I don't know how to say goodbye

    I've been through a number of downsizings at Sun. I even ended up on the down side of one of the early ones, but found a new position just before taking a job elsewhere. I work with many fun, talented people, and I've shaken my head at some of the folks let go in the past. But I'm still getting over the number of people I knew well and worked with, and the number of really talented, top notch employees who got let go on Thursday. Some of these folks where in high demand, both by sales teams and customers. These same folks drove a lot of training in hot, important technology topics, like Solaris, virtualization, consolidation, ZFS, Zones, etc, and they are gone. I really hope that they find another opening at Sun, now or soon. I have no doubt that many of these folks will be in high demand, even in a tough market like this. And I wish I could tell them this personally.

    I guess this time I'm coming to the realization that through all the other rounds of layoffs, I didn't pay enough attention to how to gracefully and comfortably keep connections with the people I knew who were being let go. I'd keep my eyes open to openings, and let someone know if I thought they might be interested, but there usually weren't many such opportunities. I don't drink alcoholic beverages, and particularly these days many of them aren't local, so going out for a beer would have been awkward at best. Maybe some of the new crop of social networking technologies, like Twitter, IM, SecondLife, Facebook, will make it easier going forward, but I know friends on these who have left and haven't been on them much since. Commiserating with friends still here takes some of the shock away. I just need to find a way to stay connected with them if they go, by their choice or Sun's.

    This isn't how I really want to do this, but for the moment it's something. All my friends let go by Sun this week, not goodbye, but till we meet again.

Posted at 11:21PM Jul 11, 2008 by dragonfly in General  |  Comments[1]

DOS Bootable USB flash drive - how I did it

    There are 2 things you need in order to make an USB flash drive boot into DOS. The first is a boot sector, and the second are the DOS boot files. Below are the steps I used to get these onto a USB flash drive, making it possible to boot into DOS from the USB flash drive.

    The following steps where all done in Microsoft Windows XP in a VMware virtual machine. They should work with most other versions of MS Windows. I successfully used these steps on an USB flash drive I got at Immersion Week 2008 for use in a ZFS demo (Identifies itself as CBM). YMMV depending on USB flash drive model and manufacturer. These steps are based off of the very useful information at BootDisk.com.

1) Getting a boot sector on the USB flash drive
    Start by gettng the mkbt DOS utility from here mkbt
    Unzip mkbt into a temporary directory
    OK, if you are like most people these days, you don't have a floppy drive in your laptop or desktop, and you may never have, although you should know what a floppy is if you have any interest in doing this. So, if you don't have a floppy drive in your machine, you can use vfd to create a virtual floppy, which is what I did. You can get vfd from here vfd, then follow the directions for creating a virtual drive in RAM, then save it as a file for future use. Use the Windows Explorer format menu item to format the virtual floppy and make sure you check off the box to make an MS-DOS start up disk.

    Once you have access to a DOS boot floppy, use the following command, from a command prompt, to save the boot sector, where a: is the drive letter of your DOS bootable floppy (virtual or physical)

mkbt -c a: bootsect.bin

    Now use the following command to write the boot sector to your USB flash drive, where n: should be replaced with the drive letter of you USB flash drive.

mkbt -x n: bootsect.bin

2) Getting the DOS boot files
    copy all the files from the boot floppy onto the USB flash drive.

    Now you should have a DOS bootable USB flash drive, for use with a system that supports booting from USB, including x64 products from Sun. Copy over whatever DOS utilities you need to use, including AFU for Adaptec RAID controller firmware updates, which is used in some of Sun's x64 products. Or use it for whatever need you may have. Even with a small USB flash drive, you will have a lot more room than a floppy ever dreamed of. Perhaps my next blog post should be on whether inanimate objects dream. :-)

Posted at 11:12PM Jun 16, 2008 by dragonfly in Geekery  |  Comments[2]

DRM sucks ... battery life

    I like reading, a lot of it is science fiction, and so does my wife. She actually reads more than I, and has the good fortune to work at a library, where she has access to a virtually limitless supply of books at almost no cost. I'm thrilled that both of my sons are following in our footsteps in this regard, as they are both enthusiastic readers and regularly take advantage of the library system.

