Tim Foster's Weblog

Happy Z-Day everyone!

Breaking with tradition somewhat, I'm not sure there's going to be any fireworks photos here this year: we're down at my parents house, and are less likely to get the sort of sustained shelling that we normally experience in Raheny each year.

On the plus side, we had homemade pumpkin soup for lunch, so was at least able to get this shot. If there's any fireworks later on, I'll update this post - but otherwise, here's some Halloween cheer:

The day's been great so far - lovely birthday presents (a Merino base-layer and a copy of Neverwhere from the lovely missus, and DVDs of the first two Ice Age films from E (I think she had an ulterior motive there!) and a nice fleece from my folks)

I also popped out for a birthday run around Greystones this afternoon, only 10k but it was enough for me to realise I'm far from being back in running form: the recovery is going to last a few more weeks I think!

My folks are baby-sitting tonight, so myself and the missus get to go out for a grown-up dinner, which I'm really looking forward to. Happy Halloween!

Update: There were fireworks after all, here's a few shots: fantastic, the tradition continues!

I ran the Dublin City Marathon yesterday in approx. 3h 30m (more on that later) - that's my first marathon, but I suspect not my last: to anyone even half-thinking of running 26.2 miles, you have to try it.

My motivation for running started several months back on a low note. The background was that I was increasingly working from home, with work being busy and having a desire to eat dinner with the family and be around to put the kids to bed, I was noticing that there were days where I wasn't leaving the house at all. At the same time, the rumours started about Sun being in talks with various companies about a possible acquisition.

When the Oracle deal was announced it made things worse - what had previously just been rumours in the press became a lot more believable. Usually when something like this is going on, I'll write my thoughts about it here: but doing so would have been unprofessional. The furthest I ever went was the occasional emoticon on my twitter feed.

The solution for both problems, I decided, was to get out in the mornings and run: exercise, and a little time to think.

As the months went by, I was running further and further, logging my progress to @timfoster as I went ,and generally having a whale of a time. One weekend, we had a few friends over for lunch - Kev, Nic, Mike & Maria. A bit of the conversation went something like this:

"That's great running you're doing Tim, you should do the marathon"

Well, that was it, I'd had vague thoughts of doing it one day, but hearing someone else say it out loud was enough to make me register that night - with some trepidation, I might add. The registration form grouped entrants into three categories in order of expected finishing time: 3h or less, 3:30-4:15, 4:15+. I had no clue where I belonged, so popped myself in the middle and got on with it - that was July 28th this year.

I figured I ought to be following some sort of formal training plan. The athletics forum on boards.ie was a great resource, and were pointing newbies like me to Hal Higdon's running site . I chose the Intermediate II schedule, as I figured I was already reasonably fit with the daily commute on bike from time to time, and all the running I'd done so far. I'd missed a few weeks at the beginning of the formal program, so worked out where I should be (which turned out to be a good place to start given the running I'd already done) and stuck to it.

As I got closer to the race, I was dutifully doing my Long Slow Runs each weekend and was coming up to running the last of the three 20 milers when I became anxious about what sort of pace I'd manage in the race - could I go fast over a long distance? I didn't know. I didn't want to risk burning myself out in the early stages of the race, and end up not finishing. I decided to push it, and do a Long Fast Run instead - you're not supposed to do this during training, I found out why. Yes, I discovered that I actually could manage a 7:15 min/mile pace over 20 miles, but I also managed to injure my leg in the process. To make matters worse, I'd miscalculated where I was joining the schedule, and it left me with only 2 weeks to taper before the race rather than 3, and most of those 2 weeks were spent just resting my leg rather than doing the suggested mileage.

With that, race day was upon me. I was aiming for a 3h15m finish - but given the last few weeks, this was probably unrealistic.

The atmosphere around the start was tense, but an amazing experience - very very well organised I thought: a record turn-out of 12,500 people this year.

After a lot of limbering up, and shedding of bin-liners, the starting gun fired. We moved very slowly at first, eventually getting past the starting line. The race started gently: I was in the middle of the 3:30-4:15 pen and first few miles were depressingly slow, difficult to overtake slower runners and I was already well down on my target. They say one of the most common mistakes by new marathon runners is starting too fast, so I kept repeating that to myself, and tried to stay calm.

By mile 5, I'd escaped the crowds in Phoenix Park and picked up the pace, passing Kev & Nic at mile 10 who were out cheering for me (thanks!!) and managed to keep pretty much on target till about mile 16 where I started slowing down, only to slow down further on miles 20/21 (the dreaded Roebuck/Foster Avenue hill) The missus & the kids, and Mum & Dad were cheering for me there, and I spotted my friend Barry too, who was marshaling for the race: familiar faces making the run a lot easier.

In general, the support from the crowd on the day was phenomenal: I really hope the people who got up early on an October Bank Holiday Monday appreciate what a difference them cheering really makes to runners - and, to the lady watching the race who gave me a jelly baby around Kimmage to whom I forgot to say "thankyou" - many many thanks, it was yummy, and much needed!

