Andy's Blog

Serenity

So, today, I flew from San Jose, California to Chicago, Illinois, just so I could see Joss Whedon's big new movie, "Serenity". I wanted to see it with the only other "Firefly" fan that I know*, Sara. We went to the 12:01 AM showing, which means we are totally hardcore about this moving, foregoing sleep to see it as soon as possible on release.

I purposefully skipped all of the test screenings, becuase I wanted to see it as Joss intended it to be seen. And I religiously avoided spoilers, because I wanted to be surprised.

And I can say, without a doubt, that surprised I was.

For fans of the show, the movie was great. It was an excellent continuation of the show and the characters -- nearly a perfect love letter to fans (I'll get to why it is only "nearly" perfect in the spoiler-laden extended entry). For non-fans, people who are new to the Firefly universe, I'm not sure how it will play. The movie is really funny, has great action, and never drags. But, the full weight of what the characters are going through will be lost on those that haven't seen the show.

So, I'm not sure, it could go either way with non-fans. If you are into sci-fi action comedies, you should definitely see this movie. If you are just into sci-fi, or just action, you should still see it.

Basically, you should just go and see this movie. It's mostly great.

Read on for the one spoiler-laden thing that isn't great, and that I have to get off my chest.

-Andy.

* Only other Firefly fan that I know in the lower 48 -- sorry Fredrik!

Major spoilage below! Do not read what follows unless you have already seen the movie.

Invisotext on:

He killed Wash!

I can understand killing "Mr. Universe". I can at least sortof understand killing Shepard Book. I mean that really sucked, but he had a great death scene, which carried some solid emotional weight.

But Wash?!?!?!

I'm not so sure that I can forgive that. Sara was shaking her fist at that Joss Whedon, something that she hasn't done since "Angel" was cancelled. There is a reason why we call him an "evil genious", but still, he really amped it up this time.

I don't know how there can be a sequel without Wash. I don't know that I would go and see a sequel without Wash. I know that Star Trek killled off Spock and survived -- but that is only because Spock survived. Characters don't often stay dead in Joss Whedon's universe(s), but the way that Wash was killed, it certainly looks like he isn't coming back.

Stupid damn Joss Whedon... I hate you so much!

Invisotext off.

Back from my first trip to Yosemite

I just got back from my first trip out to Yosemite, accompanied by Anjali and Pratima. Yosemite is simply amazing, I can't believe that I have lived in California for over two years, but just got to Yosemite now. Even in late summer, the beauty of that park is staggering. We left the bay area early on Saturday morning, and came back late on Sunday night -- which is nowhere near enough time to see everything. Still, we managed to cover Yosemite valley, Bridal Veil falls, crested Glacier Point at sunset, and went to the Hetch Hetchy reservoir:

The above is a view of the reservoir, facing the dam. Anyways, it was an awesome weekend. I took tons of pictures and short videos, which I will post in a gallery sometime this week.

-Andy.

My new computing environment

So, months after my ergonomic evaluation and new keyboarding environment that I got at work, I finally have one at home too:

I bought a refurbished Kinesis Advantage keyboard (per recommendation from Carl), and a Biomorph Exo desk.

So far, things are working fairly well. The keyboard is definitely a hit -- I can type far more comfortably on the Kinesis than I can on either a Microsoft Natural keyboard or the "straight" keyboard on my PowerBook. The desk isn't blowing me away as much as I had hoped, but it is solid. I chose it because I was looking for something where the keyboarding surface as height adjustable independently from the monitor surface. While the Exo does support this, it is not to the degree that I thought -- what you see in the picture is the maximum degree of separation that can be achieved.

Nevertheless, I am typing far more comfortably at home now than ever, which is great. The only thing that is missing is a nice new 20" iMac G5, to replace my aged Sony monitor and not-quite-fitting-on-the-desk PowerBook. If only Apple would release a dual-core model, to force my hand...

-Andy.

What is the best Windows RSS reader?

Without a doubt, the most frequently asked question that I receive when I evangelize blogging and RSS at work is "What is the best RSS reader for Windows?". Unfortunately for me, I do not have a good answer to this question, as all but stopped using Windows on a daily basis.

