What better way to celebrate the release of Ubuntu Dapper Drake than by joining in the discussing in the Ubuntu Feisty Fawn forum.
Many thanks and congratulations to all those involved with Ubuntu. It's nice to be running an officially stable distro... if only for a couple of weeks before I decide I need to upgrade to Feisty!
Thursday, 26 October 2006
Online Music
I downloaded (illegally, if it matters) a Jack Johnson CD called In Between Dreams and decided almost immediately (30s into track one) that it was a CD that I wanted to have.
I headed over to play.com, searched for Jack Johnson, picked two of the three albums he has (my decision of which two was made even easier by the fact that one was not in stock), selected buy and proceeded through the checkout process.
Total time between starting track one and completing the transaction: easily under two minutes.
If this doesn't show off both the highs and lows of the Internet, I don't know what does.
I headed over to play.com, searched for Jack Johnson, picked two of the three albums he has (my decision of which two was made even easier by the fact that one was not in stock), selected buy and proceeded through the checkout process.
Total time between starting track one and completing the transaction: easily under two minutes.
If this doesn't show off both the highs and lows of the Internet, I don't know what does.
Tuesday, 24 October 2006
When the last sword is drawn
I've seen some really amazing films in the last week or so. Kiki's Delivery Service was awesome, and just now I've finished watching Yojiro Takita's When the last sword is drawn. Absolutely superb.
Set at the beginning of the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate it details the life of a samurai forced to desert his clan to provide for his family.
Definitely one to watch.
Monday, 23 October 2006
Car!
Woo! Here's a photo of my new car:
Not sure exactly when I'll be getting it... but it looks cool to me :) It's a 2004 1.2L Punto with five doors. Says it has twin airbags, ESP, engine immobiliser and even electric windows with central locking. No air con, but that's not a big problem :)
I'm just waiting for my parents to trundle it down to Camberley so I can drive it about. Should be fun!
Not sure exactly when I'll be getting it... but it looks cool to me :) It's a 2004 1.2L Punto with five doors. Says it has twin airbags, ESP, engine immobiliser and even electric windows with central locking. No air con, but that's not a big problem :)
I'm just waiting for my parents to trundle it down to Camberley so I can drive it about. Should be fun!
When was the last time you...
* stayed under the cover so long that your breathing made it all hot and humid?
* unbuttoned the duvet cover and slept inside?
* made a "nest" out of your duvet and pillows?
* stayed up *all* night long to read your book?
* talked all the way through the night?
* actually listened to the rain in bed?
* unbuttoned the duvet cover and slept inside?
* made a "nest" out of your duvet and pillows?
* stayed up *all* night long to read your book?
* talked all the way through the night?
* actually listened to the rain in bed?
Sunday, 22 October 2006
Valentine's Day in Japan
Utterly bizarre fact, but 25% of all chocolate sales in Japan are on/around February 14th.
In Japan the women give to men, there are two types of chocolate: giri and honmei -- giri is given to say "thanks" to people who have helped out, such as bosses, co-workers, etc., while honmei is given to a love.
White Day, on March 14th, is used by men to return the favour. Chocolate could be given, but it is not uncommon for lingerie to be given... even to female co-workers.
I mean... seriously. What's wrong with Japan?
In Japan the women give to men, there are two types of chocolate: giri and honmei -- giri is given to say "thanks" to people who have helped out, such as bosses, co-workers, etc., while honmei is given to a love.
White Day, on March 14th, is used by men to return the favour. Chocolate could be given, but it is not uncommon for lingerie to be given... even to female co-workers.
I mean... seriously. What's wrong with Japan?
Friday, 20 October 2006
EULA, GPL, CDDL and BSD comparison
There's a really neat visual comparison of these four licenses over at http://blogs.sun.com/chandan/entry/copyrights_licenses_and_cddl_illustrated -- well worth viewing if you're in any doubt at all as to what each allows.
Seeing things like this only helps confirm my feelings about the GPL: it's a virus.
I also can't help but think that whoever came up with the idea of restricting our rights to guarantee freedom is an utter hypocrite.
As they say, bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity. But let's not go there.
Seeing things like this only helps confirm my feelings about the GPL: it's a virus.
I also can't help but think that whoever came up with the idea of restricting our rights to guarantee freedom is an utter hypocrite.
As they say, bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity. But let's not go there.
LiveUpgrade... Debian-style
So. As things stand now the Nexenta project have a fully-working GNU OS that uses the OpenSolaris kernel. The whole look and feel will be familiar for anybody that's used Ubuntu. After all, this is what Nexenta is based on.
I am interested in the Nexenta project primarily because it is useful to me. It (will) provide the applications I need to use, the ease and speed of management, while at the same time having a seriously interesting and powerful core kernel. Nvidia helpfully provide display drivers that are kept up-to-date with the Linux and FreeBSD-equivalents.
Nexenta uses Debian's deb/apt package management to handle everything on the system -- this includes the OpenSolaris kernel and userland gubbins that go with it. As such, upgrading from say, b48 to b49 is totally seamless to the user: a new package is available, it gets downloaded and installed and the user is prompted that they need to reboot their system for the installation to complete.
For desktop users this is exactly how things should be. LiveUpgrade is an impressive tool, but it relies on the user having a "spare" slice to allow a full backup of the root filesystem. On my laptop (20GB HDD) this isn't really something that I can afford, and on even on my desktop machine where disk space is not at a premium I don't want the hassle of such a large disk operation. However, performing such an upgrade on a live enterprise machine would likely cost the operator their job: and it's not hard to see why.
I can see a very clear solution in the very near future: a Nexenta-style "LiveUpgrade" with all the safety netting that current LiveUpgrades allow, provided at minimum cost and maximum speed, thanks to ZFS snapshots.