Things took a turn for the worse though around mile 22 - going down Nutley Lane, I felt a twinge in my thighs that I'd felt once before during training: the onset of cramp. I had to stop stretch/shake out my legs periodically, eat more jelly babies and start again. My times were tumbling now, and I watched in dismay as the 3:30 pacer balloons passed me on Merrion Road. For the rest of the race, I kept going as fast as I could manage, but it wasn't enough.

Rounding the final corner onto Pearse St. I went for it, eating my remaining sweeties and telling myself it'd soon be over. I crossed the line, and stopped my watch, which told me 3:30:46. I was tired but happy - I'd missed the 3:15 target, but there's always the next marathon.

As for official timing, I'm still a wee bit confused - the timing service that was tied to the chip on my bib told me I'd finished in 3:32:04, yet when I visit the results page on the Dublin Marathon website and search for my number (4871), at the time of writing, it confirms that chip time of 3:34:04, but tells me my finish time is 3:30:34. I know there's a difference between chip time and gun-time, but I'd always thought gun-time should be longer than chip-time (as it doesn't account for the time it takes you to actually reach the starting line, whereas chip time is registered from the moment you cross the start-line) Perhaps they got the numbers mixed up - 3:30:34 is closer to what was on my stopwatch. Anyway - it doesn't really matter.

I had a ball on my first marathon - I finished 1516^th out of a field of 12,500, which I'm happy about. I've got memories I'll never forget and a belief in myself that I never had before. Sure, I'm walking around like Boris Karloff today (legs rather sore) and am wishing our house didn't have stairs, but I'm extremely proud of what I've achieved. I think I'll keep running and would strongly recommend everyone to have a go at completing a marathon: it's a truly unforgettable experience.

Here's the route map, and the splits from my watch - I missed a few mile markers here & there, so just rolled up those times into a single row. As you can see, I lack consistency here - so that's something to work on for next time.

Discovered via Boing Boing this morning, I found this article particularly enlightening. Bruce Sterling talking about the future, picking five technologies from today, "The Cloud! Web Squared! The Internet of Screens! The Internet of Things! Augmented Reality!" and showing how they would seem completely normal to anyone in the future.

They're phantom far-out notions gobbled up by the real world. They packed in there so deep that nobody notices them. So, yes, I can write about it. It's just: it doesn't look futuristic. It looks way too real.

Why isn't it grand? Why isn't it as fantastically grand as the spectrum of all possibility? Well, why isn't today grand? Why didn’t we wake up this morning in direct confrontation with the entirety of past and future? The present day is the only day we’re ever given.

[ Bruce Sterling, writing for Webstock ]

Definitely worth reading the whole article.

A few weeks ago, we had a Saturday that was everything a Saturday should be - not too early a start, a nice breakfast, an energetic, if slightly damp, walk with Calum and the four of us visiting the Botanic Gardens for a picnic.

We're sort of in a weird state at home at the moment, trying to go around appreciating everything that Dublin has to offer (hence the visit to the Botanic gardens), unsure of what the future holds.

Ever since our first trip to New Zealand we've always thought it'd be an interesting place to live, but before my most recent trip there for Glynn & Jayne's wedding, we'd talked about my using the time over there to consider more carefully whether it's somewhere we'd want to emigrate to.

Over the course of the two and a bit weeks there, I was gradually leaning towards a "yes" answer to the question above, but it's funny - as soon as I heard the rumours about a supposed deal with IBM to buy Sun, I'd decided that if the deal went through, that'd be it, we'd really seriously look into moving. In some ways, that the deal fell through was a bit of a relief, not only because I think it'd have been the wrong thing for Sun, but also because I was off the hook in terms of facing that big decision to move. Now that there's another deal pending with Oracle, I need to face that question again.

On the other side of the argument, we've got a pretty cushy number in Ireland at the moment: our house is a 25 minute cycle from the office (the missus has a shorter commute to her office) and the creche we use for Ella, and possibly Calum too, is right next door -- but that, in a way makes us feel even more trapped: should we give up what appears to be a perfect setup and fling ourselves into the unknown? Looking further out, there's good primary schools in the local area for the kids, but getting them to a secondary schools would mean quite a commute for them I think, so we'd end up having to move somewhere in a few years anyway.

There's some things that could make moving easier. Already, I'm the only person in Ireland working in the Solaris xVM kernel group, so I'm working remotely wherever I am: working from the other side of the world probably wouldn't be that much different for me, assuming I'm allowed that opportunity with the pending acquisition. And of course, I'm not just moving me - we're a family, so anything we do has to work for everyone, otherwise it's not going to happen.

So is the decision to move made yet? No, not at all - it is a realization though, that we need to make that decision soon, rather than leave it hanging over us. Perhaps the best way, is to try to get out there for a year, and see how we settle - a sort of "Try and Buy" approach I suppose.

But, between then and now, there's plenty to enjoy about Ireland, and it seems like considering the question on whether to emigrate or not has made us think a lot about life in general and what we want to get out of it. I think we all should be enjoying it a lot more, dancing in the bluebells as much as we can.

I'm rubbish at this sort of thing and generally don't do Internet memes, but since stevel tagged me, the worry of whether I'm interesting enough to come up with 7 things you may not know about me has been weighing heavily on my mind. Judge for yourself whether they're interesting or not!

