Thursday March 31, 2005

Three into two won't go

On my way home I leave the M3 motorway and join the Bracknell road. Shortly after doing so there is a major junction patrolled by traffic lights. As you approach the junction an extra lane appears from the right. Now in the UK no tarmac is left unused, it is almost a criminal act to do so. So folks use it. The trouble is after you get over the lights the extra lane disapears in the length of two cars. So when the lights are against you what happens is a few people use that lane. Then the lights change. The first car if they get a move on will beat the car in the middle lane to the remaining tarmac after the lights. The second won't and of course there is the customary British scramble and tustle before the two vehicles merge. This pattern repeats itself until there are no more cars in the third lane. Meanwhile all the cars behind this are left wondering why when the lights are green they are going nowhere.

I just do not understand what purpose this lane is there for, except to invite trouble on our roads.

Dan Brown - Angels and Demons

This is the last of the four Dan Brown books I have read. In some ways it is the best of all four. However it is spoiled by the ending which is a jumbled mess. How Langdon who survives this book to appear in the Da Vinci code can fall out of a helicopter, make a parachute out of a hankerchief and then use it to guide himself to the raging Tiber, fall in and then be plucked out unconscious but alive is a mystery to me. I think a better ending could have been written with more with a closer grip on reality. However there is one twist at the end which was very unexpected and clever.

Langdon as usual is dragged into a conspiracy this time involving anti-matter which a secretive scientist in CERN has managed to make. It gets stolen of course and the criminals this time are the Illuminati who are out to blitz the Vatican , and the front runners in the Papal election and anyone else who gets in their way. Langdon of course has to have a pretty sidekick who works with him in this story. She was the adopted child of the secretive scientist.

So all in all a good read, shame about the ending.

Wednesday March 30, 2005

No turning !

I am always amused when I see side roads ( private ones ) that say "No parking" or usually "No turning". I appreciate the owners of the properties don't want people using their drive as part of the main highway but for the number of times people would pick your drive to safely reverse the direction of their travel I think this is a bit off. Also what do these people who put up these signs do ? Do they religiously never use other people drives to turn into ?

Of course one would expect Maggie Thatcher would never turn into someones road or instruct her driver - Mark perhaps ? to do so. Her famous line The lady is not for turning.....

Hay fever season starts again...

Yes it has started. Even though we are having a late start to spring my eyes are itching already. As soon as the grass pollen starts then things progress to very itchy eyes (which can end up glowing like charcoals after rubbing them) , wheezyness, sniffy nose and the rest of it. I usually take zirtek (antihistamine) and opticrom for the eyes and eventually have to use an inhaler to sort out the wheezyness. Last year I finally got fed up with this annual problem and sought out Immunotherapy . It is now 'mainstream' and after the initial reports of some people reacting badly it is now safe . The problem I face is two fold. First I am allergic to tree and grass pollen (the tests I had last year confirmed this). In the UK each allergy would have to be treated serially and the Immunotherapy is a multi year treatment. Secondly for reasons unknown the grass pollen treatment is no longer widely available so this way forward is a dead end. The problem I have is I hate taking pills. The recommendation from the specialist was to put that aside and as soon as the hay fever season starts start swallowing zirtek on a regular basis instead of just taking it when the hay fever is really bad. Same for the opticrom.

In the height of the grass season I actually go out with a pair of goggles on my head. These are the ones that seal up around your face. It actually does work but they can get steamed up. I know I look an idiot but if it allows me to go for walks or work in the garden/allotment then I'l look a prize plonker thank you. Someone at work has also suggested herbal type remedies. Enjoy your summer !

Tuesday March 29, 2005

An Easter Break

Had a great weekend in Marlborough which is just inside the Wiltshire border. Less than one hour away but so much quieter with less people and traffic on the roads. Did a three night stop over in the hotel called the Castle and Ball which is in the centre. The first day we did a walk that started by the pub above. The pub called The Ibex has in the past been in the hands of the jockey Colin Brown who partnered Desert Orchid for many years. Further around the walk we went through the village of Leckhampstead where the war memorial below is situated.

