Blog
Back in Australia
Well, it's been a rather hectic two months. First, preparing to leave Seattle while working the whole time was perhaps a little ambitious. I then headed down to LA and stayed with Ian and Rae for a week. That first weekend I also went down to San Diego for a night to hang out with the old crew which was really good.
Sydney was the next destination and I spent 2 weeks there in between my parent's place and my sister's place. I've organized the parents with ADSL2+ and VoIP through iiNet bringing them into the future (from dial-up Internet!). Lot's of fun back there with my little neices and catching up with my old friends.
I've now been back in Perth for the past 4 weeks and things are starting to return to normal. I have a car, mobile phone, gear for my bike, Internet access (ADSL2+), etc...
The first week of January Ruwani and I are headed away on holidays. This
is to celebrate our 2nd wedding anniversary and possibly the last time we'll
be able to spend some time on our own before the baby boy arrives
.
VMware issues on Linux host
I use VMware all day everyday and something has been really annoying me. What seems to happen is VMware causes window manager (keyboard/mouse) focus issues. It's kind of strange really, keyboard and mouse input seems to disappear. I can move the mouse cursor around, and sometimes if something outside of the VMware window is selected (e.g. gnome-terminal) then I can continue to type into that window, but can't switch windows (alt-tab) or use other control commands.
Disconnecting and reconnecting the mouse and/or keyboard doesn't fix the problem. The system isn't "locked up" or frozen, although I've seen it been described that way. Unless you can ssh into the system from a remote box then it may as well be frozen as you're only other choice is to hard reset the box.
The good news is I have a work around, at least if you're using Ubuntu 6.06.1 on a laptop. I find if I shut my laptop lid and allow the screensaver to start up, and you must have the "Lock screen ..." option enabled, then keyboard/mouse input will be restored when the lock screen UI pops up.
Travel Details
I'll be in LA from Nov 10th to Nov 18th, then Sydney until Dec 4th,
then back in Perth. I can't wait .
VMware saves the day
Thank goodness for VMware. After a crappy day yesterday (yeah the day
was already crappy) Windows decided to die after a Microsoft update. I run
Windows in a VM of course, I never let it touch the bare hardware
.
After the updates the system kept rebooting over and over flashing a blue-screen error message too fast for me to read. VMware to the rescue No. 1. I used the "Capture Movie" feature in VMware Workstation (5.5.2) to record the bootup, then used mplayer to watch it back frame-by-frame. I was able to read the error msg finally!
The problem was a corrupt system file. VMware to the rescue No. 2. I had another working Windows VM. So I added a disk, pointed it to my broken Windows VM disk and booted up. The broken drive appeared as E: and I simply replaced the corrupt file from the working VM. I then shut down and start up the original VM and it's working again.
It's great when stuff just works.
Yes, lots of other options here - backup the VM, use the snapshot facility, etc... But I didn't have a backup and wasn't using snapshots on this VM.
photo from my balcony
I liked how the sky was lit up last night. My intention was to
photo just the sky but from my balcony there is a tree in the way.
Anyway I like the way it turned out .
Life Update
I haven't been updating my diary for a while, but the big news over the past couple months is that we're having a baby! We're also moving back to Australia (Perth).
Actually, Ruwani left on Saturday so she's already back in Perth now. I'm trying to keep my position with IBM and still waiting for the details and approval to come through. I'll be going to the Netcool User Symposium the last week of October anyway, so I don't see myself being able to leave until November at the earliest.
The baby is due end-March and everything is going well so far. Ruwani was a suffering a bit with morning sickness but I think that's starting to lessen now.
Vonage Customer Service Sucks
38 minutes to get through to customer service today.
Hydrogen Fuel Cells
The other night Ruwani and I went to see Who Killed the
Electric Car. Although we wanted to see the film anyway, we happened
to want to get out of our uncomfortably hot apartment and go somewhere cool
too .
