Alan Hargreaves' Weblog

Live Upgrade and TimeSlider gotcha

Tried to upgrade my workstation over the weekend to snv_117. Apart from a little tridying up I had to do as a package didn't install correctly, all apeared to be going fine. I then went to unmount /.alt.snv_117, and it failed saying that the filesystem was busy.

fuser -c showed no processes using the mount point. What could it be?

A little bit of dtracing the umount2() system call was illuminating.

  1              <- zfsctl_umount_snapshots           0                0
  1            <- zfs_umount                          0               16

Hang on, snapshots? Although it returned 0, let's just check; as I do have timeslider enabled on this box.

rootksh@vesvi:~$ zfs list -t snapshot|grep 117                                                                     
pool/ROOT/snv_116@snv_117                                   4.03M      -  8.78G  -
pool/ROOT/snv_117@zfs-auto-snap:hourly-2009-06-19-09:00     43.8M      -  7.99G  -
pool/ROOT/snv_117@zfs-auto-snap:hourly-2009-06-19-10:00     48.9M      -  8.44G  -
pool/ROOT/snv_117@zfs-auto-snap:hourly-2009-06-19-11:00     43.7M      -  8.74G  -
pool/ROOT/snv_117@zfs-auto-snap:frequent-2009-06-19-11:15   42.6M      -  8.75G  -
pool/ROOT/snv_117@zfs-auto-snap:frequent-2009-06-19-11:30   45.8M      -  8.76G  -
pool/ROOT/snv_117@zfs-auto-snap:frequent-2009-06-19-11:45   38.1M      -  8.77G  -
pool/ROOT/snv_117@zfs-auto-snap:hourly-2009-06-19-12:00     38.5M      -  8.80G  -
pool/ROOT/snv_117@zfs-auto-snap:daily-2009-06-22-00:00          0      -  8.80G  -
pool/ROOT/snv_117@zfs-auto-snap:weekly-2009-06-22-00:00         0      -  8.80G  -
pool/ROOT/snv_117@zfs-auto-snap:hourly-2009-06-22-10:00         0      -  8.80G  -
pool/ROOT/snv_117@zfs-auto-snap:frequent-2009-06-22-10:30       0      -  8.80G  -
pool/ROOT/snv_117@zfs-auto-snap:frequent-2009-06-22-10:45       0      -  8.80G  -

Oh, timeslider was taking snapshots of the filesystem while it was upgrading. Hmm maybe we should be having that disabled on the target of a live upgrade (rfe coming, but I don't hold out a lot of hope).

Anyway, removing them was not difficult:

rootksh@vesvi:~$ zfs list -t snapshot|grep snv_117@zfs-auto|awk '{print $1}' | xargs -L 1 zfs destroy
rootksh@vesvi:~$ luumount snv_117                                                                                  
rootksh@vesvi:~$ 

Something to keep in mind if you are using timeslider, zfs root and live upgrade (I wonder if we would have the same issue with 'pkg image-update' in OpenSolaris).

Posted at 11:05AM Jun 22, 2009 by Alan Hargreaves in Solaris  |  Comments[1]

What's in the OpenSolaris Support repositories?

As you may or may not know, you can now buy support contracts for OpenSolaris.

Apart from the ability to make a support call, you also get access to the Support Repository. This is where we backport as subset of fixes from development system and do a lot more testing. Chris has blogged on how to point at the extras and support repositories, so I won't repeat him. What I will do is point you at a couple of sunsolve documents that may be useful in seeing what we are fixing in there.

The important one would be OpenSolaris Support Repository Updates (SRUs). In this page we list each of the updates as well as a browsable link (instructions provided on how to add the certificate to Firefox) and a README outlining the bugs that were addressed.

A link to SRU 6 hasn't made it into this page yet, but you can find it here.

