2009-10-31 15:42:00
Great. It looks like we've got snow fungus in our backyard. So far I haven't been able to figure out how harmful it is supposed to be and since I'm not exactly the gardening expert I've called in the guys who designed and made our yard. I'd really hate to see the lawn go down the crapper already.
I gather that my mowing the lawn so late in the year might have opened up the possibility of the fungus in there. Supposedly this fungus usually comes out in fall or winter. Meh...
EDIT:
This is consoling. According to this article snow fungus is somewhat common in a newly laid lawn and supposedly it usually appears in the first year after laying. I've so much new stuff to learn, I LOVE IT! ^_^
kilala.nl tags: house,
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2009-10-31 10:39:00
After my recent upgrade to Parallels Desktop 4 I've run into yet another issue. Apparently upgrading from PD3 to PD4 introduces some minor changes to the networking setup, which causes OpenSolaris' ni interfaces to break.
"Break" turns out to be a large word, but it's still an inconvenience. Apparently during the upgrade process the virtual PCI slots get shuffled a bit, leading to the ni1 interface getting renamed. Before the upgrade everything ran on interface ni0, which started complaining about problems right after the upgrade.
Here's some of my troubleshooting. First, on boot you'll see:
WARNING: ni1: niattach: SA_eeprom is funny, assuming byte-mode
Failed to plumb IPv4 interface(s): ni0
svc.startd[7]: svc:/network/physical:default: Method "/lib/svc/method/net-physical" failed with exit status 96.
svc.startd[7]: network/physical:default misconfigured: transitioned to maintenance (see 'svcs -xv' for details)
Checking the svcs output doesn't actually give me much hints aside from the fact that interface ni0 can actually not be found. Both prtdiag and prtconf seem to confirm this. I then checked the output of dmesg to see if there's anything useful in there. There was.
solaris2 ni: [ID 328865 kern.info] ni1: pci_regs[0]: 00002800.00000000.00000000.00000000.00000000
solaris2 ni: [ID 328865 kern.info] ni1: pci_regs[1]: 01002810.00000000.00000000.00000000.00000000
solaris2 ni: [ID 328865 kern.info] ni1: pci_regs[2]: 02002814.00000000.00000000.00000000.00000000
solaris2 ni: [ID 297787 kern.warning] WARNING: ni1: niattac: SA_eeprom is funny, assuming byte-mode
And so on... This confirms that the ni driver and interface are working. It also tells me that there's an interface ni1. ni0 only gets mentioned when Solaris tries to actually start TCP/IP on ni0, which as has been said is not present. By typing "ifconfig ni1 plumb" I've confirmed that the network card is now in fact called ni1.
Hypothesis:
During the upgrade to Parallels Desktop 4 the virtual PCI slots got shuffled, leading to a rename of the network interface.
Solution:
mv /etc/hostname.ni0 /etc/hostname.ni1
mv /etc/dhcp.ni0 /etc/dhcp.ni1
kilala.nl tags: sysadmin,
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2009-10-29 07:49:00
I recently upgraded my Macbook with OS X 10.6 without a hitch. However, I soon discovered that Parallels Desktop 3.x does work work with Snow Leopard so I was kind of forced to upgrade Parallels as well. *shrug* Oh well...
The installation process of Parallels 4 requires that all virtual machines are shut down. They cannot be running, or suspended. Funny thing: how are you going to do that if you've already upgraded the OS and thus PD 3.x doesn't work anymore? Yeah ^_^;
I scoured the web to see if there was a command line trick to stop a suspended VM, but couldn't find one. In the end I had to boot from my backup hard drive, start PD3 from there and use it to shutdown the VMs on my Macbook's drive. At least PD4 looks pretty sweet :)
kilala.nl tags: apple, sysadmin,
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2009-10-28 22:27:00
Geh! Why is it that work-supplied standby laptops always seem to come with the worst possible OS build? Simply booting the IBM notebook took me almost twenty minutes before it was finally done! Jeez-Louise! I could've been back in bed half an hour ago if they'd just let me VPN into our network from my Mac! =_=
kilala.nl tags: work, sysadmin,
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2009-10-28 22:23:00
A bit over half a year after putting my Powermac G5 to bed I've actually gone and sold her. A new member at the MacFreak fora was interested in buying a cheap Mac to get his feet wet after living on Windows all his life. He'd tried Linux which wasn't "it" and now was curious about OS X. While the G5 is no powerhouse by today's standards it's still a very nice box for a beginner. G5 @1.6GHz with 1.5GB RAM and 200GB of hard drive space. I sold it for 220, which is a bit under the market price but it's definitely fair money for a six years old box.
