Posts for year 2007 (old posts, page 9)

Figured out why www.jmcp.homeunix.com failed to boot properly

Regular readers (and planet-style aggregators) might have noticed that www.jmcp.homeunix.com has been down for all of my trip to Beijing. I’d called J and asked her to tell me what was showing on the box’s console, but with a few dozen lines of SMF output all we could get was that svc:/system/filesystem/local:default failed. I really didn’t feel like trying to walk her through fixing it over the phone, so I got her to turn off the system instead.I could really have done with a remote console at that point but unfortunately the U20 and U20m2 don’t have a serial port header for me to connect to. Sigh.Turns out (on reviewing the logfiles) that I could have fixed this one myself if I’d bothered to pay attention on my pre-trip reboot! I was suffering from 6460985 mountall does not handle lofs from zfs filesystems properly, which is a duplicate of 6418732 add_install_client lofs mounts break boot. Most annoying and aggravating!A simple mountall this morning worked around those bugs, so now we’re back and I’m paying attention again. Next step is to upgrade to the next possible snv build I can get my hands on, but since I’m going to do a fresh install and re-whack my system config that’ll take a little while to get scheduled.Ciao!




Home again

I’m home again, and enjoying the warm weather here in Brisbane.I had a bit of a freakout at Beijing Capital International Airport yesterday – when I got there to checkin (once I’d managed to find the checkin desk!) there were 60 or 70 people waiting in front of me. The 4:20pm flight to Hong Kong had been delayed by nearly an hour, and there were flyers on the checkin desk advising that due to serious airspace congestion at PEK, flights could be stacked up and ready to take off but have to wait for more than an hour.This wasn’t acceptable, so I asked the checkin staff whether I could get standby on the KA909 that was going at 1710 so I would not miss the connection with QF98 out of Hong Kong. Luckily for me I was able to get standby, but that wasn’t immediately clear. Hot-footing it over to the standby registration desk I was greeted with the announcement that KA909 was full, with no further standby requests accepted. Back to checkin. Aaargh! J called me right then wondering whether I had just forgotten to call her and she was a bit concerned about me missing QF98 too. The checkin staff then reassured me that there definitely was a seat for me, and to go direct to the other desk and push forward. I’m not used to the pushing forward thing in queues, but I was starting to get frantic – it was less than 30mins before departure! Standby gave me my boarding pass, collected my luggage and then I dashed through immigration and security literally sprinting up the other end of the terminal to just get on board KA909 a minute or two before the doors closed.Most definitely NOT my idea of a fun way to do international travel!Got to HK alright, found the transfer desk and was incredibly relieved to find out that BCIA had managed to check my suitcase through to Brisbane. As it turns out I had nearly an hour before scheduled boarding of QF98 so I grabbed a decent-sized bite to eat, then once more had to make my way to the other end of the terminal to board.The flight from HK departed on time, I had a window seat, the food was ok (better than the alleged noodles + pork on KA909) and I managed to get a few hours sleep thanks to my sleep deficit, exhaustion from talking to people for 8 hours straight at the Beijing Sun Tech Day and these a href=”http://www.sennheiser.com/sennheiser/icm.nsf/root/500370″>little beauties




Photos from The Scott 24hr MTB Championship

Last weekend J and I flew down to Canberra to provide support for Spoonboy in the Scott 24Hr MTB Championship. Not sure that we did such a good job, but I think we improved on our efforts at Easter.The Mt Stromlo course is massive – each lap was at least 10km – and there were about 2500 riders in teams and as soloists. Huge, I tells ya!I didn’t manage to take quite as many photos as I had hoped, and every now and again I’d catch sight of the official race photographers Sportograf who’d sent out 5? professionals to photograph absolutely every competitor. Even their sample photos are fantastic, and definitely give me something to work towards in terms of composition and technical considerations.My little album is here, and when I get back from Beijing in a few weeks I’ll think about putting up all the other shots too even though they pale into insignificance when you look at those from Sportograf (sob!).While we ended up being incredibly tired, it was a kinda-sorta fun weekend. Not sure how many of these I can do though – very very draining.Thankyou to CORC for putting on a great event, and thankyou to all the participants and their supporters for being so wonderfully supportive, welcoming and a pleasure to hang out with.Thankyou also to KHS Bicycles and Pat, who provided the tent which we based ourselves in`Technorati`_tags: topic:{Technorati}[Mountain bike], topic:{Technorati}[CORC], topic:{Technorati}[Canberra Off Road Cyclists], topic:{Technorati}[Scott 24Hr], topic:{Technorati}[Spoonboy], topic:{Technorati}[Sportograf], topic:{Technorati}[Mt Stromlo], topic:{Technorati}[Stromlo Forest Park], topic:{Technorati}[KHS Bicycles]




A blokey thing to do….

