Gorkon’s Little Place on the Web

I have thought about the episode for the last three days and the more I think about it, the more I love it.

4 of the final 5….

Wow.  Simply Wow.  I did not think that any of these folks were Cylons.  Now they are.  Do they reveal what they know about themselves to the other Colonials?  Do they tell the Cylons??  How did the Cylons have this technology for 40 years?  All that awaits in Season 4.

Kara is that you??

Kara’s back.  At least we’re left to believe that.  Kara’s been to earth?  So many things are weird with this ending.  My only question….is Kara a Cylon too making her the fifth Cylon?  it sure seems like it. Or how in the world did Kara go all the way to Earth and back in a Viper??  Again, it leaves me wanting more.  All this points to RDM and David Eick being a genius at keeping things interesting.  I SOOO don’t want to wait 9 months.

Yes indeed.  I will be flying out to Phoenix, AZ sunday for my next training class.  I’ll be learning IBM’s HACMP.  HACMP stands for High Availability Cluster Multi Processing.  Basically what it is is a way to fail over your server from one server to either a idle one (the proper way and also the most expensive way) or another LPAR  or running system.  It’s a way to fight hardware failure and also to ease maintenance on IBM’s pSeries machines.  For example, say I have a HACMP cluster set up between 2 servers, one running the application, the other running the database.  Say a firmware update comes out and I need to apply it before upgrading to a new Technology Level on AIX.  I can fail over the application to the database server, apply the firmware, bring the cluster back to normal and then do the same thing to the database and ideally this will happen and be transparant to the users.   Cool stuff….IF the application supports it.  Some do not.  The one I work on does not, BUT you can still cut downtime in that the application can be brought up in a reduced state on a server while you work on the other machine.

Oh and in case you did not know, IBM’s pSeries, then called RS/6000 was used to create the chess  playing program that beat Gary Kasparov.  Deep Blue as the system was called was based on a RS/6000 running AIX in a SP cluster.  SP stands for Super Parallel and is also the basis for super computers built on the same platform.   While I will probably never get to  play with a SP setup, it’s cool that I have 99 percent of the hardware I would need to do it.  You COULD do it over existing NICs, but I think it would be better to run Myrinet or some other low latency networking technology like infiniband instead of plain ole Gig copper.  Anyways, it’s not like I have a need to simulate nuclear explosions or do DNA research or research where I can find oil….many uses for super parallel computers.

Anyway, I should be podcasting on digital distraction and also blogging from Phoenix starting Sunday evening.

If you have not already listened to the latest FLOSS Weekly over on the Twit network, do yourself a favor and go do that.  Jon Hall is a great hacker from the days of DECUS and was one of the first to work with Linux.  He has plenty of intresting stories and I listened with rapt intrest.  He has funny stories about Linus and some interesting history of how the sharing of software started way back when.

Also, since Chris and his wife just had a new child, Jon has offer Leo to help out with the FLOSS weekly which if you haven’t noticed turned out to be more like FLOSS monthly.  So hopefully we can get back to the weekly goodness that is the FLOSS Weekly.  Check the Jon “Maddog” Hall show out at:

http://tinyurl.com/366rga

Subscribe to  FLOSS at:

 http://tinyurl.com/2l3cxu

I wanted to write a quick post with a few things on my mind.  First, I enrolled in a class this quarter that’s titled Designing a E-Commerce Website.  I thought, intresting, but when I got the book it was even more interesting….it’s MySQL and PHP.  Even cooler.  What shocked me a bit was that the instructor said the first week would be spent installing MySQL, Apache and PHP on….WINDOWS!  Yeah….that’s what I thought.  Luckily I had asked if Linux was OK (What PHP/MySQL website DOESN’T run on Linux???) and he siad it was ok.  I had also reccomended a VMware appliance called Grandma’s LAMP.  It’s a Xubuntu based VMware appliance with XFCE desktop and the standard LAMP set.  Suggested that studnets can check that out as a proper way of doing MySQL/PHP.

Next is an experience I had with Windows at work.  I have just received a fine Lenovo desktop with a Core 2 Duo and all the trimmings.  I JUST got it last week and was working away today and all of a sudden a virus thing popped up….I looked where it found it and it was in the Yahoo Widget application and I thought…hmm…that’s weird.  Did some poking around and it ends up Symantec has a false positive on a file in their app for VirusBlast.  If you’ve seen this too, you should be getting a update soon to the signatures that fix NAV.  This sucks and is one reason I hate Windows.

I downloaded the latest Herd 5 release of Feisty Fawn and am trying it in a VM at work.  I will be installing it on my new PC as soon as it arrives.  I heard they were installing the image yesterday and if all goes well my PC and it’s new 24 inch widescreen LCD will be sitting on my desk tomorrow.  I plan on testing Feisty in a VM as this is my main Windows Workstation.  That reminds me….have to poke the boss to pony up for the workstation version of VMware.  Server runs on XP ok, it’s just for the kind of support I have to do, it would be nice ot create the check points and see what changed and more.  I had asked to get it but have nut heard anything.

After using Beryl for a full day on this Lenovo T60, I am hooked. It looks awesome, it works smoothly and I find no fault with it except XGL doesn’t like OpenGL Screensavers too much. Resolve that and Linux had THE desktop to envy. It’s better then Vista by FAR.

I’ll reserve final judgement for tonight, but it seems I discovered a bug in Beryl and I figured out why it seemed like I was getting thrown back to the gdm prompt. It appears that if you hit Shift-BackSpace, it will log you out of Beryl. They need to fix that….for the mean time, I did what they proposed on the ThinkWiki and created a script called annoymenot.sh and with it I changed my keymappings. We’ll cross the fingers and see how long I remain in Beryl tonight! WOOHOO! For the full instructions, check out the T60 Ubuntu Edgy Eft page on ThinkWiki at http://tinyurl.com/ypnl5d and also make sure to visit the main wiki at http://thinkwiki.org .

Just read this through a post and found it on his blog, but Ian Murdock, of Debian fame is joining Sun Microsystems to head Operating System Platform Strategy.  This means GOOD things for Sun.  Looking like Sun may be looking more like Linux everyday.   Here’s the link.

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T60 with a ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 graphics card in it that was purchased for me by work. For months on Edgy, I was not able to run Beryl at all. Now it seems the latest Beryl updates WORK on my T60. This is a good thing. The bad thing is XGL is frickin UNSTABLE AS HELL.

Has anyone gotten AIGLX to work on this card?? Any suggestion? Can I meake some tweaks to the X setup to make it better?

I really want to use Beryl as it’s the first Window Manager that has actually gotten me to USE the multiple Desktops just so I can hit Ctrl-alt and SPIN the windows in a cube and find the one I want. I especially like hte new 3d effect of popping the windows up like papers hovering over each side of the cube. Fantastic. Plus once people see how cool Beryl is I can then say this ONLY works on Linux! Anyway, if anyone has some suggestions, just leave me a comment.

Here I sit at work finishing up the DST shift.  Had lots of last minute things to do and fortunately, it almost all went smooth.  We have one server that is on the cusp of being upgraded and then moved that had to have some quick fixes after the rollover but it did finally work after making a tweak.  DST change 2007 is a big nothing.  Hopefully this old box is gone once we upgrade it and move it to an LPAR.