Ah! I'll miss her a little bit. She was my very first Macintosh and she was definitely a woman after my tastes: reliable, gentle, nice to look at and built sturdily ^_^
kilala.nl tags: powermac, apple,
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2009-10-26 19:14:00
It's great to see that Dana's started responding to music. She won't react to everything we play, but anything with a clear uptempo beat and happy sounds will get her bouncing and smiling. So far she seems particularly fond of ska, proving to be a chip off the ol' block. She sure seems to like stuff by Beatbusters, so here's many thanks for my buddy Edmond for hooking me up with that CD :)
Now that Dana's thirteen months old we've made a bunch of changes to her daily schedule. Here's her new "roster".
0800 Wake up + breakfast
1200 Lunch + sleep
1500 Wake up
1600 Fruit + cookie
1800 Dinner
1930 Bath time (Tue, Thu, Sun)
2000 Sleep
As you can see we haven't changed much about her bedtime, and most of the changes are regarding her meals. In the afternoon all she's getting is a light snack, while we're trying to move her dinner time closer to ours. We've also dropped the eight o'clock bottle completely after first building it down to 100ml. Finally Dana now changes into her PJs and gets read a story before turning in for the night. She's changed into a little girl! :)
All in all she's actually doing pretty great. Right now we're up in my office and she's quite whiny, but overall she's great! ^_^
kilala.nl tags: baby,
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2009-10-25 08:41:00
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I've been thinking of solutions to reading manga on the road, usually opting to just bring a pocket book or two. However, now that I've started using Dropbox life's gotten a bit easier. No more need for one of those eBook readers with electronic ink and such, because my iPhone screen is -just- big enough to comfortably read comics. Hooray for the Dropbox iPhone app which gives me access to my DB share everywhere I can have 3G Internet access.
For those unaware what Dropbox is: it gives you 2GB of free online storage space which you can access from a web browser, an iPhone app, or using software for Mac, Windows or Linux. On the PC side of things your Dropbox will appear as a normal directory in your homedir. However, everything you put in that directory will automatically get synchronized to your online storage. This ensures that your files are accessible from all your computers and even when you're someplace else with a browser. Nice.
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2009-10-25 07:46:00
(Clickable)
Last week I finally got my mits on our OS X Snow Leopard install disc. After properly backing up my Macbook and disabling the guest acount (to ward off the horrible bug) the install went without a cinch. I fell asleep on the couch while it was running, but I reckon it didn't take more than half an hour. Anywho, afterwards (as expected) everything seemed exactly the same because just about all the changes took place under the hood.
Inspired by some fellow Arsians I went and tinkered some more with Geektool. On my desktop I now have:
* Output from top for the six heaviest processes running.
* SMART status LED for my internal hard drive
* IP address info for Ethernet, Wif and my Internet connection.
* The time and date :)
* In Iron Man's hand:
** Status LED for charger cable
** Current charge percentage of the battery
** Status LED for charging process of battery
Also, here's the original file for the Iron Man background.
kilala.nl tags: apple,
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2009-10-23 18:17:00
I'm just a big kid at heart. Whenever Marli's cooking lasagna I love scraping out the sauce pan with a piece of bread or a spoon :9
That is all.
kilala.nl tags: cooking,
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2009-10-22 21:10:00
Holy fook! There's skill and then there's mastery...
LegoPopupBook.mp4
Via Japanator.
kilala.nl tags: geeky, awesome,
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2009-10-22 05:36:00
Image (C) AkibaBlog |
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As the title mentions Windows 7 has been released to the general public. Of course this means that Tokyo's Akihabara tech-district got flooded with thousands of midnight shoppers wanting to get the disks as soon as possible.
And they said us Mac-heads were nuts for sleeping in line for the Jesus Phone iPhone.
kilala.nl tags: sysadmin, geeky, japan,
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2009-10-18 17:59:00
I try to help out people with computer/network questions on various online fora, like Tweakers and One more thing. One of the things that frequently leads to both confusion and frustration is the divide between the parlance of true geeks and normal users.
