Tuesday Nov 04, 2008
A few weeks back I was listening to my local NPR station KUT and got to hear Fresh
Air, something I don't usually get to hear as I'm working
when it's on here. I happened to catch Michael Pollan talking
about his
"Farmer in Chief" open letter to the next U.S. president.
It was an interesting discussion, so went to check it out on
line. Pollan ties our food system to cheap oil, global warming
and national security and suggests rethinking the way we grow,
sell and even define food to something more sustainable. He
also suggests turning about a third of the White House lawn into
a small farm, about 5 acres. Interestingly the CSA from which
we're getting our vegetables for the next several weeks has
about 4 acres in cultivation.
I thought the article was good "food for thought" :).
Thursday Oct 30, 2008
Just 5 days to go before the election. Of course, the election
is already happening in the 30-some states that support early
voting. Being a bit of a political junkie, I'm all set to watch
lots of TV on Tuesday night.
I quite honestly don't want another electoral college squeaker
like the last two elections. I do think if McCain is going to
win, it will be a squeaker. If Obama is going to win, probably
not as much so, if we believe the polls. It will be interesting
to see how well the polls match reality. While I'm hoping they
do, I've also seen enough times where the polls are messed up to
wait for the ultimate poll on Tuesday before I start celebrating
or pouting :).
Monday Oct 27, 2008
Last night we went to a "meet the farmer" and potluck event at
the community supported agriculture (CSA) farm we joined for the
fall harvest season. The farm is Hands of the Earth, not too
far from the Austin airport. Our boys were impressed by the
planes going by overhead. Having grown up near the
Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, I can tell them it's not always so
much fun.
The farm is pretty small, probably around 10 acres, and I think
they said about 4 were cultivated. We had a tour from a long
time member and after dinner another tour from Marisol, the
farmer. She was obviously really into it, and most excited by
the carrots that were growing in about 5 rows at one end of the
farm. Nice to see the person growing your food getting really
into it.
The potluck was interesting and fun, as they usually are. My
wife Karen brought some chili she made that day using beef from
our grass-fed beef (cattle?) CSA. She got some compliments, and
I agreed, it was quite good. There were lots of other good
dishes, a great blueberry pie, wine, beer, etc.
Karen thought we were a bit out of place with this crowd, which
mostly seemed younger and more urban. Some had kids, but many
couples did not, or didn't bring any kids. But really, the
thing that brought us there was a love of good vegetables,
right?
There were also lots of dogs at this event, and Nick and Sam
loved it! They particularly liked this male gigantic lab
cross. He was the biggest lab I'd ever seen, more the size of a
heavy Great Dane. Funny thing, his mother was also there, and
she was a lab-sized black lab or lab cross. There were lots of
other dogs, and they were all pretty well behaved, which was
nice. There was a little terrier that was zipping around the
fields having a great time!
This is our second time with a CSA. We joined a CSA in the
spring, and while it started out okay, that farm didn't
communicate very well. After the season was over, we signed up
for another half share, and didn't get any of it, despite
repeated attempts at communicating with that farm. We're hoping
this goes better, and I have a pretty good feeling about it
after this potluck.
We start getting our vegetables on Wednesday at the Triangle
farmer's market in Austin. Since Sun is at least part of the
way there, I'll be picking up the veggies. I'm looking forward
to it.
Tuesday Oct 21, 2008
I checked out my county's elections web site, and discovered I
could vote early a few places near home, and one quite close to
my route to work. So I stopped by this morning on my way in to
Sun Austin and voted.
The polling place was doing steady business, and kept the four
people checking voter registrations busy during the time I was
there and paying attention. When I left it had slowed a bit,
but it was heartening to see the business they were doing.
Our county used electronic voting machines (they even called
them "computers", which they are, of course) that allow you to
select the precinct and ballot style. One of the poll judges
was there to help get that done, and go through an optional
demonstration for those who hadn't used the machines or needed a
review. I hadn't used the machine before (I wanted a paper
ballot last time I early voted) but I figured out I could work
it out, which turned out to be true.
The machines have a touch screen, and touching a candidates name
in a race selects, touching it again deselects. I didn't
actually have to change any of my votes, but I assume if you've
selected one candidate and touch another the selection would
change, or perhaps pop up a question asking whether you want to
change.
