Albert White's Weblog

It started with a question: How can we inspire people to take action on climate change?

The answer: Ask the people of Sydney to turn off their lights for one hour.

On 31 March 2007, 2.2 million people and 2100 Sydney businesses turned off their lights for one hour – Earth Hour. This massive collective effort reduced Sydney’s energy consumption by 10.2% for one hour, which is the equivalent effect of taking 48,000 cars off the road for one hour.

On 29th March 2008 we're doing it again WorldWide! Friends of the Irish Environment and the Irsh Light Pollution Awareness Campaign are asking everyone to do their bit for the environment and turn their lights off for one hour on March 29th.

In Ireland te event will take place from 9pm to 10pm rather than from 8-9pm. This is because at Ireland's latitude it won't really be dark by 8pm so in order to see the difference in the night sky the event will start at 9. Astronomical Societies around the country will be holding events so please be sure to check for details at www.irishastronomy.org/boards.

We need all of you, across the world, not just Ireland, to turn non essential lights off for this hour. Do you really need your porch light on? Does your building really need to be floodlit? And longer term you can think about whether your security lighting is really efficient. Does it allow light to spill above the horizon causing light pollution? Is the bulb too bright for the purpose? Are you using a motion sensor to ensure the light  only goes on when needed? Have a look at the Institution of Lighting Engineers document on Domestic Security Lighting to see how best to use security lighting.

 Heres what the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Councillor Paddy Bourke, had to say about Earth Hour when he announced Dublin's participation:

"Earth Hour is an international campaign and Dublin is one of the latest cities to get behind this important event where on March 29th all non-essential lights will be switched off for an hour. This campaign is important and everyone from citizens up to Government has a duty to do what they can against global warming. It is up to us all to do what we can to reduce our CO2 emissions. Through one simple action, turning off our lights for an hour, we can deliver a powerful message about the need for action. I am thrilled that as Dublin Lord Mayor I will be leading our capital city in its participation in this international event. It was estimated during the Sydney Earth Hour last night demand for electricity dropped by 10 per cent. It would be fantastic if we could do the same in Dublin. I would urge businesses and homes to join in and take part in the campaign."

Earth Hour in Ireland is fully supported by the Irish Light Pollution Awareness Campaign. For further information on the project in Ireland please contact the Friends of the Irish Environment. For global information please visit www.earthhour.org.

Finally here is the promotional video for Earth Hour. Enjoy!

Something that I've been meaning to do for a while is to carve a spoon. After coming back from Matty's wedding on Friday I noticed that a bough had broken off a sycamore tree in a nearby park. I took that as a sign to get on with it. So today I went up with a pocket saw and cut off a few sections of branches. Sycamore is a fairly soft wood and when its green its especially easy to work with.

I peeled off the bark with my trusty knife (ok a €15 Mora knife). Next made a rough sketch of where I wanted to carve out and with my trusty axe (ok the cheapest axe in Woodies (official sponsors to Shamrock Rovers F.C. btw!)). The knife and especially the axe needed a good sharpening but seem to be holding well. Anyway, lots of chopping and carving later I got something that resembled a spoon. The next step was to carve out the depression for the spoon bit. This was my first try with a spoon knife that I bought from Andrew at OutdoorCode, it cost about €35 euro but its one of those tools that you need for this kind of carving. An alternative to using the spoon knife would be to use embers to slowly burn the depression. After a couple of hours and a blistered thumb I ended up with a spoon.

 

I didn't bother reading much about what bits of wood to select and how exactly to carve before trying this. Sometimes you learn more by trying first, and Sunday afternoons are a good time to make mistakes anyway. One thing to change next time will be to use a bigger piece of wood. This was carved from a piece about 4cm in diameter - which doesn't give you much of a spoon! A branch at least 8cm thick is probably needed to get a decent sized spoon. Knots. I think I saw a Ray Mears program where he mentioned that using a fork in a branch made carving the spoon easier - having knots in the middle makes it harder that's for sure! I'll have to split a branch and see exactly how a branch is formed - 'open it and see how it works' is an approach that has yet to fail me!

