FreeBSD 4.10 upgrade
With the recent release of FreeBSD 4.10 I decided to upgrade my machine this weekend since I was still running a RC of 4.9.
I got the source, build the world and upgraded all the jails, it went perfect since I could slowly do the jails one by one as they kept working on just fine on the old 4.9 kernel, all the usual things that break like ps and so forth worked just fine.
When it came to upgrading the main host, it started going bad from the word go. First my serial console got itself corrupted and I could not type anything at all to the server, this means I could not do the installworld in single user mode. I shut everything down that I could essentially keeping the machine in multi user mode with just sshd running. Did the installworld and installkernel and rebooted.
I hoped at this point that the serial port would reset and things would be fine, but it seems now that the serial port was actually producing garbage to the console and ended up preventing the bootloader from choosing the right harddrive for the bootup.
I power cycled the machine with my remote power management and that was it, dead, no response at all.
After getting hold of the ISP and gaining access to the co-location facility I discovered the BIOS battery died at some point and when I power cycled the machine it forgot its BIOS settings, including the fact that it has to turn back on once it gets power 
A quick replacement of the battery solved it and now its all fine again, I also turned off the motherboards console redirection relying on FreeBSD's. This way future console corruption won't prevent a bootup since the FreeBSD console stuff only kicks in after the bootloader.
“Gukanjima – View of an Abandoned Island”
I found via boingboing a link to this site with photos of a deserted island (click on 'thumbnail' for the actual photos) off the coast of Japan, this reminded me of the town near Chernobyl that has been deserted, I have been interested in visiting that for years. There are tour groups that will take you to it now, I am very seriously considering going in the summer.
Off the westernmost coast of Japan, is an island called "Gunkanjima" that is hardly known even to the Japanese. Long ago, the island was nothing more than a small reef. Then in 1810, the chance discovery of coal drastically changed the fate of this reef. As reclamation began, people came to live here, and through coal mining the reef started to expand continuously. Befor long, the reef had grown into an artificial island of one kilometer (three quarters of a mile) in perimeter, with a population of 5300. Looming above the ocean, it appeared a concrete labyrinth of many-storied apartment houses and mining structures built closely together.
Eventually, the mines faced an end, and in 1974 the world's once most densely populated island become totally deserted. The island, after all its inhabitants departed leaving behind their belongings, became an empty shell of a city where all its peopl disappeared overnight, as if by some mysterious act of God.
Ten years later, I returned to the island, equipped with food and drinking water. The island was devastated, with the smell of people gone. Inside the buildings, however, evidence of people's lives remained strongly. The strange atmosphere led me to wonder if island had remained in sleep ever since all its inhabitants left.
Sigma 28-300mm Compact Hyperzoom
After my recent purchase of the Nikkor 70-300mm lens - which was intended as a cheap way to find out if I would like a zoom lens - I now purchased an upgrade on this based on my experience with it - the Sigma 28-300 Hyperzoom.
The Nikkor is a good lens though it suffers from heavy Chromatic Aberrations, especially at 300mm and in high contrast areas. The problem with a 70-300mm lens is that it does not start wide enough for holiday or walk about type shots, I often found myself wanting to change lens to my 18-70mm to get certain objects in frame that was too close or too big.
The 28-300mm is a good middle ground lens, I used it a bit today and found that I was unable to produce any CA and that I was not tempted to swap to a wider lens ever. Lens swapping on DSLR's are notorious for getting dust on the CCD which requires rather scary cleaning using expensive CO2 based systems or cleaning swabs. The 28-300mm gives the equivalent of a 10x magnification when quoted in the typical digital camera speak. The lens was a bit hard to find, but eventually I found a dealer with stock and paid £200 for it.
View the full entry for a photo of the lens, also my first attempt at a studio type shot using some black cloth and a desk lamp, will need to get some velvet.
Weblog application comparison
Via Geek News Central I got a link to a very thorough side-by-side comparison of various blogging tools. If you are considering moving or even deciding for the first time on what tool to use then this will be very handy.
MovableType update
Six Apart made what they call a "brief explanation clarifying some points" on their current PR Nightmare.
The big one is basically that they now say a single weblog may be a collection of weblogs as long as it displays as one entity. I am contemplating splitting some stuff off my main blog, photography related things that many people just don't care for, so with an additional blog that means extra RSS feed etc. This is something that a lot of people do and they have now recognized that their 5 weblog limit would ruin it for a lot of people. Now it is unlimited.
They have also made a nice compromise on licencing for a setup like mine, I could install the basic Personal Edition for $70 which allows for 5 authors and I can buy additional authors for $10 each. That is good, it is a solution I can afford and use, I can easily move the $10 once off fee to whoever I am hosting the blog for if they are that eager to get it hosted.
I think though that this is too little too late, they have effectively made themselves the poster child for the evils of Free but not Open Source software and so I will still be contemplating moving to something else, currently I am leaning towards the GPL WordPress system but it requires MySQL and that is something I need to still contemplate since I am not a fan and do not have it on my primary server.
I need to weigh up the time required to move away, redo the web design etc and the fact that no doubt my permLinks will now be not so perm anymore. Loss in Google penetration etc. Maybe WordPress can output stories in the same format as MovableType, at least in the same URL's so that won't change. Good thing is WordPress has a MT import function so that's half the battle won.
Today is ‘Bend over so sixapart can screw you’ day.
I have been a big Movabletype fan and use it on my blog. Thankfully I have never contributed code to the community. They released version 3 today in the form of a Developers Edition and introduced new pricing schemes.