1. As a kid, I lived opposite Rathfarnham shopping centre, which in those days was shut at weekends and at 6pm each night. This made for the perfect place to tear around on my blue Raleigh Grifter, a fantastic machine - which probably weighed as much as I did at the time. I have fond memories of that bike - it's motorcycle-gripshift and it's wonderful, if sometimes deadly, 3-speed Sturmey Archer hub.

   Much of the time was spent just messing about, playing chicken with brick walls (pretending you were an X-Wing trying to pull up before crashing into the shields of the now-fully-operational Death Star. I still have all my teeth, in case you're wondering), but playing "Squares", a mixture of a slow bicycle race, sumo wrestling and Kick Start, was the best way to spend your time on a bike.

   Here's how you play: decide on a playing area, a square or rectangle, marked out by the white lines of a few empty car parking spaces. Then get a few of your friends/siblings on bikes to cycle around within the confines of that square. If you touch the ground with your feet or go outside the square, you're out. The winner is the last person on their bike. Hilarity ensues. (and the odd grazed knee, I'm guessing)

2. I'm the most optimistic person I know. I think this tends to eventually get on people's nerves, but I can usually be relied on to put a cheery spin on whatever situation we're in at the time.

3. Back in the day, I spent way too much time writing mod files using FastTracker and others. This was all on our 16mhz i386 (2mb ram!) with a handmade Covex thing stuck in LPT1 - I couldn't afford real hardware, which was probably for the best. I've lost most of what I wrote over the years, but have dredged up a few bits of music here, with one converted to mp4, just in case you don't have a mod player handy. If you don't, don't worry, you're not missing much!

4. From time to time, I wonder what life would be like if I followed the other career ideas I'd had. Over the years, I've wanted to be a cabinet maker and a rally driver. I studied Science in university and was still doing two units of Botany in my final year, before deciding computers were for me.

   Even now, I wonder whether I'd be any good at photography, probably not - though more on my SmugMug page (I like the New Zealand ones - and am looking forward to visting there this year for Glynn & Jayne's wedding!) On the other hand, without the pressures of deadlines and actually putting bread on the table, perhaps being an amateur isn't so bad after all.

5. I'm the only Genesis fan I've ever met - I mostly prefer the Peter Gabriel era, but like all of their stuff really. I tend not to really like any other prog rock band I've listened to.

6. I used to role-play rather a lot: epic games that'd last multiple weekends, with story arcs that went on and on. We played anything we could get our hands on - D&D, Runequest, Call of Cthulu, Paranoia, Shadowrun, the system didn't really matter to us. Haven't played in a year or two though, but it's still something I really enjoy. I'm not sure whether this qualifies me as "evil" stevel? Depends who you ask I guess ? :-)

7. Do you ever get the feeling that you have a really good idea floating around in your head, but can never quite organise your thoughts enough to express it? I get that all the time. I hold a few software patents (not really worth talking about) and have submitted one or two other patent disclosures, but still feel like I haven't quite had my "Eureka!" moment yet - it's not something I worry about, but it's in there somewhere.

Ok, with that out of the way, here's another list of people who can choose to ignore this Internet meme if they so choose:

• Rich Lowe @richlowe - because I bet he won't play along! (hah - see, I said I would :-)
• Fintan Ryan @fintanr (blog)
• Mark Musante @mmusante (blog)
• John Corrigan@corriganjc (blog)
• Constantin Gonzalez @zalez (blog)
• Jesse Silver@silverguru
• Alan Coopersmith@alanc (blog)

Here are the rules:

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged.

One of the many great things about being a parent around Christmas, is that not only do you get to see the looks on the faces of your kids when they're opening their presents (itself, priceless) but you also get to play with the presents with them!

Ella was really lucky this year, receiving lots of lovely presents, but one of the best, in my opinion, came from Duncan & Denise, an Alphabet Jigsaw - handmade by a company in Westport, Co. Mayo. It's one of the most ingenious things I've seen.

Ella thinks it's wonderful too. Here she is playing with it wearing her Upsy Daisy costume (thanks Santa!) with Gramps on the kitchen floor:

Calum, being only 15 days old when Christmas arrived, wasn't quite as much into the spirit of the occasion as Ella was, though he did manage to look quite adorable in his "My first Christmas" outfit. May the joys of parenthood continue!

So far, parental leave is going pretty well - 9 days in and we're coping ok (and by the way, I'm not reading work email at the moment, which is probably a good thing - in my sleep-deprived state, I'm not likely to have much in the way of coherent responses!)

To lessen the effects of cabin fever we decided to go on our first family trip with Ella and Calum yesterday. This year in the Dublin Docklands, there's a Christmas market, and it sounded a bit easier to get the kids to that, rather than fly to one of the real Christmas markets in Europe.

A few things became clear during this trip - getting all four of us out of the house is going to take a lot more practice, and our car doesn't fit two prams (the missus carried Calum in a sling instead, but he won't stay this size forever: perhaps it's time to consider a mini-van? Our days of 3-door BMW coupes seem to be long gone...)

Was the market worth going to? Well, yes, if only just to see the look on Ella's face when she saw the carousel - so many rocking horses in one place, how fantastic! The Bratwurst and Lebkuchen were also very welcome treats. More photos below.

Happy Christmas everyone!

