The floating village

Today I had a well-deserved lie-in.  In the morning my Mum and Uncle Quentin headed off to the silk farm.  I decided to give this a miss but got up for the afternoon trip to the bamboo floating village.

The name was a little deceiving as the bamboo wasn't that heavily featured.  I had an image of a village clustered floating around in a bamboo forest.  It turned out that they were more or less rafts or boats with long bamboo poles used to keep them afloat.

It wasn't anywhere near up to the splendor of the temples of Angkor, but still worth a visit.

Tomorrow we're catching the bus to Phnom Penh and on Sunday March 4 we're flying to Beijing, China.

Once in Beijing we'll be visiting the Great Wall, Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven and making a trip to the Terracotta Warriors in Xi'an before flying on to Shanghai for a day before our flight back to Manchester.

I've no idea about Internet in Phnom Penh... maybe I'll have it, maybe I won't.  Either way, we're staying at a Home Inns hotel in Beijing, which is fully equipped with a (filtered) connection.  I'll finally get a chance to give my Tor router a shot.  BBC here I come!

Last day in Angkor

Well, today was my last day in the Angkor temple area. Our three-day pass is up and tomorrow we'll be heading somewhere different. On the cards right now is a trip to the floating village nearby.

Quentin and I got up at 7AM today to head out to a few of the smaller temples. We picked the Roluous group and visited a monastery first. Later on we headed to a temple that was under heavy reconstruction and watched a group of ladies crushing bricks to be used in a mortar made up of brick dust, palm sap and water. The women had been doing the painstaking work for six years on just $40/month!

After heading back to sleep over lunch I arranged for our driver to collect me at 2PM from the hotel for a final trip to Angkor Wat and the Bayon. I was very fortunate to meet a group of five novice monks who were taking in the sights at Angkor Wat. As I had a taxi to myself I was able to offer three of them a trip to their next destination for the sunset.

In the end I spent about three hours with the novices, one of which was as young as 17 years old. He's the one in the photo at the top of this entry.

I collected an address and email address from them, so I'll pass on a few photos when I get back. The sunset from the top of the mountain was truly incredible, but my photos unfortunately don't do it justice.



It's about time for me to be getting to bed. See everybody in about two weeks.

Millionaire!

Just four days ago we were multi-millionaires.  We had 2.6 million rial in our pockets, but recently we spotted it was going down awfully quickly.

This morning after our 5AM start at Angkor Wat we headed to another temple for an early-morning viewing.  On the way out my Mum stopped to pick up a pineapple from one of the road-side sellers.

It was only after we'd bought the pineapple when I asked for 2,000 rial ($0.5) for a can of coke.  My Mum handed me two 10,000 rial notes... around about three quid.  When I queried this she said that's what she paid for the $1 pineapple with!

In the end it turned out that we'd paid about twenty times more than we should have!  A pineapple should cost about $0.5, but my Mum isn't much good at bargaining so she got it for $1 or 4,000 rial... but what she paid was 40,000 rial... about $10 instead!

The seller lady kept very quiet about it but once we realised she did admit it and offered us a "refund".  Instead we picked up a second pineapple and let her keep the change :)

Everybody stood around found the whole thing pretty funny... no doubt it will continue to be a source of much amusement for weeks to come!

Angkor Wat

Well, we're well and truly in Cambodia now. Our hotel is pretty nice and does provide an Internet service... at a price.

For USD4 I can get wireless Internet access for one hour. I've yet to actually try it, but it should be quite enough for me to post a new entry, read/reply to emails and generally keep up-to-date.

This morning we were collected by our airport taxi driver at 7AM. We visited Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom and towards the end of the day, the Bayon.

Angkor Wat really is incredible... I sort-of knew what to expect, but the photos I've seen are really not preparation for what the place is truly like. The only comparison I can think of is Tintin and some crazy jungle adventure.

This photo is one I took at the Bayon... as it was towards the end of the day the light was much improved. Overall I've not fared very well with my camera... after using an OM-10/OM-4 for such a long time, coping with a tiny dim D70 viewfinder is really hard work.

On that note, it's interesting that while in China I had my first hands-on experience with a Fuji S5 Pro. Unfortunately it wasn't switched on so in reality it might as well have been a D200 with a different logo. Very interesting stuff... the opening price was about 1.2k. More than I have.

