that’s whacked

cha shu!

Sunday, Jul 30. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

that’s chinese for “bbq pork” as in “cha shu bao”, the bbq pork buns favoured at dim sum.

it’s also the name we’ve decided to give to our new beagle well, not ours yet, since he’s still in the 2 week sleepover, but if things work out between him and Isis, he’ll be ours. he’s a real sweetheart, very obedient, and a real handsome 15″ beagle. he’s 4 years old, and we found him through Northern California Beagle Rescue.

right now, the only obstacle we’re seeing is that Isis is used to being the queen around here. she doesn’t seem to mind sharing attention, but she doesn’t seem to want to play with Cha Shu. we’re hoping she’ll get to know him better over the next two weeks and things will work out… keep your fingers crossed!

Cha Shu was found by a shelter in San Jose wandering the street in early May, untagged and unchipped. they didn’t know his real name, so they called him Dusty - but he’s pretty much non-responsive to that name. we’re attempting to train him to respond to Cha Shu now… hopefully it works out

happy 30th birthday wendy!

Sunday, Jul 30. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

we had a great 30th birthday party for wendy last night with some excellent sushi from our new local organic supermarket, farmer joe’s marketplace and absolutely delicious cupcakes from sibby’s cupcakery.

hotlum-wintun ridge ascent & descent

Thursday, Jul 27. 2006  –  Category: Outdoors

the ascent is in blue, the descent is the red line.

…. it’s gonna rock

nfsv4/nfs mapid nobody domain @#%$@#%!@$

Wednesday, Jul 26. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

i hit an annoying bug today, and resolved it thanks to some help from Rick. basically, i had two machines both running NFSv4. the server was setup to share/export a dir, and when I tried to mount it on the client, i’d see all the perms stomped down to be owned by nobody:nobody, ex:

app2# ls -la /mnt
total 10
drwxr-xr-x   2 nobody   nobody         3 Jul 26 09:35 .
drwxr-xr-x  23 root     root        1024 Jul 25 11:47 ..
-rw-r--r--   1 nobody   nobody         6 Jul 26 09:35 foo

very annoying.

looking through nfs(4) and nfsmapid(4) helped somewhat in that they pointed me to check the domainname. since my machines weren’t using NIS, i looked at the resolv.conf for DNS resolution.

my server had a string domain opensolaris.org in /etc/resolv.conf, but my client didn’t. so i added domain opensolaris.org to the client, but still no effect.

what i didn’t know was the presence of /var/run/nfs4_domain which is the NFSv4 domain that the machine has decided it belongs to. looking at that file clued me in that the domain it was picking up was actually listed in my search list in /etc/resolv.conf.

so what i needed to do was re-order search so that it had the same domainname listed in the server’s /etc/resolv.conf domain listed FIRST in the search list. alternatively, rick pointed out that if there was no search list, then it would have used my domain setting correctly.

so here is what my server /etc/resolv.conf ended up looking like:

domain foobar
nameserver x.x.x.x
nameserver x.x.x.x

and my client’s /etc/resolv.conf:

domain foobar
search foobar, helloworld, qwerty
nameserver x.x.x.x
nameserver x.x.x.x

and all is well in NFS world again….

exhausted…

Tuesday, Jul 25. 2006  –  Category: Outdoors

so it looks like this weekend’s exertions gave me some mild heat exhaustion. i spent a good part of yesterday and almost all of last night alternating between shivering with chills, sweating with a fever, and having waves of nausea.

so clearly a few lessons to be learned here. i need to hydrate more. i brought two litres of water on our hike, but soon found myself drinking more than i had predicted. i probably should have worn a wider hat instead of the bandana i opted for… a hat would have provided greater shade and facial coverage.

oh well… noted for next time i suppose.

meanwhile, if you come by my office and find me passed out on the chair, i’m not slacking - i just feel sick. (as opposed to other days, when i may indeed be slacking :-P)

sweatiest….weekend….. evah.

Monday, Jul 24. 2006  –  Category: Outdoors

staying up till 3am friday drinking scotch is probably not the best way to start training for Shasta. despite that, jesse and i set out saturday for our first training hike in our long arduous goal of getting ourselves in shape to haul ourselves up to the top of Shasta.

in all our infinite wisdom, we decided to train for hiking up Shasta by hiking a day hike (11 mile loop trail) in the blistering heat at Big Basin.

cause… you know… hiking in 100 degree weather is totally indicative of what we’ll be doing at Shasta.

after the best Jamba Juice smoothie ever, we finished up our training by devouring tapas and sangria before heading home to knock back some Henry Weinhardts Irish Pale Ale (i’m normally not a fan of Pale Ales, but this one was pretty good) and watching the 19th stage of the Tour de France.