This is no ordinary memorial. As can be seen it has a clock on it, with the hands being made of bayonets, the minutes on the face are machine gun ammunition and the Roman numerals are of rifle ammunition. Very poignant. The second day we did two other walks, the first was a disaster due to terrible instructions in the book and clearly some kind of unofficial diversion undertaken by the owner of the land we were walking on. I have to say in the south of England stiles are in a terrible state and often not repaired properly. In the afternoon we did a walk by the river Lambourn and passed this unusual church on the return leg.

The final day we threw caution to the wind and did a longer walk around Pewsey downs. It is a pity the weather was overcast else the views would have been awsome. We passed two little villages and saw this ancient church below and then had lunch at the Barge Inn where pictures in the pub proclaimed part of Inspector Morse ( The Wench is dead) was filmed there. The pub is by the Kennet and Avon canal which we followed for a bit before returning to the downs.

Back on the downs we saw in the distance the White Horse of Alton Barnes which dates back to 1812. There are a lot of these White Horses cut into the Hills where chalk is near the surface. My favourite is not a horse but the Cern Abbass Giant . It is not recommended to visit him after dark as the site is known as an ancient fertility haunt. ( reach your own conclusions !) We then had a steep climb to reach the summit of Milk hill the highest in Wiltshire. Finally we straddled "Wansdyke" which is thought to have been contructed in the 6/7th centuries by the Britons to act as a defence against invading Anglo Saxons.

We had some nice meals in the town. We found a nice pub which I will suggest is a good lucky dip entry in the Good pub guide . The pub is in the centre and is called the Wellington Arms. After the meal we joined in a pub quiz and despite there only being two of us we managed to scrape together a score better than a larger group nearby. We also had a great meal in a Brasserie called "Godots" which I would recommend if you are in the area.

Monday March 28, 2005

Why do I like logging bugs ?

Stacey wrote a good article on how customers can request changes to Solaris. I am pleased to say I have written a few RFE's that have gone into changing Solaris. I logged a very simple bug for the manual page for the Sunray command utadm last week. The -f option is meant to offline the server but leave existing sessions intact. For the 3.0 release the page reads : Existing sessions are killed, but load balancing does not select this server for new sessions.. The word 'not' have been removed. Simple typo. A simple bug but for new Sunray customers this could cause confusion or misunderstanding. At the moment I seem to have two other active bugs where I am in communication with Engineering. I am kind of annoyed with myself on the Sunray bug and a few others we have logged recently because if we had not been moving the lab we would have found time to run the beta products and found these bugs before FCS... But we are doing our bit now.

Empowering, encouraging and rewarding people is what we try in Sun to do to make sure people do log bugs when they find problems. It is a bit like the story of a village which built a fountain and wanted milk to run in it. Everyone was told to put a pint of milk in the fountain. Some folks said "no one will notice if I put water in the fountain instead". Of course they turned the fountain on and it ran with clear water.

So when I hear people say this core dumped or this did not work I tell them to log a bug. Simply running pstack on a core file can often be used to assertain if the problem is a known issue by putting the stack trace into Sunsolve. If it is not then I would log a bug giving as much detail as possible and attaching relevant message files, patch lists and so on. Sometime you have to put a lot of effort into helping the responsible engineer (RE) gather more data. I view this as a learning exercise the process usually goes log a bug and the RE then contacts you for more information. It can be a very rewarding experience, watching the trail of information requests and the final bug fix.

I also wonder if in the future customers would pay for a service where all there 'system' program core dumps were analysed for them. You would use coreadm to setup a global cores area ( note this has changed in Solaris10 to include a zone name in the filename for the core file) and then something would spot new core files, check to see if they were known issues, email the customer advising to load a new patch,that a new bug is now logged or there is and existing bug etc etc.

Friday March 25, 2005

Bruce Springsteen..