But, since 99.8% of EDS employees use Windows, and because I really want to promote blogging and RSS, I would like to have an answer to this question. So, with Google and Virtual PC by my side, I am going to list some popular Windows-based RSS readers in this post. Hopefully, this list, combined with the comments, will help me to arrive at an answer.

When I google for "best windows rss reader", I found the following:

• Directory of the Best RSS readers
  
• Wikipedia: free Windows RSS readers / commercial Windows RSS readers
  
• RSS Info (blogspace.com)
  
• RSS Quickstart Guide (Lockergnome)
  

Based upon the above research, it looks like the top RSS readers for Windows are SharpReader, FeedReader, and FeedDemon.

Well, I was hoping to be able to try a few of these out on Virtual PC, but I have spent an hour patching and installing the .NET 1.1 runtime on Windows 2000. So, I ask the Internet -- which of these readers is worthy of my recommendation?

-Andy.

Doc Oc

I received a bit of a jolt the other day, when a form letter e-mailed from Case informed me that one of my freshman year professors, Ignacio Ocasio (better known as Doc Oc), had died. In addition to the e-mail, I found a short two page article in the Summer 2005 Case Magazine about him. Click on his picture below for the full article:

Some additional links are a campus news article, and a blog.

What I remember most about Doc Oc was his passion for teaching. And when I say teaching, I mean actually teaching. The process of taking some new and foreign information, and helping a person to learn it, to the point that they understand it. Chemistry may not have been my thing, but I do appreciate the fact that Doc Oc took the time, effort, and energy to teach it to me.

Finding someone who is a good teacher is very rare in this world -- especially in higher education. That is what made Doc Oc special. And it is why I will always remember him.

-Andy.

Solaris finally has industrial-strength logfile rotation

In all of my years using Solaris, I have always thought that their solution for rotating the core system log files was a joke. The "utility" (I use the term loosely) that Solaris used to ship with was called newsyslog. It was an incredibly simplistic shell script, and wasn't really re-usable, in terms of being able to rotate log files other than /var/adm/messages and /var/log/syslog.

For years, the Open Source UNIXes have included utilities for managing the system log files based upon a flexible configuration file. FreeBSD, for example, includes the newsyslog utility, which reads from newsyslog.conf, in order to decide which log files to rotate, and how they should be rotated. It's great, and I have thought for years that Solaris should have something like this too.

So, it was a pleasant surprise today that when I went to setup log rotation for Apache running on a Solaris 10 server at work, I found that Sun has finally beefed up this part of Solaris. Gone is the weak Solaris newsyslog, and in its place, we welcome logadm. It looks like this utility became available in Solaris 9, but it was news to me until today.

This logadm thing seems pretty nice -- it is super-flexible, in that it took care of all of the quirks around rotating Apache log files. One odd thing about logadm is that every time it runs, it re-writes the config file (/etc/logadm.conf for those of you keeping score at home) in place. For example, here are the two configuration lines that I wrote today:

# -C -> keep 5 old versions around
# -e -> e-mail errors to areitz@aops-eds.com
# -p -> rotate the file every day
# -z -> compress the .1 - .5 files using gzip. this means we don't need to
#       sleep before gzip.
# -a -> gracefully restart apache after rotation
/var/apache/logs/access_log -C 5 -P 'Fri Sep 16 00:24:48 2005' -a \
   '/usr/apache/bin/apachectl graceful' -e areitz@aops-eds.com -p 1d -z 1 \
   -R '/usr/local/bin/analog'
/var/apache/logs/error_log -C 5 -P 'Fri Sep 16 00:24:48 2005' -a \
   '/usr/apache/bin/apachectl graceful' -e areitz@aops-eds.com -p 1d -z 1 \
   -R '/usr/local/bin/analog'

The comments should explain some of the options. But the whole '-P' flag was added by logadm, after it ran. This flag tells logadm when it last successfully rotated the log file, so that it knows when it should rotate again. Kindof a nifty hack for performing that function, if you ask me.

-Andy.