Chris Gerhard is one of the big promoters of ZFS on blogs.sun.com and currently has an entirely-as-possible ZFS implementation on his home server (ZFS root supported by a small UFS boot slice). I believe that he currently has two separate ZFS root filesystems and uses the LiveUpgrade scripts to "toggle" between these. Even with a setup like this I cannot see it being difficult to modify the LiveUpgrade scripts to create a (cloned) snapshot instead of a full slice mirror. Once native ZFS root is available, all that would need to be provided is a way to boot a specific snapshot or clone, as opposed to the "current" filesystem -- something I expect the ZFS developers will already have plans for.
It is highly unlikely that Sun will make the massive jump from the current method of providing updates, to something more channel-based at any time in the near future. But until then, the users can still benefit from the advantages through Nexenta, leaving plenty of time for the Sun developers to give serious thought to how best enterprise updates might be handled.
I am interested in the Nexenta project primarily because it is useful to me. It (will) provide the applications I need to use, the ease and speed of management, while at the same time having a seriously interesting and powerful core kernel. Nvidia helpfully provide display drivers that are kept up-to-date with the Linux and FreeBSD-equivalents.
Nexenta uses Debian's deb/apt package management to handle everything on the system -- this includes the OpenSolaris kernel and userland gubbins that go with it. As such, upgrading from say, b48 to b49 is totally seamless to the user: a new package is available, it gets downloaded and installed and the user is prompted that they need to reboot their system for the installation to complete.
For desktop users this is exactly how things should be. LiveUpgrade is an impressive tool, but it relies on the user having a "spare" slice to allow a full backup of the root filesystem. On my laptop (20GB HDD) this isn't really something that I can afford, and on even on my desktop machine where disk space is not at a premium I don't want the hassle of such a large disk operation. However, performing such an upgrade on a live enterprise machine would likely cost the operator their job: and it's not hard to see why.
I can see a very clear solution in the very near future: a Nexenta-style "LiveUpgrade" with all the safety netting that current LiveUpgrades allow, provided at minimum cost and maximum speed, thanks to ZFS snapshots.
Chris Gerhard is one of the big promoters of ZFS on blogs.sun.com and currently has an entirely-as-possible ZFS implementation on his home server (ZFS root supported by a small UFS boot slice). I believe that he currently has two separate ZFS root filesystems and uses the LiveUpgrade scripts to "toggle" between these. Even with a setup like this I cannot see it being difficult to modify the LiveUpgrade scripts to create a (cloned) snapshot instead of a full slice mirror. Once native ZFS root is available, all that would need to be provided is a way to boot a specific snapshot or clone, as opposed to the "current" filesystem -- something I expect the ZFS developers will already have plans for.
It is highly unlikely that Sun will make the massive jump from the current method of providing updates, to something more channel-based at any time in the near future. But until then, the users can still benefit from the advantages through Nexenta, leaving plenty of time for the Sun developers to give serious thought to how best enterprise updates might be handled.
Thursday, 19 October 2006
Steve McCurry
Magnum have an absolutely awesome set of interviews/photos with Steve McCurry. Head over to http://inmotion.magnumphotos.com/essays/mccurry.aspx to learn a little more about one of the world's greatest photographers.
Amazing photos
There are a bunch of really amazing photos over at a rather bizarre Chinese Esquire blog hosted at sina.com.cn.
I think they're totally cool shots... there are some football ones too, all of the photography outstanding... but you'll have to judge for yourself :)
I think they're totally cool shots... there are some football ones too, all of the photography outstanding... but you'll have to judge for yourself :)
Spring Holiday
I've been chasing various little bits and pieces up to sort out a decent holiday sometime early next year. I have sorely missed my "usual" foray into Asia so with any luck this new trip should help fill the gap.
My Mum has been wanting to visit China for the New Year for quite a while. The next Chinese New Year is on February 18, so around this date me, my Mum and my Uncle will be catching a flight to the People's Republic of China, probably PuDong international airport in Shanghai.
I've got an outline of what I'd like us to do, but I'll obviously sort this out properly and plan things a little better once more has been confirmed.
* Half a day in Shanghai to recuperate and visit the Bund
* A day or two in Suzhou ("Oriental Venice"), just north of Shanghai for a nice slow start
* Four hour+ sleeper bus trip to Taizhou City, Zhejiang, where we'll stay with Xiao's family for a couple of days over the New Year
* Flight to Xi'an province, near Beijing, so we can visit the Terracotta Warriors and other cool things in the area. At most two days here
* Train journey to Beijing where we'll spend a few days visiting the essential sights: The Forbidden City, Great Wall, Tiananmen Square, Temple of Heaven, Summer Garden, etc.
I expect that the above will take about two weeks, maybe a little more, maybe a little less. At this point, my Mum might head back to England, but Quentin and I will catch a flight to Bangkok in Thailand.
* A little time in Bangkok to look around and enjoy the weird place that it is
* Possibly a (two) day-trip up to Ayutthaya, an hour or two north of Bangkok
* We'll then be travelling to Siem Reap in Cambodia, home to the largest temple complex in the world: Angkor Wat
* A good week in Siem Reap visiting the many amazing temples, hopefully getting plenty of good photos
* Around this point I'll be out of days and we'll have to head back. This will probably mean flying back to Shanghai from Bangkok; I've yet to figure the most economical way to handle all of these flights
It should be a really great trip. Four weeks isn't a massive amount of time, but so long as I get all of my planning done well in advance it should all be fine. It'll make one hell of a difference to the way I've handled things before... randomly turning up and attempting to explain what I want to do and where to go.
Last but not least, a photo I found of Angkor Wat. I can recommend Steve McCurry's excellent book about Angkor Wat, some of the shots are truly great.
My Mum has been wanting to visit China for the New Year for quite a while. The next Chinese New Year is on February 18, so around this date me, my Mum and my Uncle will be catching a flight to the People's Republic of China, probably PuDong international airport in Shanghai.
I've got an outline of what I'd like us to do, but I'll obviously sort this out properly and plan things a little better once more has been confirmed.
