So... I've been working on switching www.lewiz.org away from Drupal to Wordpress. Vlad has already asked why, when I've made such a big deal about how great Drupal is. I know it might seem odd, but lately I have a lot less time to spare keeping things up-to-date. In addition I'm also hosting my image galleries on www.fajita.org, using the gallery2 software, so I no longer need a blog that has built in galleries.
I still stand by Drupal for larger community projects, but for little me, that adds a few random thoughts every once in a while, I think Wordpress is a far more suitable piece of software.
The big challenge has been to migrate my Drupal blog entries over to the Wordpress database. However, I've found some really handy scripts and spent a bit of time working things out on my own, and I'm happy to say that just a few minutes ago I managed to do a more or less full import of my current blog entries... the major change from previous attempts is that I have now imported data using the correct character set: UTF8 (Unicode), which means that the random bits of Japanese, Chinese and other language of the month show up properly.
The main things I need to sort out now are:
* categories for the blog entries
* importing the comments properly (right now they all show up as being by "anonymous", which is useless)
* calculating the comment count for each entry (trivial; the entry tuple stores the associated number of comments, instead of doing a SELECT COUNT each time it is displayed)
* figuring out how to handle the Drupal node attachments (all of the inline blog images are technically node "attachments", which is something I'm not sure Wordpress supports natively; this will probably be the big problem to work around)
Once that's all sorted I should have it switched over and the old site (backed up/archived) and down to make way for the new Wordpress version.
I might try and get things going tomorrow, if I can find the time :)
Wednesday, 27 September 2006
みんなの日本語
Woo! Makiko is helping me out a bit with my Japanese. It's pretty lucky really because she had a Japanese partner that she helped last year and she was looking for another this year. So far my Japanese is really poor, but I do keep trying to sit down with my text book and learn the grammar and language sections.
As I did an introductory Japanese course at university I have the set of Minna no Nihongo (that's the title of this entry) books -- one in English and the other entirely in Japanese. They're actually really good books, I would recommend them to anybody that is interested in learning a language "properly". "Properly" doesn't exactly mean a great deal, but here I'm using it to mean: learning the two basic alphabets (hiragana and katakana), developing a good understanding of the grammar, and learning plenty of practical words. The other method is probably something along the lines of JapanesePod.com, where they basic phrases at you a lot of times until you remember.
Both methods have their merits, and some people fare a lot better with one than the other. I like patterns and order, so I guess learning the grammar and understanding why sentences are formed the way they are works well for me. That and writing things down lots and lots of time.
But the good news today is that I've managed to find a digital version of the two textbooks available via BitTorrent. I've got them downloading now and I'll send them to Makiko as soon as they are done. I had suggested that I take a few photos of the stuff I was working on to show her, but this will work a lot better :)
Anyway, right now I do believe that it is time to go to bed.
おやすみなさい！ (good night!)
As I did an introductory Japanese course at university I have the set of Minna no Nihongo (that's the title of this entry) books -- one in English and the other entirely in Japanese. They're actually really good books, I would recommend them to anybody that is interested in learning a language "properly". "Properly" doesn't exactly mean a great deal, but here I'm using it to mean: learning the two basic alphabets (hiragana and katakana), developing a good understanding of the grammar, and learning plenty of practical words. The other method is probably something along the lines of JapanesePod.com, where they basic phrases at you a lot of times until you remember.
Both methods have their merits, and some people fare a lot better with one than the other. I like patterns and order, so I guess learning the grammar and understanding why sentences are formed the way they are works well for me. That and writing things down lots and lots of time.
But the good news today is that I've managed to find a digital version of the two textbooks available via BitTorrent. I've got them downloading now and I'll send them to Makiko as soon as they are done. I had suggested that I take a few photos of the stuff I was working on to show her, but this will work a lot better :)
Anyway, right now I do believe that it is time to go to bed.
おやすみなさい！ (good night!)
Sunday, 24 September 2006
Washing day
After three years of tumble driers and wet clothes draped around anything that fits it is a refreshing change to be able to wear clothes that have been washed with fabric softener and hung out to dry on a genuine outdoor washing line.
Saturday, 23 September 2006
Sun. Evolution.
You may have read about the Niagara II and Victoria Falls CPUs on The Register. We were fortunate enough to attend a presentation by David Greenhill, lead (and distinguished) engineer for these new CPUs... (and just because I've always wanted to say this:) I'm not at liberty to disclose much of the presentation (yes!).
But after the talk I got chatting to Matt Finch about exactly what the Hypervisor does in the T1 (Niagara) chip, which he helped explain. Since then I've been trying to read up a little more about it, using internal Sun documents (gotta love the VPN access).
I have to admit that I've surprised myself by being so interested. I didn't pay a massive amount of attention to the CPU architecture course back at university, mostly because it never seemed that interesting. I think where the course went wrong was bogging it all down with too much detail into *exactly* what each stage did, rather than discussing how and why the things that are being done are cool and better than how things might have been done previously.
