The Sect of Rama

Friday Jun 20, 2008

You're Jealous, Aren't You?

Linda's giving me some grief- again- about my thermometer collection entry, but I think its just a thinly veiled bout of jealousy. Hey Linda, do you know the temperature of your koi pond to the tenth degree fahrenheit? I rest my case. :-D

I would like to see her get some rest before the weekend though (as opposed to nervously refreshing the stats counter like we both did far too long around our 100k blog entries milestone. So if you're a Sun employee and don't already have a blog, now's your chance to earn yourself some delicious interweb fame.

Posted at 03:16PM Jun 20, 2008 by rama in Brewing | Comments[0] | Permalink

Thursday Jun 12, 2008

ZFS on the Root Filesystem

As of Nevada build 90+, you can boot from a ZFS root file system. Woot!

Note that this option is only presented in the Solaris Interactive Text mode, not the GUI installer.

Posted at 03:29PM Jun 12, 2008 by rama in Brewing | Comments[1] | Permalink

Friday Jun 06, 2008

Letter to Eye-Fi: Allow Access From Any Access Point

Eye-Fi is bragging about one of their cards "phoning home", when in reality, the thieves just "happened to have left their network with the same default Linksys name". Hey Eye-Fi, if you just allowed the cards to connect to any AP, rather than the ones you call out by name, you'd probably have a lot more happy customers and wouldn't have to resort to bragging about coincidences. Care to explain why you don't allow this?

Posted at 08:50AM Jun 06, 2008 by rama in Gadgets | Comments[4] | Permalink

Saturday May 31, 2008

Goodbye Twitter, Hello Tumblr?

With 21 hours of downtime for the month of May, I've lost faith in Twitter and am struggling to see any remaining value. Sure- when the site was stable, it was great. But now that its floundering with no end in sight, its really quite useless. If I can't share and consume things on a whim, whats the point of Twitter?

So after running across an interesting tumblr account (via a source I no longer recall) I thought I'd revisit my account, setup a while ago but left alone when it seemed to offer nothing I didn't already have via Twitter, Flickr, this blog, and my personal Galllery2 site. With Twitter (potentially) out of the picture, I would need to fill that void for the micro-blogging scenario. My recent experience with Pownce suggested it was not stable itself, so why not Tumblr?

In my brief exploration of it so far, my only gripes are that the Mac widget and bookmarklet are crippled (you can only share text), I couldn't seem to find anyone I know there to follow, and that the 'quote' and 'chat' sharing options are fairly useless- I'd much rather ditch the audio/video sharing only options and have the ability to share any file type. Tumblr could be the killer app if it allowed sharing of anything.

So- anyone else on Tumblr?

Posted at 08:35PM May 31, 2008 by rama in Interweb | Comments[1] | Permalink

Sunday May 25, 2008

BabyCam: The Stages of Self-Soothing

I setup a wireless video camera over the weekend (a Panasonic BL-C131A) to keep an eye on the baby without being in the room. The idea being to teach her to work things out herself since she'll feel like she's alone, but still be able to watch her progress (and know when a cry means "I'm overtired and don't want to be here" versus "my leg is caught in the rails again!")

Curiously there are no affordable networked video cameras that do better than 640x480- and this one is pretty laggy when you try to do over 320x240. But even with the horrible pixel count and poor low-light performance, its satisfactory as a baby monitor. These snaps were taken showing the phases our kid goes through before finally falling asleep:

Trying to crawl to freedom:

Flailing about wildly:

Mooning the camera:

Dropping the pacifier onto the floor the wailing, knowing one of us will come to retrieve it (now that we've caught her red-handed in this manipulation, we've gotta work on nipping this):

Then finally collapsing:

Posted at 04:20PM May 25, 2008 by rama in Gadgets | Comments[4] | Permalink

Friday May 23, 2008

Bear Grylls Comes Clean; Survivorman Season 3

My friends Tom, Igor and I have a good laugh whenever we see another comment on this old entry questioning the realism of the show Man Vs Wild. It seems he's got a vast legion of supports, largely women and military men. O RLY?

With the start of this season, each return from commercial break opens with this disclaimer:

no doubt as a response to the wave of criticism that the show is portrayed as genuine when in reality much of it is staged, or safety precautions put in place beforehand but never shown to the viewer (such as ropes and harnesses).

