Monday Apr 14, 2008
On Thursday April 10 I decided to join a local cycling group,
the Georgetown
Cyclopaths, for one of their evening rides. I really love
that name!
There were eight of us that met at Berry Springs Park
and Preserve and headed out. One of the riders had an
idea for a route, so we took the lead from him. We ended up
getting in about 24 miles before finishing back at the start.
This was a nice rural ride, going in a loop to the east, then
north, west to Walburg, and back to Georgetown. I recorded the
ride with my Garmin
Forerunner 305 and uploaded it a couple of places:
Another interesting feature, at least to me, was the amount of
poultry I heard while we were riding, since we have 13 chickens
ourselves. I'm pretty sure I heard chickens, and I saw a sign
about a guinea fowl crossing or something like that. I need to
take Karen out there, since she's the person in our family who's
really into poultry.
I enjoyed the ride, and will join the Cyclopaths again when I
can.
Wednesday Mar 05, 2008
Yesterday I voted in the Texas primary at my polling place,
Round Rock High School, in the morning. The Democratic side
seemed busier than the Republican side (that's a switch!), but
didn't have lines at that time, around 9:30 a.m.
In the evening, I attended the caucus, or precinct convention,
at the same location. The caucus was supposed to start at 7:15
p.m. or shortly after the last voter voted, but we weren't let
in the building until 7:55. We all had to sign in and give our
presidential preference, and apparently had to have our
credentials verified, but I don't know if everyone got the
message on that. We had about 130 people show up, which is
impressive in what's been a heavily Republican district. I
recognized at least 4 of my neighbors there, and that was nice
to see. Sometime we Democrats feel a bit lost amongst our
conservative neighbors.
The Clinton campaign complained that at some precinct the Obama
supporters controlled the caucus packets, which are apparently
just the instructions and paperwork. In our case, the temporary
chair was a Clinton supporter. The first order of business
after calling the meeting to order and signing in was to elect a
permanent precinct convention chair and secretary. Two
candidates ran for chair, one an 18-year-old high school senior
supporting Obama, and another a 30-something Clinton supporter.
It was close, but the 18-year-old won 17-15. Someone then
nominated the Clinton supporter for vice chair, and we approved
that by acclamation.
After this, the chair announced the vote count. Obama won
around 59% to 41% or something close to that. We had 16
delegates to send to the county convention in Georgetown on
March 29, so Obama got 10 and Clinton got 6. I was in the Obama
camp and we had 10 volunteers to be delegates, and 4 of us,
including me, volunteered to be alternates.
I think the rules for all this are a bit weird. You can vote in
just the primary and the caucus, but not just in the caucus. I
suppose the idea is that the people who care about the party get
a second shot at voting. But I think Clinton has a point about
the caucuses excluding those who have to work that night or have
other duties. We have 12 hours to vote but we have to be at the
caucus at a specified time.
I enjoyed the experience, and kind of regret that I didn't raise
my hand to be a delegate to the county convention. Maybe
they'll call me as an alternate.
Wednesday Feb 13, 2008
When I last wrote about chickens, we had nine chicks indoors and
four hens outdoors. Last week I came home from work and was
looking at the indoor chicks in their 2' W × 4' L × 2' H box and
noticed a little black chick. To this I said "Where the heck
did that come from?" I was told it was a silver
laced Wyandotte pullet (female chick). Karen knows she's
going to have to get rid of the new roosters at some point, so
she wanted one more hen. Okaaay.
At first, the little chick seems quite wary of the much larger
and older chicks, and got chased around by a Rhode
Island Red rooster. But by the next morning, she seemed to
have settled in and started hanging out with the larger chicks
and keeping warm. She particularly liked our largest chick,
which we think is a Buff
Orpington rooster. She even roosts with the larger chicks.
Also, she really stands out as the other chicks are buff and red
and she's black with a bit of silver. Pretty cute.
The older chicks have a few weeks before it's warm enough for
them to go live outside. We're not sure how this will work with
the little Wyandotte, who may not be old enough to go outside
yet. When we've taken the older chicks outside for a few hours,
the poor little Wyandotte makes lots of noise and really misses
her friends.
Wednesday Feb 13, 2008
On Sunday my sone Nicholas turned 10 years old! Congratulations
Nick! We had a sleepover party on Saturday night with four
other fourth grade boys, and they were up and kept me awake
until 1 a.m. Sunday morning. I think our family is still trying
to recover. Nick in particular was not feeling well on Monday
morning, so we've sent him to bed early the past couple of
nights.
