/dev/zero

I’m playing around a little bit with Google’s “Chrome” browser. The jury is still out, but I am very impressed with it’s rendering speed. Everything I’ve thrown at it so far, the only rendering delays I’ve seen so far are things outside of the browser’s control: time for the DNS server to resolve the hostname, bandwidth, speed of the remote web server. Rendering the page once it’s downloaded is the fastest I’ve ever seen.
I also like how well it imported all my Firefox settings, including history, bookmarks and saved passwords. The last is a little creepy, but sure saves me having to re-enter them all for every site I want to test that is behind a login.

Yesterday was spent mostly dealing with HR, getting benefit paperwork filled out, getting ID bages, waiting for a new workstation, then getting logins to all systems I need to log into.

Today has been reading some documentation, attending one meeting (a weekly ticket status update), familiarizing myself with all the different ticket / email systems. (Kana: support email. Not related to our Outlook / Exchange email used internally, HEAT: support ticket system (not to be confused with support mail system), Remedy: internal ticket system and replacement for HEAT. Are you confused yet? I am.)

Taking the train to work has it’s perks. It would take just as long to drive, I’d have to deal with traffic, put miles on my car and burn gas^H^H^Hmoney. Taking the train I drive 5 miles to the station, buy a ticket, wait for the train, then read my book for the next 40 minutes. Change trains at Union station, get off at City Place, take two escalators, through a secure door, another escalator then an elevator up 23 floors.

The break room is near by and has free soda machines (and free juice machines). Coffee is also free. Gotta buy our snacks though.

Now, if I could just get half the fluorescent lights over my desk turned off…

So after I don’t know how long del.icio.us has been around, they finally sold out and become delicious.com. Can’t really blame them. Those-other-than-geeks are so tuned to the “everything on the internet ends in .com” mindset, and putting too many dots in the name confuses people, that it makes sense eventually. But it doesn’t quite have that same flare to it.
Along with the new domain name, they’ve made some changes to their infrastructure, engine and look-n-feel. Check it out.

delicious blog

Congratulations to my good friends and “p”.
They snuck off to “Canuckistan” to get married. From the pictures it was a lovely ceremony.
I wish them all the best and look forward to the reception they have planned here in Big D some time in Oct.

It’s been an interesting week. Had a job interview last Friday that left me feeling pretty sure I got the job. By the end of the day the recruiting firm let me know I did get the job, and for a grand more than the initial listing for the position. They were supposed to have an actual offer letter to me on Monday, but the manager has been out of the office all week. The recruiters contacted the customer’s HR dept and they hadn’t gotten the paperwork from the manager yet, so I still don’t have it. They also need to do a background check, but I told them I’m OK with giving notice at my current place with a contingent offer letter. There’s nothing in my background that will cause a problem.
Meanwhile, I don’t have an actual offer yet, so I’m not giving notice.
I also have a job interview with UT Austin next week in their computer services dept. Since I haven’t signed any offers yet, I’m going to go ahead and take the interview. It’s more in line with what I really want to do (system administration, rather than tech support) and the pay is almost $10k more. Pluses: what I want to do with my career, stable firm (can’t get much more stable than the largest state university in the country), more money, closer to my folks. Drawbacks: moving away from some very good friends here in DFW.

Meanwhile, at my current $POE, a water pipe burst in another suite on Wed night, flooding out half our tech floor, including my desk. I had to work from the NOC Thurs morning. At least this time I had my laptop with me so I didn’t have to spend an hour setting up all my tools on yet another PC that isn’t my normal workstation. Friday morning I got to put my desk back together, but luckily both Thurs and Friday were quiet days, calls-wise.

Today, my parents are coming to town to go out to dinner to celebrate Dad’s retirement. We’re going to go to some place in the Fort Worth Stockyards. Apparently Dad also wants to go shopping for some casual western wear. I dont’ know why he needs to come up here to DFW for that. Surely there’s plenty of places in Austin to buy that stuff, but oh well. I know where I can take him. Not sure why he’s suddenly interested in acquiring some western wear either.
However, them coming to visit means I need to do some mad cleaning. I think it’s almost a blessing that Kestrel has to work today; it means she’ll be out of my way while I run around the house stuffing things into closets and getting them off the floor.
The lawn is edged and mowed and I’m exhausted and drenched in sweat. But I still have the kitchen, living room and front bathroom to clean. Back to work.

Not as in I WAS antisocial, but as in I discovered how much I dislike people.
Now I don’t, as a general rule, have a problem with people. I’m a pretty gregarious kind of guy. However lately I’ve discovered how much I dislike groups of people. Groups in public places.

Hanging out with friends is all right. I enjoy going out to the movies with my friends, game night at friends houses, going out to dinner, etc. Churches are fine (without getting into religion or faith. That’s unrelated to my main theme here.)
It’s crowds, crowded places, places with lots of people, where most of them have nothing to do with each other, save for their physical presence at the same time and place. This is where people really annoy me. It’s the thoughtless acts, the “no one else here but me matters, so I don’t have to be polite”, that ticks me off.