For example, take this thread where people discuss the ins and outs of the UPC broadband service. Many, many times will one see frustration arise between the lesser experienced members and the veritable geeks regarding the usage of m/M and bit/byte.
As in:
* m versus M = mili versus mega = 10^-3 versus 10^6
* bit versus byte = 1 bit versus 8 bits
Normal folks will happily mix their m's and their M's and their bits and their bytes, not caring about the meaning of either. They reason according to the famous adage "Do what I mean, not what I say". So you'll frequently see things like:
Until two days ago I could happily download at a well-deserved 30mbits, which today fell to a miserable 5mbits. Then I rebooted the modem and now it's back up to 3.5mbits, so I R happy.
Does that sound confusing to you? Because to every true IT geek out there it does! So now there's dozens of folks like me berating the folks who keep mixing stuff up to "get it right because you're not making sense". Of course we are then in turn labeled as nitpicks (or "comma fornicators" as the dutch term would translate). The thing is, even though SI units are piecemeal to every (IT) geek, it seems that most "normal" people don't know all of them.
Sure, they know their milis from their centis and their kilos from their decas, but I don't think anyone in primary or high school usually deals with megas or anything bigger. Pretty odd, since you'd imagine that science class will cover stuff like megaWatts etc. A quick poll with Marli (who is otherwise a very intelligent AND computer-savy person) supports this idea: she knows "m", but not "M" and doesn't know the difference between a bit and a byte.
Ah, what're you going to do? I don't think this is a divide we'll quickly bridge, unless we unify to a completely new unit for measuring network speeds :) Might I suggest the "fruble"?
EDIT:
Mind you, I didn't write this just to rant. As an aspiring teacher I actually -do- wonder how one would best work around such a problem. Verbally there isn't any ambiguity because one would always say "mbit" or "megabit" in full. But in writing there's much room for laziness and confusion, as discussed above. So, what do you do as a teacher? Do you keep on hammering your students to adhere to the proper standards? To me, that does make much sense.
EDIT 2:
*sigh* Then again, if even the supposed "professionals" can't get it right, who are we to complain. Right? =_=;
kilala.nl tags: work, sysadmin, geeky,
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2009-10-17 23:02:00
I actually enjoyed it. Quite a lot :) It's was horribly predictable, completely by the book, filled with famous people, but I still liked it.
Confessions of a shopaholic
kilala.nl tags: movies,
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2009-10-17 17:40:00
I finally went out and bought a hand mower for our lawn and spent three hours in the back yard. The lawn's gotten its first and final trim before winter and I've "knotted" the catalpa tree. I'd say this yard is ready for the winter!
Next wednesday our electrician will return to hook up power in the garden shed and to install two motion sensitive lights. On the one hand that'll improve the security of our back yard and on the other it means I will no longer be stumbling about in the dark when I get my bike for the ride to work.
kilala.nl tags: house,
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2009-10-17 17:31:00
While everyone was told that we'd get started at 0900 and that we'd have to be there by 0830, my flight (the last in the whole bunch) actually took off at 1020. I wasn't too happy about that because Marli'd given up her usual Saturday rhythm so I could get my early start. In the end I got home around 1300, instead of the expected 1100. Oh well.
I was accompanied by semi-pro Ronald who made this exam well worth the 17 euros I paid for it. One could say it was a -very- cheap 1.5 hours private lesson! We played four rounds, three of which counted. My play was awful: consecutively eight, sixfive and six hits for three PAR3 holes ;_; Most of the "delays" were caused by overshooting/veering off the fairway and by inaccurate puts.
As I mentioned, I learnt a tremendous amount of new stuff from Ronald, including:
* The biggest mistake I keep making during my swing: lifting my left foot. During the upswing both feet need to stay firmly planted. This is exactly why I keep hitting the ground.
* I look up too quickly on the down swing, meaning that I very frequently make an air shot instead of striking the ball.
* One interesting way to get out of close-to-a-tree situations is to hold your pitching wedge to your side, stand backwards facing the fairway and make a swift backwards strike at the ball. Silly, but it works.