After I finished selecting my choices, I was given the option to
review. In some races I had not voted, as their was only one
selection, in all cases for the locally predominant party, and I
didn't care to give them a free vote. These were highlighted.
When I got to the last page of the review the "Vote" button on
top of the machine was highlighted and I hit it. The machine
gave me a last chance to re-review and noted I had not selected
a vote in some races. I said go ahead and complete my vote, and
I was done.
Overall, a good experience. In the past I've worried about the
security of these systems, and while I still do, I've come to
look at this in a more historical perspective. Vote fraud can
happen with paper ballot boxes or electronic voting machines,
though I think we need to work on making this more detectable in
the electronic case. I trust the local election officials to do
the right thing, as I have no reason to believe they won't.
Tuesday Sep 23, 2008
I previously blogged about getting
NMH from the Solaris Companion web site. I went to the web site
again and read further down the page and noticed there was a IPS
repository. This is easier for OpenSolaris than downloading a
package and then adding it. Here are the steps I followed to
install gnuplot:
pfexec pkg set-authority -O http://pkg.sunfreeware.com:9000/ sunfreeware.com
pfexec pkg refresh
pfexec pkg install IPSFWgplot
Works great.
Monday Sep 22, 2008
One of the things missing when you install OpenSolaris in a
VMware virtual machine is audio. Apparently the driver for the
audio device that VMware emulates isn't redistributable, so it
isn't included as part of OpenSolaris.
To solve this, I grabbed a copy of the Open Sound System
drivers package
and followed the installation
instructions. After a reboot, I had sound.
Monday Sep 22, 2008
Last week I blogged about OpenSolaris
BE and build names. Another way to accomplish this is on
your next image update. Create an OpenSolaris boot
environment, mount it, update it, unmount it, and activate it.
This is steps 4 through 9 of Updating
Your System to OpenSolaris Development Builds.
Friday Sep 19, 2008
Yesterday I mentioned that I needed to install MH or NMH on my
home OpenSolaris virtual machine. I took at look at the Sunfreeware site and
discovered NMH is part of the Sun
Companion CD Project. I grabbed the Solaris package from
there and installed it with pkgadd. Nice and
quick, works great.
Friday Sep 19, 2008
I updated my laptop running OpenSolaris from build 97 to build
98 yesterday. No issues at all. Gotta go update at home too.
Thursday Sep 18, 2008
Last night I finally threw the switch and migrated my main
virtual machine at home from Solaris Express snv_79 to
OpenSolaris. Well, actually, I finally had the new OpenSolaris
virtual machine ready and the data migrated so I could power off
the Solaris Express virtual machine.
I still have a few missing pieces left to deal with. First, I
need to get tkbiff
installed. I also need MH or NMH. I've
used MH and later NMH on and off for many years. It provides
command line tools to scan folders, send mail, sort mail, burst
digests, and more. Now I use Gnus within XEmacs, but I'm on one
mailing list that only comes in digest form, and I used the
MH burst command to break the digests apart into
single e-mail messages. I also occasionally use the MH
scan command to quickly scan a folder for an item of
interest, particularly if I don't have XEmacs running. It's
much quicker to run scan than to start XEmacs and then
Gnus within XEmacs.
The other item of interest is that I'm finally migrating away
from fvwm2 with fvwm-themes to GNOME. I started using GNOME a
few months ago when Sun gave me a laptop and told me to run
OpenSolaris. I've grown to like it well enough, though I miss a
few of fvwm's capabilities. But now my work and home
environments will be more similar, and that's more efficient for
me. I've gotten more used to the GNOME mouse clicks and have
found they just don't work with my FVWM setup! :)
Thursday Sep 18, 2008
I recently read a thread on one of the OpenSolaris mailing lists
about how BE (boot environment) names don't reflect anything
about the OpenSolaris build it contains. It occurred to me that
since pkg image-update finds a BE named
opensolaris-N and then creates a new
BE named opensolaris-N+1, you could
rename your current BE
opensolaris-buildnumber and pkg
image-update would "just do it". This only works if
you upgrade at every build. If you don't, the number gets off,
but you can fix that by renaming BEs or by creating BEs for the
missing builds with the appropriate names.