The talk that Matt did on the T1 chip was nothing short of enlightening. I guess that a lot of what went on in the CPU arch. course stuck with me, because I understood close to everything he said. The best bit is that it made sense. From what I understand, the T1 is a really simple chip (when you consider the big pink fluffy bunny overview) -- this appeals to me (in the same way that a tool like
I've gone off track again, this blog entry wasn't supposed to be about Hypervisor, or N1, or even N2. It was supposed to be about Sun, as a company. Halfway through reading this overview of what the sun4v hypervisor can do I decided to check out what info was available to the general public, in the form of the OpenSPARC website. I was really impressed: I'm no expert at understanding this stuff, but I found plenty of potentially useful information. And this is mirrored in the OpenSolaris project: lots and lots of code, groups and useful info.
Time will tell exactly how important these two projects (and hopefully OpenJava, in the future) are. But I really wouldn't be surprised to discover that Sun have managed to strike exactly the right balance between the Cathedral and the Bazaar.
But after the talk I got chatting to Matt Finch about exactly what the Hypervisor does in the T1 (Niagara) chip, which he helped explain. Since then I've been trying to read up a little more about it, using internal Sun documents (gotta love the VPN access).
I have to admit that I've surprised myself by being so interested. I didn't pay a massive amount of attention to the CPU architecture course back at university, mostly because it never seemed that interesting. I think where the course went wrong was bogging it all down with too much detail into *exactly* what each stage did, rather than discussing how and why the things that are being done are cool and better than how things might have been done previously.
The talk that Matt did on the T1 chip was nothing short of enlightening. I guess that a lot of what went on in the CPU arch. course stuck with me, because I understood close to everything he said. The best bit is that it made sense. From what I understand, the T1 is a really simple chip (when you consider the big pink fluffy bunny overview) -- this appeals to me (in the same way that a tool like
grep or vi appeals). Now that David Greenhill has talked further about future stuff and changes with the Niagara chip I'm interested again... this time in Hypervisor and all of its potential (Hypervisor isn't a Sun-specific thing, read up on Google for more info; in short it is a hardware abstraction layer that sits between the OS and the physical components).I've gone off track again, this blog entry wasn't supposed to be about Hypervisor, or N1, or even N2. It was supposed to be about Sun, as a company. Halfway through reading this overview of what the sun4v hypervisor can do I decided to check out what info was available to the general public, in the form of the OpenSPARC website. I was really impressed: I'm no expert at understanding this stuff, but I found plenty of potentially useful information. And this is mirrored in the OpenSolaris project: lots and lots of code, groups and useful info.
Time will tell exactly how important these two projects (and hopefully OpenJava, in the future) are. But I really wouldn't be surprised to discover that Sun have managed to strike exactly the right balance between the Cathedral and the Bazaar.
Thursday, 21 September 2006
Things that can knock you flat
Over the past few days activity has picked up around some of the university societies I was/am involved in. First of all CompSoc has had a few new requests and there is a little more activity on the photoSoc forum than there has been in a while.
All of this has caused me to realise that I'm not a student any more.
I have to pay council tax, I don't get a "free" £3,000 per year and I have to actually get up in the morning.
All said, I'm really enjoying working at Sun. It's fair to say that some of the stuff can be menial, but it's also required to make our own jobs easier and more straightforward. Over the past few days I've been working on getting two C4 tape libraries up and running. tbh, when I took this up I thought it would be more straightforward -- at the end of the day I've previously managed to set up and configure a StorageTek L20 tape library (two tape drives, a robotic arm and 20 tapes) under FreeBSD using entirely open source software, half as much documentation and no people to ask questions. Now I have access to the "official" NetWorker backup software, all of the internal documentation, plenty of people who have done this before, practically unlimited machines and pieces of hardware to aid my work... and yet I feel as though I'm working slower than ever.
Since starting at Sun I've totally changed the way I work. Previously I used to set my mind to a task and work until I completed it. This involved research, reading, set-up, testing and putting into production. Now I'm multi-tasking everything and fitting time and thought in the few free slots that I have. This is obviously required as I have responsibilities that have deadlines, but at the same time it's really impacting the whole process. I also feel that having so many people to answer my questions is slowing my brain down... I've come from an environment where there is me, my experience and Google. This is how I've learned most everything I know about Linux, UNIX and FreeBSD. It works well, too. But now I find I'm trying to get things done, rather than fully understanding how and why. This is definitely bad and is something I'm going to need to work on.
Okay, back on track. The whole non-student thing is a little annoying. I find I'm paying more for things, there are more responsibilities that I don't really want to have to deal with and so on. What's even more annoying is that the people I'm living and working with are (in many/most cases) still students. So they get a few extra quid "free", don't have to pay the tax, and benefit from the goodness of the NUS card.
Ah, well. I guess this is just the way of the world.
All of this has caused me to realise that I'm not a student any more.
I have to pay council tax, I don't get a "free" £3,000 per year and I have to actually get up in the morning.
All said, I'm really enjoying working at Sun. It's fair to say that some of the stuff can be menial, but it's also required to make our own jobs easier and more straightforward. Over the past few days I've been working on getting two C4 tape libraries up and running. tbh, when I took this up I thought it would be more straightforward -- at the end of the day I've previously managed to set up and configure a StorageTek L20 tape library (two tape drives, a robotic arm and 20 tapes) under FreeBSD using entirely open source software, half as much documentation and no people to ask questions. Now I have access to the "official" NetWorker backup software, all of the internal documentation, plenty of people who have done this before, practically unlimited machines and pieces of hardware to aid my work... and yet I feel as though I'm working slower than ever.