* Half a day in Shanghai to recuperate and visit the Bund
* A day or two in Suzhou ("Oriental Venice"), just north of Shanghai for a nice slow start
* Four hour+ sleeper bus trip to Taizhou City, Zhejiang, where we'll stay with Xiao's family for a couple of days over the New Year
* Flight to Xi'an province, near Beijing, so we can visit the Terracotta Warriors and other cool things in the area. At most two days here
* Train journey to Beijing where we'll spend a few days visiting the essential sights: The Forbidden City, Great Wall, Tiananmen Square, Temple of Heaven, Summer Garden, etc.
I expect that the above will take about two weeks, maybe a little more, maybe a little less. At this point, my Mum might head back to England, but Quentin and I will catch a flight to Bangkok in Thailand.
* A little time in Bangkok to look around and enjoy the weird place that it is
* Possibly a (two) day-trip up to Ayutthaya, an hour or two north of Bangkok
* We'll then be travelling to Siem Reap in Cambodia, home to the largest temple complex in the world: Angkor Wat
* A good week in Siem Reap visiting the many amazing temples, hopefully getting plenty of good photos
* Around this point I'll be out of days and we'll have to head back. This will probably mean flying back to Shanghai from Bangkok; I've yet to figure the most economical way to handle all of these flights
It should be a really great trip. Four weeks isn't a massive amount of time, but so long as I get all of my planning done well in advance it should all be fine. It'll make one hell of a difference to the way I've handled things before... randomly turning up and attempting to explain what I want to do and where to go.
Last but not least, a photo I found of Angkor Wat. I can recommend Steve McCurry's excellent book about Angkor Wat, some of the shots are truly great.
T2000 Logical Domains
Well, Sun have announced it and it is linked from the frontpage of Sun.com.
A hardware virtualisation product for the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers (Niagara CPUs) will be shipping early next year. There's not a great deal of info available for this yet, but Sun internal guys will know that this is what I did my TOI on a few weeks ago. Using an early internal preview of the Logical Domains software I had a T1000 in our lab running multiple copies of the Solaris operating system.
The Niagara CPU has a hardware virtualisation layer called the "Hypervisor" that presents an abstracted view of the system devices to guest OSes (this info has been available for quite some time on opensparc.net and the Solaris ON source). Using this and some updated system firmwares the machine can be logically partitioned allowing multiple (different) kernels to run on the same hardware. The good news is that any operating system that will currently run on a non-LDoms Niagara box will also be capable of running on an LDoms version -- in fact, as far as the OS is aware nothing has changed, as it is already running beneath the Hypervisor.
I'm not 100% sure what has been announced right now, so I'll leave it at that. I'll add a little more info at a later date when I know exactly what is/isn't public information. Either way, keep your eyes open :)
A hardware virtualisation product for the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers (Niagara CPUs) will be shipping early next year. There's not a great deal of info available for this yet, but Sun internal guys will know that this is what I did my TOI on a few weeks ago. Using an early internal preview of the Logical Domains software I had a T1000 in our lab running multiple copies of the Solaris operating system.
The Niagara CPU has a hardware virtualisation layer called the "Hypervisor" that presents an abstracted view of the system devices to guest OSes (this info has been available for quite some time on opensparc.net and the Solaris ON source). Using this and some updated system firmwares the machine can be logically partitioned allowing multiple (different) kernels to run on the same hardware. The good news is that any operating system that will currently run on a non-LDoms Niagara box will also be capable of running on an LDoms version -- in fact, as far as the OS is aware nothing has changed, as it is already running beneath the Hypervisor.
I'm not 100% sure what has been announced right now, so I'll leave it at that. I'll add a little more info at a later date when I know exactly what is/isn't public information. Either way, keep your eyes open :)
Wednesday, 18 October 2006
Time off
Thanks to the way our 15k course fell, Anton, Chris and I ended up with the morning off. This was to allow every person on the course to get up close and personal with the procedures required to remove system and IO boards, expander boards, system controllers and centerplane support boards.
I personally took used this time in bed asleep. The (extremely) long weekend had left me pretty tired and I was glad to get some time to recoup. Around 9:45 I got up, read my email and did all of the usual stuff. I used the time to prepare dinner this evening, which means I've only got to drop my veg and chicken into the wok to get going. A real time saver.
The kitchen was getting pretty messy too, so I tidied up and hoovered the floor (and the hall and living room) in preparation for the mop. Much easier when there aren't loads of little crappy bits that stick to the mop. I'll do this shortly; right now Charlotte is working in the kitchen, so I'll do it once she's finished (or maybe I'll cook first).
In other news: Win4BSD sucks, the single application mode is a cheesy Windows hack to replace the explorer.exe shell with a single application. No use to me at all. Needless to say I'm back running Ubuntu Edgy Eft and will be scrapping the FreeBSD partition shortly.
Tomorrow my two new books should turn up: Solaris Internals and Solaris Performance and Tools. I've got a battered Solaris Internals I accidentally bought second hand; this will go back on Saturday when I get to the Post Office.
I personally took used this time in bed asleep. The (extremely) long weekend had left me pretty tired and I was glad to get some time to recoup. Around 9:45 I got up, read my email and did all of the usual stuff. I used the time to prepare dinner this evening, which means I've only got to drop my veg and chicken into the wok to get going. A real time saver.
The kitchen was getting pretty messy too, so I tidied up and hoovered the floor (and the hall and living room) in preparation for the mop. Much easier when there aren't loads of little crappy bits that stick to the mop. I'll do this shortly; right now Charlotte is working in the kitchen, so I'll do it once she's finished (or maybe I'll cook first).
In other news: Win4BSD sucks, the single application mode is a cheesy Windows hack to replace the explorer.exe shell with a single application. No use to me at all. Needless to say I'm back running Ubuntu Edgy Eft and will be scrapping the FreeBSD partition shortly.
Tomorrow my two new books should turn up: Solaris Internals and Solaris Performance and Tools. I've got a battered Solaris Internals I accidentally bought second hand; this will go back on Saturday when I get to the Post Office.
Tuesday, 17 October 2006
Current desktop OS
This evening I've installed FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE on my desktop machine; it's triple-booting with Windows XP and Ubuntu Edgy Eft for now. I've used Windows once: to mess around with the shocking driving theory test software I borrowed from Liam.