Previously MT was free for non commercial sites. I could host blogs for friends without charging them and without paying for MT, multiple authors multiple blogs, fantastic. As long as you advertise them with little 'powered by' logos it was all good.
The new pricing structure shows how committed to a free version they are by removing all the mutli user support from the free versions. And even then with just one author you are only allowed 3 blogs.
For me to support just the few blogs I host I would need to fork out $70 to $120 at their 33% discounted introductory price. This is a huge step away from their previous licencing structure and one that is driving the community raging mad since a lot of people have provided free plugins, free development work, free beta testing and sent sixapart huge amounts of great ideas and so forth, only to be shafted by them. You only have to do a feedster search on the subject to see the outcry, you can also see the trackback on their posting that I linked above for a snip of it.
My only option to ever move away from MT 2.x is to install multiple versions of the free MT 3 on my machine, one per author and restrict them to 3 blogs. Creating a administrative nightmare for upgrades and so forth.
I suppose it is time one of these volunteers put their effort where it will be appreciate most at this point - write a migration tool away from MT 2.x to something else like Drupal, Typo3 or something Zope based
allofmp3.com
A quick update on my experiences with allofmp3.com.
Initially when I started out using them they were being terribly slow - the 'current users' counter constantly sat around 2000 users so I imagine they had a bit of unexpected traffic. By the weekend of the 1st of May they were actually refusing connections and eventually on the 2nd they were up again after posting a note about maintenance.
Since then the service levels have been acceptable. The 1 Gig of mp3's I downloaded from them were all perfect quality and their online encoding system is really nice and definitely a reason to return to them in the future. I was surprised with their music selection covering some bands that I had trouble sourcing in London. My bank statement shows a perfect deduction from them with no funny business.
A big thumbs up to them then. The question about the legality of their service still remains, The Register has some interesting things to say about it but still no-one is being clear on what this means for the consumer and if music purchased from them will be considered illegal copies of copyrighted material.
The answer is far from clear. The site is not licensed by any labels. However, currently there is an exemption under existing Russian copyright legislation (Article 39 for the aficionados) allowing phonograms to be performed publicly without the authorisation of the copyright owner for broadcasting and cable transmission. The Internet could be deemed to fall under this exemption. A similar argument can be applied to copies in the cache memory of computers.
So as IFPI Russia's legal adviser, Vladimir Dragunov, concedes: "Because of these loopholes we don't have much chance of succeeding if we attack these companies who are using music files on the Internet under current Russian laws."
Trademark, Silence is Sexy and Wolfsheim concert
Last night I went to see the Wolfsheim concert despite my earlier plans not to go. I was quite glad I went the concert was excellent.
The supporting acts were Trademark and Silence is Sexy.
I did not care much for Trademark, they seem to be a bit of a Kraftwerk inspired electronic band completely with glowing costumes and all, but it lacked something in the overall execution. Silence is Sexy was really good I thought, the female vocal has a very strong voice it may be worth trying to get hold of some of their music.
Wolfsheim was fantastic, it is mostly a 2 man band with what seemed to be temporary band members on drums and guitar, one member takes care of the music with the help of a Apple Powerbook while the other does all the singing, after listening to them now for 3 years or so it was really great to finally see them live other than on the DVD I have of their concerts.
The concert was held at the Carling Islington Academy. The venue is pretty small but has an impressive lightning system and good sized stage, the sound quality can do with some improvement though as there were quite a bit of distortion some times.
View the extended entry for some photos that I took with my Canon iXus 400, they wont allow you into concerts with professional camera equipment
Yet another black and white technique
Via PhotographyBLOG I found a nice workflow and action for creation black and white images from color without messing with the original file. The workflow is very flexible and seems to give good results that can be tailored to your needs.
Links
- @ripienaar
- Flashpolicyd
- Flickr
- London DevOps Group
- MCollective Plugins
- R.I.Pienaar
- Ruby PDNS
- The Marionette Collective
- Wiki
Tweets
- Giving up hope finding a iPhone twitter client that can do word filters
- Dante's Ingerno is a fun game
- DC visit done. Puppetmaster now has 4GB ram. What a PITA. Time to have good look at masterless operation
- Nice. Some aws ip trying to abuse my dev asterisk machine. Don't see many spammers/scammers using ec2 yet but clearly just a matter of time
- Sent a bug report about broken ruby stomp gem in 1.1.4, hopefully this mail does not fall on deaf ears like previous ones :( #activemq
- Damn you apple for inviting me to reserve an iPad when I do not live in the states and so cannot.
- Blog Post: New release of my Puppet Concat tool with 0.24.8+ support http://bit.ly/aA9RYh #puppet
- French village went insane after CIA spiked its bread with LSD http://bit.ly/9r2307
- It's ironic how you cannot send email with google charts api images to gmail users and expect it to work. way to go.
- Google charting API really is very sexy
Reading
Planned books:
- The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain by Daniel Gardner
- Relentless by Dean Koontz
- Mind Over Ship by David Marusek
- The New Space Opera by Gardner Dozois
- The New Space Opera 2 by Gardner Dozois, Jonathan Strahan
Current books:
-
Ariel: A Book of the Change by Steven R. Boyett
Recent books:
- Hacking Vim: A Cookbook to Get the Most Out of the Latest Vim Editor by Kim Schulz
- Beautiful Architecture: Leading Thinkers Reveal the Hidden Beauty in Software Design by Diomidis Spinellis , Georgios Gousios
Categories
Archives
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