Since starting at Sun I've totally changed the way I work. Previously I used to set my mind to a task and work until I completed it. This involved research, reading, set-up, testing and putting into production. Now I'm multi-tasking everything and fitting time and thought in the few free slots that I have. This is obviously required as I have responsibilities that have deadlines, but at the same time it's really impacting the whole process. I also feel that having so many people to answer my questions is slowing my brain down... I've come from an environment where there is me, my experience and Google. This is how I've learned most everything I know about Linux, UNIX and FreeBSD. It works well, too. But now I find I'm trying to get things done, rather than fully understanding how and why. This is definitely bad and is something I'm going to need to work on.
Okay, back on track. The whole non-student thing is a little annoying. I find I'm paying more for things, there are more responsibilities that I don't really want to have to deal with and so on. What's even more annoying is that the people I'm living and working with are (in many/most cases) still students. So they get a few extra quid "free", don't have to pay the tax, and benefit from the goodness of the NUS card.
Ah, well. I guess this is just the way of the world.
Wednesday, 20 September 2006
Amazon, my personal shopper
Lately I've been paying a lot more attention to what Amazon suggests I might like. I've noticed that a lot of DVDs that I've been out and bought and really love are being recommended to me. It's been happening with CDs and books too.
This is a really good thing. I've been encouraging it more by telling it when it comes up with things I already own. Just a few days ago it showed up with the Howling Bells. I downloaded their title album via BitTorrent and I really like it. I'll find somewhere with a decent price online and pick it up soon.
Now is a good time to bring up downloading music. It's certainly true that some people download music and don't pay for the real stuff any longer, but not me. Lately I've been downloading a lot more, but at the same time I've been buying a lot more music. I've got a bunch of new Bob Marley CDs (which I got the MP3s for first), some cool jazz stuff and three Regina Spektor CDs thanks to BitTorrent and "illegal" music.
Anyway, the beat goes on...
This is a really good thing. I've been encouraging it more by telling it when it comes up with things I already own. Just a few days ago it showed up with the Howling Bells. I downloaded their title album via BitTorrent and I really like it. I'll find somewhere with a decent price online and pick it up soon.
Now is a good time to bring up downloading music. It's certainly true that some people download music and don't pay for the real stuff any longer, but not me. Lately I've been downloading a lot more, but at the same time I've been buying a lot more music. I've got a bunch of new Bob Marley CDs (which I got the MP3s for first), some cool jazz stuff and three Regina Spektor CDs thanks to BitTorrent and "illegal" music.
Anyway, the beat goes on...
bash programmable tab completion
After reading about bash a bit more I decided to make the switch. It's been surprisingly painless considering just how long I've been running tcsh more or less exclusively since I learned the joys of FreeBSD way back at version 4.1 (okay, so it's not /that/ long ago).
The main incentive was to get that funky programmable tab completion working. Everybody all over the place should investigate whether or not it can be of use to them. What I've done is fairly simple -- allowed bash to use a NIS+ lookup (via the nisgrep command) to provide the necessary information to drive tab completion.
For example, in our labs the host naming scheme is fairly straightforward: arch-type-no-geo. So a host might be: v4u-10-e-gmp03. That's the fifth SPARC Ultra 10 in my building. Normally we ping this by typing the command out, but with my simple script we can tab complete. This isn't a massive time-saver, but every little helps.
It's also very handy to be able to do:
to get a listing of all of the Ultra 10s we have in the lab.
At a later point in time I'd like to tie this in to our booking system and maybe allow more powerful completion in a similar way to bash's history search (CTRL+R) to allow us to just type
A word of warning: don't forget to update tcsh's ASCI escape sequences to the bash-style ones. I had an annoying cursor wrap that was driving me crazy for about a week until I bothered to fix it.
The main incentive was to get that funky programmable tab completion working. Everybody all over the place should investigate whether or not it can be of use to them. What I've done is fairly simple -- allowed bash to use a NIS+ lookup (via the nisgrep command) to provide the necessary information to drive tab completion.
For example, in our labs the host naming scheme is fairly straightforward: arch-type-no-geo. So a host might be: v4u-10-e-gmp03. That's the fifth SPARC Ultra 10 in my building. Normally we ping this by typing the command out, but with my simple script we can tab complete. This isn't a massive time-saver, but every little helps.
It's also very handy to be able to do:
$ v4u-10[TAB][TAB]to get a listing of all of the Ultra 10s we have in the lab.
At a later point in time I'd like to tie this in to our booking system and maybe allow more powerful completion in a similar way to bash's history search (CTRL+R) to allow us to just type
ping 10-e[TAB] to get ping v4u-10-e-gmp03.A word of warning: don't forget to update tcsh's ASCI escape sequences to the bash-style ones. I had an annoying cursor wrap that was driving me crazy for about a week until I bothered to fix it.
