Alan Hargreaves' Weblog

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]