It's been a pretty hectic Z-Day and Halloween, but a great birthday overall! (Of course, if you were to ask E, she'd maintain it was her birthday today as well - but that's ok, I'm happy to share :-)

I was woken up by herself and the missus this morning, being presented with my birthday present: a set of knee and elbow pads and a unicycle, which I'm absolutely thrilled about!

As a result, when working from home today, coffee breaks were spent wobbling precariously around the kitchen, hanging on to various bits of furniture for dear life - definitely more practice needed, but I think I'm really going to enjoy this particular form of transport: the goal, to commute to work on it at least once, but one step (and fall) at a time - I'm a long way off being able to commute on it.

Work-wise, Halloween has been haunted by a wodge of xVM Server work, a not-too-terrifying zfs-auto-snapshot putback, the creepiness of some of my code getting pushed to pkg.opensolaris.org as part of nv_100a, and the blood-curdling results of more people trying out the service, running into both unknown and known issues along the way. Bug reports are always welcome though, however horrifying!

Tonight though has been entirely work-free: answering the door to trick-or-treaters, some nice pizza and some excellent beer (on an American theme tonight, Sierra Nevada Bigfoot 2008 and Anchor Steam Liberty Ale, yum) and the by now, traditional photographs of fireworks - so, here goes with continuing that tradition!

We're down in my parents' house in Wicklow this weekend - a bit of a family get-together, Lyd and Edu are over from Barcelona, and Duncan & Denise are down from Carlingford - the occasion being Duncan & Lyd's birthday. We had a BBQ, yes in September, and thankfully the Irish weather was kind to us and the Sun was shining all day - gorgeous. Sorry Glynn & Jayne, wish you were here!

One of the conversations over lunch was about our respective blogs (we all have one now, apparently), and everyone was complaining that mine had an almost complete lack of anything interesting at all right now - they've probably got a point. Posts in my "Off-topic" category have been pretty thin on the ground of late. Actually, I'm even slipping with the technical ones too - OpenSolaris monthly news posts are late, it's nearly the end of September, and I haven't done August's yet either. Sorry about that, there's just not enough hours in the day at the moment.

So, to appease some of my less technical readers (hi Mum & Dad!) here's a post that barely mentions computers. [ suffice to say, that this being Software Freedom Day, I'm composing this post on OpenSolaris 2008.11 nv_98, I used GNOME, Gimp, Exiftool and Gedit to write it - scarcely a scrap of proprietary software here, and I like it! Ok, on with the non-technical content]

Apart from hanging around with the family this weekend, I was down here for something just as enjoyable. Recently it was a milestone birthday for my father-in-law, and we had clubbed together to get him a a day out experiencing falconry, on a Hawk Walk. The voucher was for two people, and as my mother-in-law isn't terribly fond of birds, I was invited along.

What a fantastic outing it was! A group of eight of us spent a few hours learning about the sport of falconry, then got to spend time handing and flying a pair of Harris hawks in the open, and saw several other large birds-of-prey up close and very personal.

I brought the camera along, and quickly managed to fill a 1GB CF card - here's some of the better shots, but it was a tough choice.

A few emotions strike you when you see one of these birds flying towards the leather glove you're wearing in your left hand. Fear initially - it's all beak & talons arriving awfully fast, as the bird's going for the piece of meat you're holding. The landing is pretty dramatic too, but then wonder takes over. Close up they're absolutely amazing creatures. Surprisingly light too, but then again, they're birds, right?

Back at the centre, we got to see a Snowy Owl, some Ferruginous Buzzards, a pair of Lanner Falcons, and an Eagle Owl and got to bring one of the falcons out to see how vastly it differs in the air from the hawks we were flying earlier in the day.

Would I recommend the day out? Absolutely, yes! The guides were friendly and engaging, informative, and very very passionate about their hobby - a really fascinating experience, which I'd love to repeat sometime. More over on Falconry Ireland's web page and check out their Flickr stream too.

We visited Bloom 2008 this afternoon, after EB finally woke from her afternoon nap. The weather's been kind to us so far this bank holiday weekend and the sun was out again today! It was a good show, perhaps a bit too commercial, but strolling around the gardens, with a camera and my two favourite people was a perfect way to spend the afternoon (seeing as how we still don't really have a back garden of our own to speak of!)

Here's a few photos I took on the day

We last left our intrepid hero worn out having moved 1.5 tonnes of gravel. This weekend, the real work started. The weather held out thankfully, and I was able to hire a rotavator (a Briggs & Stratton-engined Electrolux Ursa 6 - nice model name, I thought) on Saturday morning, and spent the day ploughing my back garden. It was pretty heavy work, but it kept me out of trouble.

Today, I started the task of leveling the garden - there isn't enough room to get a mini digger through to the back garden, so what I've done so far has been with a wheel barrow and a shovel, digging down about a foot in order to bring the garden level with the new patio steps. I've lots of topsoil now to make raised beds with, but that's work for another weekend.

I'm not sure if I'm going to get any time in evenings this week to finish the digging: ZFS Root/Install, the next IE-OSUG meeting and likely a few other appointments sound like they're going to keep me busy. So next weekend, I hope to get that part of the job done. Pictures below, for those keeping track:

Today's our last day of the St. Patrick's Day/Easter break - given the way public holidays fell this year in Ireland, I was able to take just 3 days off work and get a break from the office from Saturday 15th to today - I'm back in the office tomorrow.

