A few weeks (ok, closer to 2 months) ago, our oven died. The grill was still ok, but that was about it. Got ourselves a new one from HardlyNormal at Oxley, and finally got it installed this morning. I’ve been thinking that we could get the microwave oven put on a shelf on top of it – there’s certainly space available since the old one was nearly 1m high (combined oven and grill rather than integrated grill). Maybe when the electricians come back to do the outside work that the rain prevented today….

We Can Has Oven Now!

Really looking forward to having lasagne tonight, and for J to make one of her amazing pavlovas… mmmmmmmm.

A few weeks ago while visiting E+T (and clan) the topic of baby photos came up. E+T mentioned that they had been unable to find any photos of T before he was about 5 or so. I thought we had a few, so a few days later (when I managed to remember) J and I had a wander through our old photo albums to see what we could find. Since J and I are going to be parents in a few short months (15.5 weeks today, I believe), we thought it would be nice to have some pictures of what I was like when I’d just popped out.

Turns out we didn’t have any of my photos prior to when I was about 7, although I did have one photo of me, Dad and T in a sling on Dad’s back – so T was about 1, maybe a bit younger.

Mentioned this to Mum, who went through her + Dad’s collection and sent down one album for me to go through, and she’d gone and put some explanatory post-it notes on the outside of the plastic sleeve.

So here’s where it gets tricky. The photos in the album are from about 1968 to 1976. They’ve been printed on what was standard photographic tech for the time, and stored in a decent quality (again, for the time) album. That means: the paper and glue were not acid free.

Add to that the propensity for these old photos to have stuck hard to the glue backing each page, and you’ve got a conservation nightmare.

Fortunately the pages are all removable from the album, so I’m scanning each one separately (600dpi, PNG format) and stashing them on my photography zpool for later working over via The Gimp to separate into separate images. When I’ve got this all done I’ll burn to CD and send out copies.

One thing that’s been quite scary just on flipping through the pages is just how alike Mum and A look. There are several photos of Dad with rather wild sideburns, a few of me running nekkid in the back yard, some colour and b+w shots from Mum and Dad’s wedding… and finally some photos of the northern approach to the Warringah Freeway with a speed limit sign showing “45″ – I guess that must have been pre-decimalisation of the roads.

I’ve got a few long evenings ahead of me to get these pictures ready for consumption, but I know it’ll be worth it in the end.

I noticed that Meld v1.2 has been released, and while I could wait for Blastwave’s version to get updated, I figured that getting my SysV packaging skills a bit more use would be a handy thing. It’s written in python, requires at least version 2.4 and I’ve built it on snv_93. Not that this should matter, really.

The dependencies are: (1) Python 2.4 or greater, and (2) OpenSolaris build 79 or later.

If you’d like a copy (same pkg for both sparc and i386), grab it here.

Courtesy of the corp. that I work for, I was able to upgrade my u40m2 on Friday night to build 93 of SXCE. Joy of joys, wonder of wonders – ZFS Root here I come!

I could have LU’d to 93 from the existing 89 BE, but I wouldn’t have got the ZFS Root goodness since you have to be on 90 before you can do that. Pain. Oh well, been thinking about a reconfig of my zones for a while now, time to get that happening.

So – installed to a spare-ish disk (45Gb ZFS rpool), attached the mirror after rebooting into snv_93′s xVM kernel and started customising the system config. The mirror sync took around 5 minutes. Zone install for the one non-global zone I now require took 5 minutes – zoneroot on ZFS … goodness!

Then I needed to get Apache Roller 4, Apache httpd 2.2, Apache Tomcat 6 and PostgreSQL 8.3 configured. This took me quite a few hours, since I had to get figure out why setting “postgresql_83/data” didn’t seem to stick, where to deploy roller’s webapp to, how to get tomcat’s app manager working, and how to do the AJP passthru from apache to tomcat.

I realised that no matter what I set “postgresql_83/data” to, it was still set to /usr/postgres/8.3/data. Why? It’s because in the svc manifest it appears as a property group:

<property_group name='postgresql_83' type='application'>
<propval name='bin' type='astring'
value='/usr/postgres/8.3/bin' />
<propval name='data' type='astring'
value='/usr/postgres/8.3/data' />
<propval name='log' type='astring'
value='server.log' />
<propval name='value_authorization' type='astring'
value='solaris.smf.value.postgres' />
</property_group>

I could set the user and group ok, because they are different property types:

<method_context>
<method_credential user='postgres' group='postgres' />
</method_context>

Doh!