Now my beef has never been that he has help. Its very clear there's at least one camera man following him at all times- so he's never truly out on a limb. Its that he opens with the statement that he's going to (paraphrased) show you how to survive in dangerous situations, when in reality he takes what would be very unnecessary risks that he probably wouldn't even do if there weren't that off-screen safety net. Certainly makes for entertaining watching, but surviving? No.

So I was pleased to see this recent entry on Les Stroud's blog talking about the first shoot of Survivorman season 3! And better yet he's doing something that might actually occur to normal people: simulating a lost backpacker in the Sierra Nevada. I can't wait. (and yes, I will continue to watch Man Vs Wild. Who else is going to climb the waterfalls and dig up the porcupines?)

Posted at 10:47AM May 23, 2008 by rama in Misc | Comments[6] | Permalink

Tuesday May 20, 2008

Grooming an Indoor Cat or Dog

After 7 years of having an indoor cat, I've finally found the grooming dream team: a FURminator for the undercoat and a Zoom Groom for the outer coat. Combined, they remove an insane amount of fur in short order-- well worth their prices (although the FURminator seems awfully price gouge-y. If you've got a defunct hair clipper and are handy, you can probably turn one of the blades into your own comb. They look like the same part to me.)

Posted at 05:06PM May 20, 2008 by rama in Gadgets | Comments[2] | Permalink

Wednesday May 14, 2008

Where's Rama?

I couldn't let a month go by without some sort of update, even if its rambling. So whats new? Nothing terribly interesting in itself, but in the past week I've:

Been bitten playing basketball (ok, had someone's teeth pushed into my arm).
Did my first home demolition work. The sketchiest part was pulling down the wall around the main power panel.
Picked out tile and fixtures for the new bathroom. This was way easier than many led us to believe.
Celebrated Mrs R's first mother's day.
Learned a lot about German Riesling. Trying to find something to cellar a case of for a decade or more (most likely a Spätlese). I'll be cracking these at the end of the week, and trying them over the course of several nights to try to get an idea of how they will age: 1994 Schloss Schonborn Johannisberger Klaus Kabinett, 2002 Carl Schmitt-Wagner Longuicher Maximiner Herrenberg Kabinett, 2005 August Kesseler Rüdesheimer Berg Roseneck Spätlese Gold Capsule, 2005 Dönnhoff Schlossböckelheimer Felsenberg Spätlese, 2006 Selbach Oster Zeltinger Schlossberg Spätlese.
At Levi's request, here are some quick tasting notes on a couple of bottles I cracked this week. 2002 Heitz Cellars Napa Cabernet Sauvignon: subdued, great balance, surprising amount of fruit given its age. And a 2006 Strong Arms (R Wines) Shiraz South Australia: looks, smells like aussie shiraz, but lots less dust and way more acid. Can't wait to try it again tonight after its had some air.
Took around 50 photos- uploaded maybe 15 of them. Fell back in love with my Nikon f/2 35mm lens.

Posted at 10:11AM May 14, 2008 by rama in Misc | Comments[2] | Permalink

Friday Apr 18, 2008

100,000 Entries on blogs.sun.com!

In just under four years since the inception of blogs.sun.com, we've reached another major landmark: 100,000 total blog entries. Growth has been exponential- nearly 40% of that is just in the past year, according to the site statistics captured by the Wayback Machine.

What's next? I fully expect to see continued growth with blogs.sun.com, but I'm also really excited with the rate wikis.sun.com is growing. In the first 8 months, we've seen 12k registered users and 5500 pages created. This is roughly increasing 30% month over month, with March showing 63k visits and 220k pageviews. I fully suspect wikis.sun.com will follow in the blogs.sun.com footsteps, as far as exponential adoption- and will be an equally major shift in how Sun communicates with the world.

Posted at 04:02PM Apr 18, 2008 by rama in Interweb | Comments[0] | Permalink

Thursday Apr 10, 2008

Urban Bee Keeping

This video has renewed my interest in raising bees. I didn't even think to keep the hive on the roof. Thats a great solution- even though I've got a backyard (as its not near any neighbor's backyards, or readily accessible by children.)

Posted at 04:08PM Apr 10, 2008 by rama in Misc | Comments[4] | Permalink

Wednesday Apr 09, 2008

My Cheapo Wine Purchases

To supplement my somewhat expensive wine club purchases (2007 was Turley, Reynolds Family, Rhys. 2008 will be Rhys and Ridge Monte Bello)-- and my insanely expensive home addition-- I've been leaning heavily on the affordable K&L staff pics, which this last purchase is large based on. (and yes, they are strongly biased towards Aussie wines, but I'm digging them lately- especially for their value.) Besides the Kim Crawford- which had a solid 2006 vintage- these are all new to me. I've found plenty wines that are readily available I'd consider daily drinkers, but there's still a never-ending stream of wines I've never tried. These take priority. If any of you have tried stuff from this list, I'd love to hear your comments...