Posted at 03:56PM Jun 16, 2009 by Alan Hargreaves in OpenSolaris  |  Comments[7]

Windows, OpenSolaris and VirtualBox

Over the weekend (as I knew we were going to have some network stuff going on) I installed Virtual Box on my notebook on the Windows disk (I have nevada on the other disk [yes I have a notebook with two 250gb discs]) and then installed a release candidate ISO of OpenSolaris 2009.06. I copied a backup of my punchin credentials and the two packages I needed onto the FAT32 partition of the windows disc from within nevada and then got to work setting things up.

Gotcha #1, don't try to do the install with only 512mb memory, it looks like it's working, but it just sits there doing precious little. I used up about an hour of battery on the train trying this. I got off the train at Tuggerah and went to McDonalds to both get dinner and finish the install, which then went along happily (I chose McDonalds mainly because they also have free wifi).

Installed the punchin packages and restored the credentials. It actually took a bit of research to find out how to use sharing. Doing it from the Windows side with Virtual Box was relatively straightforward, but doing it from the OpenSolaris side was not so obvious. I ended up finding it after hitting the User Guide. I'd called the directory I wanted "share", from OpenSolaris I had to do

$ pfexec mount -F vboxfs share /mnt

Once I'd done that it just worked fine. Everything looked great, except I'd now run out of battery with no power points easily in sight. Oh well headed home.

Once connected to the power everything seemed to work. I dropped the memory back to half a gig (as I run a few things in windows that are kinda memory hungry), and it worked fine for me all weekend just on the notebook.

Arrived at work today to find that for reasons that I won't go into today, the workstation that I normally run my Sun Ray IIFS from was off the internal network, making my Sun Ray useless to me.

I ran up Virtual Box on the notebook and then started the OpenSolaris that I had to start working. A little into the day it occurred to me that I have two 22" screens and a full sized keyboard and mouse sitting next to the notebook, currently doing very little. The keyboard and mouse are in their own unpowered usb hub plugged into the Sun Ray. OK they are now plugged into the notebook. That made a huge difference to productivity.

I then unplugged the digital connection from the screen and attached that to the notebook. Now I have a mirror of what's on the notebook and it is also easier to read. Productivity goes up again.

You know, I could go one step further by instead of mirroring the screens actually going dual screen, such that I have the windows session displayed on teh notebook and then I could go full screen (1600x1200) for OpenSolaris.

Once I arranged things that the mouse moved in the correct direction between the two, this is wonderful and surprisingly usable (well more so once i upped the memory for the OpenSolaris part to 768mb).

Gotcha #2, don't install the VDI files on a FAT32 filesystem, which is what I did because that's where I had the most free space. Everything worked wonderfully until the size of the dynamic disc that I had allocated hit 4gb. Then I started getting errors about full disks from Virtual Box. OK moving the VDI file to the NTFS wasn't that hard. I had to first physically copy it, then release and remove it from within Virtual box, then attach it again from the NTFS disc.

And that's how I ended up getting my job done today. I'm pretty happy with how it worked out.

Posted at 07:09PM May 25, 2009 by Alan Hargreaves in OpenSolaris  |  Comments[6]

Installing "extra" packages against OpenSolaris 2008.11 (with or without support repository updates)

It took me a bit to work out what was going on here (including a number of re-installs to make sure I hadn't screwed up), so I thought it worth sharing.

First, what a failure looks like:

After following Chris's instructions for adding the extra repository, I tried to install flash from it so the kids could play their browser based flash games.

$ pfexec pkg install pkg://extra/web/firefox/plugin/flash
Creating Plan |                        
pkg: the following package(s) violated constraints:
        Package pkg:/SUNWcsl@0.5.11,5.11-0.111 conflicts with constraint in installed pkg:/entire: 
                Pkg SUNWcsl: Optional min_version: 0.5.11,5.11-0.101 max version: 0.5.11,5.11-0.101 defined by: pkg:/entire

It turns out that what is at issue here is that the extra repository now has the "fat" packages that we will be using for 2009.06. The pkg command on 2008.11 (with any number of support repository updates - I was originally on SRU4 before re-install) can't handle these so it produces that cryptic message.