 

 That's the spoon, and the tools used.

On Thursday my cousin Matty got married in Terrath Co. Wexford. I've uploaded the pics; most are only visible to friends and family.

Dino has created an Irish Geocoin!

 

Preorders are currently (until Saturday!) being taken at  http://geocoins.croaghan.com/
This is the first official Irish Geocoin and probably will not be re-minted so get your orders in!

 

Tonight I noticed that one of my favourite cartoonists is syndicated online. Martin Turner does the daily cartoon for the Irish Times and usually has a politcal theme.

I've resisted speaking about the current crisis in Israel and Lebanon on my blog. I think Martin captures what's happening quite well in this cartoon from early on in the conflict:



Trócaire ,an Irish overseas development agency, have been appealing for donations on Irish radio, they accept donations worldwide on their site. Consider giving a donation to them or to other organisations working in the region. Lets hope the UN can work out a deal soon to end the violence.

I’ve been getting a bit lazy thanks to Google Earth. Just type in an address (works best in the
US) and you have the coordinates. Plug the coords into the GPS and you are
fine. I’m in the US at the moment and staying in a hotel I’ve not been in
before. So I googled for it, got the address, added that to google earth... And
turned my GPS on at Milbrae BART Station. The logic was simple, keep drivng
down the road until the the GPS tels you that you are there. Where it actually
put me was at the entrance to a pet store. Well at a tree in the car park
actually, which is why I had to check that I had been following the waypoint
for the hotel and not a geocache!

It turns out that Google was about 4 kilometers out. So after a quick chat with people in the pet
store, and a call to the hotel I was back on the road to the hotel.

Now that I have the full address and the exact zip code, google puts the hotel nearly a
kilometer away in the other direction! Both google and mapquest use NAVTEQ, yet
both give very different locations for the hotel. Mapquest is correct btw.

In other news, it is completely overcast in the Bay area. This is because I bought a PST. No not
another Patch Test group, Coronado’s Personal Solar Telescope. Hopefully it
will get some use tomorrow.

Tomorrow is for geocaching. But where to go? There are just too many caches in the US. 18 in a
1k radius from me at the moment. I think the geocaching experience in Ireland
is much better. We have a low cache density, but the overall quality is higher.
That said, I think I’ll spend most of tomorrow looking for some of the caches
on peoples favourite lists on geocaching.com rather than just notching up
numbers.

www.cybuscorporation.com - Runs the SunOne webserver.
Cybus founded in 1982, Sun Microsystems founded 1982.
Participation age eh?

Perhaps its too easy to get too stuck into Dr. Who! :-)

Long live the Daleks!

Last week .eu domains went on sale to the general public in EU countries. Today there are 17,645 active .eu domains registered in Ireland out of a total of 1,410,297. Some of those 17.645 are mine.

I've moved my personal website from cademuir.net to  www.cademuir.eu. I've also set up  www.realteolaiocht.eu which at the moment just points to the Irish Astronomical Dictionary on the  South Dublin Astronomical Society website.

I recently decided to change the SDAS website. Its now in its 4th incarnation. It started off as this. Then I set up the current domain name and put a basic site together. Maintinaing this was a pain, so I moved over to a mainly static site next using moveable type as the blog software to publish news updates. This worked better but still had limitations once someone wanted to change something. So now I've set it up with mediawiki, the wiki software behind wikipedia. We made this site live last week after myself and John Flannery decided we had enough material in there to start the ball rolling, its already got about four times as much material as the old site. We hope that it will grow to be a resource for amateur observational astronomy as well as containing pages of general astronomical interest. The focus therefore is different to wikipedia, which is an encyclopedia. For example compare our entry for M3 against the Wikipedia entry. If you are interested in astronomy drop by and add some content!


