Journal: September 2007

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Tubes and tyres
Tues 24/9/07 (Link to this entry)

My bike's rear tyre blew again late last week. It was early in the morning, about a quarter of the way into my ride to work. Passing motorists on the A30 were treated to the spectacle of me hastily pulling off the road, inspecting the rear tyre, then proceeding to get off the bike and kick it forcefully. This was followed by a short bout of hopping and a small amount of whimpering, then a fairly sustained burst of bitter cursing which turned a small section of the pavement blue (OK, I admit I made that last bit up). Next time I'm buying a bike, I must remember not go go for the bargain-basement crap...

I've now fitted a new, stronger rear tyre in the hope that I'll be able to get more than a week's-worth of use out of the bike without suffering a puncture. I've had a short burl about on it and it seems good - it's a bit more grippy than the old one, being a hybrid on/off-road tyre. This should make riding through the woods easier on my way to work. My pump also got nicked recently, so I've also gotten myself a new pump. It's much better for inflating tyres than the old one, and screw-off handle contains a puncture repair kit. A simple yet clever idea, I feel.

Work's been difficult recently - I'm working on some very challenging development work and trying not to let other things distract me, which means my todo list now has about a dozen items on it. The bits I'm working on just now are some procedures for interacting with some database tables I've been helping to design. It's mind-boggling. The scheme is designed so that we can store any kind of arbitrary information about any item of hardware in our lab database, which has some interesting and complicated implications.

One of the biggest challenges is that we can't sit down and work out all of the different things we want to know about an item, then have a column for each of those things in a table. We might want to know different things about different types of hardware, and we might decide at a later date to change the list of things we want to know. This is very difficult to do in database design - imagine trying to invent a searchable, flexible system for storing items, only you don't know what those items actually are. This is what I'm currently working on.

As an example of how much of a headf**k this is, here's a description of what one of my procedures has to do: we have 'items', which are specific bits of hardware; 'models', which are specific types of hardware (like a certain server model); 'basetypes', which are generic types of hardware (like 'server' or 'storage array'); and 'attributes', which are things that we want to know about an item or model (such as CPU speed or its codename). We associate attributes with basetypes, so any item or model which is of a given basetype should have all the attributes associated with that basetype.

The procedure is for changing an attribute associated with a basetype from being item-specific to being model-specific. What the procedure has to do is: Alter the properties of the attribute which is associated with the basetype, then search for models which are associated with the basetype (but which haven't been marked as deleted or customised independently of the basetype), and apply the changes to them too, taking into account the fact that if it's changing to be an item-specific attribute (rather than model-specific) then all items of the affected models will need to be updated too (assuming they haven't been marked as deleted either). Alternatively, if the attribute was item-specific and is now model-specific, the corresponding item attributes will need to be removed. Oh, and the procedure needs to make sure the user has fed it sensible data in the first place. And probably some other stuff I've missed.

In the words of Monty Python's famous Gumby Man: MY BRAIN HURTS!

Of penguins and rocket swords
Wed 19/9/07 (Link to this entry)

I meant to upload this on Monday night but I forgot. Oh well...

My parents have been down for the weekend (Dad was going to a shoot nearby so they thought they'd come see me too), so I've had an entertaining time. On Saturday my Dad was off to the aforementioned shoot, so Mum and I hopped on a train to London to go see some museums. Irritatingly, I forgot my camera, so no pictures. This is particularly vexing given that we came back via Westminster. I'd have liked to have taken some snaps around there :-(

First off, we visited the Science Museum - this wasn't as good as I was expecting but it did have some fun exhibits. I was particularly taken by the 'phobias' exhibit; apparently Linonophobia is the fear of string and there is such a thing as Aerophobia - fear of air. That must suck.

The best exhibit, however, was nestled at the side of the big display of space rockets. There was a wee section of historic rockets (ancient chinese war rockets, that sort of thing), and among them was the best. weapon. ever. It was a rocket with a sword blade attached to it - though it looked more like a sword blade with a rocket attached to it. Just picture the idea of a volley of rocket swords being launched at someone. It made us laugh :-p

After touring the Science Museum, we went for a wander around the Natural History Museum next door. This was much better than the Science Museum IMO. This is mainly because they have a big dinosaur exhibit, including a big model T-Rex which looks at passers-by and roars at them. They also have a life-size model of a blue whale. It was most entertaining to see the life-size model of an elephant looking utterly pitiful in its shadow. Those things are big.