He also taught us a lot about etiquette on the green. A day well spent, even if I'm not too proud about my achievements. ^_^
EDIT:
After reading my score card again, I found out I actually played one hole on "playing PAR", ie that it actually matched my current starting handicap. So over three holes I only played three strokes over "playing PAR". I feel much better now :)
kilala.nl tags: sports,
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2009-10-17 08:42:00
Today I'm up for course permit exam and I'm more nervous than I expected. I arrived here at 0800, spent a while at the driving range and am now waiting for the rest of my class to arrive.
Just now my swing was inconsistent, my stance scked and I'm definitely not used to my new golf shoes. Unlike my running shoes they don't provide me any support against my underpronation and thus my legs tire really fast.
Well... Here we go!
kilala.nl tags: sports,
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2009-10-13 18:55:00
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Japan's previous prime minister Junichiro Koizumi does voice acting for the next Ultraman movie. ^_^ |
kilala.nl tags: japan,
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2009-10-13 07:25:00
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No more than three weeks after my last lament for First Squad it's here. It's finally here and it's good. It's not entirely what I expected, but I'm definitely liking it. As I said a few years ago, I just -love- these settings: 30s/40s + occultism + scifi ^_^ |
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2009-10-11 22:09:00
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It's that time again: the new anime season has started with a whole wad of new shows to follow. I've already scratched one from the list because it's YAOMH show (Yet Another Otaku Meta Humor): Seitokai no ichizon (The student council's discression). Sure the jokes are funny, but after Lucky star, Kannagi, K-On and such (ignoring Haruhi) I've had enough self-referential humor for a while. |
kilala.nl tags: japan, anime, tv,
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2009-10-11 16:19:00
Yesterday we celebrated Marli's grandmother's birthday in Utrecht. Because we'd be having our traditional, annual dinner with the whole family we decided to leave Dana at home. At the restaurant Dana wouldn't be able to get to sleep on time and frankly it's pretty good to get away from her for a few hours. My lovely step-brother-in-law Hans came to babysit Dana again, something which (we're very lucky!) he loves to do.
Today Hans and I spent an hour or so watching anime with Dana, while Marli slept in. Then when the little girl turned in for her afternoon nap we hit the golf course for two hours of driving, chipping and putting. It's interesting to see that after two weeks of not playing I've actually improved a bit. A higher percentage of my balls fly straight and I'm hitting 100m pretty consistently with my 7 iron. Hans was a bit stiff since he hadn't played for nine months, but his game came back pretty quickly.
Around 1430 I noticed that it started to get colder (the weather'd been pretty crappy all day) and glanced at my iPhone weather app. Radar reports showed that a heavy rainstorm'd hit Amsterdam fifteen minutes earlier, so we quickly packed up our gear. By the time the storm hit Naarderbos we were already enjoying our hot cocoa ^_^
We'll definitely go play golf together again soon. I'm up for my baan permissie exam next weekend, so after that we're free to hit the PAR3 course together.
kilala.nl tags: family, sports,
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2009-10-10 14:01:00
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The title says it all: Holy fook, DO WANT! This toy combines two of my favourite childhood loves: Donald Duck and Transformers. |
kilala.nl tags: geeky,
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2009-10-08 18:31:00
IMNSHO paper companies such as Xerox are doing things wrong. Why am I paying thirty euros for a box of 100% recycled paper, while eco-unfriendly, bleached paper can be had for under ten euros? Personally I'd greatly prefer it if things were made the other way around for a while: make eco-friendly paper cheap while taxing people for buying the "bad" paper.
Anywho... A box of Xerox Recycled Pure is on its way to us.
kilala.nl tags: life,
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2009-10-08 16:55:00
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The other day I'd filled up my notebook and it was time to get a new one. Instead of getting a bulky hard cover one I got a bunch of Moleskine smaller ones. They're pretty nice, though I like my paper to be a bit smoother. |
I reckon I'll quickly replace the six euro doodad I bought with one that looks a -bit- nicer. Criteria for me are: cheap, slender/straight with a medium nib. I don't like fine nibs as I tend to scratch with them.
Ideally I'd get a wad of the pens we used when I was in primary school. I -think- they were made by Heutink, but I just can't be sure. I know they were slender and straight, came in three colors (dark red, dark blue, dark green), had a silver tip at the end and had a metal cap without clip. *sigh* I don't think they make those pens anymore though, because I've looked all over.