    While my wife reads mostly 'physical' books, I read a lot on my RAZR V3xx and my Palm T3. And while there are multiple formats and readers for the Palm OS, our library's DRMed format is MobiBook. Some other ebook sources I use also use that format, and the Mobipocket Reader isn't bad. I think I prefer Plucker, which is a readily available format for a lot of Public Domain stuff via Project Gutenberg, and I use it for 'mostly text' web page reading.

    The problem with MobiPocket is that it really seems to drain my battery faster than most anything I do on my T3. I got several of David Weber's Honor Harrington book for my birthday, and reading them ends up generating multiple battery warning pop-ups, requiring several visits a day to the cradle for a boost. I attribute this power hungry nature to the encryption heavy nature of DRM, although maybe I'm enjoying the books so much I'm reading more. Or maybe the battery I installed in my T3 a while back doesn't have the lifetime the original had, and is fading already. Nah, more fun to blame DRM. Excuse me, I've got to get back to my reading. :-)

Posted at 10:21PM Jun 02, 2008 by dragonfly in General  |  Comments[3]

My new home takes shape

    While I continue to struggle to get my house ready for selling, I take some comfort in the progress of my new community, Mosaic Commons, both from a personal level and from a construction perspective. One of our many resident geeks set up this webcam in our marketing trailer, and it happens to look at my house (the one on the right). I can now look to the future whenever I'm having doubts.

    As it turns out, one of the General Contractor's folks working on this project had the chance to take some fabulous aerial photos of our site, including this one, where my home is one of the 2 large buildings on the bottom just left of center. This picture also gives you a sense of the 2 neighborhoods, with Camelot Cohousing in the upper right part of the picture, and Mosaic Commons in the middle to lower left. These 2 communities are part of Sawyer Hill Ecovillage in Berlin, MA. We still have units available, so come be my neighbor. :-)

Posted at 09:58PM May 21, 2008 by dragonfly in General  |  Comments[3]

Dealing with uncommon image formats

    During my downsizing and de-cluttering, I came across a half dozen 3.5" floppies that held digitized pictures. These were from a time before I had a digital camera, and were done as part of the film processing service. They happened to be of my oldest son's birth, so they are important, and I wanted to be able to view them with ease and manage them the same way I do the pictures from my digital cameras.

    Ooops, they are in KGP format, Konica Camera File, so it must have been a Konica based service. My MackBook Pro, running OS X 10.5.x, didn't recognize the format as something any of the apps currently installed knew what to do with, so off to Google for help. There I find XnView, a free graphics viewer supporting mucho formats, and it's associated utility NConvert. As it turns out, the Mac OS X version of XnView is in transition from an older release to a new alpha of a universal binary re-write. I tried it and it seems to work OK, but I really wanted the files in a more usable format.

    So, I tried NConvert, which turns out to be a CLI-based utility. I wanted to do a bulk conversion from KGP to .jpg files, and after a quick review of the command line parameters, /Applications/NConvert/nconvert -help, I took a stab at doing my conversions, as follows :

/Applications/NConvert/nconvert -in kqp -o %.jpg -out jpeg -keepfiledate *

    This worked great, in a quick, efficient manner. Keep in mind that the command examples I give are based on where I put the nconvert directory, and that this command line execution is done via the Mac OS X Terminal application, giving me access to the BSD under-pinnings of OS X. Am I done and ready to upload them to SmugMug yet? Not quite.

