Tuesday November 30, 2004

A Romantic idea

My soft side makes an appearance on this weblog...

Before your significant other gets home take a bottle ( do not use it all !) of their bubble bath and write their name or your own personal nickname for them in the bath. The bath has to be dry and this is best done only a few minutes before they arrives else it slurrrrrsss a bit making it unreadable. Also put the plug in. I should have saved this tip for Valentine's day .

I am even prepared to let you have the credit for this idea and claim it as your own

Monday November 29, 2004

Motorway advertising, children walking to school and 4X4's

Last weekend we drove up to see my father in law. Two hundred miles of motorway driving. Amazingly on both journeys we did it in about three hours, only breaking the national speed limit by ten miles per hour. But as we drove up we saw an ever increasing number of 'mobile' advertising in fields along the motorway.

If I remember rightly advertising is not strictly allowed by the sides of motorways. But there is nothing to stop people parking a lorry trailer in a field which then happens to carry advertising material. There also seems to be an ever increasing number of really mobile advertisments on trailers pulled along the road by vans. Our local Sainsburys store had an extension and a refit recently. The store kindly parked one of the mobile trailers and its towing van on the concrete apron of a busy roundabout in Camberley. This had the effect of blocking the view of drivers approaching the roundabout, in my opinion a safety hazard. If I had the presence of mind I should have reported it to the police.

The ultimate advertising by the side of the road for me must be the Fort Dunlop building. This building is being redeveloped and has an outer covering with really big adverts on it. This is seen by 7 million vehicles a month which trundle along the M6.

How does this relate the kids walking to school ? Well last Friday I came off the M3 early as there was clearly some kind of accident causing snails pace traffic flows. I went along the A30 which runs in parallel to the M3. This of course was not much better. I passed a place where kids were walking along clearly school had closed for the day. I was impressed by the number of kids walking along the road. I am sure many were also in cars but it was good to see so many doing what I did walking to/from school.

We are not parents so I do not know how hard it is to allow your kids to walk to school, fearing abduction and other scary things that you hear of nowadays. But I think the statistics show that if there is a risk to children walking to/from school it is the motorist who is the main culprit.

There are plans to make the effect of such accidents less harmful on pedestrians but these may be scuppered by a voluntary code instead of law. One of the issues is that many cars we have on our roads nowadays like 4X4's some sports cars would not be able to be made in their current guise. Having developed these markets so successfully the car manufacturers clearly do not want to loose their nest egg. I think in London one if four car sales are 4X4's or is at least higher than anywhere else in the UK.

Which is crazy of course given the lack of need for such vehicles in London unless you want to drive over Clapham common instead of around it as most people do..

Friday November 26, 2004

Nice short break in Bath ( or Aquae Sulis )

Got back yesterday after a short break in Bath or as known to the Romans as Aquae Sulis. We stayed in a hotel in the centre called the Queensbury. We left the car with them and had two days wandering around reminding us of when we visited over fifteen years ago.

Bath is on one of its 'ups' in its long history and is very smart and clean. We were both surprised at how quiet it was in terms of traffic and people. I am sure in the summer it was very busy. So this an ideal time to visit the place.

The place everyone visits is the Roman Baths of course. The tour is excellent and we bought a double ticket to visit the Costume Museum later in the day. The baths tour is very interesting as you walk around the site an audio guide tells you the history and other useful information as well.

While a sewer was being dug in Bath the head of Minerva was found luckily undamaged which is now on display.

Amazingly some 'curses' have been found on the site which have been translated to English so we can read them. These were thrown in the water in the hope the gods would do what was asked on the curse. Return of property, making someone well again were typical reasons for writing these curses.

The costume museum also had an audio guide and a section on the gowns made for the various TV and films of the Jane Austen books.

Bath is a nice city to walk around. There is plenty of lovely cream coloured Cotswold 'style' stone buildings which look their best on sunny days. The river Avon also runs through the city which has a nice path you should walk along. There are also plenty of shops including antique ones to visit plus the indoor market by the river where we purchased several second hand books at a reasonable price. I now have a new Jack Higgins book, two books of short stories by Raymond Chandler and two by Robert Harris.

Near Christmas time they have a Special market which they were erecting while we were there.

The other site people go and look at is the circular 'circus' of houses and the Royal Crescent where one of the houses is a very discreet expensive hotel

We ate in our hotel on the first night but then visited the Moon and Sixpence which was recommended and was excellent. At both venues I enjoyed a bottle of the local beer made by Bath Ales .

Thursday November 25, 2004

Real shame for F1

Anthony Davidson will not be having a chance to drive for Williams it has been announced.