<random tangential rant about the Tour de France> first: to the American announcer, it’s Tour “de” France, as in “de” rhymes with “the”. Not Tour DAY France. second: i’m sorry - but watching time trials at 1am has got to be one of the most boring things on TV. i’ve been assured that the regular stages are better and more exciting, but watching a time trial on TV is stunningly wickedly amazingly fantastically BORING. </random tangential rant>

we followed that up by watching Superman on Sunday morning and then running around in the afternoon for another exhausting sweaty 1.5 hours of ultimate.

today i feel …. broken. my hips hurt. my knees hurt. my fingertips hurt (yeah i don’t know why those hurt). ugh. i think i may take the week off of frisbee to let my body heal.

and so the training begins….

Thursday, Jul 20. 2006  –  Category: Outdoors

A couple of weeks ago Jesse and I decided we are going to climb Shasta next June and snowboard down (inspired by a colleague who did it this year). Jaime and Zac have decided to join us, so we’ll have a good group of 4.

Last night we went to an REI clinic on climbing Shasta which overviewed the different routes. We’ve narrowed it down to either Avalanche Gulch, the West Face, or the Hotlum-Wintun Ridge descents, and we’re starting some research into which one we eventually want to do.

We’re obviously going to have to do a lot of training, so time for me to start hitting the stairmaster at the gym. We’re also going to have to start doing some higher-altitude backpacking/mountaineering to get used to the elevation.

I intend to blog everything and tag it in my ‘MtShasta’ blog category and keep track of my training progress, all the decisions we make, and research we do.

Right now it looks like the equipment we’ll have to buy: a pack capable of carrying my snowboard, lighter snowboard boots that I can hike in and strap crampons to, crampons, ice axe or whippet.

busy busy busy

Saturday, Jul 15. 2006  –  Category: Food, Football, Pets

i so rarely blog about anything personal these days.. to the point that my default new blog post category is now ‘OpenSolaris’. a little bit sad, neh?

i guess that’s what happens when you love your work. oh well. losing some blog audience is a small price to pay i guess

anyway, after today’s cleanup and reorganising work, my basement is starting to look… well… almost there. two years after we started, with countless distractions along the way (including putting up two windows last weekend), we’re finally done with the drywall. (seriously, we started drywalling two years ago… sad, i know). our next steps are to texturise, and paint the walls/ceiling, and then lay down a floor. once we have those done, the basement will be… well, liveable!

our inner storage room in the basement is finally done, with all the storage in place, and my new workbench area and tool wall all organised.

after a long afternoon of inhaling plaster, we headed down to Milpitas to “Cafe Orphelia” at McCarthy Ranch for some great filet mignon on the “hot rock” grill. they bring out a big rock/stone that’s been super-heated, and you grill your own steak on it. great steak. mmmm…afterwards, we had some red bean shaved ice. we ate all the red bean and then asked the waitress to box up the remaining unfinished ice. she gave us a blank stare and asked why we wanted to save ice? of course, isis was in the car… and she looooooves ice cream, so we thought she might want some shaved ice.

of course, isis lapped it all up - and we have some great photos (which i’ll post tomorrow).

after that, we headed down to Los Altos and tried out the new Satura bakery which was awesome. we got 4 desserts and loved all 4 of them.

and on a very last quickie note: we’re planning on adopting a second beagle. his name is Dusty and he’s 3 years old. i can’t wait!

opensolaris starter/training kit (dvd+cd+cd+cd+cd+cd)

Friday, Jul 14. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

a while ago, for fun, i put together what i called an opensolaris mashup DVD which combined SXCR + Nexenta’s Alpha4 livecd. the hope was that people could boot up the livecd to see how well their hardware was supported before committing to installing SXCR.

over the past week i’ve been helping out the starter/training kit team with the DVD ISO images.

i’ve now got a way to automate creating two DVDs which contain:

<i install> DVD:

• Solaris Express Community Release (snv_43 at the moment)
• Nexenta Alpha5 Install CD
• Studio 10 Compiler (x86)
• Studio 11 Compiler (x86)
• Source for the ON, JDS, NWS, X, and SFW consolidations

<i learn> DVD:

• Belenix 0.4.4 LiveCD
• Nexenta Alpha5 LiveCD
• Schillix 0.5.2 LiveCD
• The training documents that Michelle has been putting together.

it’s been a fun and interesting diversion from the usual work. i had to do some interesting workarounds to aggregate all the various distributions onto one image - but it works well and should be a good giveaway. i plan on posting the scripts once we get a project setup on opensolaris.org.

sigh. another season wrapped.

Wednesday, Jul 12. 2006  –  Category: Movies&TV

i have to say… i quite liked David Tennant as the doctor. i still think i preferred Christopher Eccleston, but the 10th doctor is not bad at all.

this season was great… cybermen, daleks, and the last two episodes with the “death” of Rose was pretty moving.

… and now begins another 5 and a half month wait for the Christmas special. sigh.