    Apparently, when one set of film was developed, either I had taken all the pictures upside down, or the developer processing them upside down. Either way, one whole floppy worth of pictures were upside down, and that diminished from their excellence, or at least from them being readily recognizable. Another quick review of command line parameters, and I tried this on that floppy's files:

/Applications/NConvert/nconvert -in jpeg -o %.jpg -out jpeg -keepfiledate -jpegtrans rot180 *.jpg

    Et voila, c'est magnifique. All the pictures where then burnt onto CD for safe keeping, and uploaded to SmugMug for sharing, discretely, of course. Then yesterday, as I considered blogging with pictures of my bike riding family, I got to thinking that perhaps I could replace my old standby method for resizing my RAZR taken pics to something I consider more usable in a blog post. My habit had been to use The Gimp to load, resize and save each picture. Sure, there might be a way to automate that, but here I was already becoming an expert at nconvert. And, with the number of pictures I was considering to post, it was time for a bulk method, and here it is:

/Applications/NConvert/nconvert -in jpeg -o %b.jpg -out jpeg -keepfiledate -resize 30% 30% *.jpg

    It's just that simple. Nconvert's help listing is really long, so I won't post it here, but I highly recommend nconvert for your image manipulation needs, as long as you can deal with command line utilities. Oh, I should mention that both XnView and NConvert are cross platform apps, available on Solaris, Linux, Windows, and obviously Mac OS X. Thanks Pierre Gougelet.

Posted at 11:26PM Apr 22, 2008 by dragonfly in Geekery  |  Comments[1]

Rail Trailing it

    I live in New England, which is notorious for bad weather and frequent changes. Still, the last week or so has been quite warm spring weather, including today, much to the chagrin of the runners in the Boston Marathon. But that is another story. Today's weather, and the kids being on April vacation this week, inspired us to make our first sojourn on one of our local Rail Trails. This one starts in Ayer and goes up through Pepperell, although we rarely ride the whole thing as a family.

    This was the first time on the trail for my youngest with his new multi-speed bike. We have been furiously getting rid of stuff and downsizing, and due to a miscommunication when our dumpster arrived, my youngest's mono-speed bicycle got put out by the side of the road and quickly claimed. Needless to say, he was quite upset, but a quick trip to our local Salvation Army and $20 later, he had a 'new' bike with 18 speeds. He did great, riding for a 4 mile round trip with no complaints and plenty of energy.

    We even had my Dad along, who has an electric bike, which is basically a 15 speed with a mounted, and heavy, battery and electric motor. With this he can start up quickly and get help on the hills. Since he is legally blind with severe tunnel vision from his triple bypass surgery, and this is his primary means of getting around farther than he can walk, I guess I won't chastise him for 'cheating'. :-) Unfortunately, our car bike rack really doesn't have room for more than 3 full size bikes, and while my youngest's new bike can fit in the back of the car, my Dad's is too much, so he rode to the trail head and back. Guess he ended up with more of a work out than me.

    Here are some pics I snapped on the way. I've never given cell phone cameras much credibility, but I have to admit that the one in my RAZR V3xx isn't bad, and really handy, even compared with the 2 small digitals I have.


Almost everyone is on the trail. :-)


Now we are all on the trail.


Including me. :-)


A break at the half way point, and some stone skipping too.


Nice scenery too.

Update

I was cursed with errors of '6' inn writing this post. First, I mis-heard my wife and accepted the '18' speeds of my youngest's bike. After she read this blog she suggested I was mistaken, and so during today's ride I checked. He does have 6 back gears, but only one pedal gear, so he has a '6' gear bike. Second, he lasted for the full trip, which was '6' miles round trip, not 4. And he was a champ today as well, going for the full 8 mile round trip. :-)

Posted at 11:36PM Apr 21, 2008 by dragonfly in General  |  Comments[0]

My old app on a new medium

    I enjoy dabbling in programming, particularly when I doing it for my own interests. As a matter of fact, that's how I first got started with computers, back in high school. Computers weren't even part of the curriculum yet, but the math department had one for scoring tests, and if you came in early or stayed after school, you could program in BASIC on it. With a keyboard and monitor no less. Which was more than I had at MIT and Northeastern University in the years to follow.