We've spent the holiday sharing ourselves out between visiting my parents in Wicklow, getting away for a short stay in Athlone (with EB staying in Wicklow, the first time we've ever left her over night [she managed it better than we did!]) and visiting my in-laws in Carrickfergus.

We got back home last night, and despite enjoying my time off, I thought I really should have something to show for the few days off work (although you know what they say about time you enjoy wasting...)

It's been a few years since we last did anything major to the back garden, and since we recently had the front drive re-paved, and a small patio installed in the back garden, the rest of the garden was starting to look a bit shabby.

So here's the plan:

• take up the gravel path we laid a few years back
• re-level the back garden, creating proper raised beds this time (perhaps even a brick wall here & there ?)

Again, I'm still not exactly in Diarmuid Gavin or Monty Don territory, but I'd just like to neaten up the place a bit, and hopefully end up with a garden where we'll be able to play with EB during the summer and read a few books in peace. Bobby McFerrin has it right - simple pleasures are the best.

I tackled the first part today, taking up the gravel path - which meant moving about 1.5 tonnes of gravel from the path, saving it in a large hessian bag to lay down again later. It was heavy manual work, and I suspect I'll be a bit stiff tomorrow.

The next step will be done this coming weekend, weather permitting, when I'll hire a rotavater, and get to work trying to level the garden out a bit (the grass currently slopes gradually towards the house, resulting in slightly damp (mossy) grass towards the bottom). No doubt this will result in more stealth potatoes, but I can take 'em.

In the meantime, the back garden looks slightly chaotic - but it'll get worse before it gets better.

(sorry for the laundry in that picture above, the sharp-eyed reader will notice a "FSCK You" t-shirt hanging on the line. Note to self: this can be a bad choice of apparel when visiting your parents! :-)

Just thought I'd write a few lines here to document experiences with the excellent little eee pc that arrived just before Christmas.

It was going great - I had done some preliminary investigations at getting it to run Solaris from an external disk, and posted the same to the laptop-discuss list. Garrett had suggested some ideas around getting wifi to work, and I was planning on looking into those more while I'm still on vacation.

However something happened the other day that's left me with a warm brick! I'm not entirely sure how it happened, but on a reboot, I was presented with a screen saying that the bios was corrupted, and that the system was looking for a new rom on an attached USB disk. Not having one to hand, and running on battery power anyway, I turned off the machine (thinking, that if it's managed to restart once with a corrupted bios, it'd do so again when I've had a chance to download the latest bios image)

Bad move. The machine now doesn't start at all - it doesn't even get to the bios splash screen. No combinations of:

• removing the battery and power supply and leaving it for a few hours
• hitting alt+f2 during boot to flash the bios from an attached usb disk
• pressing the 'reset' button on the bottom

So, I've logged a ticket with Asus tech support, and have dropped a mail to my reseller to see what the story is at getting a replacement under warranty - my machine shouldn't have broken, and I haven't messed with the factory-installed linux OS nor have I altered the hardware in any way.

In general, this sort of thing is what I hate about PC bioses - there should always be a way to rescue a dead machine. Something like a hardware switch you can use to boot the machine from a read-only bios that has enough smarts to allow you to flash the redundant bios chip with a fresh image, or at the very least bring the machine up to a state where you can save your data somewhere (in my case, since the SSD in the machine is soldered onto the motherboard, getting my data back isn't just a simple case of popping the hard disk!)

So, for now, I'm back to being without a laptop - oh well, it was nice while it lasted. Excellent start to 2008 - it can only get better :-) If anyone else has come across an eee pc in this bricked state with a potentially corrupted bios, I'm all ears, comments welcome!

I wrote previously about Peggle, citing it as the main reason why I'd even consider running Windows [Counter Strike Source being the other] but thankfully those folks at PopCap Games have given me a way out, phew.

You can now get Peggle for the Mac - and while I don't have a PC running Windows at home (the nearest one is up with the in-laws in Carrickfergus, and indeed, it does have Peggle installed), I do have a Mac at home.

The fact that this release coincides with the beginning of my Christmas holidays is the icing on the cake! I'm back in the office on the 4th of January - and I suspect that some of the intervening time will be spent playing Peggle. Yes, I've heard ZeroPunctuation's (hilarious) views on the game, but I don't care, I still like it.

Now, getting this for Java may in fact mean total world domination for a certain casual games company - any chance of it PopCap?

One evening last week, I agreed to do a favour for a friend. His family was giving a picture to the National Gallery on permanent loan - having a rare oil painting painted in 1800s hanging in your house isn't wise unless it's suitably insured and your security system involves lasers, in my opinion.

So, they were looking to get a few good photographs of it, that could ultimately be printed onto canvas once the original had gone, and while they had access to several digital cameras, on-camera flash and oil paintings don't mix (the flash bounces off the canvas) and I happened to have an off-camera flash. I rolled my sleeves up and had a go. A summary of the results is on the left.