A teensy bug in iPod nano

After my first full day of using my new iPod, I seem to have stumbled upon some sort of display bug:

As you can see, the iPod is a big confused, and is displaying two overlapping versions of the song/album/artist text, one slightly aside of the other. I am not sure what I did to produce this bug, but I suspect it has to do with the iPod nano's ability to display album art for songs. Turning the iPod on and off didn't fix the issue, nor did syncing with my PowerBook. It persisted all day today, so I decided to try loading some album art into the new Fall Out Boy album, and then loading those songs onto my nano. Sure enough, when I tried to play the new FOB album on my iPod, the display was fixed, even for non-FOB tracks.

My guess is that this started when I played a Denali bootleg, which had some album art in it. That art may be corrupt or something. I will try reproducing this bug again tomorrow.

Finally, in other nano news, I have posted a gallery of pictures of my iPod nano.

-Andy.

And the display is clear to boot...

The reviews I've read of the nano said that the display was nice and sharp. They weren't kidding:

I have a bunch more pictures that I have taken of the out-of-box-experience, that I will try and get into a gallery soon.

-Andy.

Oh boy! My new iPod nano came today

After thousands upon thousands of minutes spent waiting, my iPod nano finally arrived today. My first impression: this thing is small.

I mean, really freakin' small.

When I opened the grigrundous shipping box that the iPod came in, I was astonished by the diminutive size of the iPod box itself. I don't have my iPod shuffle box anymore, but the box for the nano cannot be much bigger.

As for the nano itself, it is small:

I haven't had too much time to play with it as of yet, but so far, I really, really, really, really like it.

-Andy.

Hacking the Solaris partition table

It was our sysadmin's last day with EDS today, and as a result, I now have a systems administration aspect to my job. This means that lately I have noodling around with Sun hardware and software more than I usually do. What follows is the story of how I spent a good chunk of my afternoon:

Due to our local Jumpstart process not properly partitioning the two disks in the E220R that I was trying to build today, I was forced to take matters into my own hands, and fix things manually. Since I'm a hacker at heart, this didn't pose too much of a problem for me. What did pose a problem, however, is getting the E220R box into a position where I could perform surgery on the partition table. Even in single user mode, Solaris refused to unmount /var. Thus, I was forced to find some way to get a non-local version of Solaris running, so that I could perform my surgery.

To my knowledge, Sun doesn't ship any sort of Solaris recovery CD, not even on Solaris 10. Doing a quick Google, I found a few brave souls who have posted instructions for creating your own Solaris recovery CD, but I have things to do, and don't have the time necessary to craft my own CD from scratch. The trick that I know is to boot off of the Solaris install CD, and then break the install process before it gets very far. This can usually net you some sort of shell, which is usually mostly-sortof functional.

When I tried to do this today with a Solaris 10 CD, I found that once the installer started, it mucked with the TTY to the point that when I managed to break it, I couldn't see any characters that I typed, etc. In general, the shell that I got wasn't usable at all. So I tried again, and this time managed to break into the startup sequence before the installer launched, which provided a rather functional shell.

It really seems like Sun should make this easier, however, by providing some sort of bootable recovery CD. This is one of the "rough edges" that Solaris still carries with it, that the Open Source UNIXes have mostly smoothed over. Fortunately, because Sun has given Solaris the Open Source treatment, Sun doesn't necessarily have to provide such a CD -- the community could step up and do it. Another of the advantages of Open Source.

Anyways, after getting my E220R booted off of the CD, I was able to hack the partition table on the boot disk, run newfs, and have a machine with a preserved root partition, but enlarged swap and more importantly, enlarged /var. Mission accomplished, but only after considerable effort.

-Andy.

FreeBSD 6.0 Beta 4 first impressions

By virtue of our IT person announcing that he is leaving EDS, my responsibilities are expanding. While I have prior experience with systems administration, and I have been dabbling in that space while at EDS, I think I'm actually going to have to get more serious about it now.

To get myself acquainted with a Dell PowerEdge 1750 server that we have, I decided to install FreeBSD on it. Seeing as how I haven't been on the "bleeding edge" of FreeBSD for quite awhile now (my home machine is still on FreeBSD 4.10+), I decided to give FreeBSD 6.0 Beta 4 a whirl.

I'm pleased to say that so far, it has been great. The install was a snap (well, mostly because they are still using sysinstall, which I have used many times in the past). All of the server hardware was automatically detected, including the Ethernet adapter, the built-in LSI SCSI Raid, and the dual Xeon processors. In fact, it appears as if SMP is finally enabled in the generic kernel, so I didn't have to re-compile in order to enable the second CPU (that's hot).

