Today, in Australia, we finally get the chance to exercise our democratic right and vote for our federal representatives. I’ve eagerly been awaiting today – the campaign has been tortuous and I’m more than past it. We’re going to vote at our local state primary school, where hopefully they’ll put on a better bbq and cake stall than North Sydney Boys’ High did for the last NSW state election.Both J and I made up our minds a long time ago about who we would vote for, and who we would vote against; now we can put that into action. In recent days, however, it’s been very disturbing to hear people calling in to commercial radio saying that they don’t know who they’ll vote for just yet and that their opinions and plans change with every ad they see/hear, or every leaflet they get in the letterbox.Please, if you are somebody who is in that group, please think about the direction that you want the country to go in for the next 5, 10 or even 20 years. Look to the future, use your noggin and think for yourself.Most importantly Get Out There And Vote! ----------------------- You can find your local polling places by using the AEC’s Polling Place Locator.And this evening, if you are at all interested in how the rest of your fellow citizens made their choice, tune in to the coverage on The ABC, Channel Nine or Channel Seven. Channel Ten, on the other hand, is showing this instead. Oh, sorry, I meant Star Wars.

What a complete freakin’ pain these last few days have been!I’d no sooner gotten snv_75a installed on the ultra20 in preparation for xVM-ification, than snv_77 ISOs were released, so I pulled those down and tried the live-upgrade path.Part of the rationale for building up on the ultra20 (rather than my u20m2) is that the u20m2 was so crufty that I really couldn’t do an LU without serious pain.Unfortunately I came across a number of problems with the LU process from snv_75a to snv_77:6628378 snv_77 upgrade installation fails to update grub menu.lst file, still refers to previous version`6628268 snv_75a with non-global zones refuses to allow LU `_\ `6627736 snv_75a sys-unconfig and zone bringup gives “#” for choice of Language and Locale`_6628272 biosdev is still broken, even with nv_sata-attached disks in Sun hardwareNone of which appear to have made it through the firewall into Openness .. image:: /images/smilies/icon_sad.gif

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Suffice to say that I wasted many hours trying to figure out wtf was going on with the LU before I twigged to having to remove my non-global zones, and then once I did get everything fixed up again, I’d managed to leave my punchin certificates on the other environment.Sigh.At least I’ve had the chance to get 77 installed. Once I’ve got a few spare cycles (probably later in the week) I reckon it’ll be fun to play with the in-kernel CIFS service and perhaps xVM.

A short while ago my upstream provider from Watersprite got bought out. In the changeover process for all the downstream customers it seems that my static IP didn’t get migrated to the new system.Fortunately that’s all now been resolved, so www.jmcp.homeunix.com is now back on the air.Happy now .. image:: /images/smilies/icon_smile.gif

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Thankyou to Conrad for chasing this up for me.

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!

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

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]

… 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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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 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]

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.