My wife Karen and I were chatting last night, and I mentioned
how some of my memories have gotten muddled and I "remember"
Nick being at certain places with us, when I know darn well he
wasn't born yet. Weird. But we agreed it is difficult
for us to remember life before Nick entered our lives during the
1998 Winter Olympics, which we remember watching on the
television while Karen was in labor.
Wednesday Feb 13, 2008
Yesterday we at Sun announced we are
acquiring Innotek and their VirtualBox software. As
someone who runs OpenSolaris in a VMware virtual machine on my
home PC, I decided to give VirtualBox a try.
As other reviewers have mentioned, the installation package for
Windows is quite small, around thirty megabytes or so (yes, I
remember when that would be considered large). It installed
easily and I was able to start it up and create a new virtual
machine to install Solaris in very little time. The virtual
machine wizard allows you to select machines for many operating
systems, more than VMware.
I then tried installing Solaris Nevada 79a, a preview version of
the latest SXDE release. I got to the nice install GUI, it
started installing, but somewhere along the line decided it
couldn't read the rest of the yet-to-be-installed packages from
the DVD. Weird. I didn't try it again, as I had other things
to do, but up to that point it was pretty smooth. To be fair,
I'm not convinced this is a VirtualBox problem at this point, as
I had problems with installs of Solaris Nevada 79 on VMware.
The other thing I found difficult to figure out was how to get
1280x1024 screen resolution. It appears to default to 1024x768
or even smaller, and VirtualBox complained about the 24 bit
color depth and suggested I use 32, 16, 8 or 1. It seemed to
work anyway, though.
At some point I'll try the install again and give a bit more
detail about the various warning and error messages. So far
VirtualBox seems okay, but I'm not going to abandon VMware for
my personal use at this point.
Wednesday Jan 23, 2008
I've been running Solaris 10 in a VMware virtual machine for
several months. This has worked pretty well, and somewhere
along the line VMware decided to support the VMware Tools with
Solaris 10.
A few months back, Solaris management asked us engineers to test
an early, internal version of the next Solaris Express
Developer's Edition (SXDE), snv_79. I attempted to install this
in a new virtual machine. The installer didn't work in that it
failed to partition the disk. On a Sun internal mailing list I
heard this has something to do with the disk driver, but that
you could install from text installer. Okay, I did that and it
worked fine. One other problem is that the VMware Tools don't
seem to install correctly, but that's not such a big deal. One
final issue I had was getting the hostname set correctly. I set
the system up to use DHCP, and I tried various ideas I found in
Sun's documentation and on the web, and finally remembered the
trick is to put the hostname in /etc/nodename.
This was very frustrating. I'll need to write this down, as I
must have done this on the Solaris 10 machine earlier.
Last week we were asked to test the respin of the next SXDE,
snv_79a. I created another virtual machine and this one
installed as advertised. VMware Tools don't install right here
either. The installer also set up /etc/nodename,
so I didn't have to remember to do that. Very nice! It appears
from the internal survey we were asked to fill out that snv_79b
is in the works so we have a little more time to go before the
next SXDE is released.
For the issue of VMware Tools, VMware open sourced some or all
of the tools (I'm not sure) a few months back, so I suppose I
could figure this out at some point if I ever care about it. Or
just wait and keep trying occasionally until the tools install
correctly.
Wednesday Jan 23, 2008
After some months of driftless, occasional running, I've decided
I needed a goal to motivate my training. I looked at some of
the upcoming local half marathons, but they're too soon for me
to train up in time without a high risk of injury. I decided to
train for the Capitol
10K, which I've run a few times in the past, but stopped
running due to lack of interest. It's such a large race that
fighting the crowd of people who've lined up in the wrong place
takes a good mile, and I got tired of that. But it turns out to
be about ten weeks out, long enough to get back into the groove.
I set up a plan using the Runner's World
Smart Coach tool. I'm hoping this will be motivation enough
to stick with it and build my weekly mileage back up from about
5-10 miles up to 20.
Tuesday Jan 22, 2008
I rented The Wild for my boys this weekend, and we
really enjoyed it. If I recall correctly, this movie came out
at nearly the same time as Madagascar, and parts of
the story are similar enough that I'm sure a lot of people said
"Oh, this is just like Madagascar, why bother?" In
truth, while there are some similarities, like animals in a zoo
in a large city go on an adventure, the characters, the reasons
for their trips and the trips themselves are quite different.
