Where did it all go so wrong?

Between 1987 and 2003, Fugazi played over 1000 concerts in all 50 states and all over the world. Over 800 of these shows were recorded by the band’s sound engineers.

You should already be well aware of this given that it reached the New York Times frontpage, but as this has been a long time coming (in various forms) - I figured I’d mention it here as well.  The NYT article points out another interesting aspect:

[…] the project also tells a story about musical technology from the 1980s into the 2000s. The earliest recordings were made on cassettes, then came digital DAT tapes, then CD-R’s and a few hard drives.

Go give them some of your money.

Countless times I’ve looked on Knockhill’s website and wondered (often out loud) about driving the short distance from Edinburgh to check out some of the events there.  And so finally, me and my Dad made the trip up there (a whole 25 minutes!) to watch the second day of arguably the biggest weekend on the calendar - the Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship.

The day included support from the Porsche Carrera Cup as well as SMRC and the Ginetta GT series.  Our luck was in with the weather as the sun shined all day long - we’ve somehow managed to come home with sunburn.  Not what you expect early September in Scotland!

The racing was fantastic and lived up to all the hype surrounding BTCC; Knockhill is a short and aggressive circuit which seems to lend itself well to the touring car style.  We witnessed numerous shunts, dodgy overtake manouvres, spinoffs, and so on - the sort of thing you’d almost never get to see at a level like Formula One.  All in all it was a fantastic day out, hopefully the photos I captured reflect that.  

Some of my favourites below, otherwise check them all out on Flickr.

Me and the missus just spent a fantastic 10 days sunning it up on the cheap in Malta.  I came away qualified as a Scuba Diver, and as if that wasn’t productive enough, I even took some photos!  

Favourite thing to shoot was definitely the random selection of cars we came across, although it’s a shame I didn’t decide to start collecting them a little bit sooner.  Still grabbed a few decent ones though - check them out on Flickr.

This past weekend, RAF Fairford once again played host to the 40th Royal International Air Tattoo.  It’s become something of an annual (more or less) trip for me and my old man, I’m not much of a plane nerd by any stretch of the imagination but I do love the noise and the excuse to shoot a few photos and sit around outside drinking beer.

Speaking of photography, each successive year sees me trying to upgrade my equipment in some way in order to get closer to the action.  I first shot wih a D70 and a 70-200, then a D200, then a D700 + 1.7x Teleconverter (which got me back to square one…) and then this year I borrowed a friend’s D300s which, in conjunction with the TC and the 70-200, had me as close as I’ve gotten so far.  Still need that 200-400 though really…

Annoyingly, the weather and the selection of planes was far worse than it’s been on previous occasions but I still managed to bag quite a few keepers (~80 or so out of about 400), half of which I’ve stuck up online.  Here’s a few of my favourites below, otherwise check out the set on Flickr.

The cheapest way to backup your data these days of course seems to be to just buy more disks, but with that comes the problem of what to plug them into. Enter the HP N36L MicroServer.  It might only have a relatively meagre 1.3GHz Athlon II Neo CPU (dual core though!) but it’ll support up to 8GB of RAM and most importantly, it has 4 x SATA drive bays as well as an additional SATA header on board.  A few clicks on eBuyer.com led to this little lot:

• 1 x HP N36L MicroServer;
• 2 x 4GB DIMMs;
• 4 x 2TB Samsung HDDs

All for the princely and scarcely-believable sum of £434, once you factor in HP’s £100 cashback offer.  With a nicely compatible set of hardware onboard the opportunity to double this up as my new vSphere ‘lab’ was too much to resist so I installed and booted ESXi off a USB stick plonked into the header on the motherboard.  I had a spare 750GB drive knocking around which I stashed in the 5.25” bay at the top and connected it to the spare SATA header, but what about all those other disks?  That’s where I started to scratch my head.

The MicroServer doesn’t do “proper” RAID, the BIOS essentially fronts a software-based solution which isn’t supported by VMware.  You could import and provision them with ESXi for use by all the virtual machines, but eventually I decided to go down the route of raw-device mapping the disks directly to one VM, and that machine would run FreeBSD so that I could take advantage of ZFS.  The other upside to this is that if I decide for some reason to take ESX out of the equation, I can boot and run FreeBSD natively and just import my zpool.  I don’t have to worry about the messiness of VMFS or anything else like that.