The film explores the death of electric cars in the state of California and the suspect circumstances that led to it's death. The disappointing result is that auto manufacturers are no longer required to produce zero emission vehicles (ZEV) in California. It's disappointing because the electric car was a success for many people, the demand seemed to be there, and the cars actually existed and were rolled out commercially for a short time. Instead we're left with hybrids, which are a step in the right direction (but why no plug-in hybrids?), and emerging technologies such as fuel cell cars. Why take something off the plate that works and replace it with something like fuel cell cars which are prohibitively expensive, not commercially available, and a potential dead end. The dead end bit is what I want to explore in this post.
Last night I was listening to The Watt weekly podcast with guest speaker Dr. Ulf Bossel on the future of the hydrogen economy. He recently announced at the yearly Lucerne Fuel Cell Conference they would not be continuing the PEMFC Forum series as hydrogen fuel will never contribute to a sustainable world. So that's a bit of a shock, but why would he do this?
Let's take a look at what's involved with the hydrogen fuel cell use life-cycle as it would apply to a fuel cell car. We start with electricity, perform electrolysis to create hydrogen from water, then compress/liquefy the hydrogen for storage and transport, and then consume it in the fuel cell to produce electricity. The problem lies with energy losses due to the electrolysis, compression, and general operating loses of the fuel cell itself. The basic point is that it's an inefficient process, much more inefficient than simply storing the electricity in batteries in the first place.
According to Dr. Ulf Bossel because of the losses in the above process you're only left with 25% of the original energy. Storing and retrieving electricity in batteries on the other hand leaves you with an efficiency in the 50-70% range. The Watt has some worked examples of real numbers to demonstrate this.
Electricity generation is a separate issue. We're facing global
pollution problems, finite supplies of fossil fuels etc... Considering the
electricity generation environment then it seems rather silly to pursue options
such as hydrogen fuel when existing battery technology is already much better
and the efficiency of hydrogen generation, transport, and storage isn't going
to get much better. How we should be producing and conserving energy is a
topic for another post though .
Cascade Loop Drive
Ruwani and I went for a nice ~400 mile drive around the Cascade Loop over the 4th of July long weekend.
The first day took us up north and through the cascades where we spent the night in a wooden lodge near Winthrop.
The second day was spent passing by mostly pasture lands and farms. Mostly
fruit farms it seemed, so we bought quite a few cherries to fuel us over the
day . That night we stayed in Leavenworth,
an interesting town that re-invented itself as a small Bavarian village.
We continued back to Seattle on the third day stopping briefly at Alta Lake.
London & Barcelona for the EMEA Netcool Users Conf
I've added some photos from my recent 16 day trip to London and Barcelona for the EMEA Netcool Users Conference.
An Inconvenient Truth
Roons and I went to see An Inconvenient Truth this evening. The movie is focused on delivering a message that global warming is real and that mankind is responsible. Al Gore shows there is a consensus in the scientific community about global warming and allows the audience to easily draw the same conclusion from historical data.
There isn't as much focus on the solutions, aside from it's really up to us. Both individually making conscious decisions about reducing our carbon footprint and driving change through government.
I was a little disappointed at the end with the closing credits when some CO2 reducing tips were shown that none of them mentioned becoming vegetarian or vegan. Regardless of the ethical and health reasons, which are worthy on their own, the environmental cost of producing animal products for human consumption is huge.
I'm not sure of the availability of the movie, hopefully they make it freely available down the track from something like google video. In the meantime take a look at this interview with Al Gore on the Charlie Rose show where he talks about global warming and touches on topics from the movie.
Robert Newman's History of Oil
From theDossier.ukonline.co.uk.
The comedian and author gets to grips with the wars and politics of the last hundred years - but rather than adhering to the history we were fed at school, he places oil centre stage as the cause of all the commotion. Excellent and factual, Newman tells it how it is: stream, download (47 mins, funny, requires realplayer).
American Life
From a conversation today:
friend: my 12 gauge is fun but it hurts to shoot it much
friend: I got it in trade for some web dev I did
me: lol, only in america
Computer Trouble
I woke up last Tuesday and sat down at my computer only to find it unresponsive. Actually, I could ping and managed to SSH in, but couldn't really execute anything, not even the reboot command. So something odd was going on. I reset the computer and during the POST as one of the hard disks was spinning up I heard some awful sounds - the sounds of a dead or dying hard disk. It was dead :(
I have 3 disks in the system and it turned out to be the boot/OS disk, i.e. my data was safe! Thankfully because I used to keep my desktop/laptop in sync which would act as a nice backup mechanism, however I recently wiped my laptop and set it up purely for work.