I decided to give FreeBSD another go for one reason only: Win4BSD. Yep, this is Win4Lin, except compiled natively for FreeBSD. In addition, it has one superb new feature: the ability to run a single application without all of the regular clutter that comes with the Windows desktop. I believe this to mean that I could fire up Photoshop CS2 and have it appear as a regular window managed by my GNOME window manager (metacity).
Right now Windows XP Pro SP2 is installing and I'm hoping to test a really simple application like notepad.exe later on this evening. If it works as expected, I do believe that Win4BSD is an absolute winner. With any luck the feature will be ported over to Win4Lin soon afterwards so I can continue to run Ubuntu. Don't get me wrong, FreeBSD is a great OS, but it's not quite as simple to manage on a desktop machine as Ubuntu.
More to follow.
I decided to give FreeBSD another go for one reason only: Win4BSD. Yep, this is Win4Lin, except compiled natively for FreeBSD. In addition, it has one superb new feature: the ability to run a single application without all of the regular clutter that comes with the Windows desktop. I believe this to mean that I could fire up Photoshop CS2 and have it appear as a regular window managed by my GNOME window manager (metacity).
Right now Windows XP Pro SP2 is installing and I'm hoping to test a really simple application like notepad.exe later on this evening. If it works as expected, I do believe that Win4BSD is an absolute winner. With any luck the feature will be ported over to Win4Lin soon afterwards so I can continue to run Ubuntu. Don't get me wrong, FreeBSD is a great OS, but it's not quite as simple to manage on a desktop machine as Ubuntu.
More to follow.
Thursday, 12 October 2006
Firefox + gvim == good
MozEx is one top Firefox extension. It allows you to hijack links, edit boxes, etc. and pass them to some external programme. A very basic setup (for now) is to allow me to hit CTRL+e and have the content of textboxes fire up inside of gvim for me to edit quickly. Now that gvim has tab support it would be really easy to allow it to open a new tab to edit the text.
Car hunting
I'll be heading home after work tomorrow. The idea is to start looking for a car. It's obviously fairly unlikely I'll find a suitable car, get it bought and paid for, as well as sort my insurance out in one weekend... it'd be seriously cool if I did though :)
After work it looks like I'll have to catch the Sun bus to Blackwater station as everybody else is heading back home as well. It shouldn't be a problem, but I've got a fairly tight schedule in getting from work, to the train station, to LKX in time to catch my train home.
I should have plenty of time to catch up with "Dance, dance, dance" my current book, as well as flick through some photos and maybe even watch some TV on my laptop.
Right, time for me to get ready for bed now.
After work it looks like I'll have to catch the Sun bus to Blackwater station as everybody else is heading back home as well. It shouldn't be a problem, but I've got a fairly tight schedule in getting from work, to the train station, to LKX in time to catch my train home.
I should have plenty of time to catch up with "Dance, dance, dance" my current book, as well as flick through some photos and maybe even watch some TV on my laptop.
Right, time for me to get ready for bed now.
Vim's new omni-completion
I've been busy recently. Not entirely sure what I've been busy with, but obviously it must have been good.
This evening I have done some light playing with Vim 7's new omni-completion. tbh I've not used completion like this since I left the sheltered little world of Delphi programming on Windows (btw, Pascal is an awesome language and I shall smite all those who say otherwise!). But for a lot of stuff it was really handy... from time to time I find myself not being 100% sure of the function I want to run and have to look up: this is where omni-completion will hopefully benefit me.
So, feast your eyes on Vim's in-built PHP completion, helping me remember the substr() function (and providing all of the friendly arguments, or something):
Pretty nifty for an editor that was born in 1976... and even then it was an add-on to ex, which was an improvement to the original ed.
This evening I have done some light playing with Vim 7's new omni-completion. tbh I've not used completion like this since I left the sheltered little world of Delphi programming on Windows (btw, Pascal is an awesome language and I shall smite all those who say otherwise!). But for a lot of stuff it was really handy... from time to time I find myself not being 100% sure of the function I want to run and have to look up: this is where omni-completion will hopefully benefit me.
So, feast your eyes on Vim's in-built PHP completion, helping me remember the substr() function (and providing all of the friendly arguments, or something):
Pretty nifty for an editor that was born in 1976... and even then it was an add-on to ex, which was an improvement to the original ed.
Wednesday, 11 October 2006
Tuesday, 10 October 2006
Vim 7
Woo! The new version of Vim absolutely rocks!
Vim is obviously editor of choice, but new features include spell-checking, omni-completion (it's been a long time coming), tabs in gvim, undo branching, internal/external grepping and editing remote and compressed files.
Pretty impressive stuff. I've just got to figure out exactly how to make it all work :)
Vim is obviously editor of choice, but new features include spell-checking, omni-completion (it's been a long time coming), tabs in gvim, undo branching, internal/external grepping and editing remote and compressed files.
Pretty impressive stuff. I've just got to figure out exactly how to make it all work :)
Monday, 9 October 2006
Sunday, 8 October 2006
Ingmar Bergman
This weekend I've made a decent-sized dent into my stack of as-yet-unwatched DVDs. Up for viewing were two Ingmar Bergman films: Smiles of a Summer Night and Persona.
Smiles of a Summer Night was pretty good, it was a comedy, but not really the kind of comedy I'm used to. Well worth watching :)
Persona was... weird. Very weird. I don't really understand all of it, and I'm not sure that a second viewing will change things all that much. It's rated as one of the all-time great films, so definitely worth giving a chance -- I have a nasty habit of hardly understanding any of the films I watch, so plenty of other people will do better in understanding it than me.
I had sort-of decided to not buy any more DVDs until I'd got through this pile. Well, I guess I buckled and just bought The Seventh Seal from play.com. This is a really great film, up there with my favourite film: The Seven Samurai. Like the Seven Samurai it's also incredibly long, and requires a lot of concentration to fully appreciate it. It should make an interesting evening :)
Smiles of a Summer Night was pretty good, it was a comedy, but not really the kind of comedy I'm used to. Well worth watching :)
Persona was... weird. Very weird. I don't really understand all of it, and I'm not sure that a second viewing will change things all that much. It's rated as one of the all-time great films, so definitely worth giving a chance -- I have a nasty habit of hardly understanding any of the films I watch, so plenty of other people will do better in understanding it than me.