With that decision made and ESXi installed, the first step was to RDM the locally-attached drives to my VM.  This isn’t supported via the VMware client, it has to be done from the commandline as an option to ‘vmkfstools’.  The procedure is well document elsewhere so I won’t bother with the details here, but once that was done FreeBSD saw all four disks on boot and I created a new RAIDZ array with those four drives.  So now onto some performance testing - just how much does my setup suffer when it’s virtualised?  Here’s a real-world example, the time taken to rsync (-av) a ~30GB directory over NFS:

• Native

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sent 30211839333 bytes  received 19108 bytes  4125330.57 bytes/sec
total size is 30208073684  speedup is 1.00
real    122m3.212s
user    6m11.601s
sys     5m4.499s

• Virtualised

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sent 30211839333 bytes  received 19108 bytes  3530453.81 bytes/sec
total size is 30208073684  speedup is 1.00
real    142m37.140s
user    6m33.874s
sys     5m6.392s

So an extra 20 minutes to do the full 30GB, which isn’t insignificant but I can live with that given its purpose.  The native install had the run of the whole 8GB of RAM, but the virtualised instance had only 2GB allocated - and everyone knows that ZFS loves RAM.  Aside from enabling ZFS prefetch for the VM, there hasn’t been much in the way of performance tuning here either - Jumbo Frames are disabled, NFS is out-of-the box on both client and server in terms of configuration, and so on.  Best do something about that then…

After three and a half years of ownership and > 40,000 miles driven across almost all of Europe, last Friday we finally said goodbye to YK03 DPV.  It was an extremely tough decision, mostly because there’s few cars that can touch the E39 M5 for what it is.  Practical, refined and yet still capable of thoroughly upsetting 911 owners, it took some beating.  And then there was the sound of that V8…

Nostalgia aside, there were a number of big-ticket items on the horizon that would have wanted doing should I have decided to keep the car, and so instead it made more sense to look at something newer.  I did briefly debate a Cayman S and even perhaps an Elise, but after looking around eventually decided on an E46 M3 (ideally a CS) instead.  Largely because I know the marque, but the Cayman doesn’t really do it for me and the Elise is just a tad too extreme.  A Megane R26 was also briefly considered but come on, that would have been pretty depressing coming from the M5.

So here it is - the new motor.  I’d been passively searching around for a little while but then stumbled across this E46 M3 CS at a main dealer down in Carlisle, thoroughly do-able from Edinburgh.  A trip down there to discuss trading my M5 in as a part-exchange resulted in an excellent deal, mainly due to some serious bartering (thanks to Rox!).  And holy shit, what a car it is.  The M5 was comprehensively rapid, but its weight meant that the momentum generated was a bit much through the twisties to say the least.  And then there were the woefully inadequate brakes, typical for M-cars, and which completely wilted on the way down the Stelvio Pass.

The drive back from the dealership put to rest any reservations I had - the M3 CS is an utterly magnificent car to drive.  We headed back along the A702 in the sunshine and the difference on these types of roads between the two cars is like night and day.  The M3 feels like a surgically sharp precision instrument compared to the M5’s blunt sledgehammer approach.  While I miss the sound of the V8, the straight six’s cacophonic howl above 4k RPM is enough to prick the hairs on anyone’s neck.

Enough of my self-affirmation though at spunking a load of money.  Here’s a few pics of the M5 to celebrate!

Some digging around revealed the steps necessary to create this homebrewed version. The author provides a link to a precompiled version, but this doesn’t (yet) have the necessary ID in place in order to pick up my 88E8056.  One quick amendment to the aforementioned simple.map and we’re in business though, and I’m happy to report that this particular NIC now works quite happily under 4.1. To save anyone else the effort and headscratching here’s a copy to drop in place on your installation: oem.tgz

Anyway, yes.  That wasn’t my point.  This new telly, which is really nice but thoroughly underwhelming, is ‘Internet-ready’.  I hooked it up with a piece of RJ-45, logged into my Youtube account, and for some reason searched for Atari ST (honestly, it was a mindless search).  I then noticed one video in particular, chuckled to myself, and hit play.

