Planet Offtopic2

Few years ago, I found a formating bug in PowerDNS's web interface. It took a while for it to get fixed. Since it wasn't a critical bug, I never tried to make the maintainer see the light --- eventually he found it himself :) Now, I can say that PowerDNS is perfect :)

Last night, while roaming around BBC's website, and I noticed this:

I took a screenshot and earlier today I let them know about the problem. I don't see today's numbers displayed in engineering format, but today's numbers are an order of magnitude larger than yesterday's so I can't tell if they already fixed it, or if it's the larger numbers that are hiding the problem. We'll see if I get a "thank you" note, or something :)

As I mentioned over a week ago, people have found copies of First Edition UNIX source. Today, I managed to accidentally stumble on a google code project with said code: unix-jun72.

You can check out the entire code from the subversion repo:

svn checkout http://unix-jun72.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ unix-jun72

Then look at something like pages/e01-01...

$ cat pages/e01-01 
/ u1 -- unix

unkni: / used for all system calls
sysent:
	incb	sysflg / indicate a system routine is
	beq	1f / in progress
	jmp	panic / called if trap inside system
1:
	mov	$s.syst+2,clockp
	mov	r0,-(sp) / save user registers
...

Pretty sweet, huh?

From the latest “filesystem test” of btrfs, nilfs, ext4 and xfs:

It took 20 seconds for this database test to complete under EXT3, 34 seconds under NILFS2, but 870 seconds for EXT4! XFS was at 1312 seconds and Btrfs was at 1472 seconds! These results are a bit shocking, but the Phoronix Test Suite does run these tests multiple times to ensure accuracy and statistical significance.

Ok, but the issue here is not statistical noise or averaging problems.  ext4 & xfs & btrfs are flushing the drive’s write cache to be sure fsync is on disk; ext3 is not.  This came up on their own list, and I explained that it was related to barriers etc.  Short memories I guess.  Phoronix could be useful if the tests were more meaningful & transparent, and if they engaged in a bit of communication with the experts in the subsystems they are testing.  It could have been a teachable moment, but it’s just noise this way. 

Today, I came across a link to a photo with a long description. I'm going to include both below:

ISS020-E-009048 (12 June 2009) --- Sarychev Peak Volcano eruption, Kuril Islands, is featured in this image photographed by an Expedition 20 crew member on the International Space Station. A fortuitous orbit of the International Space Station allowed the astronauts this striking view of Sarychev volcano (Russia's Kuril Islands, northeast of Japan) in an early stage of eruption on June 12, 2009. Sarychev Peak is one of the most active volcanoes in the Kuril Island chain and is located on the northwestern end of Matua Island. Prior to June 12, the last explosive eruption had occurred in 1989 with eruptions in 1986, 1976, 1954, and 1946 also producing lava flows. Ash from the June 2009 eruption has been detected 2407 kilometers ESE and 926 kilometers WNW of the volcano, and commercial airline flights are being diverted away from the region to minimize the danger of engine failures from ash intake. This detailed photograph is exciting to volcanologists because it captures several phenomena that occur during the earliest stages of an explosive volcanic eruption. The main column is one of a series of plumes that rose above Matua Island (48.1 degrees north latitude and 153.2 degrees east longitude) on June 12. The plume appears to be a combination of brown ash and white steam. The vigorously rising plume gives the steam a bubble-like appearance; the surrounding atmosphere has been shoved up by the shock wave of the eruption. The smooth white cloud on top may be water condensation that resulted from rapid rising and cooling of the air mass above the ash column, and is probably a transient feature (the eruption plume is starting to punch through). The structure also indicates that little to no shearing winds were present at the time to disrupt the plume. Another series of images, acquired 2-3 days after the start of eruptive activity, illustrate the effect of shearing winds on extent of the ash plumes across the Pacific Ocean. By contrast, a cloud of denser, gray ash -- most probably a pyroclastic flow -- appears to be hugging the ground, descending from the volcano summit. The rising eruption plume casts a shadow to the northwest of the island (bottom center). Brown ash at a lower altitude of the atmosphere spreads out above the ground at upper right. Low-level stratus clouds approach Matua Island from the east, wrapping around the lower slopes of the volcano. Only about 1.5 kilometers of the coastline of Matua Island (upper center) can be seen beneath the clouds and ash.

