Journal: February 2007

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Ne renversez pas mon chapeau!
Mercredi 28/2/07 (Link to this entry)

My hat got a bit abused today. It was rather windy when we were out for lunch, and of course silly me wasn't wearing his Tilley Hat's chinstrap for fear of looking daft in front of all the hawt femmes. That didn't work out too well as I'm pretty sure that fishing one's hat from under the wheels of a car on the Champs Elysées probably looks pretty stupid too...

It's a testament to the robustness of the Tilley Hat that it can be run over by several Parisian drivers on one of Paris' busiest streets and come out looking a little bit creased and mucky but otherwise unharmed. A quick run in the washing machine and it'll be as good as new!

Ils pensent que je suis Irlandais
Mardi 27/2/07 (Link to this entry)

I got asked for the second time today if I was Irish, so I've now been called Irish twice, English once and Scottish no times. I think that's pretty good going, to be honest, since I was concerned at the start of the week I'd have to keep clarifying that I wasn't English (the Scots can't let that kind of thing go, sorry :-p ). The French have been excellent so far with speaking English but also letting me muddle on in French whenever possible - I managed to make it through an entire restaurant dinner tonight on my own without speaking a word of English, which was gratifying as I've been embarrassed by my poor French for most of my time here.

Work's proceeding slowly but surely, we now have a number of machines online and ready to be used - although with the room for the desktop machines not complete we've been unable to get some engineers' desktop boxes up and running. It's getting a bit worrying that there might still be a lot to do come Friday but hopefully we can get stuck in over the next few days and sort out as much as possible.

One of the more fun things I did today was creating a network storm which crippled our new lab network for a while. We have a telco machine called a CT900 which includes two network switches that provide network links for all the blades in its chassis. Normally, this kind of machine would have redundant switches; that is, one waits in standby and only kicks in if the other one blows up. Unless I'm mistaken, however, it seems that both switches are always active in the CT900 which means that hooking them both up to the same network creates a network loop, resulting in packets being endlessly retransmitted - great fun when they're DHCP requests. It just about filled the /var filesystem where the log messages are kept on the main server...

Au Louvre
Dimanche 25/2/07 (Link to this entry)

Today has been conducted at a nice leisurely pace, which is blessed relief after the hecticness of the past week. Iain and I met up for some food near Odéon and then went for a look around the Louvre. Sadly, the inside of the Louvre wasn't as good as I had been hoping - it's very much a museum with a "here's three rooms full of pottery" kind of mindset - I like it when museums are creative with their displays and make you think about stuff or use your imagination, but the Louvre was a bit staid.

That being said, it would be an injustice to discount the Louvre as a tourist experience - it has some fantastic colections and displays; we looked around the Roman, Greek and Egyptian bits which involved lots of pottery and sculptures before working around to the Middle-Eastern displays and ending up in the French sculptures wing. This last was my favourite (and Iain's) because it was in a very open space with the statues spaced out well; it was a very relaxing atmosphere - there were quite a few people sat on the benches reading books or just watching the world go by.

One of the fun parts of Paris streetlife is that every so often you bump into people performing on the street. Breakdancing is very popular but I was particularly impressed by the rollerbladers in the video above who made it all look very easy. Having 'bladed myself in my youth, I know it's not, so I thought it worth a wee video.

After the Louvre, Iain and I popped into a bar (nine euros for a dram of Aberlour! WTF) before heading to an Indian place for dinner. They did a very nice set vegetarian menu including some pakora that reminded me of home - it tasted just like Mum's home-made pakora (which is pure fried wootness).

Another hard week coming up at work, though to be fair it hopefully won't be anything like as taxing as the last. Time to get some shut-eye so I'm fresh for the morning!

A voire Paris
Samedi 24/2/07 (Link to this entry)

Today has been quite busy, but I've had a fairly relaxing evening writing up journal entries and watching the France-Wales rugby match (great game, some very good tries). As it's going to be another week before I get back I've also decided to start uploading - this was painful on the hotel wifi, especially the videos, so appreciate them! :-p

Despite wanting to sleep in until midday, I had to get up fairly early today to sort out extensions to my bookings for my extra week here in Paris. I'm glad we decided to get the flexible Eurostar tickets! Once David got up we decided to head out towards the east of the city centre to have a gander at Nôtre Dame before meeting up with Iain for some lunch. Sadly we ran a bit late so we just had a quick walk around Odéon before lunch, after which David had to dash to get the train back to England.