Purchase Item	Unit Price	Qty	Total Price
2006 Evil (R Wines) Cabernet Sauvignon South Australia	$8.99	1	$8.99
2006 Strong Arms (R Wines) Shiraz South Australia	$9.99	1	$9.99
2005 Byron Santa Maria Chardonnay	$16.99	2	$33.98
2005 Patient Cottat Sauvignon Blanc	$10.99	1	$10.99
2006 Three Rings Barossa Valley Shiraz	$12.99	1	$12.99
2004 d'Arenberg "d'Arry's Original" Shiraz-Grenache McLaren Vale South Australia	$12.99	1	$12.99
Ron Zacapa Centenario 23 year old Rum 750ml	$37.99	1	$37.99
2005 Ferngrove Vineyards Estate Sauvignon Blanc-Semillon Frankland River Western Australia (Elsewhere $11.99)	$6.99	1	$6.99
2006 Bernier Chardonnay Vins du Pays Jardin de la France	$6.99	1	$6.99
Roederer Estate Anderson Valley Brut	$16.99	1	$16.99
2007 Kim Crawford Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc	$13.99	2	$27.98
2006 Bitch Grenache South Australia	$8.99	1	$8.99
2006 Torbreck "Woodcutters" Shiraz Barossa Valley	$16.99	1	$16.99
2006 Fontanafredda Barbera Piemonte "Briccotondo"	$10.99	1	$10.99

Posted at 02:25PM Apr 09, 2008 by rama in Brewing | Comments[2] | Permalink

Sunday Mar 30, 2008

Awww. Or: My Wife's Cute Toolbox

While looking for a suitable 'project box', I eyed the above toolbox in the corner of the garage thinking it'd be a perfect fit. Unfortunately, it belongs to my wife who says it has sentimental value-- apparently passed down from a long line of handymen. ;) (Instead, I repurposed one of my homebrewing boxes to contain my Stoker system.) This red box contains one or two useful items- but the rest look like something that should be stamped Playskool. The most humorous of items are not one but two tiny little hammers. It brings a smile (and a bit of a cringe) to my face thinking of my then-future wife trying to drive a nail trough our impervious plaster walls with one of these toy hammers.

I'm glad we're hanging on to it. It'll come in handy whenever I need to remind myself I can be occasionally useful...

Posted at 08:11PM Mar 30, 2008 by rama in Gadgets | Comments[2] | Permalink

Friday Mar 28, 2008

Ants on Japanese Maple: SD600 Macro Lens

Click for full size:

For photos I care about, I usually use my Nikon D70 coupled with the 35mm F2.0 lens. The point-and-shoot Canon SD600 is often for the quick and lazy shots- except when it comes to macros. The built-in macro lens on this tiny P&S camera is wonderful. Take for instance these carpenter ants, apparently feasting on some nectar oozing from another bug eating the Japanese maple tree (symbiotic or not, I'm gonna kill those aphid thingies so my tree stays healthy. Sorry Buddhists.) This was hand shot (f2.8, 5.8mm, 1/320s exposure) of moving subjects, I don't remember the last time I cleaned the lens, and it still turned out crisp. That tiny lens never ceases to amaze me.

Posted at 03:10PM Mar 28, 2008 by rama in Photography | Comments[2] | Permalink

Friday Mar 21, 2008

Thou Shalt Covet My Desktop, Round II

Continuing the the tradition of flaunting my hardware, I thought I'd share specs on the latest rig: an Ultra 24 workstation. This one sports an Intel quad core, 8G ram, 500G x 2 disks, and an Nvidia 8800 GTS (not standard). The layout (design, cable routing, cooling, etc) is so slick its unlikely I'll ever build out another rig from components myself. Haven't done anything with it yet, but I hope to change that in the next 48 hours...

Posted at 10:57PM Mar 21, 2008 by rama in Gadgets | Comments[2] | Permalink

Tuesday Mar 18, 2008

Amanita Designs: Questionaut

Amanita Designs finally came out with something new: Questionaut. Its targeted at 11 year olds, but the beautiful art and music are worth the short few minutes it'll take you to run through it.

Posted at 05:57PM Mar 18, 2008 by rama in Games | Comments[2] | Permalink