Journal: December 2006

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One thing after another
Sat 30/12/06 (Link to this entry)

This is just getting silly. I've been having a good time at home seeing everyone again, but life seems determined to throw the entire toolbox in the works. Mum and Dad have been redecorating parts of the house and it's all gotten out of schedule for a few reasons, notably the car's starter motor dying and Dad being put under pressure at work by evil road contractors and anal legal advisers. It's all been a bit hectic.

The main thrust of the redecoration is Mum and Dad's bedroom, which has been completely redone from carpet to ceiling. Yesterday we discovered that the doors for the new wardrobes weren't stained right so they'll need to be redone, and the fancy trouser rail turned out to be 20cm too narrow to fit in the wardrobe. I thought we were done with dodgy doors and things not fitting after us having to remove, plane, repaint and rehang the bedroom door!

So, while I was out yesterday afternoon, the parents went and got the car back from the garage (huzzah!) and picked up a replacement trouser rail and some new woodstain. They also came back with a new electric fire for the bedroom (Dad's going to build a wee tiled hearth, very cosy). Unfortunately this has turned out to be broken out of the box, so our trip today to the newly renovated Art Galleries at Kelvingrove has been delayed while they go and get it switched.

My brother and his girlfriend are coming around tonight and I'll see the folks from archery tomorrow, so that will pretty much complete the circle of all the family and friends I haven't seen for months, which will be nice. Oh, and somewhere along the line I have to fix Ford's old PC and help him try to set up his new XBox 360 for media sharing with his PC (should be fun seeing as it doesn't have MCE and I don't have time to reinstall Windows on his machine...). I need another month up here :-/

Shiny!
Thu 28/12/06 (Link to this entry)

I've gotten fed up with having a laptop that's broken enough to be utterly useless to me, so I've decided to get a new laptop. There was an excellent deal on at ebuyer and I was unable to resist the temptation of getting myself a rather nice laptop for only £400. For those who are interested in specs: Turion 2.0GHz, 512MB DDR2, Radeon X1100 Mobility, 60GB 5,400rpm HD, DVDRW, 14" widescreen TFT @ 1280x800, and a free upgrade to Vista Home Premium (when it comes out).

Now I can easily have a second machine at home for running a SunRay gateway on, or for using as a media centre (it has Windows MCE on it). The other nice thing is I can now donate my old half-broken laptop to my friend Helen-Marie who, despite hating computers with a passion, will find it handy for uni work. Everyone wins, even Microsoft - God, it feels wierd having a 100% legit copy of Windows!

Merry Christmas
Mon 25/12/06 (Link to this entry)

Hope everyone's having a good time. Today's been a nice quiet day with the parents, which is just as well seeing as I didn't get in until three o'clock last night. Unfortunately the house is all a bit topsy-turvy due to redecoration and the car has developed a dodgy starter motor, which has thrown a bit of a spanner in the works for our plans.

We usually go for a walk in the countryside on Christmas to work up an appetite for dinner, but obviously with an unreliable car that wasn't an option so we went for a wander around the Kelvin Walkway instead. The other problem is it's meant that my sister Lizzy and her boyfriend are having to come through for the day tomorrow on the bus, as opposed to being here for today and Boxing Day like we originally planned :(

It's all good though, it's great seeing everyone again and catching up. I'm also catching up on all the good food I've been missing... just about to have a bowl of mum's patented homemade broth. Result! :-D

Homeward bound
Sat 23/12/06 (Link to this entry)

I've just finished packing to head up north for the festive period. It's great to be going home, it's been too long since I've seen all my Scottish family and friends. It's a long train journey but I've packed plenty of reading material and charged my mp3 player so bring it on!

I went to see Casino Royale last night with Jay and Maddy (we were originally going to go bowling but we got... mislaid). The critics have been raving about Daniel Craig's new, gritty portrayal of Bond and I certainly found him a lot easier to take than the smugness of Pierce Brosnan or the bumbliness of Roger Moore. Plus Eva Green is teh hawt :P

Mmmm... Thumper
Wed 20/12/06 (Link to this entry)

This week's been fairly busy in work as we try to finish stuff off before the Christmas break, so it's all been pretty hectic. One of the fun things I've been doing is finishing off a setup of a new machine for engineers to play with ZFS, Solaris 10's funky filesystem with knobs on.