Iain and I had no such problems, however, so we decided to go and have a quick tour of the sights. We didn't fancy standing in queues all day so we walked around to scout places out and marvel at the views; Paris truly is a marvellous city. It's absolutely massive and the architecture is absolutely amazing. I feel like I could spend weeks upon end exploring the city and never get bored!

Our first stop, since we were in the area, was Nôtre Dame. The cathedral stands on an inch (that's the Scottish word for an island in a river) in the middle of the Seine and the views from across the water are very impressive. It's even more impressive close up, a grand old building worthy of the reputation. It has lots of clever little architectural features like gargoyles which jut out from the side and spit rainwater down from the gutters, although we were amused to see some of the stonework had been filled in with wood (see if you can spot the patch in the picture below)!

After checking out Nôtre Dame we headed upriver towards the Louvre. I thought Nôtre Dame and the Eiffel Tower were big... then I saw the Louvre. It's the size of a small town. In the time since Iain's been here (half a year) he says he's maybe seen 10% of it and after seeing it I can believe it. We've provisionally chalked in a visit to the inside of the Louvre tomorrow after lunch so maybe we'll get him up to 15% or so.

The glass pyramid in the panaroma above is the entrance to the museum. Iain told me that Anton had found out that it was made of exactly 666 glass panes - slightly worrying as the entrance takes you underground... The huge terraces all around are just some of the wings of the Louvre (there are more behind the east terrace so there's actually more to it than you can see at once). The arch at the open end is actually the bottom of the Champs Elysées; another example of the major locations in Paris being linked by spectacular views. It's almost as if it were planned ;-)

On of the more scary sights around Paris is the spectacle of soldiers walking around in public with some fairly brutal-looking assault rifles. They seem to be posted near the major tourist locations so I guess it's an anti-terrorism thing but between them and the gendarmes with their handguns and riot batons it can be an intimidating sight!

After walking around the Louvre we took a quick Métro ride to the north to have a look at Sacré-Couer. As well as a very impressive church which we had a quick wander around inside, Sacré-Couer is notable for being on the only steep hill for miles around. The view across Paris is stunning; no picture or video can convey the sheer sense of scale that being there gives you. Paris is bloody massive, and you can see most of it from the doors of the church. Not for the first time, I found myself hankering for a wide-angle lens to take more of it in.

We were going to take a trip up to La Défense after Sacré-Couer, but unfortunately a closed Métro line stood in between us and our goal. We left the Métro at Gare Étoile which turned out not to be a bad choice as one of the first things we saw upon emerging was another sight which I'd been planning on paying a visit to at some point...

L'Arc de Triomphe sits at the centre of no less than twelve great big long boulevards (including the Champs Elysées and La Rue de la Grande Armée) and it's a fitting centrepiece. As the queue was (again) massive, we didn't take the trip up to the top but the views were still very impressive from ground level. The designs on the pillars of the Arc are Greek and Roman in theme, with images of the French Revolution sitting atop. The area around it is a huge five-or-six-lane roundabout which has absolutely no line markings. Given the way Parisians drive, it's almost as fascinating to watch the traffic as it goes past as it is to look up at the monument!

After our exertions, Iain and I were feeling pretty tired (me because I didn't get a lie-in like I wanted and Iain because his neighbours kept him up half the night) so we decided to call it a day in order to get some good rest in preparation for another big day tomorrow. I walked home via Le Palais de Chaillot again to see what the view to the Tower looked like in the daylight and was not disappointed. The great thing about Paris is that because they use lighting so effectively, the views can be radically different at day or night (although equally impressive).

I'm going to stop now because my fingers are getting sore - can't get used to laptop keyboards (although it's certainly a lot better than French Azerty keyboards...). Looking back, I can see that I've typed shedloads in the entries I've written up today but I've hardly scratched the surface. There really isn't enough time for me to write everything down, but the way I see it is that I spend enough time looking at computer screens so it's all good :-D

Et puis tout était bon
Vendredi 23/2/07 (Link to this entry)

Finally, the lab's in good shape. At long last the power is ready and the network is looking good. The new main lab server is about halfway ready and it shouldn't be too hard to get everything else up and running. We've also made a good start on getting the data cabling in place in some of the racks so it's looking good for next week.