I think BAR may have decided not to agree to a deal as they need to be sure of having someone to replace Jenson Button in 2006 if he still goes to Williams despite Hondas increased interest in F1 by buying a stake in the BAR team recently.

Mud on the road

I must be in a very grumpy mood this week. This is the second time I have written a weblog under my grumpy old man section. Like yesterdays this one relates to the UK roads.

On my drive into work I sometimes comes across a sign usually hand painted on a piece of wood saying "mud on the road". A trail of mud then usually appears which eventually peeters out after the vehicle responsible has shed its unwanted cargo.

I just wonder if there is any reason this has to happen ? I appreciate farm vehicles have a job to do and are not the easiest to clean on a muddy field but I think an attempt to get the worst of it off before going on the road would be appreciated by us all. Cheshire council are very optimistic here but maybe so as they would be able to find out the owner of the field where the mud on the road starts I guess.

The other road related grump I want to get off my chest is fly tipping . Again I see a a lot of this in my area. I am just amazed by people who clearly are prepared to put rubbish in their car drive it away from their house but then within a mile or so of their local "amenity site" stop their car and throw their rubbish onto the side of the road.

On a more postive note I have to say I think the UK has the best countryside going in the world. Maybe not the most spectacular but for a little island not bad at all. When I used to fly a lot for work I was always cheered by the patchwork quilt of fields you saw as we approached Heathrow . In fact approaching from the US you usually fly down the spine of the UK mainland starting at Scotland heading south seeing the range of countryside the UK has to offer.

Wednesday November 24, 2004

Pesky mini roundabouts.. The highway code has the following to say about these . Like many 'good ideas' on our roads these mini rounadaobuts are springing up everywhere. They are used for traffic calming and also to improve traffic flow at junctions. I make the following observations about them:

They are often poorly signposted and marked so in a lot of cases where they are meant to slow traffic down by providing a traffic flow interruption drivers go straight over them without realising they should have been prepared to stop.

Often cars appear at exactly the same time at the mini roundabout and the drivers often stay put waiting for each other to make the first move. Two often I am sure two parties 'go for it' with interesting consequences..

Drivers do not signal and therefore the other drivers at the roundabout have no clear understanding of the intention of the driver on the move.

Cyclists may have problems on mini roundabouts as suggested here

It has been suggested here that we take the lead from the US and use their own three/four way stop protocol. I have driven in the US and they work well.

For our American friends who look at roundabouts with wonderment there are two that are even more interesting in Swindon and High Wycombe near where I live.

Tuesday November 23, 2004

Bryan Ferry

My wife introduced me to Bryan Ferry's music soon after we met. I knew him from his Roxy Music days but had not heard his solo stuff before.

We saw him at the Hexagon recently , Reading and he was awsome. There is only one criticism I would make of him and that is he cannot dance for toffee. It was an excellent show with him performing a lot of his old stuff but also tracks from his most recent album where he has found his form again and that is the album Frantic .

Unlike other solo artists I listen to ( usually in the car ) such as Bob Dylan or David Bowie I find I am always in the mood to listen to Bryan Ferry's music. I rarely flick from his CD when it is being played.

Of course he is a poser and always well dressed. At the concert he was wearing some very expensive suits that looked like Armani . When Ferry was in the plane that was nearly brought to earth by a nutcase he was more worried about of the picture that appeared in the papers with his hair all over the place than his brush with death.

Albums I enjoy as well as Frantic must be These Foolish things which has several cover versions of Dylan, Stones and Lennon/McCartney tracks. Another time, another place with another Dylan, an old Roxy music track "The In crowd" and the title track his own song. Possibly my favourite In your mind where the majority of the tracks are his except one he writes with someone called Thomas. Tokyo Joe is excellent and the title track perhaps the best of his from all time.

There are plenty of other albums he has been quite prolific as you can see here

Monday November 22, 2004

dtlogin cores on me

Like making the early morining cup of tea I power my home machine on every day to read my emails. I usually come back to a dtlogin screen. But today it is different. No dtlogin but a

Nov 22 07:32:30 miaplacidus genunix: [ID 603404 kern.notice] NOTICE: core_log: dtlogin[300] core dumped: /var/cores/core.0.dtlogin.1101108749

On my screen. I login as root and as I have setup coreadm I know where the core file will be. A quick pstack on it does not reveal anything that points to anything obvious:

# pstack *dt* core 'core.0.dtlogin.1101108749' of 300: /usr/dt/bin/dtlogin -daemon

fef341ec strlen (ffbfed0c, 0, ffbfec60, 0, 0, 0) + 80

fef87a14 vsnprintf (ffbff170, 4c0, ffbfed0c, ffbff8ec, 81010100, ff0000) + 5c

fef52da8 vsyslog (fefc2868, 0, ffbff8ec, ffbff10c, ff1402a8, fef38264) + 4b4

fef528e4 syslog (3, fefa8190, 400, fecb1104, 1d488060, 5f5f756e) + 1c

fef38278 crypt_invoke (0, ffbff964, 471ec, 0, ffbff970, ffbff964) + 290

00018e94 bitsToBytes (fea92300, 10, 0, 2000, 31, fe9a2798) + 50

0001d634 MitGetAuth (12, fe9a26c0, 0, 472b0, 31, 47334) + 64

00017b1c GenerateAuthorization (12, fe9a26c0, 2d310000, 7efefeff, 81010100, ff00) + 2c

00017f94 SetLocalAuthorization (50498, feb822a0, fe9a26c0, 1, 636f6e73, ffbffc41) + c

0001a434 StartDisplay (3f800, 27ff, 48f38, 48ec4, 81010100, ff00) + 104

0001bdd4 StartFbconsole (1a120, 1, 4df40, 400, 81010100, ff00) + cc

0001938c main (2, ffbffdc4, ffbffdd0, 3f400, 0, 0) + 234

00016090 _start (0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0) + b8

If I was running Solaris10 I am sure greenline would have restarted dtlogin but thats another story. So I run dtlogin's init.d script and I can now login.

Using the stack from pstack I poke about in Sunsolve and eventually find a bug id that matches the stack. I then use the bugid in the patch descriptions section of Sunsolve and find the patch to resolve this issue. It is fairly new and only just fixed in the latest build of Solaris10 too. Download from our server and that should be the end of it.

( Nov 22 2004, 12:01:00 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [3]

Last chance for the Cutty Sark

The tea clipper Cutty Sark which is in Greenwich , London is in a sorry state. It has been in a dry dock for fifty years of its total age of one hundred and thirty five and the site will have to close in 2007 unless something is done. The iron ribs holding the ship together have corroded badly.

The architects Grimshaws have a plan to restore the ship and enclose it in a glass bubble accordingly to the Sunday Times article last week. The cost to conserve the ship is about half of the total project cost of twenty five million pounds.

The cover over the ship will be an inflatable enclosure using the Tensarity structural system of rigid pneumatic beams. It will look a bit like this when it is done. The Times says the glass enclosure looks a bit like a giant Nelson's hat. It will be interesting if the project gets off the ground.

Friday November 19, 2004

Web purchasing has it come of age ?

Over the last few years I have used the web to buy things. This year I have taken the ultimate purchasing (bar one) decision and bought a Golf GT . The ultimate decision would be to buy a house on the web.

I have also bought a breadmaker , DVD recorder and other items.

As you know I also contribute into the Good pub guide which is also buying things on the web as you can select a pub to visit.

Recently I had two purchasing crises which had to be resolved. I had run out of DVD-R discs for the recorder and the local shop I had used before no longer stocked them. One annoying issue was when I tried to purchase an alternative vendor discs from another store. I took the discs to the checkout and the assistant scanned the bar code in and the till said "no such product". The assistant called for help and the supervisor said hand key in its product code - again no joy. So she called for help again. This time the response was "we cannot sell the item to the customer !" An amazing response. I walked out with my mouth tightly shut.

So I did a search using Google I found the Panasonic shop but they were out of stock too. I emailed them and within their 24 hours response time they emailed back saying they had no stock but expected some before Xmas - too late for me. I continued my search and found these guys placed my order and they have shipped my DVD's according to their email. The price was also cheaper than my local store and Panasonic.

My second crisis was related to the need to buy shallot and onion sets for next year. I went to my local allotment society shop and found the cupboard bare of these bulbs. I searched the web and found Mr Fothergills who sold the bulbs but I needed clarification. I emailed them and within an hour I got a reply. Meanwhile I had found these folks who I have ordered the sets from. The site says they are heat treated and delivered in the spring so there is less chance of them bolting ( going to seed)

So if the car, DVD's and bulbs arrive I will be happy and can report that online shopping is looking good.

Check your lights !

A surprising number of road users seem to be going round with some of their lights not functional. I know from experience on a cycle the boys in blue will catch you eventually..

In fact I have to say any cyclists I am seeing on the road during these dark evening journeys home are well lit up. Being encased in a tin box gives people a false sense of security it seems.

Here is a tip to check your lights. When you are stationary you should be able to see reflections for your indicators and rear lights including brake lights. So what I do is just check indicators I have on when I am in a traffic queue. Then as I have my handbrake on and do not sit with my foot on the brake pedal while stationary just touch the pedal and you should see the brake lights reflected in the car behind you. Every so often when I come home I check the front lights reflection on the garage door.