I went out to a movie with , Nymaz, Amethyst and Kestrel. 20 minutes into the movie, something starts flashing in the theater. Not a blinking light, a flash. As in a flash photography. It does it more than once. I turn around and see some Paris Hilton look-alike sitting in the row behind us with some kind of camera phone taking pictures of herself and her young friend. A picture or two during a movie, while rude and annoying, I could live with. 6 or 7 pictures was too much. Finally I told her, loud enough for most of the theater to hear, to “Put the damn camera away!” She said something snide in return, but there were no more flashes and we were able to enjoy the rest of the movie in peace. I highly recommend Kung Fu Panda, by the way.

The next day, Kestrel and I, having new dress codes handed down by both our places of employment during the same week and neither of us possessing enough appropriate clothes, went shopping. The trip reaffirmed how much I hate malls. I used to be a bit of a mall rat as a kid. Junior high and high school, I hung out with friends at the mall. Don’t look at me like that. It was the ’80s. A mall, on a Saturday, in June, in Texas, is the last place you want to be. Too many teens doing the mall rat thing, too many familys with little kids running around. Too many people who have never heard of deoderant, or in some cases even soap. Too many people who like to walk 3, 4, 5 abreast, slowly, taking the entire width of a passage so you can’t get around them to where you’re going.

It’s the “me and my friends are the only thing that matters. Everyone else in this place with us aren’t part of our group so they don’t matter. Simple manners are unimportant. Being aware of other people around us, having any consideration for anyone else’s comfort or enjoyment is irrelevant.” that drives me crazy.

The people in the mall are just annoying and I can avoid that by simply not going to malls. I did it mostly successfully for about 5 years. Flash photography in a movie theater, DURING the feature? That’s a whole new level of “the world revolves around ME”.

Coming home from work the other night, as I turned into my neighborhood I encountered a bit of police and fire activity. No lights and sirens and fire was leaving the scene, so I didn’t think much of it. Probably someone called 911 for a medical emergency and it was all over. There was one police car still in the neighborhood and he drove off when he realized he was blocking me from turning onto my street.

Kestrel said there were two police cars out front when she got ome and the officers were talking to Jeff, our neighbor across the street. I know Jeff has a past, so I was a little worried, but she said they seemed to be laughing and joking. I stopped worrying figured I’d just ask him what happened the next day.

I came home from work yesterday, saw that Jeff was home so headed over to ask what all the excitement was the day before. Jeff and Jonnetta, his wife, were sitting at their kitchen table with Chris, the neighbor that shares the other half of their duplex. I’d never met Chris before, though I had spoken with her boyfriend and roommate, Mark. I’d seen her coming home from work so I recognized her and Jeff introduced us.
Monday afternoon, Mark died, apparently of heart failure.

He’d been ill for several months, first pneumonia, then a couple of bouts of bronchitis. He was fighting off another round of bronchitis when his doctors told him if he didn’t quit smoking, it was just going to keep coming back and his lungs would never heal, so he quit. 8 days later he was dead.

Chris said she called around 3:45 to get a phone number. He said it would take him a minute to get to it, as he was rather weak and was moving slowly. When he didn’t come right back, she figured he got distracted by a book or something, as he was in the habit of doing. (I saw him many times, at all hours of the day and night, stepping out to his porch to have a cigarette, always reading a book. He made his living buying and selling books online. Their house is so packed with books they can barely move.) Later she got an uneasy feeling and came home early, to find him collapsed on the floor, unresponsive. She called 911 and they had to take him out through the bedroom window. He was probably already dead before she got home, but they transported him to the hospital, attempting to revive him.

After getting back from the hospital, she had to deal with calling his parents to let them know their son had died. While still on the phone the police showed up and made her get off the phone RIGHT NOW, so they could remove her from the house and seal it off. They wouldn’t even let her re-enter the house to feed the dog. It wasn’t until midnight that they had their search warrant, completed their search and let her back in, satisfied that there was no appearance of a crime.

Chris and Mark had just gotten engaged and were supposed planning to sign the papers on a house they are buying this Friday. Instead she’s traveling to Oklahoma City bury him.

“Well, that was an adventure.”

Weather closed in on the Irving call center and knocked power out. Power flickered, went out again and the generator kicked in (but didn’t restore power to us on the floor.) Window blowing outside, looking very much like tornado weather.
Wind died, power came back and we’re back to work.

Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra “Concerts in the Garden” series.

Glinka

Overature to Ruslan and Ludmila

Tchaikovsky

Capriccio Italien, Op. 45

Liszt

Totentanz for Piano and Orchestra, G. 126
Kyle Orth, Piano

Intermission

Tchaikovsky

Waltz from the Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66

Tchaikovsky

Waltz of the Flowers from The Nutcracker, Op. 71

Tchaikovsky

Waltz from Swan Lake, Op. 20

Tchaikovsky

1812 Overature, Op. 49

Two of my favorite pieces, Capriccio Italien and 1812 Overature, very well done.
The guest pianist, Kyle Orth, didn’t impress me much, but he wasn’t bad either. He plays well, but I’ve certainly heard better. Still, for a 16 year old kid, he’s got his career started out on the right path.