    Over the years I have programmed in Visual BASIC, which I learned while a phone support engineer for a PC email app and had a developer respond to a customer feature request that it was something anybody could do in Visual BASIC so I learned how. I've also played with Java, Perl, Pascal, VAX Assembler, BeyondMail Rules, DOS batch, shell scripting, and who knows what else. And they have all been fun in their own way.

    When I got my first PC, a Leading Edge IBM compatible, I started playing with 8086 assembly programming. Those were the heady days of Norton and his books on the inner workings of DOS and PCs. I've always tended to prefer programming useful things, at least to me, like utilities, and despite there being several already in existence, I started coding a PC identification program. I got far enough to display the usual basics before getting distracted by other things. I have also been known to have pack rat tendencies, which I am sorely regretting these days as I drastically downsize. Fortunately, I saved most of my coding, exe and source, and still have my PCC.EXE app from all those years ago.

    For some reason, perhaps the pack rat instinct in an odd way, I like emulators. Right now I have both VMware Fusion and Sun's VirtualBox installed on my MacBook Pro, as well as a Palm emulator and Basilisk II, an old Mac emulator. I won't be surprised if others show up eventually as well. Just recently it was noted, on a Palm blog I track called TamsPalm, that the PALMDOSBOX code was picked up by a well qualified Palm OS developer and made to work on some newer Palms, including my T3. Naturally, I had to play with it, as I have several other DOS apps I sometimes play with for old times sake. And it works, although the built in virtual keyboard doesn't have a \ key, oddly enough. Makes it hard to change directories. Without further ado, a picture of PALMDOSBOX running on my T3, with my PCC.EXE app running under PALMDOSBOX.

Posted at 08:27PM Apr 14, 2008 by dragonfly in Palm  |  Comments[2]

Kick ME?

    What have I done to deserve kids like this. A slap on the back and much giggling by my youngest, and the result is below. I'll get him for this. :-)

Posted at 02:01PM Mar 29, 2008 by dragonfly in General  |  Comments[0]

A snowman comes into existence

    During our most recent snow storm, the temp was warm and the snow perfect for snow balls and their larger sibs, snowmen. So, while I shoveled our driveway, my oldest got to work on his creation.



    Step one, start with a nice big, solid base. Follow that up with a nearly as big abdomen. Not quite big enough yet.



    Ooops, after asking Dad several times if it was big enough, and what do I know, it was too big for him to lift. I needed a break from shoveling anyway. On three, and we had it on. The rest he could handle, with some help/company/interference from his younger bro. Hey, don't we have a pair of old boots around you could use? :-)

Posted at 10:04PM Mar 08, 2008 by dragonfly in General  |  Comments[0]

SF33 Live 3

    I forgot to mention who we are. There are four of us, including myself, my father, my friend Bill Page, and my friend Ken Porter. I've known Bill for 25+ years, and this is the first time I've gotten him to go. He has enjoyed the marathon, but reached his limit after WotW. Ken is still hanging on, but since he has to work today, he will likely leave after this one.

    Yup, Ken bailed to get some sleep before work. Which means he missed 'Black Sheep'. If you don't consider gratuitous gore ala Dawn of the Dead mixed with sheep jokes and fart jokes thrown in for good measure qualities of a family movie, then I would agree with you and point out that these are all essential elements of 'Black Sheep'. Needless to say it was a hit with this crowd. :-)

    Up next is 1984, which, surprisingly, I haven't seen. Then I can catch some Zs if I like during 'Journey to the 7th planet', which I have seen and which I therefore don't consider important. I'll still probably watch it though.

    Without going into all the details, our last movie, 'A Boy and His Dog' Restored is locked in a UPS warehouse. Garen is hoping to get it out in time, due to a wrong zip code having put it there in the first place. I haven't seen it since I was a teen, so it should be interesting. Later. ^_^

Posted at 05:36AM Feb 18, 2008 by dragonfly in General  |  Comments[0]

SF33 Live 2

    'In the Shadow of the Moon' documentary still on as we arrive back from a dinner break. We left the marathon after 'The Last Mimzy', since the timing was good and we were OK with missing the Apollo documentary. We had a delicious meal at Diva's Indian Bistro here in Davis Square, Somerville, MA.