On Sunday, we decided to go for a gander at Birdworld, an avian-themed zoo in Farnham (about half an hour from my home in Camberley). My parents are keen birdwatchers so they had great fun cooing and pointing at all the different kinds of birds, but I also had quite a good time as they have a nice varied display. They have pretty much everything - Macaws, pelicans, ostriches, owls, flamingoes, emus, toucans... you name it, they have it. They even have a delightfully cute flock of penguins, some of whom were mischeviously intent on undoing the warden's shoelaces at feeding time!

All in all, a fun weekend - only three months to go before I can go back up north and do such things more regularly :-)

Bumper Edition
Wed 12/9/07 (Link to this entry)

It's been a bit busy for me the past week or so. I've been rebuilding my home PC, so I've not been writing any entries lately. Here's a family-sized post to make up for lost time.

Woot, new toys

As mentioned above, I've been kitting myself out with some new hardware. My home PC's PSU blew a while ago and it seems that it damaged some other components in the process. The machine became frustratingly fond of crashing at inopportune moments, so I was eventually forced to give up and buy some new bits (corrupting my main OS install was the last straw). So, I now have some nice shiny new hardware - a dual-core Athlon64 X2 5600+, 2 gigs of DDR2-800, a nice nForce 570-SLI motherboard and a GeForce 8600GT to round things off. This was surprisingly cheap and it means I can now get some decent performance in the latest games (like Bioshock :-D ).

I've also finished my home file server, which is rather nice. It's a more modest setup; I've designed it for low power consumption and noise, with an Asus M2NPV-VM motherboard, a single 1GB stick of RAM and an Energy-Efficient Athlon64 X2 4000+. The 120mm fan in the case is lovely and quiet and seems to be more than up to the task of keeping the five 250GB disks nice and cool. It's good to know that my data is safe from a random hard disk crash, and the ease of administration that ZFS offers is a godsend (even if the output of df is a bit confusing in places). The customary filesystem porn in these situations follows, of course:

It's great having all my stuff in a single location and knowing it's safe from corruption, hard disc crashes or a dodgy RAID controller. Now I just need to work how to get MythTV or something similar working under Solaris :-D

Work: getting scary

It's all getting a bit scary at work just now. On Monday Anton, the last of my compatriots of the past year, departed Sun to go on to greater and better things (or at least a uni course). As such, I'm now left taking over the work he's been doing on our in-house booking tool, JLT. He's done most of the hard work coming up with the design - all I need to do is finish it off and then help to implement it. Sounds simple? Yer maw. I'll be lucky to get it done by Christmas...

On top of that I've been helping with a bit of server administration - we've had some problems with our console server (which I'm in charge of), so I've had to help out analysing the problem and testing a fix which we rolled out tonight. Hopefully it will sort things out - if not I'm going to have a bunch of annoyed engineers queueing up at my desk tomorrow morning!

The scariest part about work just now, though, is that at the start of next month I'm being sent to our Munich office to cover for Michael, our full-time guy there who's off to a conference in Vegas. He's got some new intern-like guys helping him out in the lab, so while I'm over there I'll be trying to train them up a bit. I hope they speak good English, because I don't speak a word of German - it's all rather worrying to be honest. I must get a phrasebook or something sorted out!

A tale of incompetence, bad luck and woe

Never, ever get your bike serviced at Halfords. I had been meaning to get my bike serviced for a while (due to a dent in my rear wheel rim) and when my rear tyre blew a couple of weeks ago, I decided to whack it in and get it all sorted out. Upon collecting the bike, I was pleased to note that the dent had been fixed, but less impressed to note that the new inner tube blew within minutes of leaving the shop. Back in it went to get properly fixed. Or so I thought.

A couple of days later I picked it up again, only for the tyre to blow again on my way home. At this point I gave up on the idea of Halfords fixing it and had a look myself. Absolutely nothing was on the inside of the tyre rubber, so I was a bit confused for a while. As it turned out, there was a sharp edge on the rim from where they'd straightened it and sure enough, the puncture's position matched up. A bit of filing later, I popped in a new inner tube and went for a ride. All well and good.

