I just now finished watching Disney’s “The Black Cauldron”. While a rather poor example of a Disney animated film, there is one element that really caught my surprise. One of the characters, Gurgi, acted, sounded, and moved just like Golem from Peter Jackson’s rendition of Lord of the Rings. The way Gurgi talked, his inflections, his character’s nature and actions were all pretty much exactly how Golem was portrayed. I’m not necessarily saying Gurgi was stolen from LoTR, or Jackson copied Gurgi alternately, but they are a bit too eerily similar for my speculations.

I’ve been on a bit of a Peter Pan kick lately. It all started with catching Hook a few weeks ago, which I’ve always loved and enjoy watching from time, on the boob tube. After finishing it, I remembered that I was given the original Peter Pan novel for a Christmas when I was around 9 years of age or so, and I decided to pick it up on my next trip to my parents’ house in Dallas. I downloaded all the other official Peter Pan films in the mean time for a watch, as I had never seen them before.

One of the main reasons for this was I was also curious as to how the stories differed in the film versions from the original story, and from each other. I found out they all varied greatly, especially in the tone from the novel, except for Hook, which got it perfect. I’m not going to go into a comparison of the stories here, as that is not really important. All I’d really like to mention about the movies is that the Disney’s 2002 “Return to Neverland” was a rather poor rip off of the Hook plot line, and I didn’t really find it worth it. Disney has really lost it’s flair since The Lion King, IMO. “Walt Disney’s Peter Pan” (February 5, 1953) and “Peter Pan” (2003) however were both well worth it.

The main difference I was referring to between most of the movies and the novel is the heavy presence of a dark and sinister theme in the original book. The Lost Boys were just as cut throat as the pirates, as it mentioned the often battles and killing each other in cold bold, and it even mentioned something to the extent of Peter Pan “thinning out the ranks” of the Lost Boys when their numbers got too large, IIRC. The mermaids were silent killers when they got the chance, and there was also talk of “fairy orgies”. I thought this was all great for a children’s book, as it didn’t concentrate on these aspects, but they were there to give a proper setting. It was a very interesting and fun read, but a far cry from the brilliant status it has been given, IMO. Makes me wonder what all the people out there that complain about Harry Potter would say if they gave this one a read. Oh, the only thing Tinkerbelle pretty much ever says throughout the book is “You ass” :-).

Speaking of Harry Potter, it came as a bit of a shock to me seeing Maggie Smith, who plays Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter movies, playing as Granny Wendy in Hook. She did an amazing job at looking decrepit.

One final non-related note… the very briefly overhead Neverland island view shown on Hook really reminded me of my Eternal Realms map.

So I have been having major speed issues with one of our servers. After countless hours of diagnoses, I determined the bottle neck was always I/O (input/output, accessing the hard drive). For example, when running an MD5 hash on a 600MB file load would jump up to 31 with 4 logical CPUs and it would take 5-10 minutes to complete. When performing the same test on the same machine on a second drive it finished within seconds.

Replacing the hard drive itself is a last resort for a live production server, and a friend suggested the drive controller could be the problem, so I confirmed that the drive controller for our server was not on-board (on its own card), and I attempted to convince the company hosting our server of the problem so they would replace the drive controller. I ran my own tests first with an iostat check while doing a read of the main hard drive (cat /etc/sda > /dev/null). This produced steadily worsening results the longer the test went on, and always much worse than our secondary drive. I passed these results on to the hosting company, and they replied that a “badblocks –vv” produced results that showed things looked fine.

So I was about to go run his test to confirm his findings, but decided to check parameters first, as I always like to do before running new Linux commands. Thank Thor I did. The admin had meant to write “badblocks –v” (verbose) and typoed with a double key stroke. The two v’s looked like a w due to the font, and had I ran a “badblocks –w” (write-mode test), I would have wiped out the entire hard drive.

Anyways, the test outputted the same basic results as my iostat test with throughput results very quickly decreasing from a remotely acceptable level to almost nil. Of course, the admin only took the best results of the test, ignoring the rest.

I had them swap out the drive controller anyways, and it hasn’t fixed things, so a hard drive replace will probably be needed soon. This kind of problem would be trivial if I had access to the server and could just test the hardware myself, but that is a price to pay for proper security at a server farm.