The Boss . His best album is Born to run . The tracks follow each other brilliantly. "Thunder Road", the title track and "Jungleland" are awesome. Born in the USA must come next with another excellent title track, "Cover me", "Working the highway", "Glory days" and " I'm on fire". Strange as it might seem my next favourite album of his must be the recent The Rising. Again a good title track, also with "Lonesome day", "Into the fire", "Nothing man" and "Empty Sky". Other albums I like are The River , Darkness on the edge of town" and Tunnel of love. I can thank my wife for introducing his music to me. Unlike her I have not seem him live.

Some people compare Springsteen to Dylan. The idea that both brought certain special talents to them usic industry when they started yes I would agree with that. But otherwise they are like chalk and cheese. I would say Dylan has stronger lyrics and Springsteen's music is better. Combine the two and that would be awsome.

Product of the week a pasta machine

This little machine was a Christmas present a year or so back. Although one can buy decent pasta in the shops and even 'fresh' I think it is kind of fun to make your own. The easiest to make is pasta for a lasagne. You can make ribbon pasta and spagetti types but they are messier to make and not so successful for me - anyway ( you pass the pasta through the section at the back of the machine pictured to get this variety). The trick is to use strong flour and also while passing it through the machine the first couple of times, fold it over itself and then gradually set the thickness setting smaller each time. Also use plenty of flour to avoid a sticky mess. I have made pasta in the presence of children who enjoy taking part in the whole process.

The ingredients to make the pasta are really easy. One egg to one hundred grams of flour. This mixture can be blended in a food processor, allowed to rest in the fridge before rolling out in the machine. After rolling out allow to dry before using.

Thursday March 24, 2005

More on the lab; the console server

For a remote lab to work - and I define a remote lab where the engineers can be separated from the lab by the distance of say two floors or in a building or thousands of miles, remote manipulation of the machine in terms of reboots etc is vital.

Chris took the console software that is in the public domain and tailored it for our own use. We are planning to work out how to put our version in the public domain or merge our changes in with the one out there still.

The idea is you start with terminal devices either locally connected like the ones we use or network devices which usually support the telnet protocol to make contact with the ports on them. In fact Sun's high end servers like the F6900 and F4900 have system controllers that also support telnet protocol which is handy. We then take a standard Sun server in our case a V210 load Solaris on it give it a bit of redundancy with disk mirroring and then load Chris's console software. The console software has a 'stub' config file that tells it to go and talk to our Javalabtool booking database which has all our console entries. The console software also has a 'stash' file to use if this connection fails initially. The software then grabs all the console entries for the database that pertain to itself. It then makes the connection or opens the terminal device and presents these on port 5000 of the console server. The console server also then writes the various ports it has setup into the NIS+ table serialports that we use to store ALL our console entries worldwide. Chris has written a 'console' command that given an argument of a lab box will then search the NIS+ table, find the entry and make contact to the appropriate server and port using telnet. I have simplified this description slightly.

The sorts of things the software does for us:

Automatically maintains a log file of all console transactions for later use per console port configured.

As you make connection to the port the console command warns you if the machine is booked and to who.

Maintains one console writer and numerous console readers for multiple access to a console port. A known escape sequence flips you from being a reader to a writer - an event that is logged in the console log

Demands a password before connection is made configurable per host so different lab boxes can have different passwords (stored in javalabtool)

Support the sending of various escape sequences to send a break to a host stop/start logging into the log file etc

These are the basics. It does a whole heap more. But it is a core competancy of a shared lab to be able to do this sort of stuff. When you reboot or send a break to a machine in Singapore thousands of miles away it blows your mind.

Nicholas Monsarrat - The Cruel Sea

The cruel sea is the best Atlantic war book written. It is not a true story but I am sure it encompasses most of the harsh realities of life for those that crossed its watery depths doing convoy duties. The story starts with the building of a new ship The Compass Rose. Ericson a hardened sailor is back in the navy in charge of this new type of ship a corvette. His crew are a mixture of hastily trained ex bankers, journalists etc who are to help reduce the carnage caused by Hitler's U boats in the Atlantic. Over time the crew turn into a viable fighting force and they go to war. Their reward for the hard work is unkind to say the least, the loss of the ship later in the book and many of the original crew.