I'm neither a fine art, nor history buff, but it was a fascinating evening - the painting was of my friend's great-great grandmother. It was painted by W. T. Parkes in 1887 who was a noted newspaper illustrator of the day, but crucially, he rarely did portraits, which makes this painting all the more interesting.

I ended up with a few good shots of the painting (didn't want to take it out of it's frame, so I suspect I'm missing a few centimetres at the edge) and have them archived now as Canon raw files. Here's hoping they survive as long as the painting has so far - another 120 years at least, we'll see how that goes.

As a bit of an experiment this afternoon, while waiting for machines to install (we're hard at it this weekend on ZFS stuff!) I thought I'd have a dig around the internet to see what's documented about the painter online. Surprisingly little it seems - this and this, but otherwise my search came up blank, so hopefully this post will add to that knowledge.

I've had a terrific morning so far, excellent presents - the missus got me the new William Gibson book and a copy of Vahalia's Unix Internals[1] and my folks gave me baselayer for cycling in - thanks all, you're way too generous :-)

As usual though, the great thing about having a birthday today, is Halloween - Bananas' creche are having a party today, and everyone was to come in fancy dress, so if you were up early enough this morning, you'd have seen a little pumpkin waddling around Raheny. A few photos over on flickr if you're brave enough!

Hopefully fireworks tonight, which I'll try to post later on, as appears to be traditional by now - and having just seen the contents of our fridge, I've a feeling desert might be wonderful!

[1] Thanks for the recommendation sch, looks like great read - shipped really quickly from abebooks too.

It's a bank holiday weekend in Ireland - so I've been pottering about today, catching up on stuff I've been meaning to do for a while.

One of those things, was working out why the front wheel of my recumbent wasn't spinning quite as truly as it should. On first look, it seemed that there might have been some gunk between the pads of the disk brake and the rotor, slowing things down a bit.

I removed the front wheel, cleaned the pads, but no - that wasn't it. Now - to put things in context, I haven't had a bike with disk brakes before, and I definitely haven't had any experience with hydraulic disk brakes (can you see where this is leading ? I've since learnt more). Never afraid to let new technology daunt me, I started tinkering around trying to see what was wrong. Taking off the wheel and pads again, it looked like one of the pistons in the brake wasn't moving in it's cylinder properly.

Thinking that the allen nut on the side of the brake would allow me to adjust that, I opened it a bit to see if that would help. Bad move - the magic blue liquid that made my brake work escaped, so I've now got no front brakes. Jan has since suggested that there could be an air bubble trapped behind the piston on one side, which would explain the somewhat erratic behaviour of the brake - and to fix that, I'd need to have bled the system anyway - so no harm done.

Given it'll take a while for the spare parts to arrive, I took down my old bike from the rafters of my shed where it was hanging, and set about pumping tyres, lubing chains and generally making it fit for the road again.

I took the Rockhopper out for a quick spin this afternoon and, after 10 months of cycling nothing but my recumbent, it feels really weird - and slightly uncomfortable (did I really cycle that thing for 10 years?). Tomorrow's commute into the office will tell all. I've gotten happily used to a really comfy seat, front and rear suspension, panniers and mudguards all round and a terrific view of the road - I'm not looking forward to a nasty wedgie seat, a crick in my neck and all other diamond frame maladies...

It appears you're nobody if you're not brewing beer this weekend! Like Glynn, I'm also brewing a batch of beer at the moment - a Smithwicks clone, adapted from a recipe in Brew Classic European Beers at Home. Adapted, since I didn't have quite the right hops on hand, so with a few sums converting alpha-acid values, I think I've got it right - no doubt it'll taste totally different from actual Smithwicks, but I'll find out in a month or so.

(as an aside, the Sun Ireland weekend away this year is in Kilkenny, where Smithwicks was originally brewed - unfortunately they don't run brewery tours during the weekend - oh well!)

I'm still really enjoying brewing at home, though I've definitely outgrown the pot I'm currently using, a 12.6l 32cm Le Creuset casserole, which weighs a ton! I'd much prefer to be able to boil the entire batch, which means investing in an electric boiler, and something to cool the wort quickly. If that goes well, then I could start looking at moving on from malt-extract brewing onto partial or full mash brewing. Would probably need to move out of the kitchen in that case, into the shed (and get a bigger shed!) in that case, so we'll see how things go.

In the meantime, here's a few snaps from Friday's brewing session, which started at lunchtime on Friday, for a few minutes to make a yeast-starter (another undocumented benefit of working from home on Fridays!) then back to work till 6pm. Put Bananas to bed at 7, ate dinner then started setting things up, and worked out the ingredients needed at about 9pm, and started the 1.5hr boil at 11pm.

All done and kitchen spotless again by 2am - spilled wort is sticky!

Hurrah! Canon announced their new EOS 40D and it appears to have fixes for all the things I've whinged about previously - notably, an ISO readout in the viewfinder (a must for any digital camera imho), and something to deal with dust - in the form of the sensor-shaker system they brought in on the 400D.

I still don't understand why a simpler solution wouldn't have been sufficient (or complimentary) to keep out that nasty dust. Something along the lines of a sliding door to the light box that closes when you remove the lens, but I'll bow to their superior wisdom here.