Rox walked into the room, snort-laughed, and asked me what on earth I was playing.  It’s just a shitty low-resolution scroller with a digitised (mono!) version of a chart-topping 80’s dance hit.  But the thing is, this demo is one of the first examples that I can remember of hearing ‘proper’ music (i.e not synthesised) on a computer.  Think about it.  This is long before the advent of Fraunhofer’s cash-cow (the MP3 format) and its subsequent ubiquity on almost every device known to man.  We take all that so much for granted now, but once upon a time it was a genuinely amazing thing to behold, at least to my then 14-year-old ears.

I know, I know - you can go back way further than that to before computers made any sound at all, to when it was all black and white and so on, but what I’m driving at is this:  When was the last time you were genuinely amazed by a piece of technology?  Like you actually stood back and thought “holy shit, this is amazing!”.  Maybe I’m just old and jaded, but that never happens these days.  Sure, Apple’s iPad is awesome and I understand its potential implications but it didn’t give me a boner in the same way that playing IK+ on the Amiga for the first time did, or seeing the 3Dfx technology demos did, or hearing that demo.

The irony of all this isn’t lost on me: I’m sat here on my Apple laptop, milled out a solid billet of aluminium, with a dual-core processor and 4GB of RAM, effectively running a portable datacentre inside virtual machines.  18 years ago I’d have never imagined such things would be possible (mind you, I don’t think I’d have come up with something so mundane), and it SHOULD be amazing but somehow it isn’t - the magic of these devices and the advances in technology just don’t seem to be what they used to be.

I remember when it was all fields around here…

This is where sslh comes in.  It’s a really simple tool that wraps incoming connections to these ports and then depending on protocol redirects it onto sshd back on port 22, or to your httpd on localhost:443.  With me so far?  Good - it’s easier to configure than it is to explain ;)

In this example, I compiled sslh from source and configured it manually in conjunction with Lighttpd  First up, grab the latest version from sslh’s homepage:

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$ wget http://www.rutschle.net/tech/sslh-1.7a.tar.gz
$ tar zxvf sslh-1.7a.tar.gz
$ cd sslh-1.7a

Take a quick look at the Makefile and amend the option for libwrap if you don’t want to use it.  Then it’s simple a case of running:

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$ make && make install

This should drop the binary in /usr/local/sbin (unless you changed this in the Makefile!), the default configuration in /etc/default/sslh, and an appropriate init script in /etc/init.d/sslh.  Now all we have to do is amend the configuration and update it to reflect our host’s settings.  In my case, I replaced the ‘ifname’ with dischord.org’s IP address:

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LISTEN=212.13.197.13:443
SSH=localhost:22
SSL=localhost:443

Now we have to amend our webserver’s configuration.  In my example, I’m using Lightttpd but it’s just as straightforward for Apache’s httpd.  Firstly, we’ll want to quickly create a self-signed certificate:

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$ sudo mkdir /etc/lighttpd/certs ; cd /etc/lighttpd/certs
$ sudo openssl req -new -x509 -keyout lighttpd.pem -out lighttpd.pem -days 3650 -nodes
$ sudo chmod 400 /etc/lighttpd/certs/lighttpd.pem

In Debian’s case, they split out Lighttpd’s configuration into a /etc/lighttpd/conf-available directory.  You then just symlink in the relevant bits that you need into /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled.  So here we need to edit the 10-ssl.conf and then enable it:

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$ sudo vi /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/10-ssl.conf
$SERVER["socket"] == "127.0.0.1:443" {
                  ssl.engine                  = "enable"
                  ssl.pemfile                 = "/etc/lighttpd/certs/lighttpd.pem"
}
$ sudo ln -s /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/10-ssl.conf \
/etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/10-ssl.conf

Here we’ve specified our newly-created and self-signed certificate, and told Lighttpd’s SSL engine that it should only bind to the localhost loopback address on port 443.  Now we can start sslh and restart Lighttpd:

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$ sudo /etc/init.d/sslh start
$ sudo /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart

If all’s well, you should now be able to connect via SSH to port 443 on your server, but also still use HTTPS in your web-browser when hitting your site.

