What is a Read Receipt?

I saw a posting on GMail's messaging forums today about their apparent lack of the facility to have a Read Receipt generated. I felt compelled to reply, and I thought I'd post it here too as it's something not quite as obvious as it might first seem. Google is moving more and more into the enterprise, and this is a standard feature that is just plain missing, so obviously it's noticed. To me, it's more of a social than technical challenge...

A Read Receipt is quite the misnomer: the best you can say is that the message was shown on a screen. Which screen though? GMail is accessible through  the webmail, POP3, IMAP, mobile devices (GMail native client, Exchange Sync), mobile web... what exactly are you trying to prove happened?

I've found Read Receipts to be near useless, while Delivery Receipts are generally poorly implemented and probably achieve the same thing: some systems will say that they've taken receipt of the message into the system, but what you actually want to know is that it has successfully arrived in the user's mailbox. Signing for a courier delivery is exactly that, but you'll never know if the recipient ever opened the package.

If you're so keen to know whether the person opened the mail, ask them to confirm receipt manually. Having a computer tell you that you read something is at best trivial and at worst misleading. For a one-line e-mail,this facility may be useful and mostly true, you're likely to have absorbed it. A 1000-word essay, what you really want to know is not just that it was displayed on some screen (and reading that much on a mobile is pointless), but rather that the end-user absorbed everything. Only the user can attest to that.

On principle, keep read receipts out of GMail (or other providers, even Exchange!), and these problems go away. Just ask for a reply that your message is received, understood and/or acted upon. Much more useful.

Are YOUR hard drives noisy enough?

A conversation with a colleague presented an interesting question: Which hard drives are the quietest?

Now there are excellent resources online like Silent PC Review and QuietPC for finding the right components to build Home Theatre PCs. But this got me thinking, are my hard drives too quiet?

A lot of parameters are accessible on the firmware of modern hard drives, including readahead optimisations, cache policies, as well as monitoring options for errors, failures, temperature and even how many times the drive has been switched on. Linux distributions provide the smartctl utility for retrieving the monitoring variables, and the hdparm tool for setting all kinds of parameters, one of which is quite interesting...

The "-M" option sets the Automatic Acoustic Management level, which in most disks is one of OFF, QUIET and FAST, corresponding to integer values of 0, 128 and 254 respectively. Now the system I'm typing this on is my laptop, and I don't want it clunking away while I work (well, apart from the keypresses required to type this article). So, I set it to QUIET (128).

But, I have a server with four disks, two 750GB and two 1.5TB, running my server applications (file shares, telephony, media streaming etc), and crucially my virtualised lab which tend to be disk-heavy, especiall at high concurrency when each OS instance thinks it has exclusive control over volumes and optimises access accordingly. This server used to be located in my office alongside my desk, and yes it got a bit clattery. Now, it's in another room tucked under a cupboard, very headless. What do I care about noise?

Now, I could do a big benchamrking experiment, but this should give a reasonable first glance. Yes, the system is doing other things, but since the cpu sits at 97% of the time in a low-power state, the load isn't that high anyway and is probably negligible to the result.

Doing a simple read of one gigabyte from the RAID-5 array, at different offsets to remove cache interference, shows a remarkable difference. Reading a 1GB data segment from the logical drive (under the filesystem) increases throughput from 147MB/s to 220MB/s when the acoustic mode is set to FAST.

On the filesystem itself (ext4, defaults), extracting the latest Linux kernel source from a tar.bz2 file found on kernel.org more than halves the duration, from 3:03 to 1:30. Reading the resulting directory tree with `ls -lR` improves from 10s to 5s.

In the end, it probably makes little difference to my day-to-day tasks, but optimisation is central to any real techie's heart.

How to set or measure these features in Windows? No idea.