Some of the other features are a bit weird - like the AF-ON button - isn't that just dedicating a button to what you could previously do with a custom function? That is, moving AF to the AE lock ("*") button on the back, my preferred mode of operation.

Still this is all academic - I'm not in the market for a new camera at the moment, but if I was I'd certainly be looking at a 40D pretty closely - though I'd be wondering perhaps whether a 5D replacement is imminent ? For now, though, I'm still happy with my aging 10D - after all, it's what's behind the camera that counts ultimately...

Had a fantastic time last week down in Kerry - we were staying in Blennerville, and spent most of the week touring the area, playing on beaches, reading books and generally chilling out. Kerry is a beautiful place, and now that we're home in Dublin, I'm finding myself wanting to be back there. Here's the sort of thing I mean:

Of course, no visit to the Dingle Peninsula would be complete without a visit to Dingle itself - a bit touristy, but there's the occasional gem to be found - in particular the notion of this place:

- a pub that's also a hardware shop as well as a bike shop - beer, hardware and bicycles, 3 of my favourite things in once place - fantastic!

I've another week of holidays left, and we're having a lot of fun here as well, having visited Howth and Dublin Zoo so far. Wonder what we'll get up to tomorrow? I'm trying to stay away from computers this week, though I will be along to tonight's Irish OpenSolaris User Group meeting, hope to see you there!

I'd previously thought that my daughter was a kernel-hacker in the making. I'm now even more convinced of her potential coding prowess after she brought this home from creche yesterday:

Needless to say, this piece of art is now the wallpaper on my desktop :-)

In other news, I'm off on vacation for 2 weeks, so probably not much work-related stuff here for a while. Next week, we're down in Kerry where there aren't any computers (at least that's what the missus told me), but I'll be back online a bit the week after, and will be along to the IE-OSUG meeting on Tuesday. See you then!

Nothing profound to say here - except that I'm doing my best to try to get the work life balance right. I've always found it very difficult to manage this, spending a bit too much time at work - in recent years, I've tended to get to December every year with loads of my vacation time still intact, and I spend way too much time reading work-mail when not at work. Not good, have to get better at that.

So, having already spent an excellent weekend down in Wicklow with the whole family (Glynn, Lydia & Edu were visiting from New Zealand and Barcelona respectively and Duncan & Denise were down from Carlingford - a good time was had by all ), today, I took a day off. I've been pretty busy with work-related stuff of late, and I decided that having a non-work day would probably do me some good.

I'd originally intended to catch up on some OpenSolaris reading (which I don't usually class as "work", it not being my actual day job) that I've been meaning to investigate for ages, but then thought - "Hang on, that's still work-related. And just because we have Bananas signed up for a creche, doesn't mean we have to send her every day - besides, I've been doing more than enough OpenSolaris stuff recently. Time for a break."

So, I decided to look after my daughter all day - reading children's books, feeding her breakfast, lunch & a mid-afternoon snack, taking a walk around the gorgeous rose garden in St. Anne's Park, stopping on the way home for an ice-cream (for myself, not Bananas - sorry, but she's only 9.5 months old and ice-cream is not on the menu yet!) and generally having a pretty relaxing time of it.

Note to self: this was a really enjoyable day, and no computers necessary - really must do it again sometime (But yes, the fact that I'm blogging about work-life balance, probably means I haven't got there yet. I'll keep trying - any tips? )

I've just posted my slides from last night's IE-OSUG meeting. Glynn has already posted his excellent slides - and I've also updated The Irish OpenSolaris User Group Podcast feed with the audio of the talk.

The audio is a bit noisy I'm afraid, but I did my best - if anyone wants to send me a decent mic, or perhaps take over as sound-engineer, perhaps the audio quality will improve, but feedback would be welcome.

My take-away from the meeting last night ? Indiana sounds like a really exciting project, and I believe that it will enrich the OpenSolaris community for the better, we just need to hang in there, think positively and help where we can.

Marcus Brody: The search for the Grail is the search for the divine in all of us. But if you want facts, Indy, I've none to give you. At my age, I'm prepared to take a few things on faith.

It's my first Father's Day today, and so far, it's going pretty well! After doing a bleary-eyed nappy change at 07:00, and being presented with a lovely card (seen here) from Bananas, I was treated to a lie-in till 10:25 - pure luxury.

Then later on, with her usual excellent sense of timing, Bananas uttered her first coherent word! And given the day that was in it, she decided it would be "Dada" - well, perhaps a bit closer to "Dhra dhra", but that was good enough for me, I was thrilled! Tim still very much in proud-parent mode, can you tell?

Not much planned for the rest of today, but the missus tells me that there just happens to be mascarpone cheese and cream in the fridge, along with cold coffee, savoiardi biscuits, sugar and and ample supply of marsala - which can mean only one thing - yum!

Here's a post I didn't want to have to write - got a call late this afternoon in the office from the missus saying that she'd been involved in a car crash.

I dropped everything, and ran (not walked) to the Dart St. to get to Raheny, followed by a very fast taxi-ride to where she had the accident. The ambulance & police were there at that stage. The missus had been rear-ended by a guy behind who wasn't paying attention, she in turn had hit the car in front, but appeared to have only caused a scratch to that car. Above all, I'm thankful that nobody was hurt. When I got to the scene the missus was swapping insurance details with the other party, and Bananas was happily grinning at the Gardaí.