Given the nature of Twitter, I don’t understand those who just automatically follow everyone who shows up on the Twitter home page. I just blocked about 5 “followers” who were each following a couple of thousand people. Some were following as many as 80k people! Clearly they’re not actually “following” any of them, just automatically adding everyone who posts, hoping to GET as many followers as possible. “TwitterMosaic”? If I wanted to see everything posted by everyone on twitter, I’d just look at the twitter home page, not follow a specific user, who just reposts everything everyone says.
Then there was the guy who’s every tweet was “Let me help you make your life better! Read my web site! makemoneyfast.com” and variations thereof. Yeah, I need twitter spam about as much as I need email spam.
On the other hand, having finally gotten up and started my e-day, one of the first emails I read told me a lovely red-head and good friend had started following me on Twitter.

Thanks to for linking to

Turns out these random “salmon” IMs are a bot, picking two people who have recently updated their LJ / Deviant Art / Xanga / Whatever and connecting them by IM. Neither one of them knows who the other is and ends up being totaly confused.
I was getting seriously annoyed at this person, but turns out it’s someone different each time and has no more clue about it than I did.

I was at WalMart today during lunch and I swear I saw a zombie in the shoe section…

Oh god, we’ve already lost 12 servers. I logged out of all of them and am holed up in an ssh session on my home server. I’ve shut down all outside ports and have been using “kill” very carefully, but the zombie processes keep coming! I don’t know how much longer I can hold out until I have to reboot!

I finally got a CentOS 5 domU running under Debian.
The xen-tools xen-create-image method didn’t work. I managed to find an appropriate build script for centos5, but it was pretty badly out of date, trying to install RPM versions that don’t exist on the mirror servers any more. Trying to bring it back up to date would have been a PITA. It has the RPM versions hard-coded in the script.
However the instructions at http://wiki.kartbuilding.net/index.php/Create_Centos5_DomU_on_Debian_Etch_Dom0 worked a treat.
After following those steps, I converted it from a file-based image, to an LVM, with the following steps:
Manually create logical volumes for the filesystem and swap. I use 40G filesystem LVs and 128M swaps.

# mkdir /mnt/loop
# mkdir /mnt/cenots
# mount /home/andrew/centos.5-0.img /mnt/loop -o loop
# mount /dev/mapper/ember-centos5–disk /mnt/centos
# cd /mnt/loop
# cp -Rp bin boot dev etc home lib media mnt opt root sbin selinux srv sys tmp usr var ../centos
# cd
# umount /mnt/loop
# umount /mnt/centos

Then edit /etc/xen/domains/centos.cfg and change the following lines:

kernel = “/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-4-xen-686″
ramdisk = “/boot/initrd.img-2.6.18-4-xen-686″
vif = ['bridge=xenbr0']
disk = ['file:/xens/name_of_new_server_to_be/centos.5-0.img,sda1,w','file:/xens/name_of_new_server_to_be/centos.swap,sda2,w']

To:

kernel = ‘/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-6-xen-686′
ramdisk = “/boot/initrd.img-2.6.18-6-xen-686″
vif = [ 'ip=192.168.1.13' ]
disk = [ 'phy:ember/centos5-disk,sda1,w', 'phy:ember/centos5-swap,sda2,w' ]

Then “xm create centos”. Boom! Centos 5, running as a domU on a Debian Etch dom0, from a logical volume.
And I still have the original centos5 image file for creating fresh domUs.

Now that’s just not playing fair.

I never was any good at foreign languages.

Because I don’t think I should have money. Let Saudi Arabia have it all.

Aught to be a good title for a book on Xen, no?

Anyway, while discussing Xen with the COO (and it just occurred to me, really this project should be the CTO’s, not the COOs… odd how the COO does all this stuff…) he came to the conclusion that, like openVZ and Virtuozzo, Xen guest systems shared the kernel with the Host. That didn’t sound right to me, but I couldn’t disprove it with my Xen server, where every DomU had an empty /boot.

So I updated the kernel in Dom0, but didn’t reboot. I now have a newer kernel installed than the one it’s currently running.
I then tweaked the /etc/xen-tools/xen-tools.conf and built a new DomU, to use the new kernel. Everything went without a hitch. I now have a Dom0 running 2.6.18-4-xen-686, with a domU running 2.6.18-6-xen-686. So it would seem that while they all “share” a kernel in the sense that they share a single install on the hard drive (all pulling from the dom0 /boot directory), they aren’t sharing a single instance of the kernel in memory.

I then tried to get a working CentOS 5 domU running, but ran into some snags. That will be another post.