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like I'll be able to roll FreeBSD into production -- nobody else on my team has ever touched FreeBSD, and I'm not getting the "eagerness to learn" vibe. So, my options are either Solaris/x86 or Linux, and I think I'm going to take the Solaris/x86 route. But, in the meantime, I'm going to try and play with the new FreeBSD as much as I can. When 6.0 ships, I'm going to have to take a serious look at making the jump on my home server.

-Andy.

Tanya and Zoey

From last weekend.

Sometimes, my roommate is a tough act to follow

This is from two nights ago:

From my surfings, this might be the highest Marble Madness score posted on the Internet. What's worse, is that Kevin is still playing, because that game wasn't perfect. We have learned quite a bit about Marble Madness, to the point that I think we have wrung all of its secrets free, like some sort of precious nectar. The game is nearly mastered at this point, and I'm hoping that we'll take the time to document what we have learned.

-Andy.

Weekend getaway to South Lake Tahoe with Stan and Anjali

While my grand plan for the Labor Day weekend was just to sit around on my ass, my friends didn't have the same idea. So, I spent two days in South Lake Tahoe with Anjali and Stan. We had a nice hike in Horsetail Falls, went biking around the lake, and I even rode a jet ski. And a grand time was had by all.

And of course, I am still in love with macro mode on my camera:

I took that shot while biking back from the beach. The rest of the pictures are of course online.

-Andy.

New Music: Rilo Kiley

I bought Rilo Kiley's "more adventurous" at Target last week. I have listened to it a few times, and so far, I'm liking it. Poppy and fun. There is one song, "I Never", that is a little repetitive, and as a result, gets on Kevin's nerves. But other than that, I don't have any complaints. I don't think that this is going to displace The Postal Service, but it's still a solid album. Recommended.

-Andy.

 

 

Some better news: the iPod nano

So, I bought an iPod nano today. After looking at it for all of like, 2 minutes on Apple's website. I have long been thinking about buying an iPod Mini, but I kindof wanted a color screen. Whelp, the nano has that, and a whole lot less -- less in terms of size, that is.

I didn't realize how small it is, however, until I watched Steve Job's speech after work. To show the world the nano for the first time, herr Jobs pulled the nano from the pocket of his ever-present blue jeans. Not impressed? He didn't pull it from a regular front pocket, but from that little itty-bitty-totall-useless front pocket above the normal pocket, that all jeans have, but no one ever uses.

Woah!

Go ahead and fast-foward to like minute 42 of the stream to see it for your yourself. It's great.

It is amazing how Apple keeps getting better with the iPod. It seems like each new iteration literally blows the old version away. It is amazing how they keep topping themselves, and understandable that the competition cannot keep up. I hope that the nano lives up to the iPod tradition, but it is an iPod, so I'm sure that it will. :)

Expect more here when I get mine.

-Andy.

Katrina: They knew it could happen

Stumbled across an interesting article yesterday, that simultaneously is and is not about hurricane Katrina. In October of last year, National Geographic did an article about Louisiana's Wetlands. The first four paragraphs lay out, in frightening detail, exactly what happened with hurricane Katrina.

It seems like there has been a failure of government, both in the time that preceded Katrina, and with what has occurred since. The optimist in me hopes that the government is held accountable, and grows and evolves to a better place as a result. But the pessimist in me doesn't think that anything is really going to change. :(

-Andy.

Umm, holy shit

That was pretty much all I could think about when watching the evening news.
The aftermath from hurricane Katrina is staggering. Right after the hurricane, I really didn't think to much of it -- at least, I didn't think it would be so bad. I mean, Florida had four hurricanes last year, and taken together, it didn't amount to the worst human tragedy that the United States has ever seen (link from Omar Shahine).

I missed the news on Tuesday night (was busy out to dinner with visiting dignitaries from work). So things didn't start sinking in until Wednesday night -- when I watched both Tuesday's and Wednesday's NBC Nightly News. I have been glued to the news since then, with what little spare time I have had this week.

EDS has announced a donation matching program similar to what they did for the Tsunami. I believe that I will be contributing when I go to work tomorrow, once again.

-Andy.