So, what can we do about it?

The first step is to have a look at all versions of the package we are interested in on extra.

$ pfexec pkg list -af 'pkg://extra/web/firefox/plugin/flash'
NAME (AUTHORITY)                              VERSION         STATE      UFIX
web/firefox/plugin/flash (extra)              10.0.22.87-0.111 known      ----
web/firefox/plugin/flash (extra)              10.0.22.87-0.101 known      u---
web/firefox/plugin/flash (extra)              9.0.151-0.101   known      u---
web/firefox/plugin/flash (extra)              9.0.125-0.101   known      u---
web/firefox/plugin/flash (extra)              9.0.125-0.101   known      u---

The version 9 packages will work ok, so we simply install one of those:

$ pfexec pkg install "pkg://extra/web/firefox/plugin/flash@9.0.151-0.101"
PHASE                                          ITEMS
Indexing Packages                            554/554 
DOWNLOAD                                    PKGS       FILES     XFER (MB)
Completed                                    1/1         3/3     2.46/2.46 

PHASE                                        ACTIONS
Install Phase                                  19/19 
Reading Existing Index                           9/9 
Indexing Packages                                1/1 

And done. The note to myself for 2009.06 is that that 4gb root disc is just not going to cut it anymore :) Time for something more reasonable.

Posted at 03:41PM May 22, 2009 by Alan Hargreaves in OpenSolaris  |  Comments[3]

multithreaded processes and mdb

Today I had to look at a gcore of devfsadm. Most specifically I wanted to have at what the threads in cond_wait() were doing. I haven't done a lot with such stuff in userland before so thought it would make a good short blog topic on things that can be done.

First off we run up mdb

#  mdb /usr/sbin/devfsadm devfsadm.gcore
Loading modules: [ libsysevent.so.1 libnvpair.so.1 libc.so.1 libavl.so.1 libuutil.so.1 ld.so.1 ]
> 

Great, we got all the modules. So, what lwps have we got?

> $L
lwpids 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 are in core of process 135.

So we have six threads, let's have a look at the registers in first one (note that this is on SPARC).

> 1::regs
%g0 = 0x00000000                 %l0 = 0x00000000 
%g1 = 0x0000001d                 %l1 = 0x00043748 
%g2 = 0x0003cb2c                 %l2 = 0xffbff8ac 
%g3 = 0x00038000                 %l3 = 0x00000001 
%g4 = 0x0003cb2c                 %l4 = 0x00000000 
%g5 = 0x00000000                 %l5 = 0x00000000 
%g6 = 0x00000000                 %l6 = 0x00000000 
%g7 = 0xff342a00                 %l7 = 0x00000001 
%o0 = 0xff342c40                 %i0 = 0x00000001 
%o1 = 0xff13b90c libc.so.1`pause+0x50 %i1 = 0x0003a2a4 
%o2 = 0xff1c3800 libc.so.1`_uberdata %i2 = 0xff342a00 
%o3 = 0x00000000                 %i3 = 0x00039954 
%o4 = 0xff342a00                 %i4 = 0x00016964 
%o5 = 0x00000000                 %i5 = 0x00000000 
%o6 = 0xffbff850                 %i6 = 0xffbff8b0 
%o7 = 0xff13b914 libc.so.1`pause+0x58 %i7 = 0x00015ce4 

 %psr = 0x00000044 impl=0x0 ver=0x0 icc=nzvc
                   ec=0 ef=0 pil=0 s=0 ps=64 et=0 cwp=0x4
  %y = 0x00000000
  %pc = 0xff14c160 libc.so.1`_pause+4
  %npc = 0xff14c164 libc.so.1`_pause+8
  %sp = 0xffbff850
  %fp = 0xffbff8b0                    

 %wim = 0x00000082
 %tbr = 0x00000000

Now to have a look at the stack we simply find the %sp value and use it with the stack dcmd.