Event-driven ZFS
It's about time I created a Sun and/or Work category for filing entries. This is only a quick entry for now as it's not something I've got beyond the very basics with.
I've been trying my best to keep up with the good stuff that Chris Gerhard has been doing with his new home server. He's got some cool ZFS stuff going with cron jobs taking some seriously frequent snapshots (every five minutes!).
A while back Jarod Nash (who has no blog entries) was talking to us about all of the stages involved in writing "Hello, world!" in vi to actually running it (i.e. terminals, editors, compiling, linking, executing, etc.). As part of this we got talking about Apple's new Time Machine, which allows the end user to easily recover previously-deleted data. Jarod mentioned how the technology behind this was technically not great (when compared to Solaris' ZFS) but the UI was. Interestingly it's also an event-driven model and likely has some userland daemon running to handle events and create copies of deleted items.
Now there's no way that I could even hope to write a great GUI for ZFS, but I did wonder to myself how I might go about making it work in an event-driven way. Fortunately Chris did a presentation on ZFS to us and I got the chance to bring this up -- the answer, he believes, is to use DTrace.
I brought a blank DVD-R into work today and pulled down Nevada build 48, which I'll install under vmware shortly. My aim is to create a simple slice to test ZFS with. It doesn't need to be more than a pool with a single volume. With this I'm hoping to write some very very (I can't stress that enough) DTrace scripts to prove that what Chris and Jarod have suggested will work.
The idea is basically to use DTrace to trap the open(2) syscall, check the flags (i.e. open for reading) and have ZFS create a snapshot at that instance. This all seemed great to me, but Tim Uglow and Matt Finch at this point decided to rock my boat by complicated things with mmapped IO, vnode pages and all sorts of other things I don't understand and can't hope to without doing some serious reading and researching. So the point really is that there's no way in hell this would be useful for anything other than a test...
More updates to come when I've actually done something (expect failure ;).
Edit: I just realised I didn't really explain the whole point of this. It's really very simple: to do away with cron jobs that create unnecessary snapshots, and have the system create them as and when required (e.g. when a file is created, deleted, modified).
I've been trying my best to keep up with the good stuff that Chris Gerhard has been doing with his new home server. He's got some cool ZFS stuff going with cron jobs taking some seriously frequent snapshots (every five minutes!).
A while back Jarod Nash (who has no blog entries) was talking to us about all of the stages involved in writing "Hello, world!" in vi to actually running it (i.e. terminals, editors, compiling, linking, executing, etc.). As part of this we got talking about Apple's new Time Machine, which allows the end user to easily recover previously-deleted data. Jarod mentioned how the technology behind this was technically not great (when compared to Solaris' ZFS) but the UI was. Interestingly it's also an event-driven model and likely has some userland daemon running to handle events and create copies of deleted items.
Now there's no way that I could even hope to write a great GUI for ZFS, but I did wonder to myself how I might go about making it work in an event-driven way. Fortunately Chris did a presentation on ZFS to us and I got the chance to bring this up -- the answer, he believes, is to use DTrace.
I brought a blank DVD-R into work today and pulled down Nevada build 48, which I'll install under vmware shortly. My aim is to create a simple slice to test ZFS with. It doesn't need to be more than a pool with a single volume. With this I'm hoping to write some very very (I can't stress that enough) DTrace scripts to prove that what Chris and Jarod have suggested will work.
The idea is basically to use DTrace to trap the open(2) syscall, check the flags (i.e. open for reading) and have ZFS create a snapshot at that instance. This all seemed great to me, but Tim Uglow and Matt Finch at this point decided to rock my boat by complicated things with mmapped IO, vnode pages and all sorts of other things I don't understand and can't hope to without doing some serious reading and researching. So the point really is that there's no way in hell this would be useful for anything other than a test...
More updates to come when I've actually done something (expect failure ;).
Edit: I just realised I didn't really explain the whole point of this. It's really very simple: to do away with cron jobs that create unnecessary snapshots, and have the system create them as and when required (e.g. when a file is created, deleted, modified).
Tuesday, 19 September 2006
What's been happening?
In short: loads of stuff.
It's been so long since I last made an entry I can't even remember. I'm loving the new Quad 33 I've got, but unfortunately my Audigy 2 ZS output is rather hissy and noisy when using Linux (but Windows is just fine), which lets things down. Probably even more exciting is the Quad 44/405 I've now got connected to my Yamahas in the living room. I can turn things up that little bit more without the amp distorting stuff as it used to with the 303 (which is half the Wattage).
On Saturday I passed my driving theory test and tomorrow I'll be booking a practical test. With any luck I'll be scooting all over the place in no time at all. I picked up a couple of new photography books after that. One of them is a great big book full of Robert Capa stuff which I've not really looked at yet. The other two Steve McCurry books; the first is a rather cheap portraits book, but the other is a truly superb collection of shots from Angkor Wat in Cambodia. I'm still confused as to the reason Angkor Wat is not more widely recognised as the wonder it is.
A bunch of us (James, Charlotte, Kim, Tom and myself) headed to Thorpe Park on Sunday for some grown-up fun. It was a nice day, but to be entirely honest, I tired of it all around 2 or 3PM, but we stayed more or less until the gates closed. Still, a welcome change to mooching around doing nothing (but don't get me wrong... there's nothing wrong with that, either ;).