As promised, here's more of the day-by-day summary of Usenix '09.

Friday

The last day of the conference. As before, I got to the place at 8:30, and had breakfast.

The first session, System Optimization, was interesting. It started with Reducing Seek Overhead with Application-Directed Prefetching. The idea is pretty obvious. You have a library that takes lists of future accesses from the application, and tries to prefetch the data while monitoring the application's IO accesses. The first deviation from the prefetch-list causes an invocation of a call-back. This allows the application to specify a new prefetch list.

The second talk of the session, Fido: Fast Inter-Virtual-Machine Communication for Enterprise Appliances, was about a simple and fast way to have multiple VMs communicating. Their target was a collection of virtual machines running in an appliance box. Since the OSes were inherently trustworthy (before virtualization took off and even now, there was one OS that did everything), they achieve zero-copy by mapping all the other OSes into each address space. For example, suppose you have 3 VMs (red, green, blue), their address spaces would be something like:

Each VM gets all the VM's address spaces read-only, and its own read-write. Then a simple message can be exchanged to specify buffer addresses.

The Web, Internet, Data Center session wasn't very exciting. The one talk that stuck in my head was RCB: A Simple and Practical Framework for Real-time Collaborative Browsing. What they did was some javascript-fu that synchronized the DOM trees between two (or more?) browsers.

The last session for the day (and the conference) was Bugs and Software Updates. It opened with The Beauty and the Beast: Vulnerabilities in Red Hat's Packages. The authors did some crazy statistics and found that there was some correlation between packages' dependencies and the number of vulnerabilities. Several audience members pointed out that publishing these findings may cause a feedback that completely maybe either exaggerate this correlation, or it may cause the developers to make dependency choices to make their software seem less likely to have vulnerabilities.

The second talk, Immediate Multi-Threaded Dynamic Software Updates Using Stack Reconstruction sounded interesting, but I really feel like I need to look at the paper first before drawing any further conclusions.

The last talk of the session, Zephyr: Efficient Incremental Reprogramming of Sensor Nodes using Function Call Indirections and Difference Computation, seemed like 2 talks in one. First, we were told about rsync protocol's shortcomings, and how they fixed them, and then we were told about their function call indirection scheme to make the deltas smaller. This function call indirection sounded far too much like dynamically linked binaries, with GOT pointer and all that good stuff.

After a short break, the last invited talk began. The speaker was David Brin - a science fiction writer. He is one of those people that really knows how to present. He gives off an aura of knowing exactly what he'll say next. I can't tell for sure if he does know what he'll say next, or if he merely has an idea where he wants to get to, and "improvises" to get there.

I went back to the hotel, but got bored soon after. Not knowing what to do, I went for a walk. I just took the first street away from the hotel. It turned out to be a road that went considerably uphill toward the San Diego Medical Campus (or whatever it was called). After some exploring, I got some food (this was the only place I saw that had fast food joints, the hotel area was about as boring as it can get).

Saturday

I woke up relatively late - 10am. I blame getting used to the pacific timezone (grr, just in time to fly back!). After packing up, and checking out, I ran into Swami. We went to get breakfast, and talked about all sort of stuff - grad school, conferences, the good ol' days at FSL. After some time, he and another student from Wisconsin took off. I decided to go for a walk. I ended up in the same fast food place. There, I started typing up the previous blahg post. After about 2 hours of working my laptop, I went back and got a shuttle to the airport.

At the airport, I tried to do some work. Before long, I switched to reading a book. Shortly after, it was time to board. The flight itself was mostly uneventful. Sadly, the 2 hour layover in Charlotte, NC was painful. The free wifi that was there few days earlier disappeared. I survived it. Two-ish hours later, we landed at DTW. Due to some miscommunication, I ended up without a ride back to Ann Arbor. I managed to call up a friend that drove me back.

This Friday, June 26th, we will be moving to our new house. This also means that kernel newbies, the passive spam block list and the other sites will be offline for most of the day.

We're moving to a new house this coming Friday and Saturday. Having learned from our last move, we started packing a few weeks ago and have almost run out of things to pack. Also, the garage grew a mountain of moving boxes:

moving boxes

Phew! It's been a fun couple of days. I'm going to provide a day-by-day summary of what's been going on.