In the end I've only lost a few scripts and things I had in /root/ and the only real problem was losing my MySQL databases. Lucky I had an old backup of some important ones, and I could easily re-create the others.
Oh, I also took the opportunity of going with Ubuntu Dapper (Beta 2) vs Debian (unstable). I must say I'm very impressed - I like the polish.
Discovery Park
Today Ruwani and I went for a walk along the 2.8 mile loop trail
through Discovery
Park. The original plan was to go on a hike but we thought we'd start out
the hiking season with a simple walk. Also, last time we went to Discovery
Park it was cold and wet and we didn't even get out of the car
.
There were some nice views and there is also a trail that leads down to the beach.
Chicago last week.
I was in Chicago last week for the IBM Tivoli Technical User Conference. Prior to that I've been flat out with work stuff so not much else happening at the moment.
Chicago was great though, we went walking around Millennium Park and saw The Crown Fountain and the Cloud Gate. Awesome stuff. Think of the Cloud Gate as a massive mirror finished metal jelly bean kind-of-shaped thing. I didn't have my camera with me unfortunately, but check out the Millennium website for some pics.
On Wednesday night we had a customer appreciation party at Buddy Guy's Legends just behind the Hilton where the conference was held. Charlie Love were playing some great music, I ended up buying their album right there =)
Ruwani and I have Moved
Our landlord decided he wanted to sell the place so me and Roons had to move out :( Not ideal since we'd prefer to stay there until we return to Australia some time this year. But with the bad comes some good too. Our new place is up in the University District near Green Lake. Nice and convenient location, the apartment is larger, and I have a nice view from my desk now too. It's also much quieter than downtown 1st Ave!
We finished moving last week and Fri 24th March was our first night in the new apartment. Everything went pretty smoothly thanks to Ruwani doing most of the work (packing/unpacking). I just helped load and unload the car on our many many many trips back and forth.
ANNOUNCE: IP Blocking Monitor (v0.3)
Announcing IP Blocking Monitor v0.3 incorportating changes sent in from Patrick Coleman (thanks!). For a complete list of changes please read the CHANGELOG.
Vegfest!
Ruwani and I went to Vegfest at the Seattle
Center this morning. For $5 entry you get to taste pretty much all the vegan
and vegetarian products out there! We left with a list of about 10 products
that we'll probably end up buying in the near future. The big one for me
though was Sammi's Best (soy) milk
alternative. I've been trying to find something that I like the taste of as I
can't seem to find anything as non-soy tasting as So Good is in Australia.
Although a different flavour, this stuff is great so I've already bought some
.
Becoming a Vegan
Since becoming a vegetarian in early 2005 I've always had this constant feeling that I should really be dropping all animal products. The quick reasons for this is because I believe in the ethical treatment of animals, the environment, and that there are positive health reasons for doing so. So today I decided that I'll switch to a vegan diet and give up animal products for good. I don't like waste so I'll probably consume some animal products that I have left in the fridge like cheese and yoghurt etc...
Portland Jazz Festival
It was a long weekend last weekend so Ruwani and I decided on a road trip. We love Vancouver but decided to try something new since we'd been there a couple times already. So we thought why not Portland and they just happened to be holding the Portland Jazz Festival at the same time!
We only had a short time in Portland with the drive down on Sat and back up
on Monday, plus we had to check out some vegan/vegetarian restaurants too
- so we only got the chance to see a couple events. We also
wimped out on seeing something Saturday night cause it was so friggin
cold!
On Sunday we went to see Eddie Palmieri and his awesome band. The show seemed to consist mostly of solos, which was fantastic and possibly what the crowd of jazz adoring fans might have wanted, but I was hoping for some more combined stuff. The trombonist was incredible. As a beginner trombonist from a long time ago, it made me want to pick it back up.