I've just arranged to do some Japanese conversation stuff with Makiko, a Japanese-partner type thing. It should be good and help motivate me to do more. I've been trying to get up-to-date with my hiragana and katakana over the last few weeks. It's been slow progress but I'm fairly happy with my hiragana reading now, but I'm still not very far with katakana at all. Ah, well, I'll have to keep working at it! がんばって and all that jazz.
So, time for some Aberdeen Angus and Prison Break now. Thanks for coming!
It's been so long since I last made an entry I can't even remember. I'm loving the new Quad 33 I've got, but unfortunately my Audigy 2 ZS output is rather hissy and noisy when using Linux (but Windows is just fine), which lets things down. Probably even more exciting is the Quad 44/405 I've now got connected to my Yamahas in the living room. I can turn things up that little bit more without the amp distorting stuff as it used to with the 303 (which is half the Wattage).
On Saturday I passed my driving theory test and tomorrow I'll be booking a practical test. With any luck I'll be scooting all over the place in no time at all. I picked up a couple of new photography books after that. One of them is a great big book full of Robert Capa stuff which I've not really looked at yet. The other two Steve McCurry books; the first is a rather cheap portraits book, but the other is a truly superb collection of shots from Angkor Wat in Cambodia. I'm still confused as to the reason Angkor Wat is not more widely recognised as the wonder it is.
A bunch of us (James, Charlotte, Kim, Tom and myself) headed to Thorpe Park on Sunday for some grown-up fun. It was a nice day, but to be entirely honest, I tired of it all around 2 or 3PM, but we stayed more or less until the gates closed. Still, a welcome change to mooching around doing nothing (but don't get me wrong... there's nothing wrong with that, either ;).
I've just arranged to do some Japanese conversation stuff with Makiko, a Japanese-partner type thing. It should be good and help motivate me to do more. I've been trying to get up-to-date with my hiragana and katakana over the last few weeks. It's been slow progress but I'm fairly happy with my hiragana reading now, but I'm still not very far with katakana at all. Ah, well, I'll have to keep working at it! がんばって and all that jazz.
So, time for some Aberdeen Angus and Prison Break now. Thanks for coming!
Thursday, 14 September 2006
Arrival of the new pre-
My new Quad 33 pre-amp from eBay turned up today, along with my new sound card (cheap but good) and a pack of banana things for 'speaker cable. I'm utterly blown away by the condition of the 33. I've not hooked it up yet but the internals of it really put my Grandad's old one to shame. It looks so good that the original boards in the "new" 33 look better than the recently replaced boards in the original 33. The new 33 has the serial number 1996 and the old one 5078.
Here's one shot to show you the difference, but head on over to http://www.fajita.org/personal/ and find a few more shots there.
Here's one shot to show you the difference, but head on over to http://www.fajita.org/personal/ and find a few more shots there.
Wednesday, 13 September 2006
Peace of mind
I'm living away from home for the first time as a non-student. This means that I'm not covered by my parents' house contents insurance. I've been meaning to sort something out for quite some time but today I did some quotes and went with Endsleigh, pretty much because they are one of the few insurers that will allow a single person living in shared accommodation to insure their possessions with minimum fuss.
I'm happy with my premium, which covers my computer (including laptop), hi-fis, 'speakers, camera and CDs/DVDs. A big plus is that I'm covered against theft outside of my property for up to £2,000 (a figure I set) -- this nicely covers my laptop, camera and lens, should anything go wrong. Much to my surprise I also have some basic cover outside of the UK -- only instead of having a single item limit of £1,000 it is reduced to £500. Still, this is pretty cool and since my camera and lenses are considered separate items I'm pretty well covered.
So... this was call to break out the big-wig hat:
I'm happy with my premium, which covers my computer (including laptop), hi-fis, 'speakers, camera and CDs/DVDs. A big plus is that I'm covered against theft outside of my property for up to £2,000 (a figure I set) -- this nicely covers my laptop, camera and lens, should anything go wrong. Much to my surprise I also have some basic cover outside of the UK -- only instead of having a single item limit of £1,000 it is reduced to £500. Still, this is pretty cool and since my camera and lenses are considered separate items I'm pretty well covered.
So... this was call to break out the big-wig hat:
Monday, 11 September 2006
New Quad 33 pre-amp
I've just picked up a "new" Quad 33 pre-amp on eBay. Last time I returned my Dad's 33 to Quad for servicing they charged me around £70 for a quick test and return shipping. There was nothing actually wrong with it but this time I know it's a little wonky so I can expect the price to be higher.
Faced with a minimum of £80 (including my shipping costs) I decided to take a bit of a risk and pick up a second 33 unit from eBay. I came across one going for a good price -- £95 including P&P and insurance. Here are the photos:
The risk here is that it may need a service from Quad, in which case I've just gone and doubled my costs. However, I do have three brand new internal boards in this current 33 which I've found to be non-faulty, so installing these in the "new" 33 should bring it up-to-date.
Interestingly the serial number is 1996, quite a bit lower than my Dad's, which is somewhere in the four-thousands.