Technorati Tag: Astronomy

Friday 17 Friday

Men's individual:

Final overall positions:
run 1, run 2, final

1 Duff Gibson (Canada) 57.80secs, 58.08secs, 1min 55.88 secs

2 Jeff Pain (Canada 57.98, 58.16, 1:56.14

3 Gregor Staehli (Switzerland) 58.41, 1:56.80

4 Paul Boehm (Canada) 58.61, 58.45, 1:57.06

5 Kristan Bromley (Great Britain) 58.35, 58.75, 1:57.10

6 Eric Bernotas (USA) 58.43, 58.76, 1:57.19

7 Martins Dukurs (Latvia) 58.79, 58.60, 1:57.39

8 Adam Pengilly (Great Britain) 58.37, 59.09, 1:57.46

9 Sebastian Haupt (Germany) 58.48, 59.10, 1:57.58

10 Ben Sandford (New Zealand) 59.16, 58.60, 1:57.76

11 Kazuhiro Koshi (Japan) 58.65, 59.40, 1:58.05

12 Maurizio Oioli (Italy) 59.28, 59.24, 1:58.52

13 Martin Rettl (Austria) 59.23, 59.53, 1:58.76

14 Phillippe Cavoret (France) 59.79, 59.08, 1:58.87

15 Alexander Tretiakov (Russia) 59.71, 59.32, 1:59.03

16 Markus Penz (Aut) 59.55, 59.51, 1:59.06

17 Kevin Ellis (USA) 59.46, 59.75, 1:59.21

18 Masaru Inada (Japan) 59.63, 59.74, 1:59.37

19 Patrick Singleton (Bermuda) 1:00.06, 59.75, 1:59.81

20 David Connolly (Ireland) 59.97, 1:00.00, 1:59.97

21 Tyler Botha (South Africa) 59.43, 1:00.63, 2:00.06

22 Shaun Boyle (Australia) 1:00.13, 1:00.00, 2:00.13

23 Kwang Bae Kang (South Korea) 1:00.41, 59.88, 2:00.29

24 Frank Rommel (Germany) 59.94, 1:00.41, 2:00.35

25 Chris Soule (USA) 1:00.33, 1:00.90, 2:01.23

26 Nikola Nimac (Croatia) 1:01.86, 1:02.44, 2:04.30

27 Patrick Antaki (Lebanon) 1:03.01, 1:01.43, 2:04.44

I’m into astronomy. I’m currently doing an MSc in it. But mainly I like it as a hobby, usually just observing but also imaging. Most astrophotography software is written for windows (MaximDL, Registax, ImagesPlus), the pros will use IRAF but that’s overkill for most of what I do.

Earlier in the year I got a canon 350D (digital rebel XT to the yanks). And most useful processing tools for regular images are windows only also (canon’s software, picassa).

Now I know about UNIX tools. I’m probably more familiar with GIMP than any of the above mentioned tools. However since I’m stuck with needing to boot the laptop into windows occasionally, at the encouragement of some astronomy friends I decided to give Photoshop CS2 a whirl. I’ve used the free version that you get with scanners etc. Before, and to be honest I’d rather use gimp. But since adobe give you a 30 day trial I though I’d try it.

The download didn’t take too long, not as long as the install actually. But after a mug of tea it was time to fire up Photoshop. It started. It displayed its window. It displayed its splash screen and text about loading preferences, loading plugins etc. Then when it all seemed done I clicked on “File” to load an image.

The program appears to halt and the helpful “Program not responding” appears.

Perhaps the old version of photoshop that was installed was interfering. Remove all photoshops and install CS2 again. Same result.

Perhaps its just my user. Log in as another user. Same result.

Perhaps its services. Run msconfig start in diagnostic mode. Same result.

Delete any preferences files. Same result.