I had sort-of decided to not buy any more DVDs until I'd got through this pile. Well, I guess I buckled and just bought The Seventh Seal from play.com. This is a really great film, up there with my favourite film: The Seven Samurai. Like the Seven Samurai it's also incredibly long, and requires a lot of concentration to fully appreciate it. It should make an interesting evening :)
The 11Ls
So, I've been pretty laid back in playing around with these new Quad 11Ls. I got all of the good stuff sorted: new 33 pre-amp, new Audigy 2 ZS soundcard and a bunch of my albums ripped to FLACs.
Past that I sort of haven't had a lot of time to really sit down and listen to it all. One thing that had been *really* annoying me was the fact that the output from the soundcard was so noisy: I previously tried this with Windows and found things to be different, so I assumed it to be a Linux thing. After messing around with the OSS modules (instead of ALSA) I re-checked Windows and realised I'd messed it all up and that it was a soundcard/cable issue.
That said... I played around with all of the options in the mixer and managed to improve things a lot: turns out that the Audigy cards have about a zillion different inputs, channels and options. I've managed to crank some of them up a lot, mute all of the others and the net result is that the soundcard output is plenty louder and the noise is down (well, only because the output is higher). Things are much better, anyway.
It all sounds great: just sat down and listened to an album (Regina Spektor's Mary Ann Meets the Gravediggers and Other Short Stories) and the bass was incredible, especially considering they're sat down on my desk, no spikes, no stands, none of that fancy stuff.
Definitely a good investment! :)
Past that I sort of haven't had a lot of time to really sit down and listen to it all. One thing that had been *really* annoying me was the fact that the output from the soundcard was so noisy: I previously tried this with Windows and found things to be different, so I assumed it to be a Linux thing. After messing around with the OSS modules (instead of ALSA) I re-checked Windows and realised I'd messed it all up and that it was a soundcard/cable issue.
That said... I played around with all of the options in the mixer and managed to improve things a lot: turns out that the Audigy cards have about a zillion different inputs, channels and options. I've managed to crank some of them up a lot, mute all of the others and the net result is that the soundcard output is plenty louder and the noise is down (well, only because the output is higher). Things are much better, anyway.
It all sounds great: just sat down and listened to an album (Regina Spektor's Mary Ann Meets the Gravediggers and Other Short Stories) and the bass was incredible, especially considering they're sat down on my desk, no spikes, no stands, none of that fancy stuff.
Definitely a good investment! :)
Greasemonkey (improving ServiceDesk QMgr)
Sat at work I find myself frequently scanning through the list of tickets that are assigned to me so I should know what to be getting on with. A bunch of tickets on my queue are "stale" -- I might be waiting for a machine to become free, I'm waiting on some big thing to happen, etc. Some are in a state where I'm still actively working on it, but I happen to be waiting on some feedback from the ticket owner (i.e. the engineer that opened it), while the rest all require work to be done.
It's possible to change the status of a ticket, but this is a bit of a pain -- it requires changing status to "Waiting on user input", etc. The tickets can then be ordered by status... no biggie, but surely there must be a "better way".
Enter Greasemonkey -- an extension for Firefox that allows the end-user a massive degree of control over how websites are presented. I'd describe Greasemonkey as a way of "post-processing" websites once they've loaded. This is done by hijacking the JavaScript and providing the Greasemonkey script with full access to the DOM for the page.
In the course of my really basic script I learned a lot about how Firefox must render pages. This DOM stuff is totally awesome.
What I wanted to do was assign each and every ticket a "status" -- I wanted three statuses: stale, awaiting feedback and active. Luckily for me three colours came to mind: red, orange and green :)
I started by intercepting a mouseclick with some JavaScript stuff... I then checked whether the "modifier" key was held (on my Linux box this is the Windows key, on Sun keyboards it's usually the little diamond thing) and proceeded to change the colour of the HTML element that the mouse pressed. This required figuring out how JavaScript worked -- it's not my favourite language in the world, but I suppose it does the job.
Once I'd got the colour cycling working (this took a little while as I've never played with Greasemonkey, JavaScript or this DOM stuff before) I decided to start investigating how I could begin to uniquely identify the "ticket number" -- turned out this was fairly easy: the ticket number link has an HREF containing: "Work on Ticket", once I'd got this I could extract the ticket number itself. This ticket number is, by definition, unique (or at least I damn well hope it is!), which means I can use it as a key for storing variables. My variable is simple: status.
Greasemonkey provides two really nifty functions: GM_getValue(key, value) and GM_setValue(key, value). These work in a similar way to cookies. So now when the user cycles through the available statuses, I store the value using GM_setValue(ticketno, status). This value is persistent, so I can close the browser and come back later and the value will be the same.
At this point all that was left was to read in the stored values and update the tickets with the appropriate colour: to do this I added an EventListener for the "load" event, found all of the ticket links (XPath provides some easy ways to do this), read the stored value (defaulting to an active status (green)) and updated the field. Easy.
So, here's the end result:
I wasn't too sure what details I should/shouldn't make available, so I blurred a lot of it out. So, it's not the most incredibly useful script in the world, but it should save me some time, and it was an interesting learning experience.
Since switching to Wordpress I'd been annoyed by the fact that I have to enter the Site admin interface just to create a new blog entry. I fixed this by using Greasemonkey to add an "Admin options" section to the top of my page:
Really basic stuff, for sure, but certainly a time-saver for me. I knocked this one up really quickly: if I wanted to do it properly I'd check if I was actually logged in before displaying the admin options. Since I tend to stay logged in all of the time, I figured this was a fairly pointless exercise.
So, Greasemonkey is good. We Love It.