Tuesday

More or less the entire day was take up by travel. The flight was mostly uneventful, with a 1 hour layover in Charlotte, NC. The one hour was long enough to get from one terminal to the other and get food, yet short enough that by the time I was done eating, the first class passengers were about to board. For virtually the entire duration of the flight, I was preoccupied with a book I took with me.

Wednesday

Waking up for a 9am event was never easier! I guess it was the timezone difference. Instead of going to bed at about 3am, I went to bed at around midnight (which happens to be 3am on the other coast!).

I woke up at about 6:30 - not due the alarm. I went back to sleep. At 7:30, I woke up for real. Before long, it was 8:30, and I was already at the conference about to get my proceedings and badge. Free food, namely orange juice and crossionts followed.

Nine o'clock rolled around, and the conference began. The keynote was ok. I wasn't amazed by it, even though the speaker had valid points.

At 11, the first session began - virtualization. This was one of the sessions I've been looking forward to. Well, I was interested in one paper specifically: vNUMA: A Virtual Shared-Memory Multiprocessor. The name summarizes the idea very nicely. Why was I interested in it? Well, a long time ago, when you couldn't walk down the street and buy a multi-core system, the year was 2003 - I had the same idea. It's a rather obvious idea, as is the name. At first, I was going to hack the Linux kernel to accomplish it (I still have a couple of patches I started), but other things sapped up my time. (The fact that everyone I mentioned it to told me that the paging over ethernet overheads were going to make it impractical made me want to do it even more!) As it turns out, the folks from University of New South Wales, that got a publication out of it, started working on it in 2002.

Their implementation is for the Itanium architecture. They said that they chose it because at the time they started, Intel was pushing Itanium as the architecture that'll replace x86. Unfortunately, I didn't get to talk to any of them at the conference.

The lunchtime invited talk was nice. It was about how faculty at Harvard tried to make the intro to computer science course fun and appealing, yet still retain the same important intro material. The big thing: they used Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instead of the on-campus computer network. They liked being in charge of the system (not having to wait for some admin to take care of a request for some change), but at the same time they didn't like being the admins themselves. Some of the students were also not exactly "thrilled" about hearing about the cloud so often - especially since they didn't have to use it in a cloud-way. One of the most memorable parts of the talk was when the speaker whipped out a phone book, asked the audience about how to find something in it, and shortly after proceeded to do binary search - ripping the book in half, then tossing a half across the podium, and then ripping the remainder in half.

Afterward, the networking session took place. The one talk that was fun was StrobeLight: Lightweight Availability Mapping and Anomaly Detection. The summary of the idea: ping the subnet, then some time later, ping it again, and count the number of IPs that changed - essentially XOR and then count ones. It's a simple idea that apparently works rather well.

The next session was about storage. It started with a paper that got a best paper award. One of the authors is Swami - a former FSL member, not at University of Wisconsin-Madison. While he never said it during the talk, they essentially implemented a stackable filesystem. Right after it was a talk by guys from the MIT AI lab, about decentralized deduplication in SAN cluster filesystems.

After a short break, the last invited talk for the day happened. A dude from Sun talked about SunSPOTs. SunSPOT is a small wireless sensor/actuator platform that's based on Java. It reminded me of several other such platforms, but seemed a lot more polished. Unfortunately, it's Java-centric way was rather disappointing. (More or less everyone that knows me, knows that I don't like Java.)

The day concluded with a poster session & food.

Thursday

Again, waking up wasn't a problem. The breakfast happened to be bagels.

9am: the first talk of the distributed systems session, was Object Storage on CRAQ: High-Throughput Chain Replication for Read-Mostly Workloads. This is one of the papers I'm intending to look at. The other two I found less interesting.

11am: the kernel development session had 2 interesting talks. The first, Decaf: Moving Device Drivers to a Modern Language talked about taking device drivers, splitting them into two portions (a performance critical section in C, and a non-performance critical section that could be moved to "a modern language" - read: Java). While I strongly disagree with the language choice, the overall idea is interesting. Java (along with other more managed languages) provides stronger static checking than C. They actually took some Linux drivers, and split them up. I want to go over their evaluation again. The next interesting talk was about executing filesystems in a userspace framework (Rump File System: Kernel Code Reborn). Unlike FUSE and other attempts, this one aims to take in-kernel filesystem code, and execute it in userspace without any modifications.

The lunchtime invited talk about about how teaching students how to program is hard. How some error messages the compiler outputs are completely misleading and confuse students.