    When you are seeing some of these films in a theatre with a group of like minded people, you need to be prepared to miss some lines, as the crowd picks up on laughs et al that more mixed crowds don't. Although this documentary on the Apollo program has the theatre pretty quiet. I am absolutely a child of the moon missions, have a couple official space pens, like Tang and wish I could still get Space Food Sticks. Applause now for Neil Armstrong saying 'That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind'.

    One film we saw, 'King Dinosaur', was a hoot with this crowd. It was an old 50s era film that was so bad by today's standards, that it had a comic affect with this crowd. It wouldn't have been nearly as enjoyable elsewhere. Hopefully I'll have more later, but don't stay up. :-)

Posted at 08:09PM Feb 17, 2008 by dragonfly in General  |  Comments[2]

SF33 Live

Originally uploaded by Dr. Agonfly.

Yes, it's true. The 33rd annual Boston Science Fiction Marathon is well under way. Surprise 1st film - Cloverfield. They should've handed out barf bag (motion sickness inducing camera work).

Posted at 02:55PM Feb 17, 2008 by dragonfly in General  |  Comments[0]

Sun Blade 6000 firmware update

    The Sun Blade 6000 Modular Computing products have been out for several months now, and have been getting good press, like this Infoworld article. While they liked the Sun Blade 6000, one thing that was noted in this article is the lack of the browser-based user interface (BUI) to the ILOM, which the Sun Blade 8000 has. It was noted that the BUI feature was coming, and good news, it has arrived. Here is a link to the recently released Sun Blade 6000 chassis 1.1a firmware, which adds this functionality. So now you can use your choice of CLI (Command Line Interface) or BUI for managing and monitoring your Sun Blade 6000 chassis and blades, just like on the Sun Blade 8000.

    While you're updating firmware, make sure you check out what's available for the compute modules you have, at the Sun Blade 60000 & 8000 Modular Systems - Downloads page. There are downloads of firmware and supplemental software for the various compute modules available for the Sun Blade 6000, including a short description of what's new in each update. Not only will you find updates to BIOS, ILOM, ELOM, Diagnostic CDs, etc, but there is also the Sun Fire x64 Servers Management Pack 3.0 for Microsoft Operations Manager 2005, making it easier to manage your x64 systems from Sun using the Microsoft Operations Manager 2005. More on managing Sun's x64 systems in a future post, so stay tuned.

Posted at 09:38PM Jan 27, 2008 by dragonfly in General  |  Comments[0]

Goodbye manuals, welcome back memories

    I've been a pack rat since I was old enough to think something was mine. I also have what I call an overactive Boy Scout gland, i.e. I'm always trying to be prepared for even the most unlikely circumstances. One aspect of this tendency is my feeling like there is never enough time, so I want to be ready to do something productive if I suddenly find myself with a few extra moments. Most of my friends find it handy to have me around, because I usually have the item they need at hand. For me though, it can be frustrating to try to carry so much stuff, or other wise keep it at hand.

    Having been in the computer industry for 25+ years, and in my poorer days having lusted for more computer stuff, I've keep a lot of manuals, etc, in case I or someone else needed them. Even within the last few years, as I decided I didn't really need them, I felt someone out there might need them or want them. I still haven't found any reasonably easy way to find someone who wants them, and as most of them are for software, etc that is over 10 years old, it is unlikely that anyone wants them anyway. So, my collection of old BeyondMail, WinRules, Banyan Vines, Banyan Intelligent Messaging, Novel MHS, FTP Software TCP/IP, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Windows 3.1, MS DOS, old 68k Mac manuals, etc is finally going away. I'm recycling them in the paper recycling pickup here at home.