Or so I thought (again).

After about twenty minutes, I heard a small pop from behind me and a few seconds later, my back wheel suddenly felt a bit bumpy. Amazingly, I had picked up a little shard of plastic which had, sure enough, gone and punctured the new inner tube that I had just fitted. At this point I have to confess I came very close to throwing the whole thing on the scrapheap and getting the bus for the rest of my time at Sun, but sense prevailed and it's now repaired. It's made it through two journeys to work so far, so fingers crossed...

Now all I need to do is pop down to Camberley Halfords and garotte their mechanic with a couple of burst inner tubes. I wonder where I'll get a couple of those. Oh look, here's a couple lying here...

Miscellany

As I type this, Scotland have just beaten France 1-0 for the second time in a matter of months. That's a bloody monumental result for a team that hasn't been to a major tournament for something like ten years. We're still in with a chance of qualifying for Euro 2008 with three games to go - not bad when we're in a group with France, Italy and the Ukraine! Fantastic stuff - it's not often our national side makes me this proud :-D

I've been asked a couple of times recently when I'm going to be back up north so here's the situation: I don't go back to uni until January, so I've extended my stay with Sun until Christmas. This is why I've been being left behind by everyone else around here - they're all off back to uni for their final years. I'll be back up in civilisation mid-December and in the new year I'll be back at uni, halfway through the fourth year of my course (the first half is allocated for placement - essentially, the last year's been a gap year). Hope that clears things up for people!

Finally, as a reward for making it through this mammoth post I now offer you FREE STUFF!

I've just bought a copy of Valve Software's Orange Box, which includes Half-Life 2 Episode Two (which looks great), Portal (which looks very entertaining), and Team Fortress 2 (which looks bloody mental). Not bad for $50, I feel. But wait, there's more - the Orange Box also comes with the original Half-Life 2 and its sequel, Episode One. The thing is, I already own these games. Valve are being damned decent about it, though, and letting me give away my newly-purchased copies. So, if you fancy a free copy of Half-Life 2 and/or HL2 Episode One, give me a shout. They're excellent games. First come, first served!

All change
Sun 2/9/07 (Link to this entry)

I'm slowly coming to accept that a lot of things are going to be very different for me over the next few months. This week, no less than five of my fellow interns at Sun left, inluding three from the lab team: James, Chris and Wilson. It's just me and Anton left out of the 2006 batch of Sun interns, and with that change comes a shift in priorities. At work just now I'm spending a lot more time on development than lab tasks - the new guys have so far faced up admirably to the challenge of handling the ticket queue, and long may that continue :-p

Every cloud has a silver lining, and even as I was facing up to the idea of the guys not being around any more, I managed to score myself a proper desk. This is going to be nice after a year of being squished between Chris and James. I now have such luxuries as my own deskphone and shelfspace, which will make a nice change from trying to cram everything into the space behind my monitors. It's also a much better staging area for the trebuchet; whoever gets Wilson's old desk will have to be very alert...

At home there's a few changes going on too; Craig is continuing to renovate his newly-expanded room while I'm toying with the idea of asking if I can move my stuff into Jay's room to enjoy the west-facing window goodness. I'm also having to shake things up on the computer front, as my desktop's somewhat ill at the moment - it keeps crashing randomly, and actually blew up my XP install the other night (handily, I'm able to use my Vista install in the meantime). I suspect something's been zapped by my PSU blowing a while ago, so I've ordered some new bits to upgrade it. This is kind of annoying as I was hoping to be able to stretch some more life out of it, but hey - at least now I'll be able to run Bioshock at more than 5fps.

While I'm at it with the hardware upgrading, I'm also taking the opportunity to build a cheap file server, which should take some of the power burden off my current PC. I plan to move my larger disks into the server and use Solaris' ZFS to handle my file storage - much better than relying on some specific hardware RAID implementation, and of course ZFS comes with the coolness of checksumming, snapshotting and so on. I'm looking forward to having a home server to muck about with to fill in the quiet evenings, and it will mean I no longer have to keep my PC on for other people to access my files (this also means no more interrupted video streams because BF2 has just crashed my PC...).

If any of the folks who have just left Sun are reading this, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you for your friendship over the past year and wish you all the best for your final years at uni. It's not going to be the same around here without you.

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