Here's a shot from Angkor Thom... this has got to be one of the most famous shots from Angkor going. I've really struggled so far to expose properly to capture both highligh and shadow detail. I've been spot-metering in manual quite a bit... the D200 no-blowout mode would be really handy here.

Tomorrow we're meeting our taxi driver at 5:15AM to get to the Angkor site for opening time at 5:30AM. We'll visit a temple or two with the good (cool) morning light before heading back to the hotel for a nap over lunch. In the evening we'll go back around 3PM when the sun brings out the best in the huge sandstone blocks.

Today I'm wearing a stupid-looking pair of cotton baggy pants and Chinese-style cotton top. Quentin and I both picked up a pair of the trousers after a quick wander around Angkor Wat in the morning. Jeans, 36C+, camera bags and sweat don't go together well. The baggy-pants are pretty stupid looking, but are infinitely more comfortable than the jeans I set off in.

In other news, we're officially millionaires. Almost three times over.

Last night at the airport we changed GBP400 to the local currency, which is the rial. The look we got from the girl cashier was well worth it, even if we are rapidly getting fed up of carrying around 2,670,000 rial around with us. So far the largest note is 50,000 rial.

Time to prepare for some dinner. Hope everybody is doing well and the France move is almost complete!

Thailand and Cambodia

Things have been pretty busy... I'm sat now in the Leela Inn off Sukhumvit Soi 3 in Bangkok.  I can't remember if I've mentioned that already...

Travelling with Quentin, my Mum and Xiaoxiao is pretty different from what I'm used to.  Yesterday we visited Ayutthaya, which was my favourite destination last time I was in Thailand.  Unfortunately the day before I burned quite badly... last time I was travelling I got burned just once, and that was after plodding around on a beach.  Obviously going from very cold in China to around 36-37C in Bangkok wasn't the best move.

We're about five minutes off catching a taxi to Bangkok airport for our 7PM flight to Siem Reap, Cambodia.  Tomorrow may be Angkor Wat and/or some of the other temples in the area.

Today I bought a Case Logic camera backpack... the info is at http://www.caselogic.com/slr_computer_backpack/product_detail/index.cfm?modelid=57080 -- my camera bag was getting a little heavy to carry so I've had to switch to something a little easier to carry, even if it isn't as accessible.  On the plus side it has a dedicated slot for my laptop.

If I'd figured out that there was wireless four days ago I could probably have got some more info online... but now it's about time to pack away and catch the taxi.

Hope everybody is having a good time :)

Happy New Year!

I've still not managed to reach an Internet cafe, but I'm hoping to get this, and the last entry, uploaded this evening from our hotel on Sukhumvit Soi 3.

We're all in Bangkok now and Chinese New Year was a few days ago... many hotels are packed and we were lucky to end up staying where we are.

We flew to Bangkok airport via Guangzhou in China as there were no available flights from Shanghai.  Both the flight to Guangzhou and that to Bangkok were very good, although both were a little turbulent.  Yesterday evening we arranged a hotel for two nights at the airport... this later turned out to have been a bad idea as we'd not properly looked around before checking in.

This morning we moved from the old hotel to a new one called Leela Hotel, which is near the Nana skytrain station.  Unfortunately when we first set off to do some touristing we got the direction wrong and walked for 15 minutes in the wrong direction.  No biggie, except for the 30C+ heat and humidity.

As the start was late we didn't manage to see as much as we'd hoped to do today... we travelled on the BTS Skytrain, had some lunch at Pizza Hut and travelled to a small Wat called Chaimongkhon, which was a 50B tuk-tuk drive from Siam station.  Amusingly four people can fit onto the back of a tuk-tuk, even if the overall experience isn't an entirely pleasant one.

I've been looking for (yet another) new camera bag without any luck.  My current one (a Lowepro Stealth Reporter 400AW) is proving to be just too heavy to easily carry around all day long.  The problem isn't the weight, but the weight distribution.  I'd probably be okay if it weren't for the fact that we're not going anywhere fast... if I was on my own I'd probably be going at a much faster pace, which seems to be more comfortable.

So far my new super-rucksack and super-shoes are doing well.  The Merrell shoes really are water-proof, so Gore-Tex obviously isn't the big scam I sort-of thought it was.  Not had too much wandering with my rucksack yet, but initial test have been good.

Tomorrow we'll be heading to West Bangkok, probably doing some boating down Chao Phraya river to get from Saphan Taksin skytrain station to Wat Po and the temples and palace around there.  The aim is to be out for aroud 8AM while it is not too hot.