Fire up dtrace and see what the hell Photoshop is doing taking up 92% of my CPU and 55Mb of memory. Oh wait…

I dont know much about windows administration or debugging so off to the internet to find information on “windows xp diagnosis”. Google’s first match was this technet article.

This is a interesting, but useless document. Its entitled “Windows XP: The Rock of Reliability”. I’ll give XP one thing. Its only crashed on me once, a monumental improvement on earlier versions. However the author goes on to make some interesting comments. Some of which tell me things that I assumed windows had always done like having versioning in DLL’s. Some were new, they have a list of device drivers that they know will break your system (we just badpatch drivers like that, if the driver even made it to being a patch before being caught). Though this document told me lots about how XP attempts to stop you shooting yourself in the foot, and all the new ways they have to help you recover from the bulletwound, I don’t think the article deserves the title “Windows XP: The Rock of Reliability”. Neverthless a comment about diagnosis being a part of reliability spurred me on to a document that promised more help, Reliability Improvements in Windows XP Professional. I only have the home edition but it looked promising.

Here is what that document has to say about unresponsive programs:

“The application window has been improved in Windows XP to allow you to easily close applications that are unresponsive..”

Great. The rock of reliability has made it easier to close unresponsive programs. Thanks.

Lets try searching for “windows XP instrumentation” instead. The first match tells me how to back up the registry. The second how to use the system restore utility. Not quite what I need.

All I want is a simple way to truss what photoshop is doing on my CPU!

If Microsoft have made it easier to kill unresponsive programs surely it must be happening often enough that someone somewhere might actually want to examine why the programs are not responding. There must be some way of doing this in XP? Answers on a postcard...

Fintan mentioned a register article in which Oracle are concerned about the interdependencies of linux patches. This is something that used to frustrate me no end while I used Debian, where apt-getting the latest package of something resulted in having to download an often large number of seemingly unrelated packages. Discussing Suns patch dependency logic is something worth of a post on its own, but for now I'd like (at Fintans prodding!) to discuss system testing of patches provided by my group, Patch System Test.

Overview of Solaris Patch System Testing and Performance Regression Testing describes the testing that is performed on patches after they are created and before they are released.

The overall process is, very simply, something like this:

• . An engineer fixes a bug or adds a feature in their code.
• . Their group performs testing of that fix to ensure it is ok.
• . This fix is then fed into the latest solaris build and tested.
• . A patch is created for the issue.
• . Patch System Test start testing the patch.

As soon as the patch is created, many audits are performed to ensure that the packaging is sane. For example there is an audit to check that the version string of the packages match what was shipped in the OS, another is to ensure that the files delivered in the previous revision are all included in the present revision etc.

Once it passes these audits, it moves to our Install Backout Testing. This simply applies and backs out the patch a number of times. In the more complicated test cases the patch is applied using the -R option to patchadd which is designed to test that the patch is compliant with live upgrade etc. Since patch creators are able to write free scripts in patches (prepatch etc.) auditing is not reliable to catch issues and this practical testing is the best way to identify problems. Abscent from the document is our Install Backout testing on zones in solaris 10 which obviously ensures that the patch can be added and removed from a system running zones.

The testing that Patch System Test performs is system testing (as the name implies!). We are not concerned with testing each and every function in the code to ensure its correctness, this responsibility lies formemost with the developers. What we aim to do is to test if any of the changes in the patches in our test cycle degrade the system or its applications.

We apply the patches to a range of machines. For our Solaris 10 line this ranges from an ultra 10 to domains on a 15k, and from relativly old PC's to the latest opteron offerings from Sun.

On these systems we run the tests that are described in the "Overview of Solaris Patch System Testing and Performance Regression Testing" document. Obviously we cant test every application on every configuration, so a set of tests of common applications and environments are selected. By running the OCE testsuite for example we are not testing Oracle, we are testing if any of the patches applied to the system cause it to fail. By running the liverpool test suite we are checking to see if a patch has caused something that a set of users logging in and using the system may notice. The document explains the other test suites, and although I have not checked every one, I think you can asusme that most are also running for Solaris 10 patches.