It's possible to change the status of a ticket, but this is a bit of a pain -- it requires changing status to "Waiting on user input", etc. The tickets can then be ordered by status... no biggie, but surely there must be a "better way".
Enter Greasemonkey -- an extension for Firefox that allows the end-user a massive degree of control over how websites are presented. I'd describe Greasemonkey as a way of "post-processing" websites once they've loaded. This is done by hijacking the JavaScript and providing the Greasemonkey script with full access to the DOM for the page.
In the course of my really basic script I learned a lot about how Firefox must render pages. This DOM stuff is totally awesome.
What I wanted to do was assign each and every ticket a "status" -- I wanted three statuses: stale, awaiting feedback and active. Luckily for me three colours came to mind: red, orange and green :)
I started by intercepting a mouseclick with some JavaScript stuff... I then checked whether the "modifier" key was held (on my Linux box this is the Windows key, on Sun keyboards it's usually the little diamond thing) and proceeded to change the colour of the HTML element that the mouse pressed. This required figuring out how JavaScript worked -- it's not my favourite language in the world, but I suppose it does the job.
Once I'd got the colour cycling working (this took a little while as I've never played with Greasemonkey, JavaScript or this DOM stuff before) I decided to start investigating how I could begin to uniquely identify the "ticket number" -- turned out this was fairly easy: the ticket number link has an HREF containing: "Work on Ticket", once I'd got this I could extract the ticket number itself. This ticket number is, by definition, unique (or at least I damn well hope it is!), which means I can use it as a key for storing variables. My variable is simple: status.
Greasemonkey provides two really nifty functions: GM_getValue(key, value) and GM_setValue(key, value). These work in a similar way to cookies. So now when the user cycles through the available statuses, I store the value using GM_setValue(ticketno, status). This value is persistent, so I can close the browser and come back later and the value will be the same.
At this point all that was left was to read in the stored values and update the tickets with the appropriate colour: to do this I added an EventListener for the "load" event, found all of the ticket links (XPath provides some easy ways to do this), read the stored value (defaulting to an active status (green)) and updated the field. Easy.
So, here's the end result:
I wasn't too sure what details I should/shouldn't make available, so I blurred a lot of it out. So, it's not the most incredibly useful script in the world, but it should save me some time, and it was an interesting learning experience.
Since switching to Wordpress I'd been annoyed by the fact that I have to enter the Site admin interface just to create a new blog entry. I fixed this by using Greasemonkey to add an "Admin options" section to the top of my page:
Really basic stuff, for sure, but certainly a time-saver for me. I knocked this one up really quickly: if I wanted to do it properly I'd check if I was actually logged in before displaying the admin options. Since I tend to stay logged in all of the time, I figured this was a fairly pointless exercise.
So, Greasemonkey is good. We Love It.
Saturday, 7 October 2006
Birthday
So, last Wednesday was my birthday. Twenty-two years old... 22 sounds a lot older than 21, etc.
My parents came down on Tuesday evening and we had a meal out at The Ely -- a pub I've passed every day on the way to work since we got here. It's quite a nice place, really, roomy, not smoky and the food was pretty good. We ended up going back on the Wednesday too -- but this was more because we couldn't think of anywhere else to go ;)
I've got a few nice presents -- Kim and James got me some great stuff from Amazon: Henri Cartier-Bresson's Europeans, as well as two Haruki Murakami books: Norwegian Wood (his first novel), and South of the Border, West of the Sun. My parents got me a nice new jumper (wore it to Tesco today, but then it got too hot so I had to take it off) and Olivia got me some goodies.
Xiao managed to arrange for my Mum to pick me up a new wallet... so I've got this too. It's really nice, but the money pocket is on the inside, not the outside like the one I have now. I'm going to have a look and see if I can find one with a money pocket on the outside, but I'm not holding out much hope...
On Wednesday my TOI went fairly well -- there were ten people there, four of them were engineers, so I got a few questions that made me pause and think. It was about an as-yet unreleased product upgrade, so I got a little worried when it all went wrong minutes before I was due to prevent things. A new version of the software was released today, so I might give it a try sometime tomorrow, or when I get back to work.
All in all, it was a nice day, but I don't think I'll be looking forward to the next: TWENTY-THREE IS OLD!
(and yes, I know that last statement is one I'll come back and laugh about -- I'm just telling it how it is :)
My parents came down on Tuesday evening and we had a meal out at The Ely -- a pub I've passed every day on the way to work since we got here. It's quite a nice place, really, roomy, not smoky and the food was pretty good. We ended up going back on the Wednesday too -- but this was more because we couldn't think of anywhere else to go ;)
I've got a few nice presents -- Kim and James got me some great stuff from Amazon: Henri Cartier-Bresson's Europeans, as well as two Haruki Murakami books: Norwegian Wood (his first novel), and South of the Border, West of the Sun. My parents got me a nice new jumper (wore it to Tesco today, but then it got too hot so I had to take it off) and Olivia got me some goodies.
Xiao managed to arrange for my Mum to pick me up a new wallet... so I've got this too. It's really nice, but the money pocket is on the inside, not the outside like the one I have now. I'm going to have a look and see if I can find one with a money pocket on the outside, but I'm not holding out much hope...
On Wednesday my TOI went fairly well -- there were ten people there, four of them were engineers, so I got a few questions that made me pause and think. It was about an as-yet unreleased product upgrade, so I got a little worried when it all went wrong minutes before I was due to prevent things. A new version of the software was released today, so I might give it a try sometime tomorrow, or when I get back to work.
All in all, it was a nice day, but I don't think I'll be looking forward to the next: TWENTY-THREE IS OLD!
(and yes, I know that last statement is one I'll come back and laugh about -- I'm just telling it how it is :)
Friday, 6 October 2006
ルイス
Why is it that my name looks so totally awesome in the Japanese katakana alphabet?
The characters are: 'ru', 'i', and 'su'... not big on the old 'L's those crazy Japanese.
The characters are: 'ru', 'i', and 'su'... not big on the old 'L's those crazy Japanese.