Saltash is the replacement ship that Ericson returns to war in and Lockhart his Number one decides to stay with 'his' captain instead of getting his own command. By this time they are close friends. The touching part in both book and film is where Lockhart finds the captain drunk in his cabin and he puts him to bed as best he can. He walks out and says "That is the best I can do for you dear captain, I wish it could be more". Ericson replies "Goodnight number one". There are many plots and charecters in the book that make it an excellent read and the film is brilliant. Here are a few of the cast: Jack Hawkins an excellent Ericson, Donald Sinden is Lockhart and a very young Denholm Elliot plays Morell.

I have read two of Monsarrat's other books "The ship that died of shame" and "HMS Marlborough will enter harbour". The latter also being a good read.

Wednesday March 23, 2005

TV's in pubs

About eighteen months ago I stopped doing something that had become a regular part of my week. A visit to the local pub. Local means the centre of my village about 3/4 of a mile away. Not long after we moved to Twyford I took to wandering down the pub on a Sunday night, Sunday Times under my arm and had a read and a pint or two.

When the pub changed hands I got to know the new landlord and landlady better than the previous ones. So instead of just reading the paper I would also have a chat with them. I also got to know a few of the locals too. I always felt it was a nice way to end the weekend. Often I would pop into the local chip shop and have a bag of chips to soak up the beer on the way home.

So what happened to make me stop ? Well two things really. The first was the death of my mother in law. Naturally my wife was very upset so I took to staying around to be with her. When it was time to reconsider going back I thought about it. I liked going but a few things put me off returning.

Coming back smelling like an ashtray.

The recently installed TV on the wall.

I think the TV did it. I don't know what it is about TV's in pubs. It sounds a nice idea, watch a bit of footie or rugby with your mates and a pint. I have no problem with this. But in a lot of pubs now the tv is on all the time. Instead of talking people watch it. It is strange but if a tv is on in a room you cannot help but look at it. I think back to '1984' by George Orwell and the screens people had in their houses. Forty years on perhaps we are getting closer to that book than we realise...

The Beatles jigsaw takes shape

This is the current state of play of my mosaic jigsaw at work. I am now forcing myself to spend at least half an hour on this away from my desk at lunchtime instead of working through lunch. I feel better for it too. As can be seen Paul Mccartney's blue jacket is complete (which is where I had got too when work was suspended). I am now working on their hair which are dark coloured pieces. The way I do it is mind boggling. You pick up a piece, find it on the puzzle box picture and place it on the board. Eventually you get two pieces that fit into each other and as can be seen reasonable progress is being made on the hair area. I had already separated the dark pieces from the rest of the bits. I do not know what area I will work on next but the solid black area at the bottom of the puzzle will be a challenge to say the least. I'l put up a picture on this blog when I am done. The guys in the office reckon I'll have it done in two years at my current rate of progress.

Of course one of my students tells me the Beatles words in the black bit at the bottom of the puzzle are not where it should be (too far to the left) . I don't think I will be doing that bit so I think I will cut it off...

Tuesday March 22, 2005

Excellence in the building trade

When you move into a new area especially if its a long distance all your old people you contact to do building etc work are now useless to you. So when we moved to Twyford nearly eleven years ago I suppose there was a fear of trepidation that we could end up employing a load of cowboys. We were to be suprised. Not long after we moved in a handy little booklet arrived on the doormat. The Little Green Book is an excellent resource where tradesmen are recommended by the people who use them. It has been a godsend to us. Of course it is like the Good pub guide it relies on people to participate else it will become out of date and useless.