Speaking of next week, I'm not going to be going back to England until next Saturday. At first David and I were only going to be here for this week but because we're a fair bit behind schedule I'll be staying on for another week to help Iain out. The upshot of this is that I'll have time to see a bit more of Paris over the weekend, which will be excellent :-)

It's a measure of how busy we've been that I didn't even realise Celtic's Champions League game was on Wednesday until tonight. Normally I'd be all over the Hoops playing in the last 16 of the Champion's League, but we haven't had a moment's rest to even think about such things. Roll on the weekend...

M'aidez!
Jeudi 22/2/07 (Link to this entry)

We got a bit further on today in the lab; while David configured our lab network, Iain and I went through every single power cable and breaker and tested each one so we could make sure the electricians got everything right today. When they came in we were able to sort everything out without too many problems, so apart from some load balancing at the PDU tomorrow, we're good to go.

To measure a lab's power load properly, we need to turn all our machines on so we can measure how much juice each rack consumes. When we turned on the largest server, the 15k, we were greeted with the message in the video above. It was a bit ill :-(

We were in quite late to make sure we got everything ready for tomorrow when the electrician would be working on the main power distribution board, so it was a bit of a frantic rush to find a restaurant to go to. In the end we went to a Thai/Chinese place which was very nicely decorated; it even had a little mini-garden and waterfall next to our table. I had a Thai vegetable curry which was very nice and Iain was again pleased to note that there would be spare mushrooms and chunks of pepper going!

David and I walked back from Gare Trocadéro to the hotel which meant passing between the two wings of Le Palais de Chaillot on the way. As with so many major locations in Paris, the view is breathtaking and pictures really don't do it justice. From the Palais courtyard one has an incredible view of the Eiffel Tower looming over the rest of Paris. We spent a fair bit of time snapping away with our cameras and ended up getting back to the hotel pretty late - although not late enough to miss the midnight light show on the Tower (it sparkles like a massive upside-down Christmas tree - an impressive effect).

Qu'est-ce que c'est un végetariane?
Mercredi 21/2/07 (Link to this entry)

Another fun day in the lab... continuing problems with the lab infrastructure have meant we're still no closer to actually getting the lab up and running. The electricians managed to get maybe 50% of the racks with the correct power setup; the rest all had wrong connectors, wrong cables, wrong labels, wrong breakers or a mixture thereof. We have, however, gotten our network drops from SWAN (Sun's global network) online so at least that's something...

The Sun office we're working in is very close to the Champs Elysées so we've been popping down there for lunch. It's a very impressive street - well, the word 'street' doesn't really cover it as it's huge; the French champs means 'field' which is probably better in terms of scale at least... It certainly makes Buchanan Street in Glasgow look utterly puny in comparison!

My luck ran out with the food tonight; David and Iain fancied some Japanese so I thought I'd give it a go despite my misgivings about the veggie-friendliness of Oriental cooking. I've felt rather guilty about my dietary requirements limiting the places we can go to, so it seemed fair enough. Out of half a dozen Japanese restaurants, we found one that had a veggie option which was basically fried vegetables with rice; all well and good until I discovered that said vegetables were carrot, courgette, aubergine, mushroom and huge chunks of pepper (out of all those, I like carrots...). Leaving half a plate unfinished would have been rude, so Iain gladly helped me out! :-D

On a éléctricité! On n'a pas d'éléctricité!
Mardi 20/2/07 (Link to this entry)

Today was quite frustrating in the lab - in some ways we ended up further back than we started out, particularly with regards to power. We spent quite a lot of yesterday waiting for the power and A/C to be turned on so today we were hoping it'd all be good for us to go forward with bringing up the new lab network. Sadly it turned out that the power for several of the racks wasn't adequate (one rack hadn't even been set up at all...) so we spent most of the day sorting that out instead!

I've gotten a fair amount of rackmounting done while we were waiting and I've sorted out the venting in the floor tiles so we get proper airflow, but it was frustrating not being able to get on with things as we only have a small amount of time over here to get the lab up and running before David and I have to go back to Britain.