The machine in question is a 'Thumper', or what Marketing would call a Sun Fire x4500. This is a 4U box (19 inches across, about a foot tall, and about 30 inches deep) with 2 dual-core Opterons, 16GB of RAM, and 48 500GB disks. That's 24 terabytes of storage in one machine. For sheer gratuitousness, here's the output of the format command:

root@sa64-zfs-gmp03# format
Searching for disks...done


AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
       0. c0t0d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@0,0/pci1022,7458@1/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@0,0
       1. c0t1d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@0,0/pci1022,7458@1/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@1,0
       2. c0t2d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@0,0/pci1022,7458@1/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@2,0
       3. c0t3d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@0,0/pci1022,7458@1/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@3,0
       4. c0t4d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@0,0/pci1022,7458@1/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@4,0
       5. c0t5d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@0,0/pci1022,7458@1/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@5,0
       6. c0t6d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@0,0/pci1022,7458@1/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@6,0
       7. c0t7d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@0,0/pci1022,7458@1/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@7,0
       8. c1t0d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@0,0/pci1022,7458@2/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@0,0
       9. c1t1d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@0,0/pci1022,7458@2/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@1,0
      10. c1t2d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@0,0/pci1022,7458@2/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@2,0
      11. c1t3d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@0,0/pci1022,7458@2/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@3,0
      12. c1t4d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@0,0/pci1022,7458@2/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@4,0
      13. c1t5d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@0,0/pci1022,7458@2/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@5,0
      14. c1t6d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@0,0/pci1022,7458@2/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@6,0
      15. c1t7d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@0,0/pci1022,7458@2/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@7,0
      16. c4t0d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@1,0/pci1022,7458@3/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@0,0
      17. c4t1d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@1,0/pci1022,7458@3/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@1,0
      18. c4t2d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@1,0/pci1022,7458@3/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@2,0
      19. c4t3d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@1,0/pci1022,7458@3/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@3,0
      20. c4t4d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@1,0/pci1022,7458@3/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@4,0
      21. c4t5d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@1,0/pci1022,7458@3/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@5,0
      22. c4t6d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@1,0/pci1022,7458@3/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@6,0
      23. c4t7d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@1,0/pci1022,7458@3/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@7,0
      24. c5t0d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@1,0/pci1022,7458@4/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@0,0
      25. c5t1d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@1,0/pci1022,7458@4/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@1,0
      26. c5t2d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@1,0/pci1022,7458@4/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@2,0
      27. c5t3d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@1,0/pci1022,7458@4/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@3,0
      28. c5t4d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@1,0/pci1022,7458@4/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@4,0
      29. c5t5d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@1,0/pci1022,7458@4/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@5,0
      30. c5t6d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@1,0/pci1022,7458@4/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@6,0
      31. c5t7d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@1,0/pci1022,7458@4/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@7,0
      32. c6t0d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@2,0/pci1022,7458@7/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@0,0
      33. c6t1d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@2,0/pci1022,7458@7/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@1,0
      34. c6t2d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@2,0/pci1022,7458@7/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@2,0
      35. c6t3d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@2,0/pci1022,7458@7/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@3,0
      36. c6t4d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@2,0/pci1022,7458@7/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@4,0
      37. c6t5d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@2,0/pci1022,7458@7/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@5,0
      38. c6t6d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@2,0/pci1022,7458@7/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@6,0
      39. c6t7d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@2,0/pci1022,7458@7/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@7,0
      40. c7t0d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@2,0/pci1022,7458@8/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@0,0
      41. c7t1d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@2,0/pci1022,7458@8/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@1,0
      42. c7t2d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@2,0/pci1022,7458@8/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@2,0
      43. c7t3d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@2,0/pci1022,7458@8/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@3,0
      44. c7t4d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@2,0/pci1022,7458@8/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@4,0
      45. c7t5d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@2,0/pci1022,7458@8/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@5,0
      46. c7t6d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@2,0/pci1022,7458@8/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@6,0
      47. c7t7d0 <ATA-HITACHI HDS7250S-AJ0A-465.76GB>
          /pci@2,0/pci1022,7458@8/pci11ab,11ab@1/disk@7,0
Specify disk (enter its number):

Thankfully it's rather easy to create and administer filesystems with ZFS, so I was able to do everything I wanted with a few simple commands rather than a long tedious sequence of format and newfs commands. It's rather fun using a single command to create a filesystem on your machine with over 20 TB of available space (although I think Sun might object if I then used their bandwidth to fill it with mp3s...) :D

Light at the end of the tunnel
Sun 17/12/06 (Link to this entry)

This week's been fairly crap for a few reasons, including more complications in the ongoing saga that is Craig's PC - I've had to RMA the motherboard as it seemed to be faulty. Nightmare. I've been feeling pretty low too and being a bit of a miserable git - so if any of those affected are reading this, I apologise profusely (especially to one person - you know who you are).

