The Sect of Rama

This is an email update I received from my wife this afternoon, regarding our 14 month old daughter, "Bean":

hello,

we had a successful trip to target. Bean didn't point and grunt like an ape nor did she try to jump out of my arms. Woo hoo. She did seem to have fun though, and enjoyed the giant round red barriers in front of target - she thought they were giant balls. We got h20 filters (yes, 3 to a pack - they stopped selling singles), gerber peaches and animal crackers. Bean was having so much fun, we walked down to Old Navy, where she was dancing like her pants were on fire to the cheezy hiphop music they were playing. She also looks at clothes like a real person - picks them up holds them up to herself and looks them up and down. The sweater folding lady handed her something and she held onto it for dear life. I thought I was going to have to buy the hideous thing, but I distracted her with fuzzy socks and got it away from her.

We walked by a fountain and she made the water sign, then the brush teeth sign. By the time we got home she was all amped up. We brushed her teeth after some brunch, but she did not want to give up the toothbrush, so there was a mini meltdown. She diverted her tears by stealing a tampon out of my purse and then trying to brush her teeth with it. It was good fun trying to get her to relinquish the tampon.

She tried to climb the crib repeatedly but kept landing on her baby butt. Finally fell asleep at 12:11, but woke at 12:47. I'm letting her cry it out a while b4 I rescue her.

All in all, a good bean day. She is in a pretty good mood - I need to take her on daily adventures from now on. BTW - my right bicep is huge from carrying her for 1 hour straight at the strip mall.

How is your day?

We've launched a really really cool product line today, albeit with a mouthful of a name: the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems. If you catch this in time, you can check out the live webcast at 3:30pm (November 10 2008).

In the meantime, here's a few teaser screengrabs from a loaner unit our team got early access to. The specs on a single 7210 "Fugu":




Some of the data available via the dashboard:




An example of the analytics available, courtesy of DTrace probes. This is real time visualization of NFS traffic:

I took a quick video of the bottomless portafilter in action this morning. Slightly fast extraction, one tick tighter on the grinder would have been ideal but I was in a rush.

I've been using the same espresso machine for a while now, but about a year ago shelved the hand grinder for a Rocky doserless. The combination produces very good shots when I have a good roast, but on occasion, I get a bad extraction when I know the beans are fine, the grind is fine, and the distribution and tamping felt fine. In an effort to get some answers, I decided to convert my portafilter to a bottomless by removing the material below the basket.

Its an obvious next step, but I've held off for a while because I feared it would be difficult to produce decent results without a drill press or dedicating a whole afternoon (the most common approach based on my quick research seems to be drilling a series of holes until the bottom almost falls out, a horribly messy and laborious task.) However once I looked closer, and realized the portafilter is made of soft brass, it was obvious I had a much better tool for the task, a jigsaw:



After clamping the portafilter to a bench, I drilled a couple of pilot holes (the first one wasn't close enough to the wall for my liking), then just let the jigsaw blade follow the inside wall around the circumference. The photo above shows this process half way through, at which point I repositioned the portafilter at a different angle to better reach the other half. Once the center was removed, I used a Dremel (a tool I once used to cut holes in 3/4" ply, I'll admit) with a grinding bit to clean up the rough edges. It literally took 5 minutes to complete.

The results? The first shot I pulled was a spurter, something that may have shown itself as blonding pre-bottomless, or maybe not at all. I thought it was the result of underfilling the basket, so on the second shot, I added more coffee and repeated. Bingo! Near perfect looking extraction (pictured at top), awesome crema, delicious shot. Apparently eyeballing the fill-level doesn't cut it when you bounce back and forth between different types of beans and roast levels every few shots- some clump more than others due to static electricity and perhaps other factors. I'll be using my scale more while switching beans until I get this under control. And definitely look forward to the immediate feedback I get via the bottomless portafilter. Why manufacturers don't make them standard these days in a mystery.

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.

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.

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:

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.

Via:

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.