I zoned out for most of the 2pm session about automated management. There were emails & other things to catch up on.

The short paper session started off nicely with The Restoration of Early UNIX Artifacts. The speaker mentioned that he managed to get his hands on a copy of first edition UNIX kernel source. While it was slightly mangled up, he managed to get it up and running. After a bit of effort, he got his hands on some near-second edition UNIX userspace. Another short paper was about how Linux kernel developers respond to static analysis bug reports.

The last invited talk for the day was unusual. It was about the Antikythera mechanism. He used Squeak EToys (a Smalltalk environment) to simulate the mechanism. He put the "software" up on the web: http://www.spinellis.gr/sw/ameso/

Afterwards, more food. This time without posters. And after the food, there were some BOFs. The one I went to was about ancient UNIX artifacts. There I got to see first edition UNIX running. Really neat. It felt like UNIX - same but different in some ways. The prompt was '@'; the 'cd' command didn't exist, instead you had 'chdir'... that's right, the "tersness" of UNIX wasn't always there!; the 'rwx' bits you see when you do ls -l were different, you had one 'x' bit, and 2 rw pairs. On my way out, I got more or less dragged into a mobile cluster BOF (or whatever the title was), the most interesting part was when we got to talk about Plan 9 all the way at the end.

This morning, radio journalist Sigurður G. Tómasson of Útvarp Saga, had as a guest an Icelandic economist and assistant professor of economy at Reykjavík University, Ólafur Ísleifsson. They discussed the commitments of the new ICESAVE agreement entered into by the Icelandic government. Pundits are expressing extreme concern over the agreement’s terms, which are said to include the right by either of the other parties (British and Dutch governments) to call in the loans before their due date for several reasons, such as the Icelandic government not honoring any payment of any loan of (approx.) 10 million pounds or more. Ólafur Ísleifsson said dishearteningly that he hadn’t read a single agreement or treaty between sovereign nations, where one party was addressed so one-sided-ly and defeated-ly, except for the treaty of Versailles.

For some very fuzzy/suspect reasons it was only “released” (leaked actually first) yesterday, while apparently signed by Steingrímur J. Sigfússon, finance minister of Iceland, on the 6th of June this year, myself and many other interested Icelanders have not yet had the time to read the agreement and come to any conclusions, but this comparison made by Ólafur this morning is very depressing, especially in the light of numerous legal experts of different nationalities who are claiming the legal grounds for the Icelandic government to assume these responsibilities are far from stable, and this matter is a matter for the courts to decide.

Naturally, I’m not a proponent of running to the courts every time you make a mistake, and indeed the Icelandic financial authorities may have made mistakes or failed to act. Why that happened, whether incompetence, corruption, or insufficiencies of the legal infrastructure has yet to be discovered, and as I pointed out in an earlier entry, the cost of those mistakes may just be too great for Iceland to pay.

Anyone interested in the actual agreements, here they are, courtesy of Economic Disaster Area.

How many times has this played out …

[17:30] * gnude (~gnude@xxx.xxx.de) has joined #ext4
[17:31] <gnude> hello
[17:33] <sandeen> hey
[17:35] <gnude> hello sandeen
… wait …
[18:01] * gnude (~gnude@xxx.xxx.de) has left #ext4 (Verlassend)


If you join an irc channel, you don’t have to say hello, really. It makes people wait around to see if you have a question, and then blog about it when you don’t.

I'm going to lose an email address I had for a long while: jeffpc@optonline.net. It's because of an ISP switch. I haven't used it as my primary email address for a long while, but either way, you'll want to update my contact info to jeffpc@josefsipek.net.

Spent some time today testing the latest upstream desktop VM bits (which BTW are in Fedora 11). It all seems to work as expected and is a big improvement over how the VM used to behave. With a bit of luck Andrew will push these bits to Linus next week and they'll all be there in 2.6.31.

Small tricks, haven't tested these yet, perhaps a bit of more error handling in fork or exec. I don't like system (3) shell interpolation. In this case one can do system_exec("ls","/tmp",NULL) or special chars in args that won't get interpolated by the shell. int system_exec(char* cmd, ...) ...

Jack Aboutboul’s blog has an interview with me about ext4 in Fedora 11.