So that bit worked ok, now for tomcat. Had to edit the server.xml file to setup the connectors and the server name, that was about it. Oh, added the “manager” role to tomcat-users.xml, then I could wander on over to the manager url. Except that I couldn’t really because the AJP proxying wasn’t setup. That bit at least was really easy:

JkWorkersFile /etc/apache2/2.2/conf.d/workers.properties
JkShmFile  /var/apache2/2.2/logs/mod_jk.shm
JkLogFile    /var/apache2/2.2/logs/mod_jk.log
JkLogLevel    info
JkLogStampFormat "[%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y] "
JkMount /roller/* worker1
JkMount /manager/* worker1
JkMount /docs/* worker1

A quick svcadm restart apache22 tomcat and then I was ready to deploy the roller webapp using the tomcat manager console.

Few more tweaks required at that point – needed to put the postgresql.jar and mail*.jar files in $CATALINAHOME/lib rather than $CATALINAHOME/classes/lib. Ditto for roller-custom.properties. When I did the deployment, I needed to set the context path (it’s not optional, really), and I already had a preconfigured roller.xml file to put into the manager webapp.

Then a quick shutdown of apache22, tomcat, postgresql followed by a restart – all good. Yay!

All the bits are apparently normal and the risk factors for Trisonomies 21, 13 and 18 are really, really low.

I’ve been playing around with OpenXVM in the last few days, trying to see whether the really annoying VNC mouse pointer offset problem has been solved in build 91. It hasn’t, at least, not with vncviewer.

While searching for other VNC client software, I came across tsclient, a front end for RDP, RDP5, VNC and XDMCP connections. With this invoking vnc, that mouse pointer problem appears to be solved!

Yay!

I liked it so much that I’ve packaged it up (gzipped SysV package format) for others to use, and I’m going to contribute the pkg smarts back to the maintainers once I’ve figured out how to make it more general.

If you’d like to grab a copy, here are the details:

Built on Solaris Nevada build 89 (amd64 architecture) as a 32-bit application. I’m hoping it’ll just work on Solaris 10, but you might need some extra libs (GTK2, fr’instance) in that case – let me know via comments to this entry.

Download it here. Once you’ve gunzipped it, it’ll install to /opt/JMCPtsclient. There’s a symlink (/usr/bin/tsclient) as well, for ease of use.

We’ve been trying for 3 years and at last J is pregnant. The bub is due in early January 2009. Don’t know the sex yet (just at the end of the first trimester so far). We’ve had some thoughts about names but haven’t settled on anything…. and we don’t have fallbacks .. image:: /images/smilies/icon_smile.gif

alt

:-)

J’s morning sickness seems to extend to noon and night as well, which is a real downer. Hopefully that’ll at least reduce in intensity in the next week or so. Going to need to get some maternity wear soonish, too.The scans we’ve had so far show everything appears to be in order, but we won’t really know for sure until a few weeks from now. What we saw today at the gynecologist’s was the spine, the hands, feet, arms, chest, and the ENORMOUS GIANT HEAD!More news when there’s something to report.

One thing J and I promised ourselves was that we’d paint our home in whatever darned colours we chose. This weekend we put that promise to the test.

Back in March (I think… it was a while ago) we went to the Curious Mail’s HomeShow @ the RNA showgrounds and saw a bloke at a very simple stand (Colours for Queensland) offering advice on interior and exterior colour choices. Thought to ourselves “that’s a good idea” and grabbed his card. In April we got around to getting him out to our place to help us choose some colours to suit our tastes, and after spending about an hour with us he had enough info to suggest specific colours – even a shade of carpet and granite (mmmmmm granite benchtops….. later!).

First this we did on Saturday morning was make our way to the Temple of DIY and spend $mumblelots on paint and general paint-assistance stuff. Got some sample pots to start with (always a good idea, what if you really don’t like the colour after all?) and got to work.

In the smallest room in the house, of course.

Got it prepped, cleaned up, and then got stuck in. We were really pleased to see that the particular colours John had recommended worked very well.

We’ve been taking it slowly and trying to not screw up too much, and before we quit to go and watch Grey’s we had managed to clean and prep J’s study and give the skirting boards a good coat of primer.

Tomorrow we should be able to finish the room entirely – it’ll be a lot easier with more room to move, larger surfaces and no toilet basically blocking easy access to half the wall!

Remember that earthquake in Sichuan province, China, that struck last week? Thousands dead and missing… and when it struck there was a wedding going on.Here’s a blog entry which features some of the photos from the shoot: http://www.xanga.com/lelandwong/657607591/photographing-a-wedding-and-then-an-earthquake.html. Fortunately, all the people missing in the rubble have now been found alive (see the comments at the bottom of the page).Truly a day to remember.

A few weeks ago QBE made an offer for IAG. I have shares in IAG, courtesy of the NRMA dumutualisation a few years back. I’ve watched with increasing anger at the arrant nonsense which passes for thinking on the IAG board, and at the continuing erosion of shareholder value due to management’s stupidity.I really really really really really hope that QBE sends an offer to shareholders, because I’d like IAG to be run be people who I can have confidence in. You know, the ones who can deliver on promises, give off that perception of competence due to actually making good decisions… that sort of thing.