Monday, 2 October 2006
Lewis' top secret TOI
At the suggestion of Matt Finch I decided to read up on a new "product" (not really) that Sun should be rolling out soon. I've spent quite a bit of time reading up and I'm fairly confident with the material available to us mere mortals (I'm sure all of the *really* good stuff is hidden away on the part of the TWiki that requires special permissions that I don't have). I've had everything up and running on a lab box for the past few days and I expect to have a few of the more advanced things played around with this evening/tomorrow at work.
I've had quite a bit of help from Mick Mullins, who works in the VSP group (whatever that is/they do) adjoining our office area, which has been great. I spoke to Paul about doing a TOI (Transfer Of Information -- a Sun term I told myself I'd *never* use when I first heard it) to Chris, Anton, James and Liam my co-workery people. This got expanded a bit to include a couple more people (I think David and William will be coming along) and then today I sent out an email to (as far as I can tell) most of the engineers at Guillemont Park (that's three whole buildings), inviting them to come along.
The room I've got booked out is good to seat about ten people, so I have a feeling a larger room may be required, if I can get one.
I'm looking forward to doing this... it's going to be pretty hard work for a bunch of reasons: there are some areas that I've simply not managed to get answers for yet; "public" speaking really isn't my thing; and if just one engineer turns up (Mick Mullins has already told me he'll be coming, and I expect Matt Finch will turn up) I'm going to be talking to people who know far more than I do about a lot of the technologies that make up the new "product". But where I have the edge is the fact that I wrote the slides and I know (hopefully) specifically how they work and exactly what they do that's of use to their function.
Anyway, time to do a little more reading-up and figuring out how to get those "advanced" (they're not really) things working in time for Wednesday.
Damn, it's really hard talking about something you can't name ;)
I've had quite a bit of help from Mick Mullins, who works in the VSP group (whatever that is/they do) adjoining our office area, which has been great. I spoke to Paul about doing a TOI (Transfer Of Information -- a Sun term I told myself I'd *never* use when I first heard it) to Chris, Anton, James and Liam my co-workery people. This got expanded a bit to include a couple more people (I think David and William will be coming along) and then today I sent out an email to (as far as I can tell) most of the engineers at Guillemont Park (that's three whole buildings), inviting them to come along.
The room I've got booked out is good to seat about ten people, so I have a feeling a larger room may be required, if I can get one.
I'm looking forward to doing this... it's going to be pretty hard work for a bunch of reasons: there are some areas that I've simply not managed to get answers for yet; "public" speaking really isn't my thing; and if just one engineer turns up (Mick Mullins has already told me he'll be coming, and I expect Matt Finch will turn up) I'm going to be talking to people who know far more than I do about a lot of the technologies that make up the new "product". But where I have the edge is the fact that I wrote the slides and I know (hopefully) specifically how they work and exactly what they do that's of use to their function.
Anyway, time to do a little more reading-up and figuring out how to get those "advanced" (they're not really) things working in time for Wednesday.
Damn, it's really hard talking about something you can't name ;)
ZFS anomaly
I was playing with ZFS on a T1000 in the lab today and I came across a rather curious "feature". I had created a pool and a single filesystem in this pool (zpool create tank c0t0d0s7; zfs create tank/test). At this point I changed to the tank mountpoint (/tank) and decided that test wasn't suitable for what I was doing: "mv test linux". No problems here. I then populated /tank/linux with a bunch of files before checking the disk utilisation... this called df to barf as it could no longer find the tank/test filesystem!
I'm going to confirm this tomorrow, before contacting the zfs-interest@sun.com mailing list about it. I'll be surprised if it hasn't already been reported.
There are a few other curious little quirks with ZFS. The whole copy-on-write concept is what makes ZFS what it is. For those that don't know, if I change the contents of a file from "foo" to "bar" ZFS performs the following steps: create new file with contents "bar", update parent of the original file such that it points to the new file, add the old file to the free list (unless we are snapshotting), recalculate checksums all the way back up to the uber-block. This means that should any part of this fail (i.e. misdirected read/write, phantom read/write, etc.) the data may be lost (there's really not much you can do about this), but the filesystem will be in a coherent state.
And back on track: if your ZFS filesystem fills up, what do you do? Easy, delete some fil... ah. Here's where it goes wrong: you can't delete a file from a truly full ZFS filesystem because the operation is an atomic copy-on-write that requires a free block to complete. Ooops.
Okay, so these reflect fairly poorly on ZFS, but don't rule it out yet: it's still very young and very much in-development. The dev team certainly know about the second issue and I'll be surprised if they don't know about the first issue. This means that they'll be thinking it over and working out how best to handle it.
In the meantime, you can always recover from a full ZFS filesystem by adding a new device to your pool.
Just don't expect to get it back :)
I'm going to confirm this tomorrow, before contacting the zfs-interest@sun.com mailing list about it. I'll be surprised if it hasn't already been reported.
There are a few other curious little quirks with ZFS. The whole copy-on-write concept is what makes ZFS what it is. For those that don't know, if I change the contents of a file from "foo" to "bar" ZFS performs the following steps: create new file with contents "bar", update parent of the original file such that it points to the new file, add the old file to the free list (unless we are snapshotting), recalculate checksums all the way back up to the uber-block. This means that should any part of this fail (i.e. misdirected read/write, phantom read/write, etc.) the data may be lost (there's really not much you can do about this), but the filesystem will be in a coherent state.
And back on track: if your ZFS filesystem fills up, what do you do? Easy, delete some fil... ah. Here's where it goes wrong: you can't delete a file from a truly full ZFS filesystem because the operation is an atomic copy-on-write that requires a free block to complete. Ooops.
Okay, so these reflect fairly poorly on ZFS, but don't rule it out yet: it's still very young and very much in-development. The dev team certainly know about the second issue and I'll be surprised if they don't know about the first issue. This means that they'll be thinking it over and working out how best to handle it.
In the meantime, you can always recover from a full ZFS filesystem by adding a new device to your pool.