So the reason I am writing about this is we are having our fascia and guttering replaced by a PVC solution. We are using a guy called Mark Hart who we found in this book. He has replaced our flat roof at the back in the past and fully supported its ten year guarantee and other roofing type work. The thing I like about him is you really feel he is honest. He has done a couple of little jobs for us and refused payement. On one job he used less materials and it took him less time so he reduced the bill. Okay he could have overestimated but how many builders would admit that and then reduce the final bill ? For this job he has advised us not to do the fascia on the garage as that would mean the flat roof would need doing when it clearly has several years life left in it. He also replaces the fascia instead of just putting a plastic cover over it as most people do - saving them time and therefore labour costs that they won't pass onto you. Leaving the old fascia board on also causes problems later on. He also asked us if we wanted the soffet changing instead of assuming we would. The felt that is on the roof by the gutter when the roof was built would have had a lip that went into the gutter. Forty years later that is now rotted away. He will replace that. All good tips if you are having your fascia boards done. Finally it is good to see his son is now working for him carrying on the business.

A new Roast to try

I like a Sunday roast but it is hard work. So when the local supermarket had Beef Silverside on offer we bought a lump to try a new recipe.

The idea of this recipe is that it looks after itself. All the juices and bits are in a large metal sealed dish. Here is what I did: seal the meat in some butter that has melted in the pan. Clean the pan with kitchen paper. Put the meat back into the pan with 425ml of red wine ( we used our home made stuff ) two bay leaves, a bunch of thyme, salt and pepper. Put the lid on and pop into the oven at 140 degrees C. Cook and don't peek at it for three hours. The weight of the meat was 1.15Kg.

Remove the bits from the pan herbs etc and put the pan onto direct heat and boil to reduce the sauce. Mix some flour and butter into a smooth paste, and add to the sauce whisking briskly with a ballon whisk.

The recipe also makes a red onion marmalade made by taking 350g of very finely chopped onions and a teaspoon of chopped thyme, fried until soft, then add 225ml of red wine and 55ml of red wine vinegar, season and simmer until all the liquid has evaporated. This can take up to an hour. Use a low heat.

So how did it turn out ? Well the beef was nice and tender but the gravy well not so wonderful. The red onion marmalade was very good. I hope Jamie would approve if it was served up at school. Unlikely it would be given the amount they get to spend on each child...

Monday March 21, 2005

The Malaysian F1 race

A quick review of Sundays race at Sepang. A surprising grid with Ferrari on a back foot again. Trulli on P2 but would he fall asleep again? Red Bull also showed the way with excellent qualifying from both drivers.

A clean start and no dramas on the first lap. It was soon clear however that Button was in trouble and soon spun on his own oil. He then retired. Davidson standing in for a feverish Sato also found his engine failing and the team ended up with nothing even after swapping their engines for more reliable ones. Button was clearly annoyed as he had a decent race pace. Kimi was doing well until a rear tyre failure saw him Robin Reliant style driving back to the pits for a replacement tyre. He then recovered well only to be denied points by Klein. Someone needs to start finding and waving blue flags in Sepang, there was worrying lack of them when the Jordan was in the way. Villneuve fell off the track and admitted the car was causing him some problems. Sauber seem to be on the verge of asking their money back on their star driver. There followed an excellent ding dong between a struggling Fisichella, Webber and his teamate Heidfeld. Heidfeld benefited after the other two took each other out. His second career podium was his just reward. Schumi senior finally got his championship points tally started with two points and Trulli did stay awake to keep second. Alonso drove well to turn his pole position into P1 in the race.

Teams that overperformed

Red Bull again with DC leading the way. Justice for those folks who work for the team who are ex Jaguar.

Toyota. Finally after all that money spent their first podium. Ralf with P5 made it even better.

Teams who did as well as expected

Renault a strong performance; they need two finishers to help them claim the contructors championship on a regular basis however.

Mclaren, Tyre failure ruined Kimi's race, but the monster only bagged a decent points haul by virtue of others failing to finish.

Teams that underperformed

BAR again a disaster. The suspect engine swapping not doing them any good. Having their arch rivals on the podium must have irked them even more.

Ferrari, again a poor performance. Even Schumi appears dispondent now. Other stuff

The stormy relationship between BMW and Williams rumbles on. Ferrari will have to work hard and get their 2005 car ready soon, it will be interesting to see how well it fares on its first outing. At least Stodders kept quiet this weekend. Coultard has now the biggest points tally for a British driver having overhauled Mansell. Bahrain next !