Tuesday June 15, 2004

Picture Perfect Sun Chai Chee

This picture was taken with an old digital camera that I had for 4 years now; and what a pleasant surprise! It actually looked really good! I was on my way back from lunch and figure that it would be nice to post a picture of Sun Chai Chee office. It was a hot day (as always in Singapore), but it turned out to be a perfect day for photography. "Chai Chee" literally means "vegetable market" or generally "wet market". Supposedly it was a farm produce distribution center, that has since moved. The place became an industrial estate with mostly factories, Adaptec's factory is still just behind. As Singapore labor became more expensive and factories moved out, it was converted into a "technology park" with intention of housing .com start-ups. Of course, now left with lots of empty offices. Sun was probably offered a sweet deal as one of the first tenants after the conversion, and being Sun during the .com era, the landlord was happy to let us put up the Sun logo on the building. There is no other tenant who has their logo up in the estate. (Btw, the other logo is the landlord's property management arm, they actually moved in later than Sun, so they had to put their logo BELOW ours! 8-) ) Most multi-national would be in or around the business district, so did Sun. But we grew so quickly during the late 90's we ran out of space. So the support people were moved to Chai Chee. Product Technical Support are here (moi included), and solution center, logistics, IT ops, etc... This is an odd location for an office. It's surrounded by residential estates and from one side of our office, you can literally peep into people's homes in the adjacent building! The upside of being in a residential area is conveniences. Cheap lunch, supermarkets, neighborhood doctor and dentists, hair saloons, you can even buy fresh meat and vegetable from the downsized wet market across the street.

This building used to be the Central Post Office! Yep, all mails came here! Being previously factories, the inside had unusually high ceilings for a cubicle laden office. That turn out to be REALLY nice, because the whole place look bright despite the cubicle dividers. No claustrophobia. This is me. Take a closer look...

You are warned!

Ah! Home sweet home. and ... nop, it is not an optical illusion nor the picture edited ... the middle is a 24" wide screen LCD panel, the object of envy of the whole office. The analog port is my Ultra60's second head, while the digital port is on SunRay 1G (the only one so far that can do 1920x1200 resolution) on our corporate SunRay network. On the left is an 18" LCD panel on another SunRay to our department's own SunRay network that runs bleeding edge software.

(2004-06-15 20:20:20.0) Permalink Comments [2]

Esc != ^[

esc Esc ESC ... No I'm not trying to get out of 'vi' insert mode.

Esc in support services world I'm in reads: Escalation. Bad news for most people, good news for me, I've got a job!

It's actually gratifying, no kidding. Unlike engineering projects that get axed all the time, all customer cases must come to a close, eventually, hook or crook, and therefore escalation too. Closure is a good thing. You sleep better, or you try to sleep it off and forget about it... either way, I slept. ;-)

It does, unfortunately, get to you sometimes. Especially when you get to explain "fixed, unverified". What kind of a fix is that? "I think I can solve world hunger! But I can't prove it ..." More so when it grabs all your time trying to explain why it's unverifiable, to the point that you couldn't blog! Now that's a sin. The reason for my "unverified" absence at Blah!

"What do you mean you can't fix 'freeing free xxx panic'?" That take quite an effort to explain, simply bec. you can't be too convincing when each time you repeat (and repeat and repeat), it always ends with the sentence, "however, we can't reproduce it so we cannot be sure if it will not happen again." Although probability says lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place, Murphy's says otherwise. Since we can't prevent for sure a ufs quietly messing up meta structures, at the least, try not to panic. [See SRDB70770] It's not going to do much good if you run only 1 app on 1 file system, but the system stays up! You can still use it as an egg boiler.

Good 'ol ufs is too fragile to begin with. I remember studying about file system strucutre; inodes, direct blocks, indirect blocks, and that's college, wholly 2 decades ago! [Disclaimer: I'm 21!] Desire to buffer i/o opens up whole new opportunities to mess up in ways that's untraceable. By the time you see it (panic or otherwise), it's too late, since it probably happened some time ago.

What gives? Let ufs R.I.P. We have zfs, if you have to go Sol 10 just for it, it's probably worth it. I have yet to take a test drive, but I will, and probably give me something else to blog about too.

(2004-06-15 00:01:02.0) Permalink