Back in China we didn't do too much: Chinese New Year really wasn't what my Mum or Uncle Quentin expected.  I think I was a little closer in my guess, but probably still a little off.

We had a couple of nice meals with Xiaoxiao's parents at Western-style restaurants in their district (Jiaojiang).  The rest of the time we visited Xiaoxiao's father's factory and watched loads of fireworks set off.  Unfortunately we were stood right next to them so we really couldn't see them at all.  Next time they should send a gopher a mile down the road with the fireworks and a box of matches.  That said, at midnight the sheer volume of fireworks was incredible... I've never seen anything like it.  The whole sky was absolutely full of them... many far bigger than we can even buy in England!

If you can imagine the impressive sort of show that Sydney put on on New Year's eve you'll get an idea for the number of firecrackers... double, triple or quadruple this and you'll be closer to what we experienced in Xiaoxiao's small city.  I can't even begin to imagine what it must have been like in Hangzhou city (capital of the province), Shanghai or Beijing!

On New Year's day Xiaoxiao and her family went to visit her grandfather's grave to bai-bai (pray).  Instead of going and watching we opted to have a quick look around the village... the first people we met went all out to offer us a cigarette from their wuling (a Chinese brand) van... the next quite literally bombed us.

I don't think I've ever been so close to a firework going off before... one minute there was a little van opposite us on a bridge, the next it was gone to be replaced with an explosion that could be felt from the other side.  The noise it made was equally impressive.  This would be a bit upsetting if we thought it was a serious gesture, but I think it was just kids mucking about and having a laugh.

Anyway, we'll be ready to head back downstairs for some nosh.  As far as I can determine, the option is fresh fish or peanuts... peanuts it is then!

China 2007

I'm back in China, after being away for about a month.  Right now I'm sat in the passenger seat in Xiaoxiao's Dad's car with Xiaoxiao driving the four of us from Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province, to Taizhou, Xiaoxiao's home city.

Our flight from Manchester all went pretty well: Quentin arrived at our house at some ridiculous hour in the morning, giving me a matter of minutes to get washed and into the car for the short drive to Doncaster train station.  We grabbed a quick bite to eat before getting the train direct to Manchester Airport.

I don't think I've ever been so early for a flight before... I can be a bit late for other things, but on the whole I always get to an airport three hours before the departure time (for international flights).  Anyway, we were so early that we had to wait forty minutes before they'd let us check-in.  Once we'd done this we waited in the First class lounge, while was a first for me.  It's all very nice: plenty of space to properly relax, grab a few "free" drinks and prepare yourself for the flight ahead.

We flew Manchester to Schiphol and then on to Shanghai.  The flights were both fairly normal, although on the way to Shanghai we made excellent time and arrive about half an hour early.  I don't think I've been through immigration quite as quickly, either.

Once we'd grabbed our bags we met Xiaoxiao's aunty and she drove us to her newly decorated flat where we had some classic English food: Pizza Hut.  Unfortunately we were a bit late for our train to Hangzhou, but the mad rush we had to try and get on the train was quite amusing: I ended up dashing off with Xiaoxiao's aunty to the correct platform, but my Mum and Uncle followed another crowd to a different platform.  In the end we caught a later train and spent the two hour trip standing up at the end of a carriage near the hot-water boiler.

You quickly realise that pot noodles are the big travel food in China.  They're very practical: a noodle with some meat and flavour in a tub that you need only add hot water before eating.  The Chinese obviously love these, backed up by the fact that every two minutes another Chinese cool kid wanders up to the hot water tap to top up their pot.  The two hours standing was really hard work, by the end my feet were thoroughly sore and I was ready for Xiaoxiao to drive us to our hotel.

In Hangzhou we stayed two nights in the Home Inns hotel, which is more of a Travelodge: spartan, but very clean and practical.  We stayed here purely by chance, although when we stay in Beijing, we have arranged to stay at the Home Inns in Qianmen, which is very close to Tiananmen Square.  So far I've been very impressed with Home Inns.  They're not the cheapest place to stay, but they are certainly very reasonable... a room with a double bed is about 14/night.

That evening we ended up in a student bar near XiHu (West Lake).  My Cokes cost a lot more than a bottle of Asahi... about 70p a bottle.

