The Sect of Rama

Sunday Oct 12, 2008

Under-House Datacenter

We've recently completed a home addition, and the electrician didn't run the new phone lines through the DSL splitter I've mentioned before- its the gray box to the right of the main phone junction in the left of this photo. When we tried to connect a phone to the new lines, the DSL promptly cut out. While we had him come out to correct this (yes its a simple fix, but the job was a fixed bid, so I might as well have him do it), I asked him to install a new dedicated 15 amp circuit under the house. I could have easily tied into one of the numerous knob and tube circuits, but I'd have to run another line to the nearby gas meter to get ground. The new 200 amp power panel was just a few feet further away, and the electrician was out anyway, so... new circuit time!

I wanted to run ethernet to the Mac Mini in the living room and one of the bedrooms, and was tired of listening to the ReadyNAS, so the DSL modem, wireless router, NAS, and a new UPS (to safely shut down the NAS in case of a power outage) were all relocated under the house adjacent to the DSL splitter. The router only has four hardwired jacks, so it may eventually be replaced by an 8 port gig hub, but surprisingly the wireless signal is stronger under the house than in the house. The DSL modem is located on the side so I can more easily see the status lights from the under house access door. The router and NAS both have web interfaces (and the NAS even reports some limited info the UPS), so I'm hoping having limited physical access won't be an important factor. And added benefit is easy access to a hardwired net connection for my Stoker based BBQ, which has been somewhat flaky running over a wireless adapter- problematic when you're trying to collect cooking stats over a 12+ hour period. So far so good.

Posted at 09:03PM Oct 12, 2008 by rama in Gadgets | Comments[2] | Permalink

Friday Aug 29, 2008

Bootable Mirrored Disks on OpenSolaris

I've got a sweet Ultra 24 workstation (thanks Will!) in the office, running the latest OpenSolaris bits (the easiest OS install I've ever done, no kidding.) Its got 2 x 1TB drives that I want completely mirrored and bootable, so should one completely fail, I just boot off the other. Unfortunately the installer doesn't yet offer this setup, so you need to do it yourself. These are crude notes I've thrown together after several questions to Joe and Matthew. These steps assume you've got a machine with 2 disks running OpenSolaris (and the acceptance you may fubar your OS if you screw up.)

First off, if this is a fresh install, do a

pkg image-update

This will grab the latest and greatest bits, which will likely require a reboot. Now determine which disk is currently used by the ZFS pool, and the device name for the currently unused disk, via "zpool status" and "format". You'll want to attach the unused disk to the existing ZFS pool. The syntax looks like so

zpool attach rpool existing_disk second_disk

On my system, this translated to:

zpool attach rpool c3d1s0 c4d0s0

"zpool status" should then show the new mirror, and the progress of the resilvering. For some reason I didn't dig into, the mirror reported a non fatal error on my box. a

zpool clear rpool ; zpool upgrade rpool

took care of it. *shrug* So now your disks are mirrored, but the 2nd disk is still not bootable (should your primary drive fail). You can fix this via the installgrub command. For my system, the syntax looked like:

installgrub /boot/grub/stage1 /boot/grub/stage2 /dev/rdsk/c4d0s0

Where the disk specified is your newly mirrored second disk. Now you should be good to go, so reboot the box, go into the BIOS settings and toggle the second disk as your boot device, and verify it works as planned.

Posted at 04:06PM Aug 29, 2008 by rama in Gadgets | Comments[2] | Permalink

Friday Aug 22, 2008

Moonshiner Van Art

An anonymous tipster spotted this van in DC. Not sure what the Native American theme is about, but after watching the Olympics all week, I thought the guys on the right (in the last photo) were gymnasts working on the high bar:

Posted at 09:21AM Aug 22, 2008 by rama in Humor | Comments[2] | Permalink

Saturday Aug 09, 2008

2GB and 15 years

In the background, a Micropolis 2.1GB differential SCSI drive. In the foreground, a 2GB MiniSD card. The difference between them: 15 years, something north of 5 pounds, and $900. Go Moore's Law! In retrospect, I'm surprised my beige box PC had enough juice to spin that thing.

I wish I recorded the startup sounds that drive made prior to extracting the platters, head assembly, and rare earth magnets. I recall it sounding something like a crash and helicopter. Would have made a great music video.

Posted at 10:52AM Aug 09, 2008 by rama in Brewing | Comments[0] | Permalink

Wednesday Aug 06, 2008

DJ Spock

Via:

Posted at 09:14AM Aug 06, 2008 by rama in Humor | Comments[1] | Permalink

Thursday Jul 24, 2008

Pixeljunk Eden Game Trailer

This very slick trailer for PixelJunk Eden reminds me a bit of World of Goo (who need to update their blog more often, hint hint), Gish 2, and Line Rider.

Posted at 08:15PM Jul 24, 2008 by rama in Games | Comments[0] | Permalink

Sunday Jul 20, 2008

Red DragonFly, Green Grape Vine

I wish I had a lens that wasn't smudged by a sticky baby hand prior to snapping this, but the contrast is still pretty striking in front of this cabernet vine. We don't get many dragonflies in this area (let alone ones of this color), so its a treat when the stop to hunt in the backyard.

Posted at 03:40PM Jul 20, 2008 by rama in Photography | Comments[3] | Permalink

Saturday Jul 19, 2008

One Plate Prep: Swordfish, Asparagus, Potatoes

Tonight's dinner was prepared with no dishes (minus the cutting board)- by oiling, salt&peppering, or marinating right in the bags the food was purchased in:

The end result- served with a delicious $7 bottle of Ferngrove Sauvignon Blanc-Semillion blend:

Posted at 08:09PM Jul 19, 2008 by rama in Cooking | Comments[5] | Permalink

Sunday Jul 06, 2008

Roasted Beet, Peach and Goat Cheese Salad

This recipe was so good (slightly modified), I had to capture it for posterity. Ingredients:

2 beets, scrubbed
1 bunch mache, rinsed and dried
2 fresh peaches (preferably slightly tart), peeled and sliced
2 shallots, finely chopped
1/3 cup pistachios, chopped
5 oz goat cheese, crumbled
1/4 cup walnut oil
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
pinch of dried mustard
salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

Double wrap beets in foil, bake at 375F for 60 minutes. Rinse under cold water to remove skin, quarter, then slice thinly.
Toss mache, peaches, beets.
Sprinkle over shallots, pistachios, and goat cheese.
Shake oil, vinegar, mustard, salt and pepper until emulsified. Pour over salad and serve.

Posted at 08:57PM Jul 06, 2008 by rama in Cooking | Comments[2] | Permalink

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[25] | Permalink