No photos unfortunately.
Miscellaneous Work Stuff
I've been pretty flat out with work recently. We're in the process of fork-lifting our company demo from running on the bare metal to running inside a few virtual machines (using VMware ESX, GSX, or Server). Just think:
- base demo image allows field to access admin features of products without fear of messing up the demo for others (since next demo will use a fresh base image).
- simultaneous demos by brining up multiple VM sets
- copies for ourselves - dev and testing
I was down in San Francisco a couple times in January to first setup some new servers and then for "build week" where the demo team get together and attempt to push through as much demo building as possible. We actually got a lot more done than expected, but I also felt like we didn't make enough progress. As usual a bunch of things that seem easy in your head turn out to take way longer in reality.
Also, the IBM acquisition has been completed and we'll be on the IBM payroll from March 1st. I'll be in Austin next week doing a bit of networking with the rest of our team, the Muse Sales org and IBM.
Breakfast at Juice Goddess
This morning Ruwani and I enjoyed a nice breakfast to the sound of a live jazz band at Juice Goddess. Actually the band was a combination of snare, clarinet, guitar, and accordion giving a very European type feel. Very nice :) The breakfast was great too, I had a vegan tofu scramble and Ruwani had the vegan stuffed french toast.
ANNOUNCE: IP Blocking Monitor (v0.2)
A new release of IP Blocking Monitor with out-of-the-box configuration for both Debian and RedHat SSH. For a complete list of changes please read the CHANGELOG.
Blog Update (tags!)
I've modified the category field to contain a list of tags instead. If a blog entry has tags associated with it, then you can search for other entries with a matching tag, any matching tags, or all matching tags. For example, click the "website" tag below.
ANNOUNCE: IP Blocking Monitor (v0.1)
I've released a security tool that monitors logs and dynamically blocks IP addresses based on certain conditions.
See the project page for ipb-monitor.
NOTE: v0.2 release with fixes and debian support will be out shortly
One - The Movie
Ruwani and I went to see One - The Movie tonight. Interesting film although I don't think I was really into the way it was presented. At first I thought I was sitting in on the "Making Of ..." versus the actual film. But is was interesting to see the different perspectives on the meaning of life, god, etc.. from everyday joes to world recognised spiritual/religious leaders.
I say go see it.
MySQL table trouble (old ISAM tables)
I recently upgraded to MySQL 5.0 and was no longer able to read some older ISAM db type tables. Actually, it took me a little to work out what the problem was as MySQL 5.0 simply reported:
mysql ERROR 1017 (HY000): Can't find file: 'table_name'
Looking in the database root directory (/var/lib/mysql in my case) revealed
the tables with issues ended with extensions IAD and ISM, while those that
worked ended in MYD and MYI. That was my starting point for doing a bit of
searching which revealed the ISAM table types were deprecated and support
dropped with the release of MySQL 5.0. Obviously I wasn't paying attention
.
The fix in this case was to find an older version of MySQL so I could read the tables and convert them into MYISAM format. I removed mysql-server-5.0 and downloaded mysql-server-4.1_4.1.15-1_i386.deb from ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/m/mysql-dfsg-4.1/
Unfortunately it wouldn't run at first, giving me the error:
[ERROR] Fatal error: Can't open and lock privilege tables:
Table './mysql/user' was created with a different version
of MySQL and cannot be read
A quick check of the mysqld man page showed an option --skip-grant-tables:
This option causes the server not to use the privilege system at all. This gives everyone full access to all databases! ...
So I gave that a go and it worked, nice! Using the command line tool: mysql_convert_table_format <database> I was able to convert the older ISAM tables to MYISAM quick smart and everything is happy again.
"alternate stylesheet"
I've always provided multiple template styles but this was via code and using Site Builder to build an alternate page. In Firefox there is the ability to switch between available stylesheets using the View -> Page Style menu option. You can let Firefox know about alternate stylesheets by including the following (X)HTML in the <head> section:
<link rel='alternate stylesheet' type='text/css' href='...' title='...'/>
"title" is used in the Page Style menu. Check it out, I've added a "Printable" option.
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