Of particular intest to some people are our Veritas and Oracle test setups. The Veritas test is designed to basically check that Veritas fs and vm work correctly after patches have been applied. So for example it checks that an existing filesystem is still mountable & writeable, it tries to create and destroy volumes and newfs volumes etc.

The OCE test suites are something that I am even less familar with! This certification test suite is ran against different machine configurations and different Oracle and OS versions. Again it is ran with the intention of finding any problems in patches that could cause something in oracle not to work.

Despite our testing, some things will slip through. A comment on Fintans blog mentiones what I think is bug 4978228 which was caused by a minor change to a data structure in a Soalris 8 kernel patch. Veritas file systems were using this portion of the data structure and this resulted in high io wait times being reported by some utilities. This issue while obviously a problem did not cause oracle to sease working or filesystem performance to be degraded so the issue was not caught until someone actually started looking at mpstat output.

Hopefully that gives an overview of our testing for you.

Tonight was the first opportunity I've had with a fully clear sky to test out my telescope since I made some adjustments to it recently. The conclusion?

The knobs are now much earlier to turn and the scope more stable, even without the vibration suspension pads. This makes the polar alignment a lot easier. Setup and aligned accurately in 15 mins.
Having better polar alignment means that tracking and goto's are more accurate. Tracking was fine using a 9mm eyepiece visually, and gotos using the high precision and quiet slew settings were always within the field of a 20mm eyepiece. Unfortunately I was at home in Dublin doing this so many faint objects were invisible, no trace of the whirlpool galaxy for example which was over the city.
Plus the scope has a much better feel to it.

I now know however why crosshairs are called crosshairs. Because about an inch from the lens there are two strands that cross to, well make crosshairs! I had always thought they were etched or painted on somewhere. I discovered this when one strand broke tonight, so now I have to work out how to fix that, its only the 6x30 finderscope so I'm not too worried about taking it apart.
There is also however a very small bolt floating around in the tube of the scope. Looks like I have to remove the primary mirror to get it out. What's worrying is of course where it came from! I have never seen a bolt that size in the scope before, and I'm worried that it may be from part of the housing of the secondary mirror, and that's not a trivial piece of the scope to service!

Computingwise, I'm still writing a tool to display the status of patches in testing. This is complicated by the fact that there are several states that a patch can be in, submitted, passed initial testing, failed initial testing,passed main testing etc. However we also need to consider the state of the patch in other tools, for example I need to display the appropriate message if the patch we are testing has already been released to sunsolve etc. Etc. This type of thing can be practically solved by Karnaugh maps. They are those truth table type things that your computer architecture teacher went on about, but neglected to mention any other application for! Basically you work out what your inputs are, in my case its mainly of on/off flags which is handy, then highlight the `boxes` that trigger particular states, and you can then trivially write the logic to arrive at those cases. This is still on sheets of paper at my desk, and hasn't made it into the code yet since some variables can have several states and I need to see if they should be split into separate binary conditions or if there is a mechanism for dealing with that in regular maps (must have been asleep that day in college).
Why am I going to this trouble? Well two weeks after writing the initial code, I'm still getting emails from people pointing out patches that slip through the logic. Currently the code is the logic, rather than an implementation of the logic, which is what I'm trying to fix.

p.s. Today the 1000th US soldier died in Iraq. This does not seem to be a news event today so I thought I would do them the honour of mentioning them (not a news story at all on many US newssites). May they and the many thousands of Iraqi victims of this confilct rest in peace.

Went to Mullingar last night to see Syrys, the lead singer is a friend of a friend. Unlike most 'friend of a friend' bands, Syrys were actually good! Nice loud Rock, with a hint of Gothiness. http://www.syrys.com/ has a couple of mp3's. They are playing a couple of gigs this month in Dublin and Dundalk and are well worth checking out.