Yesterday Chris and I hiked Mt. Adams. That was a serious hike for me - 10 miles round trip and 4400' altitude gain. The weather was great though, and we could see the cars drive up and down Mt. Washington once we got close to the top of Mt. Adams.

Every so often I needed to extract a .deb package manually. Usually I ended up installing Midnight Commander, and used it to copy the contents out. This time around, I did some search, and found a straight forward description how to do it for .debs and .rpms.

RPM

rpm2cpio mypackage.rpm | cpio -vid

DEB

ar vx mypackage.deb
tar -xzvf data.tar.gz

or

ar p mypackage.deb data.tar.gz | tar zx

About two weeks ago, I went to see a play called Bleeding Red. This was at Purple Rose --- a small theatre in Chelsea, MI.

Their summary of what the play was about says it pretty much all:

In this ball-kicking comedy with adult humor, the biggest football match in twenty years is about to kick off across the pond in London. Tommy, confirmed bachelor and passionate Liverpool fan, arrives at his best mate Bobby's flat to discover he's been dumped by his fiancee. Trouble is, Bobby is the linchpin of the all-important pre-game ritual. Tommy must get him to the pub before the game starts, even if it means recruiting the help of another traitorous female, Bobby's fetching sister Sarah.

Featuring:
Heidi Bennett
Matthew David
Matthew Gwynn
Stacie Hadgikosti
Michael Brian Ogden

Stage Manager: Jessica Garrett
Set Designer: Vincent Mountain
Properties Designer: Danna Segrest
Costume Designer: Sally Converse-Doucette
Lighting Designer: Dana White
Sound Designer: Quintessa Gallinat

Directed by Guy Sanville

It was a nice story. As the story involves Liverpool fans, the actors were doing a Liverpudlian accent.

Thomas Gleixner:

Exactly that's the point. Adding dom0 makes life easier for a group of users who decided to use Xen some time ago, but what Ingo wants is technical improvement of the kernel... The kernel policy always was and still is to accept only those features which have a technical benefit to the code base.

It boggles the mind that someone could get things so backwards. The kernel exists to provide services to the outside world, not the other way around. By all means criticise the details of the Xen dom0 code, but this argument makes zero sense. How precisely did x86_64 support provide a technical benefit to the code base?

Last week I passed the tech, general and extra level amateur radio exams. Today I found out that the paperwork went through with the FCC and I got assigned the callsign AB1KW. This is a much nicer callsign than I had expected to get from sequential assignment.

Two days ago, I decided to release HVF v0.15. It's been over a year since I did the v0.14 release. There were 4 -rc's inbetween. All in all, there have been 132 commits with lots of changes all around.

You can get the source code via Git (git://repo.or.cz/hvf.git), or a tarball.

I heard an interesting thing today, from an Icelandic economist, who recently joined the parliament. The Icelandic debts due to Icesave and other failed banks, valued at $5.8 billion, would be a huge burden on the Icelandic economy — paying these debts would require several years of reduced infrastructure (healthcare, education, social services), as well as selling some natural resources (at a time when it’s a buyers market, no less). He said, that if you take this debt as a proportion of the UK’s GDP, and and then multiply that percentage with the Icelandic GDP, the resulting number would be something rather trivial — around 300 million ISK (if I heard him correctly), which is equivalent to about 2.5 million dollars. Pocket change for a big country, right?

Now, because I thought this was pretty amazing, I went ahead and did some of my own calculations, and based on the GDP figures for Iceland and UK, as reported by Wolfram Alpha, and the (700.000.000.000 ISK = $5.8 billion) icesave-related debt, I decided to do some calculating.
iframe content

As you can see here, I calculated that for an economy of the size of UK, to pay off the $5.8 billion, would be about the same load relative to the GDP, as if Iceland was paying off a debt of $39 million. Now, that’s obviously more than an order of magnitude away from what the Icelandic MP quoted (although him being an economist, and me being a programmer, I left the fields on my little calculator open for change!), it’s maybe not what I’d consider pocket change for the Icelandic government, as 0.21% of a country’s GDP shouldn’t be, but it’s a damn sight more possible than the possibility of paying more than 30% of a country’s GDP. To put the debt into more perspective, the entire Icelandic government budget for 2009 is $4.6 billion.