Our car wasn't quite so lucky - it's rear-end seems rather unwell:

I was able to drive the car home, but it sounded pretty rattly, and the Gardaí had advised us to not drive it any further than the garage after that. We've phoned the insurance companies, and are going to pop down to the garage tomorrow morning to see what the extent of the damage is.

My (unprofessional) opinion is that given that you can see a bit of the chassis protruding from the bumper, and that the rear seat-bench is out of alignment, that it's possible the chassis has been warped, which might mean a write-off. Any other opinions?

Needless to say, I don't give a hoot about the car, and am so amazingly thankful that both the missus and Bananas are okay. Phew, what a day - apologies if ZFS didn't get all of my attention today.

My daily commute used to be right though the busiest bits of Dublin city centre - College Green. Done fast, on a Rockhopper, this was an absolute blast - nothing concentrates the mind in the mornings like the prospect of impending 16-wheel death looming up behind. I came off the bike once or twice (once at the wheels of Dublin Bus!) but lived to tell the tale.

Since moving out to Raheny, and riding a recumbent these days, my commute isn't as mad-frantic as it used to be. It's hard to weave through traffic on my recumbent, perhaps I just need more practice, but those cycle lanes make life so easy...

Anyway, City Cycling this month has a lovely article on the joys of Traffic Jamming:

There is nothing that puts a grin on my face like slipping through a congested mass of fuming cars and fuming drivers baking in their own juices on a hot summer's day. It's the real-world equivalent of a video game: a bike may not be equipped with laser cannons for shooting down obstacles, but it's still a matter of skill, prescience, lightning-quick reactions, agility and speed to get through in the best possible time. Cycling to work in an hour each morning wasn't just putting my head down and beasting it on the open roads: it was navigating the rush-hour traffic with flair and panache and a degree of cockiness bordering on recklessness -- just like Han Solo in the Millenium Falcon smuggling that Glitterstim spice. I could have chosen quieter back roads and avoided the traffic, but that would have taken longer and, critically, not been nearly as much fun.

Says it all really. You can read the entire article here.

I think I'm addicted to Peggle - I wonder are there any voluntary organisations out there that can help me?

This game is just amazing - it won me over in the first 5 minutes of playing and now has me completely hooked. Seriously, whoever thought of zooming in on that last peg in slow motion and blasting out Beethoven with appropriate amounts of fireworks and rainbows in the background should be given a large pay-rise. Even the "loading..." screen is classy.

Peggle is a marvelous game, the best €20 I've spent in a while: find a Windows PC and go play it!

Having said that, I'd really love to see this game get ported to Java so I could run it on Solaris, I'd even pay double for the privilege - any chance of that Popcap? (and yes, I've already bought a copy to run on my in-laws PC here in Carrickfergus!)

If, say, you (or some recent family member) somehow managed to get pureed sweet-potato in your keyboard, what would be the best way of getting it out ?

A purely hypothetical question, you understand...

A few years ago, when myself and the missus had just started going out, on weekends, I'd take the train up to Belfast, where she'd pick me up and drive the few hours to Coleraine where she was studying. On one of these trips (I think it was) I saw a weird light in the sky in front of us - couldn't work out what it was.

I asked the (not yet) missus what it was. Having not seen what I was looking at, she said "That's the moon Pet." Well, I found it funny anyway - perhaps you'd had to have been there.

Anyway, like much of the rest of the population, I thought I'd have a go at taking a picture of last night's eclipse. I think it came out okay:

I've just finished bottling my latest batch of beer - a Czech lager (something like Gabrinus, according to the book).

I can't understand why more people in Ireland don't homebrew. Despite the Irish reputation, pubs in Ireland (while being full of 'craic', whatever that is) don't tend to have a very large range of beers. You're lucky if they have more than 5, and probably in the Porterhouse if they have more than 10.

So, a few years back, I decided, that since quite I liked beer, and having had a (then) girlfriend who spent a few months behind the bar at the Porterhouse after completing her PhD., I'd have a go at brewing my own.

To my surprise and amazement, it's not that hard, at least to the level I'm doing it at so far. Starting off with a small amount of equipment, and a simple "just add sugar" beer kit, within a month or so, I had pretty decent beer in bottles. The only hard part, was finding somewhere that sold brewing equipment - I couldn't find anywhere in Dublin that sells it (despite being told there was a shop in Ranelagh a few years ago) - the internet was my only hope.

Over the intervening few years, I've become a little more adventurous in my brewing, a treacle-stout and a really nice Duvel-clone being among my better brews. I'm still firmly in the realm of extract-brewing, but I'm buying extract on it's own (both dried and liquid), and haven't been afraid of adding my own hops or specialty grain. I've also experimented around with different yeast varieties. All-grain brewing is the next step up, but I'm just not sure if I want to go to that extra level (both in terms of brew-day complexity or equipment budget) We'll see.

The result of home brewing is definitely worth it - beer that's as good as, and frequently better than much of the beer you get in the shops and pubs. And on top of all that, the process of brewing beer is pretty interesting, and on the whole therapeutic. I'd definitely recommend you give it a go.