Yesterday we visited the three main sights I had planned: Lingyin Si, a Buddhist temple with an impressive number of buddha statues and buildings; Liuhe Ta, a six-sided pagoda over a thousand years old.  On the Liuhe Ta grounds we also walked around a Legoland of replica pagoda from around China.  Some of these were very impressive, although I didn't find a replica of Liuhe Ta, which would have made a really interesting photo.  The last place we visited was the West Lake... unfortunately we ended up at the wrong side of the lake and spent a good twenty minutes figuring out how to get across.  We almost ended up on a rowboat, which would have taken almost an hour and 100RMB (about 7 pounds).  For dinner we had a really good (although slightly too spicy!) curry at an Indian restaurant on the lake edge.

As I've mentioned, right now I'm sat in a car on the way to Taizhou city.  This morning Xiaoxiao's alarm clock went off at 7:50... somehow Xiaoxiao was the only one that hadn't figured out we had aimed to leave the hotel at 8:00 to get to her flat in Taizhou before lunch.  Anyway, we set off a little late but we're at least half-way there now.

Today we're planning to spend a little time with her family, maybe visit the toilet factory and tour the city.  Tomorrow is Chinese new year, so this evening we will be sitting down to some sort of family meal... we're not yet sure if this will be out at a fancy restaurant, or at home.  Either way, the food will be funny and I'll have to hope that McDonald's is open so I can top up with nosh :)

Sun Enterprise 10000 (E10k)

Those crazy Sunnies really did it this time. I tried to enquire as to exactly what the status of the domains were on the 10k in the lab downstairs:

10kinthelabdownstairs # ./domain_status
./domain_status: scotty: not found

But don't worry children... I hear that Spock is doing just fine. He's in row 17, rack 3.

VMware Workstation 6 (BETA)

The new Workstation beta is definitely a step in the right direction.  For me there is one killer feature: virtual monitor support.

Running VMware fullscreen normally results in a great big sloppy mess of taskbar across both screens and dialogs and pop-ups ending up right in the middle where they are least readable.

I've now configured my XP image with two virtual displays.  In Windows these appears as two physical displays would, and I can use them as such.

VMware easily allows me to resize the guest OS (by dynamically changing the XP resolution), handles single-monitor fullscreen and allows me to expand to two-monitor fullscreen.  Very useful stuff.

Of course, for me, this is just a stop-gap solution until we get proper rootless applications.

Wooo! New shoes!

I went back to Reading today and return my £65 shoes for a pair that cost just £55!  This is pretty incredible.

The new ones look more or less the same as the ones I returned (so I won't bother with a photo), but they're a size larger (12 now), come in a funny purple colour nad have Gore-Tex.

The only downside is that the tongue isn't quite as comfy as the pair I returned, but overall they're a nicer shoe.

xkcd view on random

A must see!

http://xkcd.com/c221.html

Snow at Lake Guillemont

It snowed at Lake Guillemont yesterday.  The snow was fairly white and cold.  I didn't crash into anything on the way to work.

Anton and I decided to make constructive use of our time in the morning, and so headed out to the Lake before breakfast.



Arguably more interesting than the great big smiley face we collaborated to draw are the two letters to the very left of the photo.  Those readers that are not blind may be able to make out that they are A and N.  Clearly the start of Anton's name.

Nice work, Anton.  What worries me most is what might have happened to Anton should he have pursued this endeavour... did he not realise that the Lake was sat fair and square at the same position as O and N.

Anyway, here's a bigger picture to put things into perspective.



Chris would have you know that the five or so minutes spent jumping in a big circle were watched closely by at least five people stood in the corridor between SPARC and Solaris House.  I'm even told they found the whole thing rather amusing.

(P.S. thanks to David for taking the photo!)

bash tab completion

echo "set match-hidden-files off" >> ~/.inputrc

Finally!

Why desktop Linux sucks

Desktop Linux is well behind Windows.  There are the obvious reasons, such as ease of use, support, etc.  I'd counter all of these with the stability of Linux, the fact that on a GNOME desktop everything is already there, lack of viruses, etc.

However, for most people this isn't the issue.  The main problem is application support.

What do we have to do for Adobe to notice us?  Photoshop CS2 currently sells for almost £500... I'd be *very* hard pushed to afford this, but I would pledge that cash in an instant if it would bring about a copy of CS3 for Linux, or Solaris, or FreeBSD.  I'm sure other people would do the same for other Adobe products.