I'm really looking forward to coming home next week and seeing all my family and friends again - it's been far too long. It'll be nice to have some time away from work too as I haven't taken any days off since starting at Sun - not a bad thing, but it's nice to get a break.

It's not all doom and gloom though - my mum phoned me today to give me some good and bad news. The bad news was that my dad had accidentally factory-reset their router, which meant I had to try and remember some passwords I hadn't used for ages and talk my mum through setting the router back up.

The good news, though, is that she's gotten tickets for Dad and me to go and see the mighty Hoops just before I head back down south. It'll be great to go back to Parkhead and as the opposition is Killie, who're pretty decent this season, it should be a good match. I can't wait!

'Tis the season to be tacky
Mon 11/12/06 (Link to this entry)

And so it starts... On the way home from work today I spotted my first horrendously over-the-top Christmas display of the year. I tried getting a picture of it but it hasn't come out too well as the house was a fair distance from any lighting (well, other than the visible-from-space mess on the front lawn).

Personally I'm unimpressed by their lack of attention to detail. There's at least two square inches of uncovered wallspace on there - what a waste. I almost miss Archerhill Road up in Glasgow...

Dammit... now I want a 360
Sun 10/12/06 (Link to this entry)

I just came across a link on Ars Technica's gaming journal to some videos from a yet-to-be-released game for the XBox 360 called Mass Effect. Jesus H Waffles, this game looks good - in both senses of the phrase. It's by the same guys who made KoTOR, one of the few RPGs I've ever played and really enjoyed.

It appears to be that rare breed - a game that looks and sounds incredible but also has a decent(ish) storyline. The graphics are enough to blow you away but the character interaction looks really good as well - the ability to interrupt people or threaten them with a gun in an interactive cutscene sounds really cool. Just a shame that I can't afford a 360... here's hoping it comes out for the PC :-/

In other news, I haven't heard anything back from Dabs so I went to Ebuyer's site to see if prices on there had changed such that they would fit my budget. Happily, they had, so Craig's now going to be getting slightly better kit than I first thought (Socket AM2 - wootness). Don't think I'll be shopping with Dabs again!

Dual-screen wootness
Fri 8/12/06 (Link to this entry)

At work we use cool little devices called SunRays which are kind of like dumb terminals. We all run our desktop sessions on one of four large servers in our lab and they relay the display data over the network back to the SunRay we're sitting at. The cool thing about this is we can log into any SunRay in the building and get the same desktop we were using two minutes ago on another floor.

Up until recently I had one of the smallest SunRays in the office because I'm jammed into a space between Chris and James' desks, as there isn't enough deskspace for me to have my own desk. However this week I've grabbed a spare monitor which wasn't being used in the lab and, with James' help, have set up a nice dual-headed Sunray setup by using two SunRays together in tandem.

It's lovely having two screens just like at home. It works surprisingly well, even better than the Windows implementation with UltraMon that I use at home. Even when I go and put my card in a different SunRay with another screen, I can easily switch between sides by holding my mouse at the edge of the screen. All in all, a cool bit of technology :)

Dabs = guff
Wed 6/12/06 (Link to this entry)

I'm somewhat annoyed at the moment. It's nearly two weeks since I placed an order with dabs.com for some bits for Craig's new PC and I'm no nearer to having the gear. They've cocked it up in just about every way possible, including letting bits go out of stock while they screw up the security check, then cancelling the order without telling me. Then they had the cheek to turn around and tell me to place the order again to get it sorted!

I'm just after sending a somewhat irate email to their customer services manager so I'll give them one more chance to redeem themselves, but unless they sort this out quickstyle I'm tempted to just get the stuff from ebuyer and never go near dabs again. I miss being able to go to World of Computers in Glasgow, buy all the parts, and build the machine the same day :(

The early bird...
Sun 3/12/06 (Link to this entry)

I remembered to book my train tickets for going up north over Christmas today, and I'm glad I did. By booking well in advance I've saved around £30 compared to the same journey in July. This means the train's actually cheaper than the petrol costs of driving (which wasn't the case in the summer!).

Today has been a nice relaxing day after a long shift at work yesterday - there was some recabling I had been wanting to do for a long time and with the lab shut down over the weekend, it was a perfect opportunity to get it done. Shame I didn't realise it would be dark in the lab and the sparks would nab all the torches... my eyes hurt :-/

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