Posts for year 2007 (old posts, page 1)

A great way to start my day

I was browsing my email this morning when I came across thread on OpenSolarisstorage-discuss mailing list.It sure was a great boost to my “gee I’ve got such a heap of work to do right now” state of mind to see something which I wrote and presented being referred to as answering just about all the questions the OP had .. image:: /images/smilies/icon_smile.gif

System Message: ERROR/3 (<string>, line 4)

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Rick’s followup mentioned that I needed to correct one or two aspects, and add in some more information to make the diagram in question up to date. I’ll be working on that over the next week or so.




Roller-3 … guess which bit of the doco I didn’t read properly?

In the process of doing my migration last weekend, I managed to seriously mis-read the Roller 3.0 server admin page. You’ll see a lot of unconfigured Roller sites out there by searching google.The bit which got me was the Server Administration page’s “Handle of weblog to serve as frontpage blog” field. If you do what I did, and set it to a full url (http://www.jmcpdotcom.com/roller/door) rather than just a handle (“door”) then you’ll get no site aggregation happening.None at all.Then you’ll swear a bit, hit google and find loads of mailing lists etc etc…. and then hopefully you’ll find this blog entry.Fortunately for me I mailed two of the Roller team (Dave and Allen, thankyou!) about my problem. Allen asked the question “so why, if you’ve only got one blog, do you want the front page aggregator?” to which the only possible response is that I really do like the summary page.I also sent them the output from my roller_properties table in the db…. and quick as a flash Allen pointed out the problem. Use the handle, not the url.Doh![insert sound of head banging on desk, repeatedly....]Thanks guys for helping me get this one sorted.`Technorati`_ tags: topic:{Technorati}[roller] topic:{Technorati}[front page blog] topic:{Technorati}[blog aggregation] topic:{Technorati}[troubleshooting]




Time for another status update

First off, to everybody who reads this via an aggregator or feed reader, my apologies. Here’s why:Last night I did both a LiveUpgrade to snv_56 and a `Roller`_ upgrade to 3.0-incubating. The Roller upgrade had the effect of re-publishing (via rss) all my previous blog entries as new. I noticed this early (way early!) this morning when I checked Google Reader and saw that my feed (yes, I’ve subscribed to my feed) was full of entries which I’d already marked as read.Yay for that.The LiveUpgrade mostly went ok, once I’d remembered that my mirror disk had to have its fdisk partition marked as active, and that I needed to run /sbin/bootadm update-archive as well as /usr/sbin/luactivate.Gah. Took me a few hours to work that bit out, because I hadn’t fully read the doco and when you’re at the non-gui console root prompt, the output from luactivate is more than 24 lines.One point of note though – since I run this webserver, `roller`_ and an internal dns in a non-global zone on zfs, I had to backup the contents of the zone first (took a zfs snapshot and then the extra precaution of physically copying the data somewhere else .. image:: /images/smilies/icon_smile.gif

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), then destroyed the zone before running the lu. I’m pretty sure that particular bug has been fixed, but I couldn’t figure out even after extensive googling whether I had to be on a new release than snv_49 to do an ordinary lu. Hopefully for the next lu it won’t be an issue.I’m not sure whether I’ll bother to use svm to re-mirror my root device. At the moment I’ve got two lu BEs – “d0″ (with snv_49) and “snv” (with snv_56). If anybody has comments on goodness/badness of re-mirroring, please let me know. Since my data is mirrored with zfs, I’m not too worried about root. Maybe I should check out the zfs best practices sometime soon.Anyway…. once I’d gotten the new BE booted, I added the Simplified Chinese locale with localeadm, kicked fc-cache to re-run, then realised that I needed to do some futzing around to get roller to work. The templates and macros have changed, my roller resources directory (for photos and other uploads) was in the wrong place, and the roller.conf file’s docBase variable (under $CATALINA_HOME/conf/Catalina/www.jmcp.homeunix.com) was pointing to the wrong filesystem location for the webapp. With that all figured out, I now have to get my page layout and css back to an un-broken state then figure out the “front page” concept. Yes, I did read the release notes. Not sure how much of it stuck, though!