These days hardware support is less of an issue.  For the most part we get by... nVidia are providing great drivers, ATi are still trying to get there, while many other hardware is catered for by the third party.  But lately this hasn't quite been enough... I'm starting to feel the gap between myself and my Windows counterparts... where is my nVidia PureVideo H.264 and DVD decoding?  Where are all of the good options for my Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS?

I've already put down the money for both of these pieces of hardware.  Given that there are a lot of people now running Linux on their desktops, it would be really great for us to see this support.

In the near future I hope we'll see a revision of Vmware Workstation that includes a feature akin to the Parallels Coherency that Mac users have had for a short while now... and I bet they're just as fed up at the lack of advanced hardware support.  What's the better that they will see it before we do?  Pretty high, is my guess, and I don't think that they really have a much higher percentage of the desktop market.

Oh, well...

CompSoc downtime

As a follow-up to the last post about /var filling up, here's another one that's equally as crazy.

In an effort to fix /var once and for all I scheduled some emergency downtime last night. The aim was to make the /var partition bigger. This got off to a pretty bad start when, in true Solaris fashion, I attempted to drop noisy down to single user by typing init 0. In Solaris this drops a SPARC system to the OBP (like the BIOS), and just reboots x86 machines. In FreeBSD runlevel 0 is equivalent to Solaris runlevel 5... shut the system down and then power it off.

So, at about 22:15 last night I switched the primary CompSoc server off. Hardly the fix I was looking for.

After a number of calls to Andy and Inti I had somebody switch it back on (bear in mind that the system is in Manchester and I'm near London)... in an attempt to minimise the downtime, I decided to do the fix as soon as it came back up. This time I got the right runlevel... init 1, but (as I realise now) all sorts of crazy stuff happens to FreeBSD's serial redirection in single user mode. It appears to knock off serial support and output only to the video console. Again, not a lot of good for me.

Later on in the day somebody else rebooted it and after a number of attempts to get things working, I decided that I'd do the fix in full multi-user mode. This involved disabling logins, stopping almost all services, etc. More lsof was used to determine what was using /var; these were stopped and when there were no open filehandles I umount -f'd /var.

I dumped the contents of /var to a different disk and set about updating the disklabel.

# /dev/ad0s1:
8 partitions:
#        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
a:  1048576        0    4.2BSD     2048 16384     8
b:  8388608  1048576      swap
c: 156296322        0    unused        0     0         # "raw" part, don't edit
d:  1048576  9437184    4.2BSD     2048 16384     8
e: 52428800 10485760    4.2BSD     2048 16384 28552
f: 93381762 62914560    4.2BSD     2048 16384 28552

Above is the disklabel before the change... a is /, d is /var, e is /usr and f is /backup2. What I needed to do was grow d (currently just 512MB) by using some of the space from f, which was an unused backup directory. The obvious problem here is that /usr was in the way. My solution was to grow swap by 512MB, totally remove the d line, shrink f to around 8GB and rename it to d. This sounds a little complicated... it took me a while to get my head around it.

Prior to the change the on-disk layout was something like:

[ a (/) ] [ b (swap) ] [ d (/var) ] [ e (/usr) ] [ f (/backup2) ]

Now that I've made the changes the on-disk layout is more like:

[ a (/) ] [ b (bigger swap) ] [ e (/usr) ] [ d (/var) ]

The bsdlabel currently looks like:

# /dev/ad0s1:
8 partitions:
#        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
a:  1048576        0    4.2BSD     2048 16384     8
b:  9437184  1048576      swap
c: 156296322        0    unused        0     0         # "raw" part, don't edit
d: 16777216 62914560    4.2BSD     2048 16384 28552
e: 52428800 10485760    4.2BSD     2048 16384 28552

The beauty of this (as far as I was concerned) was that everything was still contiguous, no holes and no changing of slice letters. Next step was to newfs the new /var, mount it and restore the contents from the file on the other disk I previously mentioned. No major problems here, although I did manage to restore the contents of /var to both / and my personal home directory. Fortunately this mess was easy to clear up.

So, with all of the files back, I rebooted the box. It didn't come back up.

After a lot of time talking Inti through the console (which I couldn't get, because the machine was having none of single-user mode serial) we discovered that the only reason the system wouldn't boot was because I hadn't removed the /backup2 entry from /etc/fstab! D'oh! A rookie mistake (but one that I *always* make).