EDIT:
Haha! This took me back! Collecting the tiny balls from ink cartridges was definitely a hype in primary school.
kilala.nl tags: life, childhood,
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2009-10-07 18:40:00
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I think this quote from the last episode sums up my opinion on Bakemonogatari the best:
> Amazing, I'm speechless.
< You lack the vocabulary then.
It's like watching a Haruki Murakami novel come to life. You may remember my reaction to his Wild sheep chase. Surreal, magnificent and clever.
kilala.nl tags: anime, tv, japan,
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2009-10-04 20:10:00
*phew* What a weekend! Seventeen hours of work and six hours of driving later I'm back home. I enjoyed the DR Test, working closely together with Iain and my awesome colleague Holm from Networks to solve a few interesting challenges. It's worn me out though and I'm glad to be back home with Marli, Dana and my own bed.
The offices were great, but the cafeteria food was dire. For lunch we stuck to some rolls and what the lunch lady could forage for us from the cooler. For dinner we went out to restaurants (vietnamese and indian, both very very good), which I think most of our colleagues did.
We learnt a lot, both about our own mistakes and some very interesting Unixy things. I'll write about that stuff later.
kilala.nl tags: work,
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2009-10-02 22:04:00
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While getting ready for bed I've just finished the last episode of Taishou yakyuu musume. What a great ending! The last two episodes were a perfect climax to a light-hearted show, as they were filled with excitement! It could've ended in a number of ways, all of them pretty good and by the book. I reckon the author picked the best one of the lot though as it feels like it ended "the way it should have". |
kilala.nl tags: anime, tv, japan,
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2009-10-02 17:22:00
Well, here I am...
The room's a 6/10, surprisingly my SIM doesn't work in Belgium and the Wifi's extortionately expensive. But here I am.
The rest of the day I'll spend a few hours on homework for $CLIENT. Not a week ago I was asked to help out a huge project who need to go live by 10/10, but haven't sorted out any of the daily management stuff. Now I need to figure out a plan to quickly migrate ~700 accounts and 60 servers into our main BoKS infra. Fun and games! In this case I actually enjoy the challenge! ^_^
I'll also grab some dinner with Iain, who tells me that there's an Irish pub right around the corner. I say there's still some chance to save this day ;)
kilala.nl tags: work,
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2009-10-01 18:47:00
Today's the first Thursday of the month, which means that it was time for another installment of Open Coffee Almere. It was our fifth get-together and I was glad to see about a dozen people show up. There were two other regulars, but the rest of'm were all new faces. One attendant even came down from the Leiden area!
I enjoyed myself tremendously and got to meet a few interesting people. The aforementioned gentleman does something really cool: he provides clinics where he combines lectures on champagne (the drink) with a certain message that management wants to convey to their colleagues. Say for example that a company would like to Go Green! (as they say). He would start the usual clinic about champagne and its many intricacies and then veer off towards ecological farming and how there's an analogy with what the company would like to achieve. I'm making a mess of explaining it, but it's really pretty cool -> Champagne Experience.
Today was the first time we'd gathered at the Tante Truus lunch room in town. I had no idea what to expect, so I was pleasantly surprised. The decor is lovely, the pie's great and the coffee awesome (they include a glass of water and a smidge of Baileys plus whipped cream with every coffee). I'd heartily recommend Truus for lunch or a break in the Almere Stad area.
kilala.nl tags: work,
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2009-10-01 18:41:00
This weekend I'll be making a trip to Belgium with my colleague Iain. It's time for $CLIENT's annual disaster recovery test and we're representing the BoKS security team. We'll arrive at the hotel on Friday because we'll need to get an early start on Saturday morning. I expect that we'll be up to do our Thing (tm) around ten or eleven in the morning, after which the rest of the disaster recovery continues. If everything goes alright it'll be a very boring weekend for us, until the time's come to roll everything back. Hopefully that'll be before 1600 in the afternoon.
Man, I'm going to miss Marli and Dana! Luckily I'm bringing my Macbook, so we can use iChat for a video link :)
kilala.nl tags: work, sysadmin,
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All content, with exception of "borrowed" blogpost images, or unless otherwise indicated, is copyright Thomas Sluyter.