> 0xffbff850::stack
0x15ce4(0, 43b48, 39db4, 4, 2276c, 38000)
main+0x358(0, 39f2c, ffbffdec, 398e4, 1, 38000)
_start+0x108(0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0)

Note that this gives the stack frames above the current and not the current. From the value of %pc above we can see where we are executing in the current frame. You can also see that we the caller does not have an entry in the symbol table. Unfortunately, on Solaris 10, devfsadm has a lot of functions and variables declared as static, which really does make debugging a pain. Fortunately this is not the case in Nevada/OpenSolaris.

Looking at the other lwps is as simple as listing the lwp id in front of the regs dcmd and repeating what we just did. I won't go into how I worked out which of the static routines we were executing in for the other lwps in cond_wait(), save to say that there are only a couple of places that make that call in the code, and matching up the assembly around the locations to the source (especially looking at called functions), makes this not too difficult.

Posted at 04:46PM May 04, 2009 by Alan Hargreaves in Solaris  |  Comments[0]

Oracle buying Sun, who woulda thought

Looks like I get to work just a little closer with some of my VOSJEC colleages (both past and present).

Posted at 07:46AM Apr 21, 2009 by Alan Hargreaves in General  |  Comments[2]

New Song - That's Just the way that it goes

Finished recording this about 2 hours ago. It's now available on Myspace and The Sixty One as a download. I've just made the 128k mp3 available under the following license:

That's Just The Way That it Goes by Alan Hargreaves is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.

Which basically means as long as you don't want to modify it, as long as you don't want to make money out of it, and as long as you attribute it; you can download and pass it around as much as you like.

You can also listen to a copy from thesixtyone.com here.

The technical side of things.

I learned some things while recording this.

The drums I created with Rhythm Rascal (and I will register this shareware when I have some spare cash). I found this application incredibly easy to use and it produced a really nice wav file that I could import into reaper. I could have saved as midi, but I found I liked the samples that it used for the drums better than anything else I had.

The Bass line I did up in the midi editor in reaper using a bass sample from the Kore midi set (free download).

Now the guitar, ... big lesson number 1. Put new strings on the guitar. I could not get a decent recording of the guitar with month old strings on.I also couldn'd get the exact sound I wanted inside reaper, so I ended up recording the guitar (and actually the vocals too) through my Digitech RP-150 with some hall reverb, bright EQ and slight compression.

The other really big lesson I learned is just how absolutely essential it is to use compression given the huge dynamic range of an acoustic guitar. That made an enormous difference.

In order to keep a decent strum going through the whole song, I recorded some incidental stuff for the guitar as well.After all that was done it was time to lay down the vocal. I set up the Behringer C-1 at head level and put a pop filter in front of it and kicked offf the recorder. Wow what a difference it makes to sing along against a full backing. It really helped to get into the feel of the song and I was bopping along while singing. Same thing adding the harmonies to the chorus.

All in all, I'm extremely happy with how this turned out and I hope you enjoy it too.

Alan.

Posted at 03:57PM Apr 15, 2009 by Alan Hargreaves in Music  |  Comments[7]

Daaaaaaaad, the computer isn't booting

These were the words that my 10 year old boy yelled to me on Sunday.

I'm documenting this as I tried to imagine facing this as an end user, rather than as a Solaris kernel support engineer, and shuddered

The machine he is talking about is the OpenSolaris box that I installed for them and recently upgraded to SRU4 on Friday (more on supported updates shortly).

The box (silver) had been sitting at the boot load screen (those of us old enough to remember the original Battlestar Galactica would refer to it as the cylon screen) with the disk light hard on and the disk rattling away threatening to send itself off into hyperspace. It had apparently been like this for a few hours (he lost interest and went to watch TV before thinking to tell me).

He'd tried resetting it and it didn't help.