Once we got this removed the system shot up. Allow a few more hours to get both bump and noisy up with LDAP working and we once again have a fully running CompSoc.

It certainly didn't go as planned, but I believe the end result is a good one:

# df -h
Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ad0s1a    496M    383M     73M    84%    /
devfs          1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
/dev/ad0s1e     24G     20G    2.0G    91%    /usr
/dev/ad0s1d    7.7G    160M    7.0G     2%    /var
/dev/da0       541G    190G    308G    38%    /data
linprocfs      4.0K    4.0K      0B   100%    /usr/compat/linux/proc
procfs         4.0K    4.0K      0B   100%    /proc
devfs          1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /var/named/dev

We really need to work on getting serial output from FreeBSD working properly, not to mention installing a new network card so that we can use the internal 10/100 interface for IPMI, which will allow us serial-over-LAN and full remote power capabilities.

When I got home at 7PM I treated myself with a curry and an episode of Prison Break.

Apologies to anybody that was affected by the downtime!

Help! /var is shagged!

The last couple of days have involved some seriously weird /var behaviour over at CompSoc.

I'd narrowed the filling up of /var down to Apache's error log, and had been removing it more or less twice a day. Today I disabled the error.log file and restarted Apache... a measure designed to last us until I had chance to properly fix the issue.

This evening I come along and have a prod:

# df -h /var
Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ad0s1d    496M    488M    -32M   107%    /var

Yikes! That's not good, but... what's this?

# du -sh /var
143M    /var

wtf? This got me pretty confused, but some searching around and I came upon a handy article at http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/freebsd-why-command-df-and-du-reports-different-output.html that led me down the path of lsof. Here's what I did:

# lsof|grep var | sort -r -k 7
lsof: WARNING: compiled for FreeBSD release 6.0-RELEASE-p6; this is 6.2-RELEASE.
httpd     91413          root   11w    VREG       0,92  361496571    32972 /var (/dev/ad0s1d)
httpd     10028           www   11w    VREG       0,92  361496571    32972 /var (/dev/ad0s1d)
httpd     10022           www   11w    VREG       0,92  361496571    32972 /var (/dev/ad0s1d)
httpd     10021           www   11w    VREG       0,92  361496571    32972 /var (/dev/ad0s1d)
httpd      9973           www   11w    VREG       0,92  361496571    32972 /var (/dev/ad0s1d)
httpd      9881           www   11w    VREG       0,92  361496571    32972 /var (/dev/ad0s1d)
httpd      9865           www   11w    VREG       0,92  361496571    32972 /var (/dev/ad0s1d)
httpd      9809           www   11w    VREG       0,92  361496571    32972 /var (/dev/ad0s1d)
httpd      9807           www   11w    VREG       0,92  361496571    32972 /var (/dev/ad0s1d)
httpd      9654           www   11w    VREG       0,92  361496571    32972 /var (/dev/ad0s1d)
httpd      7245           www   11w    VREG       0,92  361496571    32972 /var (/dev/ad0s1d)
httpd      6896           www   11w    VREG       0,92  361496571    32972 /var (/dev/ad0s1d)
httpd      5909           www   11w    VREG       0,92  361496571    32972 /var (/dev/ad0s1d)
syslogd    9972          root   19w    VREG       0,85  110849268 58880006 /data/var/log/all.log
httpd     91413          root   14w    VREG       0,92    4767735    32988 /var/log/httpd/access.log
httpd     91413          root   13w    VREG       0,92    4767735    32988 /var/log/httpd/access.log
httpd     10028           www   14w    VREG       0,92    4767735    32988 /var/log/httpd/access.log
httpd     10028           www   13w    VREG       0,92    4767735    32988 /var/log/httpd/access.log

[snip]

The first few are just fine, but what the hell is Apache doing with /var/log/httpd/access.log? It's clearly not that big...

Anyway, a quick restart of Apache and /var returned to a far more reasonable size:

# df -h /var
Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ad0s1d    496M    144M    312M    31%    /var

Panic over... for now.

Tarkovsky

The last and only Tarkovsky film I saw was the epic Andrey Rublyov from 1969.  Vlad and tumbled down to the Cornerhouse to see this one, and of all the films I've seen, good and bad, I believe this may be the most memorable.

I probably wrote a blog entry about it at the time.

I now wake to discover that Amazon is recommending me Tarkovsky's Mirror from 1974 (based on my rating for Bergman's The Seventh Seal).  With past experience in mind, I am unsure what to do.