So, the idea of the exercise was pretty much to verify my MP’s claim, but on further examination, I figured out a couple of interesting things as well: what is currently happening to Iceland, if it were to happen to the UK, at the same scale the UK public would be asked to accept liabilities of around 864 billion dollars. Now, I’m not defending any bankers, but I’m pretty sure that UK public opinion on that kind of “bailout” would be rather divided, to say the least.

I Hope to get some reactions — especially in case I’ve made some drastic mistake somewhere (excuse: this was a quick hack at the end of the day, in order to procrastinate a bit!).

A small update in reference to this, a post I wrote earlier about upgrading my WordPress, and also a javascript method to safely check if a js library has already been loaded in a parent system of a widget or module.

I don’t know about you guys, but in my case, my earlier code would start acting up on my firebug sometimes, and it would force me to step through the exception which it was catching — very annoying, so I made another version which doesn’t use exceptions.

if (typeof(MooTools) !== 'undefined')
{
                // We have MooTools, is it recent?
                var numv = parseInt(MooTools.version.replace(/\./g, ''));
                if (numv  122)
                {
                        // old version, what do we do?
                }
                else
                {
                        // new version woohoo! do nothing!
                }
}
else
{
        // Failure, we assume MooTools is not setup, and we include it
        // XXX: check here for prototype/jquery and abort in that case

        var head = document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0];
        var newscript = document.createElement('script');
        newscript.type = 'text/javascript';
        newscript.src = '/blocks/indicators/code/mootools-1.2.js';
        head.appendChild(newscript);
}

I do however think that my firebug and firefox combo on the windows machine are simply f*!@#$% …. but who cares… more code, another post, we happy! =)

Just a quick note: you can follow the instructions I provided for the 2008.11 release, with one change. On a 64-bit machine, replace any instances of /boot/x86.microroot with /boot/amd64/x86.microroot. As of 2009.06, the boot archive is split into 32-bit and 64-bit variants. If you get a message like this:

krtld: failed to open '/platform/i86xpv/kernel/amd64/unix'

Then you've probably given the wrong combination of unix and microroot.

By the way, in my previous entry, I mentioned we were working on upstreaming our virt-install changes. During the Xen 3.3 work (more on which soon), I updated to the latest versions and got the needed parts into the upstream version. We've still some ZFS changes to push, but if you're running a recent enough version of Xen on Linux, you may well be able to use virt-install and skip all this horrible hacking!

Over a week ago, I mentioned reading Frazz. Another fun comic I came across is called Dork Tower.

A few months ago, I needed to make some mod_rewrite rules that did things to the QUERY_STRING. After a lot of searching and unsuccessful attempts, I found this document (local mirror). Some experimenting later, I had it all working nicely.

For example, I've got something like:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING}    ^page=([0-9]{1,})$
RewriteRule ^/testsite/$       /testsite/page.cgi?seek=%1       [PT,L]

I have a huge backlog of bird photos to upload!

Here are a few:

A yellow-vented bulbul sits in a tree in my garden.

Morning meal search time for this white-breasted waterhen.

This kingfisher shows us which way we should drive.

This olive-backed sunbird was chattering away at a university cafeteria.

I saw a little heron walking in a stream.

Here's a new one for this blog! A little egret!

When I first got a picture of a dollarbird I thought it was fantastic and rare. Now I find out they aren't all that rare after all. I see these birds on the hill at my university every morning.

If you are into comics and happen to be near Chelsea, MI (about 15 mins from Ann Arbor, MI) on June 12 & 13, you might want to consider going to Kids Read Comics comic convention. (As the name implies, it's targeted at a younger crowd but don't get discouraged by that.)

The guest list looks quite good (at least in my opinion).

About two months ago, I got introduced to a fun web comic, Frazz.

I was looking at some of the older ones, and I found one that amused me enough to share with you:

I’m turning over a new decade tomorrow, and got an early birthday present:

Rode it to work today, works just fine… I like the simplicity of the single speed, it’s pretty light & quick, and seems solid. I had been looking at the Masis but in the end decided against it. The Fixed was a bit too stripped down, and the Commuter was too much like a family sedan. This one seems like a good compromise between them. I got it at The Alt in Minneapolis.  Chuck at Behind Bars carries Masis and Konas, but didn’t have the 2008 Konas, just 2009, and I couldn’t handle the yellow rims.  But I was very impressed with Behind Bars, nice place, nice people, extremely helpful … check them out (or heck, both) if you’re in the market.