System Message: WARNING/2 (<string>, line 12); backlink

Duplicate explicit target name: "roller".

Docutils System Messages

System Message: ERROR/3 (<string>, line 2); backlink

Duplicate target name, cannot be used as a unique reference: "roller".

System Message: ERROR/3 (<string>, line 2); backlink

Duplicate target name, cannot be used as a unique reference: "roller".







SJVN: pull your head outta your *****

According to a rumour published, naturally, as fact by EWeek, Sun is allegedly going to relicense OpenSolaris under GPLv3.I have a number of problems with SJVN and EWeek.Firstly, the OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board (CAB) have no knowledge of this idea. If the governing body for OpenSolaris have no knowledge about this, and have serious reservations about it …. then it’s unlikely at best to happen.Secondly, it is somewhat well-known that GPLv3 is still in draft form only. Sure, it seems to have solidified somewhat from earlier versions, but it’s still a draft. Who in their right mind would think that anybody would release software using that license as it stands right now? It might end up being very popular, and Sun might in fact want to use it for OpenSolaris…. but until the OpenSolaris CAB, the OpenSolaris community and Sun all agree, there is no relicensing going to happen.Thirdly, SJVN allows his own biases against non-GPLv2 licenseware to colour his misunderstanding of the benefits which other licenses provide, including the CDDL.Fourthly … why should I bother?SJVN is such a poor journalist that I’d call him a pundit and lump him in with Ann Coulter and Gerard Henderson.







Learning point – ISO settings

One thing I’ve realised in the time since J and I returned from the land of the free is that I failed to adjust my camera’s ISO setting. I left it set to ISO400 for the entire trip. Partly I think that’s because it didn’t occur to me that I might want to change it, partly because I didn’t realise what a difference it would make, and partly because the old Nikon Coolpix 5400 handled that option for me.So while I was reading astropix.com and Phil Greenspun’s photo.net it dawned on me that I might have missed out a bit. I also had a chat with M a few nights ago where we just talked about photography … and she mentioned ISO setting as well. At which point I mentally kicked myself.I’ll have to chalk that up as a learning point, and remember to pay attention to it in future.




Surplus lens, going cheap

One thing I’ve realised in just the past week or so is that my Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 II lens is pretty much surplus to my needs. I’ve got the EF 50mm f/1.8 II, the EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM, and (courtesy of B&H in NYC, the Zoom Telephoto EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS Image Stabilizer USM as well.Now sure, the 18-55 has a half-stop better aperture, but I haven’t actually used it. At all. The 17-85 has been more than sufficient for my wide-angle and macro needs so far, and I’m really enjoying seeing what I can do with the 50mm. Both TimF and M were quite emphatic that I should start off with the 50mm and figure out how to actually take good photos, rather than zooming and playing around and not bothering to move myself to get a better shot. I’m finally taking that advice .. image:: /images/smilies/icon_smile.gif

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So should I dump the 18-55 on ebay? Donate it to a worthy person? Suggestions gratefully received.




What friends are doing

Last night while lurking on #humbug, Jerub mentioned that Andrae had been mentioned by Nathan Torkington and gave a glowing report on both Andrae and Mulgara.A brush with a web-celeb, and an O’Reilly one at that. Nice work!A little while later Jerub mentioned that the choice of city for Open Source Developers’ Conference OSDC07 is still not settled, but that both Brisbane and Hobart are candidates. Personally, I’d love to be able to go to OSDC07 in Brisbane, and yes, I’m quite biased .. image:: /images/smilies/icon_smile.gif

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I’m trying to find out when the call for papers opens so I can submit a proposal based around my scsi diagnostic utilities and the tools that are available in OpenSolaris.




Our photos are up (but without annotations… yet)

I’ve gone through the photos that we (ok, mostly I) took on our trip and uploaded them to my Gallery2 installation. You can have a wander through them by following this link.I think my favourites are the ones from Santa Cruz showing the surfers. I was using my new (courtesy of B&H Photo Video) Canon 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM lens, and I’m really enjoying the ability to zoom in more than I can with the 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM.update: Darn it, I forgot the tags!