Nick and Sam enjoyed The Wild enough to watch it a
second time a couple of days later, and they talked and laughed
about various scenes afterwards. This certainly isn't the case
in all movies they watch, and I take it as a sign they give it
"two thumbs up." :)
Tuesday Jan 22, 2008
My son Sam's Tiger Cub Scout den decided to take advantage of a
deal offered by UT (University of Texas) to get basketball
tickets for $6 per seat for the UT vs. Colorado men's basketball
game on Saturday 2007-01-19. We arrived a little bit late due
to slow restaurant service, and UT was already a ways behind and
it wasn't looking too good. At the half, UT was behind around
ten points, and we weren't too hopeful that they would win.
Coach Barnes must have lit a fire under his players during half
time, as they came out blazing in the second half and fairly
quickly caught up. The Horns were up close to ten points for a
while, but towards the end of the game they started to slip a
bit and Colorado was catching up. The Longhorns hung on to win
by two points. Quite an exciting game, particularly the second
half.
I'd never seen a basketball game in an arena, and I figured we'd
have nosebleed seats and wouldn't be able to see well. But I
realized when we got there that no one really had a bad seat,
and the view was pretty good.
We'll probably go again, particularly if we get a good deal on
tickets like this time. There's another opportunity coming up
for Cub Scouts to see the women's basketball team vs. Texas A
& M for $5 per seat next month.
Monday Jan 07, 2008
Late last week and over the weekend we had 9 chicken eggs hatch
in our incubator. We started out with 20 or 22 (don't
remember), discarded some earlier as they weren't developing or
had stopped developing, and were left with about 15 eggs we
hoped would hatch. Getting 9 is pretty good, as Karen knows
folks who've tried hatching multiple times and gotten no chicks
at all.
We have
Buff Orpington sounds like some sort of macho guy to me, but
Buff Silkie sounds like an oxymoron, as we think of
buff as well built and silkie
as kind of prissy looking. But in this case, of course,
buff refers to the color, a light blondish color.
Sam and Karen took care of turning the eggs three times a day
and candling them to see if they were developing. My only
involvement with the incubation was to help wire up the
incubator. I wired up a light bulb to a hot water heater
thermostat, and Karen used a thermometer to help set the
termperature. I also wired up a computer fan from an old
computer we still have around to an A/C adapter. Funny thing
about that, the best place on the web to find instructions on
wiring a computer fan to an A/C adapter was a web site dedicated
to growing pot! :)
The nine little chicks seem to be doing well, and they act like
chickens right out of the box. They test new things by pecking
at them, so every new chick that was born was pecked by the
others first :). We moved them to a brooder box with pine
shavings, they had to peck at the pine shavings to determine
whether it was something to eat. We saw one poor chick got one
of her toes grabbed by another who thought it might be something
to eat!
Friday Nov 02, 2007
I recently started using Solaris Nevada (first build 75 and now
build 76) rather than Solaris 10 Update 4 on my Ultra-45 at
work. I usually have a VNC session to which I connect from home
and occasionally from work. But since I converted to using
Nevada I've occasionally had xscreensaver tell me that it can't
open the display. This makes it impossible to unlock the
display and I have to go either kill the VNC server or just kill
xscreensaver.
This morning when this happened it finally dawned on me to check
my Xauthority file. For some reason I checked the XAUTHORITY
environment variable and much to my surprise it pointed to a
file in /tmp that didn't exist. Example:
$ echo $XAUTHORITY
/tmp/ssh-xauth-_Raqkq/xauthfile
$ ls -l /tmp/ssh-xauth-_Raqkq/xauthfile
ls: /tmp/ssh-xauth-_Raqkq/xauthfile: No such file or directory
Huh, go figure. I realized at this point that I had connected
to my work system from my home system using ssh with X
forwarding. It appears that at some point the Nevada sshd was
changed to use a temporary file for XAUTHORITY, and this change
hasn't made it back to S10.
Now I start my VNC sessions by ssh without X forwarding or
directly from my desktop X session, where XAUTHORITY is not set.
I should probably do something with the env command to set up a
known environment, but for now this works.
Tuesday Oct 23, 2007
About ten of us watched the Rugby World Cup final on Monday
night. Our friend Michael downloaded the match from the
Internet when it became available 24 hours after the match, and
we watched it via a project in his garage.