We left late again so again we headed straight to a restaurant for some much-needed food; in all the rushing around we're not seeing that much so far (other than the Métro), but Paris is full of interesting sights even on the normal streets; the wide boulevards are all very impressive (though the driving on them is very scary) and every roundabout seems to have a statue or monument at its centre.

Tonight we dined at a Lebanese restaurant called El Mir which was actually quite quiet, which made a nice change from the hustle and bustle of the rest of Paris. The food was very nice - everything was served with a kind of very thin, light version of pitta bread and there were many small portions of different fillings to load the bread up with, including some absolutely lovely hummus and herb salads. I also had some samosa-like pastries which were filled with soft cheese and spinach along with a huge ball of falafel. Very enjoyable indeed - my luck's holding out well with the food!

Tonight's the first chance I've really had to write up some entries and offload some pictures from my camera (happily, my laptop's internal card reader handles the Fuji flash card - great since I've forgotten my camera's USB cable!). Sadly, since the speed of the hotel's wifi 'net access isn't up to much I'll be uploading all of this when I get back, which means I can also use my PC for re-encoding and storing the videos. Apologies if you're reading all these entries in a big lump!

Le Métro
Lundi 19/2/07 (Link to this entry)

The Métro in Paris is utterly mental but at the same time very impressive. There are many lines and tons of stations - some only half a kilometre or so apart - but it's pretty easy to get around without too many changes. The trains are very regular, every couple of minutes, but even so it can get absolutely rammed. I tried taking a video when it was busy but there wasn't enough room to hold the camera in front of me!

The trains here are quite different to what I'm used to in Britain, they have fewer seats in favour of more doors and standing room (as can be seen above!). They also have big solid rubber wheels, which means they're very quiet and smooth-riding but also very quick as the extra grip means they can accelerate and corner impressively quickly - handy when we're stopping every minute!

Iain did us proud for food today. At lunch we went to an Italian restaurant on the Champs Elysées which was jam-packed - and once we got the food we saw why! They don't mess about in there, you get a massive pizza which is bigger than a dinner plate for a very reasonable price. I had a 'Cyclope', which was a Margherita with an egg cracked on top of it. This is apparently quite popular in France; the heat of the pizza cooks the egg and it's almost like a fried egg, but much more tender and the white blends a little with the topping. Much recommended - absolutely delicious.

On the way back from lunch we had a gander in a Renault showroom which had quite a funny display. On one half they had an Renault F1 car with some mannequins posed as if wondering where to put their shopping bags, while on the other half they had a Mégane with models of an F1 pit crew changing the tyres!

David exhibited some superior Google skills to mine by producing a long list of reviews of vegetarian-friendly restaurants in Paris, which was great as it gave us plenty of choice for dinner. Iain recognised one which he'd been to before named La Paradis de Fruit (Fruit Paradise) which he strongly recommended so we headed there. This place was fantastic - it did a wide variety of French cuisine including some really good spiced Tofu and some very nice pitta/chêvre/salad concoctions. They also had supremely thick exotic fruit cocktails; we took great pleasure in standing our straws upright in them :-D

All this was followed by some absolutely fantastic tiramisu - lush is the only word that can really describe it (because 'f***ing gorgeous' is actually two words). We ended up rather full so we took our time going home, needing a short walk to work some of it off. David and I nearly screwed up by ending up in an overland station rather than the Métro but it didn't matter in the end as there was a big double-decker train(!) going to Champs de Mars which is very close to the Eiffel Tower :-)

Bienvénue à Paris
Dimanche 18/2/07 (Link to this entry)

No, I'm not going to write the whole journal entry in French, so breath easy. I've quickly discovered that my French is nowhere near adequate anyway so I've had to muddle along as best I can.

After a quick journey on the Metro (which is very impressive - more later), we arrived at Bir Hakeim station which is just to the south of our hotel. The maps we consulted didn't lie - it literally is on the doorstep of the Eiffel Tower, as seen from the photo above which was taken about twenty yards from the hotel's front door. Photos don't do the Tower justice, by the way. You need to see it with your own eyes to appreciate just how awesomely huge it is (and I use 'awesomely' there in the true sense of the word).