… is to mow the lawn.When we moved down to Sydney in 1998, our unit had a few square metres of grass out the front, so we had to get a mower. Now when I say “a few square metres” I’m talking perhaps 4. Not quite big enough to justify getting a petrol-powered mower, so we got a push mower where the human supplies the power to the blades. That sort of thing works ok as long as you don’t have stringy grass or grass that’s basically all runners. Of course, here in Brisbane that’s exactly the sort of grass that what we laughably call our lawn has.I was mowing on Sunday morning and got jack of it – just not able to get the mower to actually cut the grass. Petrol-powered mower here I come!When I was much, much younger my dad had a Rover with a Briggs & Stratton engine. Pretty much the same models are still available today, so I got one too. Looked at the 2stroke engines and realised that I just couldn’t be bothered remembering to mix oil in with the fuel, so I paid the extra dough to get the 4stroke.Finally got it all put together, oiled up, fueled up… and proceeded to mow. It was actually quite rewarding to mow the lawn. Don’t tell J about it though, that’ll just encourage her .. image:: /images/smilies/icon_smile.gif

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Started riding my bike

Last Monday morning I got up and rode my mostly-unused mountain bike for a quick 14 minute circuit around our suburb. It was really nice to be up kinda-early in the day, and active. First time I’d ridden the bike since early Autumn and when I got home I had whirling spots in my vision. Guess I pushed a bit harder than I could handle!On the Wednesday I rode over to Chip’s for a coffee, and we ended up riding off to the NRG Cycles to get some slicks put on instead of the knobblies which I got the bike with. Rode home along the highway bikepath with the knobblies slung over my shoulders – not too bad an experience, although when they slipped down my range of movement decreased dramatically.This morning I rode @ 0600 again. Same route as last week, took about 13 minutes… I guess the tyres made a bit of a difference. What I’m more pleased about is that I actually did it. I hope to keep this going – heck, I need to keep it going. One day I hope to be able to fit into the supporter’s jersey that Spoonboy gave me after J and I assisted him with the Vaude Highland Fling nearly 2 years ago…. though having recently moved house, of course I can’t find it!




A candidate for the Australian Senate

A bloke I know from Humbug, one James Purser, is standing as a candidate for the Australian Senate in the forthcoming elections – whenever they’re called. There’s a good interview with him in Computerworld, and a brief piece in today’s print edition of the Illawarra Mercury. There’s a transcribed version here.`Technorati`_ tags: topic:{Technorati}[James Purser], topic:{Technorati}[Australian Senate], topic:{Technorati}[Election]




My next Ipod won’t be an Ipod

Via Simon Phipps’ blog I read this article on Boing Boing about Apple arbitrarily limiting their customers’ choice of operating system if they want to have the privilege of using an Ipod.That does it.My Ipod Photo is on the way out – hard drive is unreliable, there’s continual filesystem corruption, iTunes annoys me enough already…. I’m not going to buy another Ipod. I’m not going to buy one for my wife either. We’re going to get something which supports FLAC and Rockbox.Apple: forcing your customers to run a specific operating system just so they can have the privilege of using a consumer article like an Ipod….. bad idea. No more sales of your kit to me. Not just Ipods either.




A good weekend around the house

We’ve had a kinda-hectic few weeks over the last month, with rellies visiting, events to attend, bbqs to host…. So it was really nice to be able to wander off to our local warehouse of all things home improvement (ok, Bunnings) and pick up a plant, a few 20kg bags of white stones, some sugar cane mulch, tomato seedlings, a 9L (2 Imperial gallons, of course) watering can, a cat flap and an angle grinder.Angle grinder? Yup, to excise a suitable piece of grille from the security screen on the back door so we could teach codercat about her new cat flap.The plant (something with purple flowers) went into the side garden bed and the bags of stones went along the ground there – made an immediate improvement to that side of the house.The sugar cane mulch went onto my little proto-vegie patch after I’d -installed the tomato seedlings, and it was really nice to be able to use the water from our tank to get everything watered in properly.Today, joy of joys, the water in the pool was finally warm enough that J and I were able to spend about an hour swimming around, enjoying a resort-like lifestyle. With the days getting longer and the heat + humdity increasing, I can see many hours being spent in the pool. When we were figuring out what features we wanted in a house, having a pool wasn’t #1 on the list, but I’m very very very very glad that our buyer’s agent found this place for us. It’s been a great choice.




Do you use mfi on Solaris? Please let me know

I mentioned a few days ago at work that one project I have on my plate is to integrate DLG‘s mfi(7d) driver into OpenSolaris.I’m getting the ARC materials together now and if you are using mfi(7d) on Solaris or OpenSolaris I would love to hear from you – just add a comment to this entry, or email me at j m c p@s u n . c o m with the subject “mfi(7d) usage”.If you can spare the cycles (and it’s ok to provide it) I would also love to get prtconf -v output from your system which uses mfi(7d) so that I can make sure I’ve got all the necessary PCI vendor and device IDs ready to add to the packaging info.Thankyou very much for your help.`Technorati`_ tags: topic:{Technorati}[mfi], topic:{Technorati}[OpenSolaris], topic:{Technorati}[ARC], topic:{Technorati}[dlg], topic:{Technorati}[MegaRAID], topic:{Technorati}[LDI Logic], topic:{Technorati}[MegaRAID SAS], topic:{Technorati}[HP], topic:{Technorati}[Dell]




Manic Times is now in beta

I was alerted to the existence of Charles Firth’s new venture, Manic Times a few months ago, and saw an op-ed in today’s SMH which hinted that Manic Times was now up and running.Indeed it is, though in keeping with the Google philosophy of “everything we do is always in beta”, there’s a “BETA” watermark splashed across the masthead.No matter, there are plenty of articles there already, including one which I found very interesting – Top QC says Kevin fails his own character test.I’m seriously thinking about subscribing to the print edition.`Technorati`_ tags: topic:{Technorati}[Charles Firth], topic:{Technrati}[Manic Times], topic:{Technrati}[The Chaser], topic:{Technrati}[The Chaser's War On Everything]