While Michael, a Scot, wasn't really cheering for either side, I
suspect he leaned towards South Africa given he has a habit of
cheering anyone who's up against England. I've caught that
habit myself, and was pleased to see South Africa play tough and
make things difficult for the English. South Africa prevailed.
I saw three matches and part of a fourth during this tournament.
We saw the opening USA vs. England match, where I was pleased to
see the USA team play okay against England. We tried to view
the Scotland vs. Argentina quarterfinal, but only saw the first
half due to some technical difficulties. We also watched the
France vs. New Zealand quarterfinal, which was really a
fantastic effort by the French, especially the second half, and
the best match I saw. And finally the final.
I've only been watching rugby for a few seasons now. We've seen
some Six Nations matches and now some World Cup matches. One of
these days I'll go see a live match here in Austin.
Monday Oct 22, 2007
That's me in the Sun Microsystems jersey in the foreground on the left,
and Nick on the right.
On Saturday 20 October 2007 my son Nick and I set out on the 25
mile course of the 20th annual
Outlaw Trail 100. Things started out well, but after a
while we were out in the country and things got windy and we
encountered hills. We made it to the first water stop at 10
miles without any problems. A ways after that, maybe around
mile 12, Nick started saying his leg hurt and wondering if he
could take the SAG wagon back. We had hit some hills and wind
by this time, and I think it wasn't much fun for Nick at that
point.
At around mile 16 or so we hit a point where the 25 mile route
went north, west and then south. But one of the longer routes
skipped that part, so we decided to do so also. While it looked
to me this would cut off at least 3 miles, we ended the ride at
22.98 miles, according to my Garmin Forerunner 305. So I think
the 25 mile route was actually a bit longer than that.
The longest Nick had ridden in the past was 14 miles, so this
was a lot longer. It took us nearly two and a half hours, and I
think part of the problem was Nick just wasn't used to sitting
on a bike for that length of time. Also, I think Nick may need
a larger bike, as his seat post is out pretty far already, and
it really ought to be higher for better performance.
I'm proud of Nick for hanging in there for 23 miles. For a 9
year old on a mountain bike (with fairly slick tires), that's
pretty darn good!
Wednesday Aug 22, 2007
I'm a member of a summer
cycling group with Rogue Training
Systems. We started in mid July and will finish in mid
October. The goal is to work up to riding a century (100
miles).
On Sunday August 19, we rode from Bee Cave to north Austin to
downtown Austin and back, 40 miles. I hadn't ridden 40 miles in
a single day in at least a couple of decades. I uploaded my
Forerunner 305 (GPS)
data to MotionBased. While my
motion time was 2:58, for a 13.5 mile per hour average, I also
had 31 minutes of rest time.
This coming Sunday, we'll be riding the Krause Kruse out of
Krause Springs for 4 to 4.5 hours. At 13.5 miles per hour, I
can probably just do the 60 mile loop. But there will be an
opportunity to bail out and do a 43 mile loop instead, if things
aren't going well. So I'll be playing this one "by ear" as they
say.
Wednesday Aug 22, 2007
On Wednesday August 8 we journeyed from our campsite south of
Ely to
Soudan Underground Mine State Park. This mine was owned by
U.S. Steel and given to the state of Minnesota when it closed in
the early 1960s. I visited the mine at least once as a kid. It
is the oldest and deepest mine on the Vermilion Range.
We took the elevator down 2400 feet in about 3 minutes, then
took a train trip to an area where the tour guide talked about
the mine, mining, and miners. The tour happens on the 27th
level down, as it is the easiest, and quite like safest, place
to put a large group.
The Huntington Canyon, Utah mine collapse had occurred recently,
and the tour guide, a former miner and the descendant of miners,
turned off the lights and talked about what it would be like to
be those miners. Your light would only last some hours, you
probably wouldn't have food or water. The Soudan mine has deep
holes in it, so if you had been stuck there, you'd have to move
around quite carefully.
I later discussed the dangerous jobs left in our country with
Karen and some of my neighbors. Mining is one of those jobs,
the others we could think of are forestry, fishing and farming.
There are probably others we haven't considered. Some of these
jobs have certainly gotten safer over the years, but they're
still risky, especially compared to my job as a software
engineer in a nice office.
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I've been using VirtualBox since Feb 2007... so fo...
I'm very interested to see this latest Sun acquisi...