After checking in to the hotel, David and I went in search of food (I hadn't realised Sun would be paying for this too, which was a pleasant surprise). After a bit of rushed Google-fu on the hotel's wireless network, I came up with a supposedly veggie-friendly restaurant closeish to the hotel so off we trotted. Sadly it turned out not to be particularly veggie-friendly but they did do a sublime omelette au chêvre (with goat's cheese). The French know how to cook.

I'm ashamed to admit that my conversational French now sucks really badly - I keep remembering the wrong words or coming up with Spanish equivalents. It's also quite difficult to interpret menus because the food's quite different from what I'm used to, so it's just as well David came prepared with a little food glossary! It was getting late after dinner so we headed back to the hotel to get some rest ahead of a hard week's work.

I've felt really daft at times as it's the first time I've stayed in a posh hotel (this one is four stars). I was particularly flummoxed by the bed - there's a rather large number of layers of sheets and covers and I wasn't entirely sure which ones I was supposed to sleep in between! Happily, it being a four-star hotel, a lot of stuff is laid on such as the buffet breakfast, luxury toiletries, etc, which is nice. They even have multivitaminfruchtsaft or a posh equivalent thereof :-D

In France
Sun 18/2/07 (Link to this entry)

As I write this I've just finished packing for going to France so don't expect any updates for the next week or so. I might even be late back as Paul asked me on Friday if there would be any problem with me staying on there a few more days if we need more time to get everything up and running :-/

Just another day
Wed 14/2/07 (Link to this entry)

Being single, by all accounts, is somewhat crap. However, there's always a silver lining and I guess it's nice not to be agonising over what to do for Valentine's. It was always a bit of a balancing act with Stacy whereby I think neither of us was that bothered about the day but we both felt like we should make an effort. No such problems this year, although spending Valentine's alone is hardly an ideal situation either :-(

At work I've made good progress towards getting a shiny new Subversion repository up and running for the source code of JLT, our in-house booking tool. I've worked out what I deem to be quite an elegant way of working it into our current setup which doesn't cause any extra headaches and will hopefully make developing the tool a lot easier.

It's really satisfying that we're given the opportunity to work on important side-projects like this at work, it really makes you feel as if you're making a valuable contribution to the running of the lab. Some of the interns in other departments at Sun have remarked that they don't feel like they're doing much useful and they're not really valued in their positions, Charlotte and Kim in particular. It's a great shame for those guys and I really feel for them but at the same time it makes me realise just how good we have it in the labs. Props to Paul, DC, Will et al!

A tenth of a ton
Mon 12/2/07 (Link to this entry)

Another busy day at work today, including yet another chapter in the long-running saga of the DC wiring in our secondary lab. After lots of discussions over what kind of cabling to use, how to distribute the power draw over our selection of different-rated breakers, what colour of cables to use (this is actually important apparently), and so on, we've now decided to farm it out to external contractors who can sort it themselves. I believe the term is 'wootness'.

Other highlights included hunting down rogue rack-mounting kits (and eventually giving up and using a different one) and working out why I couldn't ping a system controller that was blatantly plugged into the network (turned out to be a dodgy network port, which means at some point a motherboard is going to need swapped and muggins here will get to do it).

The really interesting bit, though, was trying to work out how to get our new Cisco SAN switch into a rack. This bar steward is the size of a small cooker and weighs more than a tenth of a metric ton! We can't put it into our comms rack with the rest of the SAN switches because it's too heavy, but even getting it into a normal rack is going to be 'fun'...

"For a limited time, we are offering free hernia operations with your Cisco MDS 9513 purchase"

Normally we'd be able to lift it into the rack with four people, but it has no handles and a really crap rackmounting kit which means it has to be lifted into the rack and held there until it's screwed into place (normally you fit the rackmount kit into the rack and then slide the hardware onto its rails - not with this bugger, though). That would mean getting a Genie Lift (kind of like a pallet truck) into a rack, which we can't do because ours are too big. We're still trying to think of a way to get this bugger in there - suggestions on a postcard...

Well, the weather outside...
Thu 8/2/07 (Link to this entry)

Well, the weather outside is frightful
Working from home is delightful
So since I've no place to go
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow
It doesn't show signs of stopping
But I'll need to do some shopping
So by lunchtime please God don't
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

Looks like my luck's taken a turn for the better - it would have been a nightmare getting to work today so it's just as well I was working from home! It also gave me the chance to go and put my bike in for a service as well as a new fifth gear and rear inner tube. All in all, nice timing (although I will need to get the bus to work tomorrow - bah).