This time next week...

This time next week I'll be in bed.  But this time next week tomorrow (?) I'll be jetting off to Shanghai with my Mum and Uncle.  It'll also be my first visit to Schipol airport.

This will be my fourth trip to China and the second this year.  I've already covered the itinerary in an earlier post, but to quickly go over it we'll be visiting Xiaoxiao's parents for the New Year, before flying to Bangkok; then we'll be off to Siem Reap/Angkor Wat in Cambodia, shortly followed by a flight from Phnom Penh to Beijing.  In Beijing we'll be doing the usual touristy sites, before flying to Xi'an in Shaanxi province for the Terracotta Warriors; the two flights will be to Shanghai, and then home.

I spent today working from home, and took this opportunity to knock off a little early to allow myself some time in Reading to gather necessary items.  (once I got back from Reading I made up the hours I'd taken off :)

The result is a nice new shiny bag, and a pair of Merrell shoes.

The bag is a Berghaus Freeflow 35+8.  Why is this so good?  Well, it has one of those funky mesh-back thingies that holds the back of the bag away from your back, which hopefully means you don't get as sweaty as you otherwise might.



That's a photo of the back of the bag... with any luck you'll be able to make out the back of the bag, the mesh panel and the rigid pipes that hold the bag away from the mesh.



In addition to the mesh back, the shoulder straps are specially designed to allow airflow... here you can see that instead of being "solid" fabric, there is a honeycomb foam.  In fact, there are two overlapping layers of this foam, this provides extra padding but still allows airflow.



Above is a stock image from an online website... I think this is the model I have, if not then it looks very similar.  Mine is a slightly different colour scheme, but not by much.  According to the staff at Blacks these bags are brand new and they literally got them in a week or so ago.

This is the second bag that I've bought recently... the last was a LowePro SlingShot 200AW (a camera bag).  I try and research my major purchases, but no amount of research can stand up to a good field test.  Unfortunately the SlingShot didn't really meet my requirements: it's a great bag, but I find it too limiting in terms of accessing equipment.  For the next trip I'll likely be going back to my trusty LowePro Stealth Reporter 400AW... this is a traditional shoulder bag with all the benefits and drawbacks they bring.

Of course, a travel backpack and a photography backpack are entirely different things.  I think that a camera bag is a more personal choice as it really does have to fit in with the way you work.  But with any luck the features of this new bag will work well next week.

The bag has a 35l capacity... this is well down on the bag I took last time, which was a whopping 70+15!  In addition to the 35l it has pockets that boost it up another 8l.  Needless to say the capacity is one thing I'll have to work with... it is a shorter trip (by two months!) so hopefully I'll get away with carrying less stuff.  I think this will be the biggest problem I have with the bag, but I need some experience -- I met a travelling photographer in Laos that had a single backpack: it held his camera kit (a body and a couple of lenses) and one change of clothes and pair of shoes.  That's all the guy had for his travels.  Obviously travelling as light as this requires certain sacrifices (washing clothes in the sink every day), but the benefits are enormous!

My other purchase was a new pair of Merrell shoes.  Again, this was something I'd researched on the Internet, but none of this was any use.  Once I tried a few on I quickly found what was and wasn't comfortable.  In the end I've come away with a pair of shoes I don't even know the name of!  These were a little cheaper than my last pair of Merrells... they also seem more comfortable.  These are bog standard light walking shoes... no fancy GoreTex (which I don't think really brings that much benefit).



Here's a fairly shonky photo of one on my foot.  They look okay, but for my tastes are a little fancy.  I bought these with practicality in mind, so I'll have to let that pass.

They're a snug fit and provide plenty of support.  My main issue with the last pair I had was the seam created by the tongue and the shoe... unlike all other shoes I've worn, the tongue is sewn in all the way up the shoe, instead of towards the toes only.  This is great for keeping water out, but the way it folded over was unfortable (for me, at least).  This new pair has a much-improved seam that I cannot feel: good job Merrell.

I've bought these shoes on the understanding that I can return them if I decide they're not for me.  I'll be wearing these around the house until Saturday, where I'll make the decision to make a return trip to Blacks/Millets to swap them for another pair.  I was looking for something that was reasonably light but allowed my feet to breathe.  So far they seem to be doing a reasonable job... but I have a nagging feeling that I may well be able to find something better if I make a return trip.