A few weeks back I started talking to a friend about something. He stopped me before I finished the first sentence to tell me that he knew already, he had read about it in my girlfriends blog.
Tonight my girlfriend went out drinking with some folks. We usually agree to at least let each other know when we are going out, so I was a little surprised when I txt'd her around midnight to find out she was in a pub. "Why didnt you tell me you were going out?" I asked, the response, and I quote, "I just thought you'd read my blog". Do any other couples have this setup whereby rather than telling your other half something you post it on a blog?!
Earlier on in the week when I asked about something that was in her blog, I was told that it was none of my business! (Apparently it was for the interest of the online population of the world - less me!)
Perhaps now that we have hired Dave , he can write some relationship counseling software into roller too! Perhaps "dtrace for girlfriends" might help more!

Downloaded the SunRay3 software for linux on Friday night with the intention of getting it working over the weekend. It didn't work straight out of the box on my SuSE 9 machine so I thought I'd upgrade to 9.1 with the online update tool in yast2.

Now I have never done this before. And it's only recently that I've started using Live Upgrade to update a solaris box, I have an automated lab to test the Solaris patches work with Live Upgrade (and patchadd -R) so my confidence in the product is fairly good. The mistake I made was thinking that an automated update would be trivial on linux.

I pointed the tool to a nearby mirror, and set it downloading. When I came back hours later I discovered it had completed! However it had mentioned it neded to download several gig, and unless my broadband connection had got ultra fast, there is no way it could have finished. So I started it again, and sure enough it went off to get more packages. I started the update 5 times in total before all dependencies were met.

I then had a dilema. An update that hadne gone too well, had updated the kernel to 2.6.something, and god knows what on the system from the previous 2.4 kernel (sorry but linux kernel modules are about as forward compatible as pouring horse feed into a petrol engine, my laptop on the other hand has a solaris 8 network driver working happily in solaris 10), should I reboot? Ah sure why not, worst that can happen is that I have to recompile the nvidia drivers right?

nvidia drivers didnt work. And didn't compile. ok my own fault for not downloading the ones for the 2.6 kernel (thought of horse feed cross my mind again). downloaded compiled and insmodded fine. reboot. panic. reboot. hang. reboot. roll a d20 to see whether it hangs or panics while setting up eth0.

Turns out that the VPN client module was making all of the networking parts of the kernel break. This module was rebuilt, with the 2.6 kernel, compiled fine, loaded fine. Then does random things, when you try to do something _else_ with networking, like run ifconfig. Found a module for the Java Desktop System and it works, but I'd have expected the broken module to complain at compile or insmod time if something was amis. It worked on 2.4 afterall.

Networking now works, with the forcedeth driver rather than the nvnet driver. According to yast2 it should be nvnet, according to modprobe.conf its nvnet, but something still insists on using the forcedeth driver. I think Linux is trying to be clever somewhere, but I'll settle for using this for the moment it works. I haven't gone near audio, scsi, scanner, printer, but based on my previous experience (not counting this weekend) of the Java Desktop System and SuSE that should be ok.

That, dear friends is the story, much abridged, of how my upgrade went at the weekend. Does the SunRay work yet? Well no (its only listed as supporting SuSE 8, not 9.1), thats another days work, but when it does I'll post pictures of the PC in the attic and Neverwinter Nights running on the sunray :-)

In other news Prof. Fred Whipple passed away aged 97. He is probably best known for coming up with the `dirty snowball` theory of comet neucleii[1], in 1950 the idea of the comets being mainly ice and having tails of gas heated by the Sun was a totally new concept. Almost as if the universe decided to mark his passing, two new comets were discovered by Amateurs last week. 2004/Q1 (Tucker) and 2004/Q2 (Machholz) may reach naked eye visibility sometime around December or January.


[1]http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bibcode=1950ApJ...111..375W&db_key=AST&high=409ec4d6b916472