I had a rather scary moment when I got back from the town centre, though. I was greeted by the sight of our front door gaping open and Craig's dogs running around in the snow outside. Initially I thought I'd left the door open, although I was sure I had closed it behind me. Then it struck me that I'd seen Mac trying to use the handle on the back door recently. I went and had a look at the front door and sure enough, the latch is at waist height and it needs turned downwards to open it. Looks like we'll need to fit a mortice lock...

A giant Earth-shattering KABOOM
Wed 7/2/07 (Link to this entry)

Just when you think your luck can't get any worse, life will always prove you wrong. About 500 yards into my ride home from work today my rear bike tyre decided to explode. Literally. It went KABOOM - somewhat worrying when you're cycling through an MOD training area...

This, of course, was on the coldest day of the winter so far, and I didn't have a jacket (because I was cycling and wouldn't need it, or so I thought). I was severely torn between either throwing a major hissy fit or just sitting down in the middle of the path and whimpering. Oh well, at least I'm working from home tomorrow so I'll have a chance to get the bike fixed. It needs a service anyway so I'll just put it in and get them to fix it >:-D

Argh
Mon 5/2/2007 (Link to this entry)

Today I had to deal with one of the most mind-bogglingly frustrating problems I've met at work. A while ago I set up a fairly substantial network of fibre-optic connections around the lab for an engineer who wanted to analyse the traffic between two different machines and a storage array. Basically, he wanted two fibre connections from all three of these machines to a fibre analyser located somewhere else in the lab.

To do this, I made use of the excellent patching system we have around the lab. Above every row of racks in the lab there is a series of boxes (about 60 in total) which each provide 20-32 copper links and 12-24 fibre links. The other ends of these links all go to one row in the lab which is basically like a big wall of cable jacks. We can make connections between these as we want, which is cool because it means we can connect any machine to any other without having to move them or run huge long cables all over the place.

To give you an idea of how complicated this can get, here's a diagram of the setup I just described. It doesn't include the hundreds of other connections to the patch panels in question (that would require a rather larger screen)!

Simplified diagram of the fibre setup described above. Not pictured: me tearing my hair out

The grey boxes here are the patch panels. The blue boxes are the two servers, the red one is the storage array, and the purple one at the bottom is the analyser. The black lines are the links between the patch panels and the yellow lines are the fibre cables I attached in between them to make the links.

On to the problem. As I mentioned, I set this up a while ago. I hadn't heard anything back until today, where the engineer told me that there was a problem with the cabling and he couldn't get the analyser to talk to one of the servers or the storage array. So, I went back and checked all of the cables were attached to the correct patch ports. They were. I checked to make sure there was light shining through the cables in both directions at each connection (if you look straight at a fibre port or cable you can see the light). No problems. I even tried wiring the analyser directly up to the patch panel (in case there was too much light impedance from all the patching). Nada.

As it turned out, two of the cables (one which I had used to connect two patch ports, and another which was in place between two other panels) had been made with their connections crossed over so that the light started coming out of the wrong jack. This meant that the fibre-optic adapters at either end were essentially shining their lights at each other down the same bit of cable while the other went unused, hence the lack of connection. Richard Wilson himself would have been impressed at the ranting I put out after working this out...

Comment est-ce qu'on dit 'woot' en francais?
Sat 3/1/07 (Link to this entry)

Well, looks like I'll be needing the passport I got for going to America after all. We're needing to move our French lab to a new building in Paris and Paul's going to be sending me over for a week to help set things up in the new location. It's a fairly scary prospect but at the same time it's really exciting to be going abroad for the first time ever, even if it is only for work.

At home I've been having a merry time trying to get my laptop to connect to Craig's new 42" plasma TV, which has an irritating tendency to report itself as only being capable of 1024x768. This makes the laptop think it has to pan when outputting 720p HD output (which is 1280x720). The TV's native resolution, strangely, is 1360x768 - and the fecking laptop refuses to allow me to use that resolution! Bloody ATI drivers...

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