Having done all this, my system shows this for BEs:
BE Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created
-- ------ ---------- ----- ------ -------
opensolaris-96 - - 37.92M static 2008-09-05 10:14
opensolaris-97 - - 18.31M static 2008-09-11 15:59
opensolaris-98 NR / 13.78G static 2008-09-18 11:36
Wednesday Aug 27, 2008
Some weeks back, my manager gave me a HP Compaq 8510p laptop to
use, on condition that I install OpenSolaris, use it, and report
problems. Sounded good to me, so I grabbed it.
Over the past several weeks, I've gotten OpenSolaris and various
tools I use installed and working nicely, and was pretty
productive on the laptop. I figured out how to hook up and use
the 24.1 inch monitor here at work[1],
figured out how to customize the system using NWAM (NetWork
Auto-Magic). Everything was going good.
I turned on my laptop on Sunday, and it gave me a grub>
prompt. Oh oh. GRUB couldn't see anything. I thought
maybe the laptop had taken a hard knock on a trip to downtown
Austin on Saturday morning. Even scarier, I tried to recover
using an OpenSolaris 2008.05 LiveCD I had around, but it gave me
errors. At first I thought the errors were something seriously
wrong with the system, but on closer inspection, noticed it was
complaining about a bad sector on the CD. So I burned another
CD, and it started fine. The OpenSolaris from the new copy of
the LiveCD could see the partitions, but it couldn't access the
ZFS pool on hard disk. At this point, I gave up and
re-installed OpenSolaris 2008.05 from the CD. That went fine.
But during the install, I recalled that I had seen this when
looking at the ZFS pool using zpool status on Friday:
pool: rpool
state: ONLINE
status: The pool is formatted using an older on-disk format. The pool can
still be used, but some features are unavailable.
action: Upgrade the pool using 'zpool upgrade'. Once this is done, the
pool will no longer be accessible on older software versions.
scrub: none requested
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
rpool ONLINE 0 0 0
c5t0d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
I had gone ahead and upgraded rpool. Hmm, could this be it? I
then recalled reading something on some OpenSolaris e-mail list
about this, where GRUB couldn't read the latest ZFS format, or
if it could, you needed to update GRUB on the disk. There's an
e-mail
thread that discusses this. It turns out I *might* have
been able to recover, had I had a nv94 or higher CD
So the moral of that story is to make sure you know what you're
doing before upgrading a root ZFS pool. Also, make backups of
system configuration information and scripts!
After I installed, I knew I'd need a few things to be
productive:
- Sun Studio Express
- OpenOffice
- Punchin
- XEmacs
- tkbiff
- NWAM scripts
Sun Studio Express and OpenOffice were easy to get, I just
grabbed them using from the IPS repository by using pkg
install .... Punchin was a chicken and egg problem, in
that I had to get punched in to get the packages. Fortunately,
I have a Solaris Express VMware virtual machine on my home PC,
and used that to punchin and grab the packages, then used scp to
copy the packages and credentials to the laptop.
tkbiff was trivial. XEmacs was a bit more involved, though I
was surprised how little it took to get it built and working.
Turns out I remembered a few things from the first time around.
I wanted to use the old X Athena widgets, but the header files
disappeared from OpenSolaris several builds ago. But IPS lets
you install old versions of packages, so I figured out which
package and the version I needed and installed it.
NWAM has been more interesting, and is one area where I really
wish I'd saved a backup copy of the scripts. Grr. You can
write a script that NWAM invokes when there's a change in the
system's network interfaces, and from that you can return a
name. NWAM invokes bringup and teardown scripts associated with
that name. So my typical way of working is wireless at home and
wired at work. When I'm at work, I use NIS, at home, I don't.
Sadly, I'm still working on getting these right, and when I do,
I'll write up another blog entry about them.
Footnotes:
[1] If the monitor is connected and plugged in when Xorg starts,
it just works, but it drivers the laptop display at 1920x1200,
which the laptop doesn't support. So I use xrandr --output LVDS
--off to make it work.