Just don't expect to get it back :)
PCI-E 2.0 draft
Okay, this is very geeky, but I've been trying to read up on the expected features to come with PCI-E 2.0. By far the most interesting thing is support for I/O virtualisation, right down at the PCI-E controller level.
What this will hopefully mean is that future paravirtualisation techniques will be able to utilise this to provide direct access to the PCI bus to guest operating systems.
A little more info can be found at the PCI-SIG I/O Virtualisation page http://www.pcisig.com/specifications/iov/
What this will hopefully mean is that future paravirtualisation techniques will be able to utilise this to provide direct access to the PCI bus to guest operating systems.
A little more info can be found at the PCI-SIG I/O Virtualisation page http://www.pcisig.com/specifications/iov/
Sunday, 1 October 2006
Cidade de Deus (City of God)
It's been ages since I've done one of my film reviews. These usually consist of just how awesome (or poor) the film was, the DVD cover and a recommendation to immediately go out and purchase the disc.
City of God deserved to be watched much sooner. Released in 2002 and it has taken me four whole years to sit down and watch it. It's really no surprise it won so many awards.
Based on a true story, it tracks the rise and fall of Li'l Zi, a hoodlum and drug dealer in the City of God, Brazil, through the eyes of Rocket, a boy aspiring to be a professional photographer at the same time as setting himself apart from his brother and the people around him.
Sitting down to the watch the film, I'd prepared myself for a film with a slow plot and plenty of character development. Surprisingly only one of these was true: the film was incredibly fast paced and a lot happened without the viewer getting confused. It was easy to keep up with the roles the characters were playing (something that I often find isn't the case, but this might just be because I'm slow). The overall standard of acting was excellent and the cinematography was superb.
This feel needs to be watched. Head on out and buy it now :) Normally after watching a film like this I'd head out and buy another film by the same director (City of Men, anybody?); but I decided yesterday that I'd finish off a lot of DVDs that I've picked up over the last few years that I've simply not gotten around to watching. Next up will probably be R-Point, a hopefully idiotic film described on the front cover as: " a cross between the Blair Witch Project and Full Metal Jacket".
City of God deserved to be watched much sooner. Released in 2002 and it has taken me four whole years to sit down and watch it. It's really no surprise it won so many awards.
Based on a true story, it tracks the rise and fall of Li'l Zi, a hoodlum and drug dealer in the City of God, Brazil, through the eyes of Rocket, a boy aspiring to be a professional photographer at the same time as setting himself apart from his brother and the people around him.
Sitting down to the watch the film, I'd prepared myself for a film with a slow plot and plenty of character development. Surprisingly only one of these was true: the film was incredibly fast paced and a lot happened without the viewer getting confused. It was easy to keep up with the roles the characters were playing (something that I often find isn't the case, but this might just be because I'm slow). The overall standard of acting was excellent and the cinematography was superb.
This feel needs to be watched. Head on out and buy it now :) Normally after watching a film like this I'd head out and buy another film by the same director (City of Men, anybody?); but I decided yesterday that I'd finish off a lot of DVDs that I've picked up over the last few years that I've simply not gotten around to watching. Next up will probably be R-Point, a hopefully idiotic film described on the front cover as: " a cross between the Blair Witch Project and Full Metal Jacket".
Xiaoxiao's new hairstyle
Just got a few photos from Xiao the other day and I thought I'd include a picture of her new "curly" hairstyle.
Wordpress
As promised: here it is.
I've switched away from Drupal to Wordpress for my personal blog.
Why? Because my needs have changed, and Wordpress better suits them. I'm no longer hosting images with my blog, instead these are now hosted on a different website, www.fajita.org.
As with any change, please let me know if something doesn't seem to be working as it should do -- I've done plenty of testing over the past week, but I can't cover everything myself.
Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions? Leave a comment.
I've switched away from Drupal to Wordpress for my personal blog.
Why? Because my needs have changed, and Wordpress better suits them. I'm no longer hosting images with my blog, instead these are now hosted on a different website, www.fajita.org.
As with any change, please let me know if something doesn't seem to be working as it should do -- I've done plenty of testing over the past week, but I can't cover everything myself.
Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions? Leave a comment.
Cleaning
How come I always feel the need to clean up the house before I can sit down and do anything constructive? I've just spent the last couple of hours doing general cleaning of the house: I got fed up of the fridge being so untidy and dirty so I cleaned that (this involved removing everything, checking sell-by dates, wiping everything, removing all of the racks, bars and glass and cleaning that before cleaning the inside of the fridge and spending an inordinate amount of time deciding on the most effective use of the three fridge racks in relation to the stuff that we put in it... in the end I think I've done a pretty good job, James and Kim will be glad to know there is pretty much a "dedicated" beer section, I've put my naan bread in the plastic drawer that veg would normally go in, and I've adjusted the height of the shelves so we can put stuff that has previously leaked upright), the sofa was looking pretty grubby (everybody puts their shoes on it, which annoys me because I always have to wipe the weird tree crap off it that comes from outside before I sit down) so I put the covers in the washing machine. Then I washed all of the pots, cleaned the kitchen (just a quick job, I've not mopped the floor or cleaned the hobs yet) and tidied up the living room and hoovered all around.
It's not that I enjoy cleaning; I really don't. I think it is mostly down to the fact that I just don't like things to be untidy... what doesn't help is that somewhere in the past (almost) 22 years I've picked up the mentality that if you're going to do something, you may as well do it properly. This basically means that if I start something that other people might finish in ten minutes, I'll take at least 20, if not more. It's almost like a mini case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or something.
Ah, well. At least everything is pretty tidy now. I can get on with my work :)
It's not that I enjoy cleaning; I really don't. I think it is mostly down to the fact that I just don't like things to be untidy... what doesn't help is that somewhere in the past (almost) 22 years I've picked up the mentality that if you're going to do something, you may as well do it properly. This basically means that if I start something that other people might finish in ten minutes, I'll take at least 20, if not more. It's almost like a mini case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or something.
Ah, well. At least everything is pretty tidy now. I can get on with my work :)
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