Let's hope this all works out okay...
Faced with a minimum of £80 (including my shipping costs) I decided to take a bit of a risk and pick up a second 33 unit from eBay. I came across one going for a good price -- £95 including P&P and insurance. Here are the photos:
The risk here is that it may need a service from Quad, in which case I've just gone and doubled my costs. However, I do have three brand new internal boards in this current 33 which I've found to be non-faulty, so installing these in the "new" 33 should bring it up-to-date.
Interestingly the serial number is 1996, quite a bit lower than my Dad's, which is somewhere in the four-thousands.
Let's hope this all works out okay...
Sunday, 10 September 2006
Back in Blackwater
So, I'm back in Blackwater after a fairly uneventful four-hour train journey from Howden via LKX and Paddington train station. I've got my Dad's Quad gear back in one piece, had time to confirm that the Quad 33 pre-amp is a bit wonky and set up my new 11Ls with the 44/405 system.
I've not taken any more photos of it now that the 'speakers are on my desk, but here are two shots of them as I unpacked them on Friday afternoon.
I did say they were big.
I've not taken any more photos of it now that the 'speakers are on my desk, but here are two shots of them as I unpacked them on Friday afternoon.
I did say they were big.
Saturday, 9 September 2006
New 'speakers and the return of the CD player
My new Quad 11Ls arrived at work yesterday and I was in time to collect them and take them home, thanks to a lift from James. I got them out of the box and they sure do look nice -- the rosewood was definitely a good choice. But the thing that I noticed the most was just how big they were -- a lot bigger than the old pair of "desktop" 'speakers I had. In fact... they're so big that the side face is about the same size as the viewable area of one of my 17" TFT displays!
I've got no idea how I'll fit them on my desk, along with the 44/405 (and maybe FM3) and a Marantz CD player.
Some time ago I bought a cheap Marantz CD player on eBay with the intention of stripping it down and installing a PC into the case. It all started to go wrong when I realised it would be a lot harder than I thought to squeeze it all in, so I gave up. For almost two years the various internal system boards have been lying around in a box. Today I finally bothered to try and reinstall them in the Marantz case. It's been very successful considering I've lost all of the original screws and had to do a fairly makeshift job. Early tests suggest that it actually works fine... but because I couldn't find a suitable cable I had to test with my sister's laptop and her microphone socket. Anyway, I'll take it all back to Blackwater with me and give it a test there. The only major sticking point now is the fact that I've lost one of set of the black plastic buttons that go onto the front: annoyingly it wasn't the useless buttons that never get used, it was the play, stop, pause, skip, etc. Damn.
I've got no idea how I'll fit them on my desk, along with the 44/405 (and maybe FM3) and a Marantz CD player.
Some time ago I bought a cheap Marantz CD player on eBay with the intention of stripping it down and installing a PC into the case. It all started to go wrong when I realised it would be a lot harder than I thought to squeeze it all in, so I gave up. For almost two years the various internal system boards have been lying around in a box. Today I finally bothered to try and reinstall them in the Marantz case. It's been very successful considering I've lost all of the original screws and had to do a fairly makeshift job. Early tests suggest that it actually works fine... but because I couldn't find a suitable cable I had to test with my sister's laptop and her microphone socket. Anyway, I'll take it all back to Blackwater with me and give it a test there. The only major sticking point now is the fact that I've lost one of set of the black plastic buttons that go onto the front: annoyingly it wasn't the useless buttons that never get used, it was the play, stop, pause, skip, etc. Damn.
Thursday, 7 September 2006
Another weekly round-up
It's been so long that I can't really remember what I've done. I know that yesterday was a really full day for me: because James was at a wedding I had to be in work half an hour early because Kim and Charlotte were doing a special project this week. This was no problem and gave me a little extra time to get various different bits and pieces done. In the evening I had another driving lesson and after that I borrowed James' bike and cycled to Camberley for the first Windlesham and Camberley Camera Club meeting of the year (well... since the last one, at least). It was very different from the meetings I'm used to: everybody was older than me... in many (most?) cases by thirty years and more. But everybody was very friendly and enthusiastic about the club. It's very much involved with other clubs around the area in the form of regional competitions. I'll have to provide an update on this once I've been to one or two more.
Today was an ordinary day, bar the fact that after lunch Jarod Nash, one of the PTS kernel engineers, talked to us about editors, character input, terminal types and so on. Towards the end we were massively off-topic, but this was a very good thing because we'd steered towards the things we were all interested in. This took up an incredible amount of the afternoon... around two and a half hours without any breaks. With any luck we'll get the third and final part next week.
Today Charlotte organised a Pirate Party but I've not gotten too involved. So far it has involved a lot of drinking games, and not much more.
Earlier in the week I cancelled my Quad 11L order with Weymouth Hi-fi after I called them and they said they were having trouble getting the stock they had ordered. At the same time I bought a new pair of Rosewood 11Ls on eBay (Buy it Now) for just £204.90 including delivery (Weymouth Hi-fi were offering £229 delivered so I made a fair saving). The other advantage is that they were willing to ship to a non-card address. With any luck they'll be delivered to work tomorrow and either myself or James (if I've gone home) will collect them and take them home.