"OK", I thought, "I've just upgraded the box, maybe there was a problem with SRU4, let's boot into the prior boot environment." Easy enough to do, just reset and select the prior environment in grub.

No dice. Same issue.

Failsafe boot? No it appears that we don't have one of those.

Right, a single user boot. I want to have a look at what is going on on the console, So we need to get rid of the graphics crud at the start.

This isn't too hard. Have a look at the options in the text boot to be sure, but all I did was hit 'e' (edit) in grub, d (delete) the splash and graphics lines, e (edit) the unix line to take out the ",Graphics... " stuff off the end of the command, hit Enter to go back a screen then hit b (boot) and watch what happens.

I didn't have to wait long.

Let me give you a little more background on this machine. It really is scrounged together. The root pool consists solely of a 4gb disc removed from an ultra 10.

The root zpool was 100% full. The disc full messages scrolled for a while.

OK, once we waited for a few minutes we got the prompt asking for a login name and password to drop us to a root single user. OK, let's go looking for where the space issue is.

A 'zfs list' showed me that rpool/export/home was a little larger than I expected. Unfortunately, as the pool was full, I couldn't mount those. No worries, let's poke around on / to try to find something to remove to make enough space so we can mount things.

A good place to look for such space on a workstation is in /var/log, specifically the Xorg logs.

Let's remove one of those, ....

Bzzzzzt wrong.

Copy on write, .... In order to unlink a file we need to write a new block for the directory entry. Oops no free blocks.

The trick is to lose the space without having to rewrite the directory entry. We need to truncate one of the logs.

# : > Xorg.0.log.old

Much better. For good measure I zapped Xorg.0.log as well.

OK, that looks much better.

Let's mount rpool/export/home and have a look.

# zfs mount rpool/export/home

Ahhh, the kids home directories each have a largish core in them. Remove those, unmount /export/home. Now, as I mounted rpool/export/home and not rpool/export, a directory got created in /export. We need to remove that or the filesystem/local service won't start correctly (it will complain about /export having stuff in it).

Logout of that shell and the system continues on to milestone=multiuser and we're good again and Jake is off to do his daily moves in Kingdom of Loathing and resume his Club Penguin.

Posted at 01:26AM Apr 07, 2009 by Alan Hargreaves in OpenSolaris  |  Comments[15]

My CMT machine loads Oracle Databases slower than ..

This is more of an "Oh no not again" type post, ...

I am constantly amazed at the number of escalations that make it to the performance group with this as the problem.

It really is a case of an unrealistic expectation and knowledge of what the machines excel at.

The most recent of these to cross my desk talks of a customer concerned that a dual core 2.5GHz x86 based box loads data into an Oracle database much faster than his shiny new T5220.

Until such a time as Oracle makes their SQL Loader run multi-threaded (which may bring in problems all of their own) this will always be the case.

The design of the system is such that it will run single threaded applications much slower than the x86 counterparts. These machines, however, come into their own once we enter production and start getting lots of parallel requests on the database. As we are running far more cpus, the load on the database must be much higher before we start to see any significant degradation.

The question that really should be asked here is, "Where do you want your performance? In the database load that you will do once, or in responding to production queries?"

Posted at 06:30PM Mar 03, 2009 by Alan Hargreaves in Solaris  |  Comments[4]

Ben Folds and You Tube Covers (some good news)

I was watching Sky News Australia a few minutes ago and they ran an interesting story.

It seems that Ben Folds tried searching for his name on You Tube. Instead finding recordings of his, he found lots of fans doing acapella covers of his work.

Now many artists would consider asserting their songwriter copyright on that material. Not Ben. He decided to make an album with the best of these people. Here's a link to the story carried last month in the Daily Princetonian.

I did find one part amusing, ...

The Nassoons caught Folds’ attention with their version of his song “Time” from his 2005 album “Songs for Silverman.” The group’s version of the tune was arranged by Nassoons music director Jonathan Schwartz ’10.