Shure earphones

I'm the proud owner of a nice pair of Shure E2c headphones.  They're a particularly good in-ear style headphone that offer excellent tight bass and general goodness.  I bought them after my last pair of Sony in-ear 'phones went the way of the Dodo.

The E2cs come with a choice of three different in-ear covers: the latexy black rubbery ones (ala my old Sony pair), the sexy-looking clear white rubber ones, and the funny orange foam ones.   Each type also comes in three sizes: small, medium and large.

When I first purchased the headphones I tried each style and size out until I settled on the medium-sized orange squishy type.  They offered the optimum comfort and noise-blocking qualities.  The only downside was that inserting them into the ear was a little more invovled: you have to squish it down all the way around and then insert them into the ear before they expand.  Once you get the hang of it it becomes straightforward, but it still requires more time than the other types.

Unfortunately my medium-sized foam covers had pretty much given up the ghost a few months ago.  They were looking really grubby and didn't fit as well as they should.  Thanks to Shure and eBay, I've invested in five new replacements:



Here you can see the medium-sized clear rubber ones I'd been using in the meantime... but now I'm a very happy bunny.  £11 + delivery seems a little on the high side for ten pieces of foam, but this many should easily last me the year.

What's on my... right-hand monitor?

For the second installment of the "What's on my..." series, we'll be discussion what stuff has been showing up on my right-hand monitor over the past couple of days.

Generally I use the right-hand monior for displaying chat, terminal windows and the like. Here's a screenshot of my desktop:



In addition to this, I use the right-hand monitor for watching TV series, films, etc.  This is the topic of this post.

I've just finished watching episode 14 of the new US TV series Heroes.  This latest episode was called "Distractions".

Heroes is without doubt the most amazing TV series that has ever been.  I'm a big fan of stuff like Lost, Prison Break, The X-Files, yadda yadda yadda.  But Heroes is just mind-blowing.  This last episode was no different.

I've discovered H264, which my computer cannot decode properly.  This results in slightly wonky audio and a less-than-perfect image... but overall it still knocks HD XviD out of the water.  Maybe one day soon nVidia will release some Linux drivers for their PureVideo hardware acceleration stuff.  Then things will seriously kick ass.

This evening I also enjoyed two episodes of South Park on my right-hand monitor.  They were the first two episodes of series eight... I particularly enjoyed the Japanese subtitles for episode one, which was where Cartman, Kenny, Kyle and Stan had purchased themselves some authentic ninja weapons from the market.

The last film I had the pleasure of watching was The Last Emperor, which has a fair number of Academy Awards wins, including Best Picture.  It follows the life of the last Chinese emperor and offers some interesting insights to the modern history of China.  In my opinion it also provides an impressive argument against Communism.  Well worth a watch.

That's it from the "What's on my..." series for now!

del.icio.us

So, I'm a slow starter with this one.

I signed up for a del.icio.us account years ago; it didn't really do what I wanted.

Over the past week I've come to reevaluate this decision, prompted largely by conversations with Chris Gerhard, a big supporter of standard APIs and communication between sites, etc. (note how hard I tried not to say Web 2.0)

For the past six months I've been using FoxMarks to sync my bookmarks between my desktop and laptop.  Admittedly, I don't use my laptop that much these days, but it is handy to have everything accessible when I need it.

What does del.icio.us offer over FoxMarks?  To be honest, not a lot... my bookmarks were all fairly well organised, and I could always find what I needed.  But the big drawback to Firefox Bookmarks was the pain of figuring out which category to file it under, not to mention the sheer number of clicks it takes to do this.

Now that I'm getting started with del.icio.us I'm really hoping that my bookmarking habits will get better, if only because the task is so less painful.

In the future I'd like to get some proper Wordpress-delicious integration going.  There are a whole raft of plugins available, but it looks as though most of the implementations have fallen a little short of what I had expected.

It'll be ready when it's done.

Super Monkeys!

In 2003, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to leave a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Sulawesi Crested Macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon in England for a month; not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five pages consisting largely of the letter S, they started by attacking the keyboard with a stone, and continued by urinating and defecating on it.

Read more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

Chewits

You have to wonder why God, upon having created Ice Cream flavour Chewits, bothered to take things any further.

Did we need Strawberry flavoured Chewits?  No.

Fruit Salad flavour?  Er, no.

Blackcurrant flavour?  I think not.