I'm leaving at lunchtime tomorrow to catch a train home for my Grandad's 80th birthday party. It'll be nice to spend a few days at home for the first time in about three months. I'm also looking forward to borrowing my Dad's Quad 44/405 for use with either my 11Ls or Yamahas (I still haven't decided).
Right, time for me to get a little bit of work done before I head to bed for (hopefully) an early night :)
Today was an ordinary day, bar the fact that after lunch Jarod Nash, one of the PTS kernel engineers, talked to us about editors, character input, terminal types and so on. Towards the end we were massively off-topic, but this was a very good thing because we'd steered towards the things we were all interested in. This took up an incredible amount of the afternoon... around two and a half hours without any breaks. With any luck we'll get the third and final part next week.
Today Charlotte organised a Pirate Party but I've not gotten too involved. So far it has involved a lot of drinking games, and not much more.
Earlier in the week I cancelled my Quad 11L order with Weymouth Hi-fi after I called them and they said they were having trouble getting the stock they had ordered. At the same time I bought a new pair of Rosewood 11Ls on eBay (Buy it Now) for just £204.90 including delivery (Weymouth Hi-fi were offering £229 delivered so I made a fair saving). The other advantage is that they were willing to ship to a non-card address. With any luck they'll be delivered to work tomorrow and either myself or James (if I've gone home) will collect them and take them home.
I'm leaving at lunchtime tomorrow to catch a train home for my Grandad's 80th birthday party. It'll be nice to spend a few days at home for the first time in about three months. I'm also looking forward to borrowing my Dad's Quad 44/405 for use with either my 11Ls or Yamahas (I still haven't decided).
Right, time for me to get a little bit of work done before I head to bed for (hopefully) an early night :)
Monday, 4 September 2006
Bookcase!
It is a day of much rejoicing in the little kindgom of "Lewis' two rooms". For today I stole* the crappy flimsy bookshelf that's been sat at the top of the stairs collecting crap since we moved in. All of my stuff fits perfectly, I've done away with one of my plastic boxes for books and I have loads more space to collect my crap.
In other news, sometime last week we agreed upon which courses we were all doing: it worked out well and we're all on the courses we wanted. I'm on the 15K course along with Anton and Chris, while James and Liam are going to be taking the SAN course.
I closed a few tickets today -- some of them were really old ones that had been passed down to me from the guys that left. I'm chuffed I got those sorted... these are the ones that I enjoy doing the most.
In other news, sometime last week we agreed upon which courses we were all doing: it worked out well and we're all on the courses we wanted. I'm on the 15K course along with Anton and Chris, while James and Liam are going to be taking the SAN course.
I closed a few tickets today -- some of them were really old ones that had been passed down to me from the guys that left. I'm chuffed I got those sorted... these are the ones that I enjoy doing the most.
Friday, 1 September 2006
Modern Times
The past week has been fairly eventful. There have been a couple of big things that have happened, coupled with a bunch of smaller things. Obviously the week was off to a good start, thanks to it beginning on Tuesday and not Monday.
It was pretty early in this week that I got a text message from Xiao saying that she'd gone to hospital because she was feeling ill. The following day I found out that she'd been admittedly to hospital and wasn't going to be coming back to England when she had planned to. She's going to be in China for at least another three weeks, most of that time will be in hospital. Since then she's been receiving daily bloody transfusions to help bolster her low platelet count and yesterday they took a sample of her bone marrow to do some tests. I've not heard anything more about that, but it does seem fairly serious to me. She's a bit annoyed right now because she's not been allowed to get a shower for a couple of days :P
On Tuesday I ordered myself a brand new pair of Quad 11Ls, which I mentioned a few blog entries earlier. In the end I went for the rosewood, but it could just as easily have been any of the other colours. On the amp front I spoke to my Dad and he's agreed to lend me his Quad 44/405 system, which isn't being used. This means that I can now track down the problem with either the Quad 33 pre-amp or 303 power-amp and get it shipped off to Quad for (an expensive) repair. I haven't decided which amp will go on my desk... the logical choice would be to hook the 405 up to the Yamahas, because it is quite a lot more powerful. But in the end I really don't know.
Chris dropped a bit of a bombshell when he decided he didn't want my PC any longer. This means I've got it back now, but it certainly isn't all bad. Recently I had been getting a little frustrated with the performance of my Shuttle, especially when it comes to vmware. On Wednesday I bought a new nvidia XFX GeForce 7600GS graphics card on eBay (which turned up today) -- this is a truly brilliant card thanks to the fact it has dual DVI as well as being passively cooled. It really is the card I always wanted. In other news I finally got around to returning a dead DVD drive to MicroDirect and the local AmTrak depot have a replacement sat waiting for me to collect.
Thursday was definitely "the end of an era". Mooktakim and Martin finished their internship at Sun and today the new lot (that's Chris, Anton, James and myself (plus Iain and Wilson who are ex-students who have rejoined)) were in full charge of the lab. Well. Sort of.
