restaurant where I live and work. The restaurant/bakery complex contains about a dozen and a half; the barn, greenhouses, and farm outbuildings a similar number; and the house has just over a dozen.
Of these four dozen rooms, exactly four lack either a door or a window to the outside, and three of those are storage areas for food or wine. The fourth is my office.
Skylights keep it from being dark and dreary, but it is private, and that's the point. While activity burbles all around me, customers constantly coming and going, others dropping by to purchase a gift certificate or pick up their wine club order or get a donation to some worthy cause, and others arriving with deliveries of wine and restaurant supplies or produce from our farm or seed and supplies for the farm, while the restaurant and bakery staff check in or out and the farm staff check their e-mail or the weather, while my partner Nancy consults with the chef or the farm manager or the sommelier or the baker or the CPA or the marketing consultant or the theatrical coproducer (we do theater, too)—while all that's going on, I'm sitting at my desk in my private office editing and writing my columns and articles and blog posts and such, keeping up with technology news, and maintaining my NetFlix queue. It's my version of an informative workspace: I get the stimulation of all that activity going on around me, but still retain enough privacy to concentrate.
Until that day my Cousin Corbett showed up.
"There you are," he said, helping himself to the snack chef Joy had sent me. "You're really hidden back here, aren't you? I had to talk to three employees to find my way."
"Did they all say I was busy and that you should just e-mail me?" I asked.
"No, they all said you were back here maintaining your NetFlix queue and that I should come on back."
I made a mental note to speak to the staff.
"I have to hand it to NetFlix," he said, pulling up a chair. "I had the idea first, but they implemented it really well. Great service, isn't it?"
"Yes and no. They turn the DVDs around amazingly fast, but I've seen a high percentage of flaky discs."
Corbett got that dreamy look in his eyes. "I'm thinking," he said, "that they can be so responsive because they use existing businesses—probably video stores—as drop points. I figure that's the only thing keeping the neighborhood video store alive: the staff in the back room collecting red envelopes and e-mailing Netflix."
"Whatever. But the bad discs really..."
"They need to add RFID tags, then they could make turnaround even faster. The staff at the video store reads the RFID tag, gets the next address for the disc via the Internet, and reprograms the tag, updating the routing info to the master database."
"I'm not going to try to follow that. But this whole disc quality thing..."
"Better yet, put the RFID reader in the mail deliverer's vehicle, then if there's a call on the same route for the video currently being picked up, half the time it'll be downstream, and the deliverer can just move it from your mailbox to your neighbor's. The best-case cycle time drops to an hour or so, which is pretty good for snail mail."
"You know that's crazy talk, don't you? Anyway, none of this has anything to do with this basic disc-quality problem."
"Oh, that's an easy one to fix."
"It is?"
"Sure. It's just some bad bits on a disc, right? That's a solved problem."
"I'm glad to hear it. Would you care to share the solution?"
"Natch. Just use ZFS. Sun's zettabyte filesystem. Solves everything. You put multiple copies of the movie, with every block checksummed, on the disc, then the player just has to use the good block and repair the bad one."
"My DVD player can't do any of that."
"Well obviously it would require some changes in the hardware."
"And the software. And the media."
"Right."
"None of which exists."
"Michael, Michael, you disappoint me. You're living in the old world, the era of data corruption. The pre-ZFS era."
"You mean I'm living in the real world."
"Exactly. That's your problem."
Michael Swaine
Editor-at-Large
mike@swaine.com