Friday Aug 08, 2008
Last night we hit the brand new Freebirds on Burnet Road that
opened yesterday, then headed down to Zilker Park for the Zilker
Hillside Theater production of Disney's Beauty and the
Beast. After a slow drive into the park, which I think
was caused by the slow process of every car stopping to pay, we
finally parked, grabbed our blankets and cooler, and headed to
the hill in front of the stage. Once we got there, we
discovered that the hill was pretty packed already, but we found
a decent spot near the top of the hill to the right of the stage
and set up.
We had about an hour or so to wait, so the boys ran off to run
up and down the hill, climb a tree, and use the port-a-potties.
Karen and I sat on the blankets and waited for the show to
start. While we waited, things got more and more crowded around
us. Some folks parked in front of us and filled up an air
mattress, which put them a bit higher than us, but Karen and I
could see over them and through the gaps, and the boys could
still see well on the right side.
The people who moved in behind us, on the other hand, were a bit
of a problem, at least at first. They bumped into us, and I
felt very crowded. Eventually they backed off a bit, we moved
forward a bit, and that all worked out.
While we were waiting for the show to start at dusk, I got a
program, and was looking at the actor bios and pictures, and
noticed a familiar name. Our neighbor Ben, the son of Nick's
second grade teacher, was in the show as Chip! We had no idea
Ben was in the show, it was a nice surprise. And he played his
part well.
As for the actual show, it seemed to be pretty well done. The
female lead, Belle, was well cast, and she had an excellent
voice that was easily understandable. I'm sure part of that was
her, and part the songs and lyrics.
My only criticism is that I thought the first half was a bit
long and dragged a bit. The second half was a bit shorter and
faster paced. The only glitch I recall in the show was Gaston's
wireless face microphone broke at one point, so he grabbed a
hand wireless microphone and used that, which I thought was
pretty quick thinking of him or the directors (or both).
After the show, we went down to the stage to say hello to Ben,
then headed back to our car. It took us 10-15 minutes to get
out of the park. I noticed most people were heading west
towards Mopac, so I headed east and hit Barton Springs Road and
then headed west, and that got us to Mopac much more
quickly than if we had stayed on the park road. We got home at
midnight, so it was kind of a late night, but I think we enjoyed
it and thought it was worth it, even if Sam almost fell asleep
on the blanket. :)
Thursday May 08, 2008
May is Bike Month, and here in the Austin area Bike to Work Day
is Friday, May 16. I've only ridden my bike to work once so far
this spring, and intend to ride on May 16, possibly another time
before then too.
One of the activities this year is
Tree to Tree: The Parmer Commutes. This ride starts in
Cedar Park and heads down Parmer Lane and beyond to the
Arboretum area in northwest Austin. It just so happens that I
commute on part of this route, so I intend to join this group at
Lakeline and Parmer at 7:10 and ride down to Music City Cycles
and then beyond to Sun. The ride map shows the group going
along Riata Park Circle, right next to Apple and a short
distance from Sun.
If you live up north in Cedar Park or Round Rock somewhere near
Parmer and work somewhere towards northwest Austin, consider
joining the ride.
Monday Apr 14, 2008
On Friday the kid's elementary school PTA held its annual
carnival. One of the attractions was a petting zoo. They had
goats, piglets, rabbits and chickens.
Karen has been trying to figure out what to do with one our
young roosters, Harry, who was hatched out in early January.
He's acting more and more like a rooster, and is getting a bit
unpleasant to be around. Also, living in a suburban
neighborhood, we think sure the neighbors might get annoyed with
hearing a rooster in the early morning, so we've always intended
to get rid of our roosters. Karen had posted a "free rooster"
note on a pet chickens web site, but got no interest. The next
alternative was to take him up to the feed store and give him
away.
Anyway, back to the petting zoo. Karen asked the petting zoo
owner if she'd take a Rhode Island Red rooster, and she said she
would. So Karen got our rooster and took him over there.
Our son Nick was upset and said he was going to miss Harry, but
hasn't talked that much about him since then, so maybe he won't
miss him that much. He still has 9 other chicks, 4 hens, 3
cats, a brother and mom and dad on which to shower his
affection, so maybe that's enough :).
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I do the same thing! :)
If only the updates were m...
I've found the updates I've installed to be reliab...