On the whole my day today has gone pretty well. I only closed one ticket, and that was work completed yesterday, but I've made good headway on a number of others. In particular I've come close to completing the biggest ticket I've had so far -- one that has passed through two other people before coming to me. Matt Finch, a PTS engineer working in the same area as us, suggested that Solaris jumpstart (network) installs of Solaris 9 and less would benefit from improved performance by removing the static scsi_options from /etc/system. These options define the modes that the SCSI controller uses, and by default they were very basic. By removing the options Solaris will query the SCSI controller and proceed with the supported modes, hopefully greatly reducing the time required to install the packages to the disk.
My tests had all been done on SPARC boxes, but at Paul's (my boss) suggestion I created a new image and jumpstarted a V20z with and without the change. The results was nothing short of amazing: with the scsi_options a full Solaris install took 54 minutes, and without just 20 minutes! I think all of my tests are done now and I just need to talk to Paul, David, William and maybe some of the other lab managers before pushing the change to the main installs and, eventually, the other labs around the world.
I also made progress with an old Enterprise 3500 box that was panicking during a Solaris 10u1 jumpstart. Weirdly it claimed that CPU 16 had caused the panic... odd considering that the machine had just two system boards, each with two CPUs. It wasn't even theoretically possible to have as many as 16 CPUs. Iain gave me some help with this one and prtdiag provided the necessary info to pinpoint the CPU to a given board. As I walked out this evening the machine appeared to be happily jumpstarting with that system board removed. Fingers crossed all will be well on Monday. That'll just leave reseating and re-torquing the CPU...
Last but not least... Bob Dylan released his first new studio album since just about forever. Good stuff.
(P.S. Hurry up and get better JIN)
It was pretty early in this week that I got a text message from Xiao saying that she'd gone to hospital because she was feeling ill. The following day I found out that she'd been admittedly to hospital and wasn't going to be coming back to England when she had planned to. She's going to be in China for at least another three weeks, most of that time will be in hospital. Since then she's been receiving daily bloody transfusions to help bolster her low platelet count and yesterday they took a sample of her bone marrow to do some tests. I've not heard anything more about that, but it does seem fairly serious to me. She's a bit annoyed right now because she's not been allowed to get a shower for a couple of days :P
On Tuesday I ordered myself a brand new pair of Quad 11Ls, which I mentioned a few blog entries earlier. In the end I went for the rosewood, but it could just as easily have been any of the other colours. On the amp front I spoke to my Dad and he's agreed to lend me his Quad 44/405 system, which isn't being used. This means that I can now track down the problem with either the Quad 33 pre-amp or 303 power-amp and get it shipped off to Quad for (an expensive) repair. I haven't decided which amp will go on my desk... the logical choice would be to hook the 405 up to the Yamahas, because it is quite a lot more powerful. But in the end I really don't know.
Chris dropped a bit of a bombshell when he decided he didn't want my PC any longer. This means I've got it back now, but it certainly isn't all bad. Recently I had been getting a little frustrated with the performance of my Shuttle, especially when it comes to vmware. On Wednesday I bought a new nvidia XFX GeForce 7600GS graphics card on eBay (which turned up today) -- this is a truly brilliant card thanks to the fact it has dual DVI as well as being passively cooled. It really is the card I always wanted. In other news I finally got around to returning a dead DVD drive to MicroDirect and the local AmTrak depot have a replacement sat waiting for me to collect.
Thursday was definitely "the end of an era". Mooktakim and Martin finished their internship at Sun and today the new lot (that's Chris, Anton, James and myself (plus Iain and Wilson who are ex-students who have rejoined)) were in full charge of the lab. Well. Sort of.
On the whole my day today has gone pretty well. I only closed one ticket, and that was work completed yesterday, but I've made good headway on a number of others. In particular I've come close to completing the biggest ticket I've had so far -- one that has passed through two other people before coming to me. Matt Finch, a PTS engineer working in the same area as us, suggested that Solaris jumpstart (network) installs of Solaris 9 and less would benefit from improved performance by removing the static scsi_options from /etc/system. These options define the modes that the SCSI controller uses, and by default they were very basic. By removing the options Solaris will query the SCSI controller and proceed with the supported modes, hopefully greatly reducing the time required to install the packages to the disk.
My tests had all been done on SPARC boxes, but at Paul's (my boss) suggestion I created a new image and jumpstarted a V20z with and without the change. The results was nothing short of amazing: with the scsi_options a full Solaris install took 54 minutes, and without just 20 minutes! I think all of my tests are done now and I just need to talk to Paul, David, William and maybe some of the other lab managers before pushing the change to the main installs and, eventually, the other labs around the world.
I also made progress with an old Enterprise 3500 box that was panicking during a Solaris 10u1 jumpstart. Weirdly it claimed that CPU 16 had caused the panic... odd considering that the machine had just two system boards, each with two CPUs. It wasn't even theoretically possible to have as many as 16 CPUs. Iain gave me some help with this one and prtdiag provided the necessary info to pinpoint the CPU to a given board. As I walked out this evening the machine appeared to be happily jumpstarting with that system board removed. Fingers crossed all will be well on Monday. That'll just leave reseating and re-torquing the CPU...
Last but not least... Bob Dylan released his first new studio album since just about forever. Good stuff.
(P.S. Hurry up and get better JIN)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)