Moonlighighting Jonathan? ;-)

On a more serious note, I think it's wonderful to see artists/songwriters encouraging this kind of thing.

There's more on the project at his web site.

Posted at 11:50AM Jan 27, 2009 by Alan Hargreaves in Music  | 

OpenSolaris 2008.11 on the kids computer

OK, colour me impressed.

We got a hold of a "broken" computer today. After replacing the power supply and putting on an old 9gb disk (the previous owner wanted to keep the disk) I started wondering what I was going to put on it. So it occurred to me that I really should try to put OpenSolaris on it, as I think it should do most of what the kids want.

Downloaded the image from opensolaris.com and burned the cd image. Note to self, don't try to burn a cd image while running itunes, downloading a podcast and playing second life under XP. It's a good way to have a write underrun and burn a coaster.

Put it into the machine and booted it. Lovely, came straight up into the live cd. Hmmm, but no network. Dived into the device assistant and it noted I had a Via ethernet and needed the vfe driver, for which it kindly pointed me at homepage2.nifty.com/mrym3/taiyodo/eng/. A little bit of finger trouble later, I found the compiled version of the amd64 driver for it and installed it. Reading the README.txt is a good idea, as I left a step out and was wondering why I had no network. The trick was, ...

$ rm Makefile
$ ln -s Makefile.amd64_gcc Makefile
$ pfexec make install
$ pfexec ./adddrv.sh

That last step is vital.

Just to be safe I rebooted (it's late on the Monday of a long weekend and my brain is not working real great) and it came back with a network and everything looks honky dory.

Given this is for the kids and they spend a lot of time on You Tube and Club Penguin, I needed flash installed. I did a quick bit of googling and found something that I should have known from my day job (like I said, late n the Monday of a long weekend), in that if I went to pkg.sun.com/register and using my Sun Online credentials that I could register for the Extras repository and there was a package for flash in there.

Well I did this but stil had some trouble as it kept telling me that my certificate date was in the future. OK This one I could figure out. This did used to run windows, so the time on teh machine was an hour slow because of how windows set the clock for summer time. Easily fixed:

$ pfexec ntpdate 0.pool.ntp.org

And getting back through the screen saver that obviously came up :).

OK, now it liked the certificates and I could install flash, and successfully look at youtube after a firefox restart.

The final step was to make a new account for my 10 year old son.

Now the smoke test. I had him login. He immediately brought firefox up with no prompting from me. A few web sites later he is happily playing on Club Penguin.

We'll see how this runs for them over the next few weeks.

I'm pretty happy with how this has gone down so far.

Posted at 11:03PM Jan 26, 2009 by Alan Hargreaves in OpenSolaris  |  Comments[1]

Too much kids computing

Oh dear. Jake (10) was sitting next to me playing a game on my notebook. He stood up and said to me...

B.R.B.

... and headed off to briefly return. For those not in the know - brb is Be Righ Back.

Posted at 12:34PM Jan 21, 2009 by Alan Hargreaves in Kids  |  Comments[1]

Catching up

OK, I've been on holidays so I kind of have an excuse for not blogging this time.

Before I go on I have to acknowledge a man who quickly became a good friend in Second Life, who sadly passed on December 30. Chester Capalini was the monarch in the Tiny Empires kingdom (See Dana's blog for more on Tiny Empires) that I was playing in. On the 29th (I think) he was admitted to hospital, very ill. I performed a song and dedicated it to him while performing in Second Life (Running on Faith) and 8 hours later he was gone. Chester had a great heart and lots of people miss him dearly.

I spent New Years Eve in Rockdale with some other Second Life friends who also happen to be musicians. Shan plays bass and Byron is a drummer. We had a great jam for New Years Eve. Had a message from Shan the other day that she managed to seriously jam her fingers in a door, requiring surgery. Fortunately the nerves are still there and the doctors expect her to be able to play again in about three months.