When I go out today I will probabley be stopped for having defective lights. It seems when you enthuse about something on these weblogs something always happens... Safe travelling whatever your method of transport. ( Nov 19 2004, 12:00:01 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [2]

Thursday November 18, 2004

Our clever students do it again

As we are in two buildings ( which are several miles apart) and we and our customers can be in either office we decided it would be cool to be able to have just one sunray session and have it available at either site. We do not have the ability to extend the sunray servers private network into the 'smaller' building but we can be clever in other ways. So our clever students worked out what to do which is in essence a local dhcp server and enough of the sunray software configured in the right way so when I came into my office today my appliance had one of the sunray servers 'dtgreet' on its screen instead of the 'local' buildings server's greeting. It works a treat. I have one session which I can access in either building and the wonders of sunray never cease to amaze me. Like Chris I have a session on the server which had the cpu replaced which was replaced by the students again. I think they got a kick out of live swapping the CPU board with no downtime.

Vorsprung durch Technik going crazy ?

I like interesting cars. I like cars that have some kind of performance to them that are not dull to drive. But I am also worried about the environment.

I like the Audi car line up at the moment and the new range with its trapezoidal front grill is very appealing. In fact if the new A3 had come out better in a review against the Golf I am buying then I might have bought one.

The TV seems full of A8 adverts at the moment. The car looks good but right at the end after the "Vorsprung durch Technik" message is spelt out to us the fact that the model we are looking at has a 6.0 litre engine is revealed.

On the way into work yesterday I am following what looks like a Mercedes new CLK. As I get closer it claims with its badge to a V12 engine ? I can't verify this on their website.

Even VW have jumped onto the bandwagon with the Phaeton range of cars with a V12 which is two V6's welded together !

I think that these cars although only sold in small number spell in my opinion the unacceptable face of modern motoring. These cars might do 0-60 in five seconds but what does that really buy you ?

One could argue that other performance cars like Ferrari, TVR etc are no better. I would suggest that they are sold as two seaters sports cars where as the above cars are just executive saloons that are just petrol guzzlers.

While our American cousins grapple with the Kyoto agreement perhaps we should be showing them some responsible usage of fossil fuels in Europe.

Wednesday November 17, 2004

Careful with that zone and our hostname naming convention

We had an annoying problem with a newly created zone yesterday. In fact I have already made a fatal error by saying that it was a problem with a newly created zone

Chris made a sacrificial lamb of his zone 'dredd' to allow us to move a web server from a machine that was having problems fulfilling the job. The machine a SF4800 had the power but was now a measly two megabit link away from the the web files it was trying to serve. So the solution another dynamic feature of using zones was to move his 'dredd' zone (as he did not need the zone for now) onto another machine and use it to host the files, a faster one gigabit link away from the server.

Chris shut his zone down and we created him a new dredd on the alternative machine. All is well in the world. Suddenly he calls me and says I am seeing network problems on 'dredd'. It is hard to understand as the global zone and other zones on this machine that act as a NIS+ server which Chris documented here all seemed fine.

Of course the old 'dredd' zone had rebooted on its previous server. This was because that host machine had rebooted and the zones are automatically rebooted for us. The victim machine with the 'dredd' zone spotted the problem:

Nov 16 10:04:47 enomem ip: [ID 903730 kern.warning] WARNING: IP: Hardware address '08:00:20:d8:a9:9a' trying to be our address 129.156.173.100!

Nov 16 10:05:47 enomem ip: [ID 903730 kern.warning] WARNING: IP: Hardware address '08:00:20:d8:a9:9a' ..

enomem.eu TS 4 $ getent ethers 08:00:20:d8:a9:9a

enoexec.eu.cte.sun.com. 8:0:20:d8:a9:9a enomem.eu TS 5 $

Which is of course is the old global zone hosting dredd before.

A quick zoneadm -z dredd halt and then a zoneadm -z dredd unisntall meant the problem has gone away for good.

A quick tour of our production hostnames you might enjoy::

enospc nfs/mail server

ebusy sunray server

enoexec solaris10 sunray server

enodata backup server

enotty console server

enomem nis+ server

These were thought up by one of the engineers who works in our part of Sun. As we were moving we thought it was the right thing to do to allow them the chance to come up with the naming convention we would use. These relate to Unix system call return codes. We thought we would be first with this idea but were wrong. Nice idea John.

Tuesday November 16, 2004

What is in a name ?

Some of my better known dopplegangers..

One of my students clearly does not have enough to do...

Country and Western musician

OMD band member

Credit services

The mind boggles ! Thank you Ioannis...