    It has taken a while to let go, and now I am comfortable saying goodbye to most of the old manuals. I may keep a memento or two, at least for a little while longer, but I'm feeling pretty good about shedding these pounds. If someone somewhere wanted them, keep hope, there may be another like me who still has old manuals. Actually, I'm quite impressed by how easy it has been lately to let go of stuff I've held onto for decades. It feels good, and I'm sure I won't miss them. I am taking a few pictures to remember my past neurosis'.

    In the process of cleaning up, which getting rid of the manuals has been part of, I have been reminded of some fond memories. Sun Microsystems has seen it's share of changes over the years, and I have made many friends at Sun over my 10 years. I started during the hey day of the dot com boom, and was part of a pretty close group of pre-sales engineers. We 'lived' in a section of cubicles we called Gomerville, and had many fun times. We also went through a cleaning, when the Boston area sales office moved from New England Executive Park to the then new Sun Campus.

    As part of that move, we took the opportunity to shed some pounds, including many old manuals. Some of them, like some of the ones I have been shedding now, had wire binders, which with a small amount of effort, you could pull out of the manual. This left you with a long wavy wire, and a lot of loose pages you could then put in the paper recycling. What to do with the wire was another question. I've been throwing mine away, but one of the creative lads at Sun during our move actually created a wire man. This objet d'art hung around his cube for several weeks until the final move, and was quite interesting. I might have considered doing something similarly artistic with my current wire, but I don't even want extra art hanging around. Besides, maybe when I'm ready for some wire art, I can find someone out there with manuals they want to get rid of. ^_^

Posted at 09:26PM Jan 26, 2008 by dragonfly in General  |  Comments[5]

Boston Science Fiction Marathon

    Boston is famous for many things, including tea parties, the USS Constitution, the Boston Red Sox and the New England Patriots. It's also famous for the Boston Marathon, a 26.2 mile jaunt through the burbs which I ran as a bandit in 1992. Don't ask me why, as I don't do things I like for 4.5 hours non-stop, so I still haven't figured out why I ran for that long, particularly after training by running around the freezing Charles River all winter. Perhaps working in Cambridge and living in Pawtucket, RI does strange things to you, or the commute gives your mind way too much time.

    I have much fonder memories of my participation in Boston's other marathon, the Boston Science Fiction Marathon, which is a 24-hour escape from reality in a movie theatre in Somerville, MA. Yup, 24-hours, from Noon Sunday to Noon Monday of President's day weekend, of science fiction movies both old and new. Interspersed between movies is some live entertainment, breaks for caffeine refills and bathroom trips, and socializing, such as it is, with other sci-fi fans. The list of movies for this year is starting to flesh out, and I'm getting psyched.

    I was first introduced to the BSFM by my brother-in-law many years ago. He had been going for several years, with many friends. He kept it up while he was local, and even came back to Boston from the midwest a time or two. I joined him for 3-4 years, but now that he has a son, and lives on the West coast, it's a tad difficult for him to attend. I also gave up the marathon once my oldest was born, or shortly there after, and am looking forward to it again. I got my best friend to finally commit to going with me, although I won't be too surprised if he bags it in the end. I'm hoping to entice other friends to join me, as I know quite a few folks who like sci-fi.

    I'll admit that it has been a while, well at least since my last BSFM, that I have pulled an all nighter and I'm not as young as I used to be. Funny how that works. The BSFM was at the Coolidge Corner theatre when I used to go, and it has since gone back to it's earlier location in Somerville, so I won't even be familiar with the neighborhood. Knowing Somerville, I'm sure there will be handy amenities nearby, although knowing the crowd any local WiFi will likely get swamped. Hmmm, maybe I could do live blogging from th BSFM. Let me know what you think about that idea. :-)

    If you live in the Boston area, or will be for the President's Day weekend, I highly recommend this event. This is the 33rd running of the event, and Garen Daly does a great job, so check out the website, order your tickets, and I'll see you there.

Posted at 10:43AM Jan 25, 2008 by dragonfly in General  |  Comments[1]