There has to be some lighter news here somewhere :) Oh yes, while this is the last work day that constitutes my holidays, it also happens to be my 44th birthday. Jake and Lucy prepared me some breakfast (A crumpet with promite, a nectarine and a chocolate milkshake) and brought it up to me along with their present. Mum and dad will be down later in the day to take us out to lunch, so there is something else to look forward to. If I can get my act together today, I might try to head out to Brackets and Jam South tonight, and if Dexter is playing at Iguana's tomorrow that might also get a look in.

Posted at 09:46AM Jan 09, 2009 by Alan Hargreaves in General  | 

Christmas All Year Through

Merry Christmas!

During the last month I've participated in an amazing collaboration. The result of which is the release of a song involving 22 Second Life Artists from all over the world.

Below is a URL where you can download a free MP3. The MP3 is a collaborative recording featuring 22 SL musicians all performing an original song entitled "Christmas All Year Through", having recorded their contributions remotely from all over the world. The song was written by Djai Skjellerup and the final mix was painstaking put together by Toby Lancaster. The rest of the collaborators to whom we are hugely grateful for their excellent contributions are listed beneath the song name. I'll try to get a copy uploaded to my tracks shortly.

URL for downloading Christmas All Year Through: http://www.mediafire.com/file/wttmmwunktz/SLChristmasAllYearThrough.mp3

Project Log: http://slmc.myfastforum.org/about2137.html

Collaborators: BabbleGrabble Swindlehurst, Carah Nitely, Franziskus Paine, Jean Munro, Kaklick Martin, Kiarranne Flanagan, Krell Karu, Lonnie Nightfire, Lyn Carlberg, Mambo Welles, Mimi Carpenter, OhMy Kidd, The Professor, Rich Desoto, Saraine Sands, Slim Warrior, Tommy Cult, Tpenta Vanalten, Vicki Nilsson, Zak Claxton, Toby Lancaster and Djai Skjellerup

And as an extra bonus for you here is the last collaborative recording we did also free for you to download entitled Get It Together....

URL for downloading Get It Together: http://www.mediafire.com/file/wyoygtyizgd/GetItTogether.mp3

Information Website: http://slgetittogether.weebly.com/

Project Log: http://slmc.myfastforum.org/about810.html

Collaborators: Norris Shepherd, Zak Claxton, BabbleGrabble Swindlehurst, Rich Desoto, Jambalaya Fonck, Lyn Carlberg, Kim Seifert, Jean Munro, The Professor, Freestar Tammas, Mimi Carpenter, Toby Lancaster and Djai Skjellerup

Please keep coming back to: http://slgetittogether.weebly.com/index.html as well. It is only in it's embryonic stage at the moment but will soon be updated with biographies of all the collaborators and other information.

Thanks for your time. We'd also like to send our best wishes to those who do not observe Christmas. We hope you enjoy our efforts all the same and have a happy time over the holiday period. My thanks to all the Get It Together collaborators for your efforts with a special mention to Toby Lancaster, Bree Birke and Cher Harrington for your invaluable contributions.

Posted at 11:13AM Dec 22, 2008 by Alan Hargreaves in Music  |  Comments[1]

Why I love the Second Life Musician's Community

After getting back from CEC, I checked into Second Life to start playing some of my regular gigs again. One of the first things I saw was that one of our number (Dominick Manatiso and his real life family) lost their home in a house fire. Immediately the community pulled together to stage a benefit to raise money to help them towards the holiday season (they have very young kids).

After I finished playing my gig today I directed everyone who was listening to me to head over to the benefit and give what they could, I donated the pretty much all of the tips that I made at that gig.

As of me typing this blog, the community as raised Linden$648,338, which is roughly equivalent to about US$2300. Nothing can replace what these folks have lost, but it is good to see musicians donating their time to raise money for this family heading into the holiday season!

Posted at 07:33PM Nov 20, 2008 by Alan Hargreaves in Music  |