Anyway, Rob is a top chap and has recently found himself newly qualified in the field of whatever it is that doctors have after six or eight years of study.  His recent forays into IRC have sounded pretty grim to say the least, but this latest outburst is a real winner:

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[19:37] * rob has joined #quake2.uk
[19:37] [rob] hi
[19:39] [nick] hi!
[19:39] [nick] how's work??
[19:40] [nick] killed many people yet?
[19:44] [nick] no answer :/
[19:44] [nick] can't be a good thing :/
[19:48] [rob] ://
[19:48] [rob] i stuck my 1st finger up someones arse today as a doctor :/
[19:48] [rob] came out all covered in shit
[19:49] [rob] even before i stuck it in, there was diarrhoea like shit smeared all over her anus
[19:49] [rob] and no she wasnt hot, nick.
[19:49] [rob] she was 84 :/
[19:49] [rob] kill me now :|
[19:50] [rob] on that note, im gonna go to the gym and work the anger out of me :|
[19:50] * rob Quit (Quit)
[19:50] [nick] jesus :///
[20:35] [Durz|lnx] rob realising its not like off the TV :/
[20:35] [Durz|lnx] i missed the episode of ER where they stuck a finger up an 84 year olds ass

I think I’ll stick to IT.  Which, ironically, Rob already has a degree in (Computer Science).

• someone on IRC that I’ve been speaking to for > 10 years but haven’t actually met.

If you’re still using an @freebsd.cx address I can offer you @xen.cx instead, otherwise consider it dead.  RIP!

I can’t believe how quickly the last year has gone, but we (me and Rox) have made a decision to move back to the UK towards the end of summer and this week I handed my notice in at work.

To be fair, the motivation wasn’t really the passing of time, instead there’s been a number of personal / family related stuff going on which when they’re all factored together means that somewhere closer to home is the best place to be for us both, for now.

We’ve had an amazing time out here in Darmstadt,  it’s a cool place and we’ve made some great friends.  But if we don’t start making plans now then before we know it another year will have passed and well, you know how that goes.

I have a three month notice period to work, so it’ll be mid to late July before I start seriously job hunting.  If you hear of anything that would suit, let me know!

First thing you’ll want to do is install some packages to make your life a bit less painful.  Connect the DVD device with the Solaris 10 ISO and mount it within your VM:

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# mount -F hsfs -o ro /dev/dsk/c0d0t0s0 /mnt/cdrom

Then we can install some packages from /mnt/cdrom/Solaris_10/Product. Let’s start off with some basic utilities, bash, and online documentation (man pages):

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# yes | pkgadd -d . SUNWxcu4
# yes | pkgadd -d . SUNWadmfr SUNWadmfw
# yes | pkgadd -d . SUNWbash
# yes | pkgadd -d . SUNWdoc SUNWman

SSH is also quite useful:

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# yes | pkgadd -d . SUNWsshr SUNWsshu SUNWsshdr SUNWsshdu SUNWsshcu
# /lib/svc/method/sshd -c
# svcadm enable ssh

The second command will create your RSA and DSA host keys, without this you won’t be able to connect.

Then there’s a bunch of additional prerequisite packages you need to install before SunCluster itself. These are as follows:

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SUNWtcatu
SUNWj3rt
SUNWj3dev
SUNWmfrun
SUNWxwrtl
SUNWxwice
SUNWxwplt
SUNWctpls
SUNWxwfnt
SUNWxwplr

You also need some Solaris Zones related gubbins otherwise you’ll see various errors pertaining to missing libraries such as libzonecfg.so.1:

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SUNWzoneu
SUNWzoner
SUNWpool
SUNWluu
SUNWluzone
SUNWlur
SUNWpoolr
SUNWlucfg

Finally, the core / reduced networking group installation also disables some RPC related services that are necessary for cluster node communication. You’ll find that installation hangs, for example, when the primary node is waiting for the secondary to reboot. To remedy this, do the following:

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# svccfg -s rpc/bind setprop config/local_only = false
# svccfg -s rpc/bind setprop config/enable_tcpwrappers = false
# svccfg -s rpc/bind listprop
# svcadm refresh rpc/bind

One other oddity I noticed was that I was seeing a bunch of RPC timeouts when looking at anything IPMP related. This turned out to be some DNS resolution going on as a result of the IP addresses assigned to the cluster interconnects and my ISP returning bullshit records. It’s easily fixed by editing /etc/nsswitch.conf and amending the ipnodes line as follows:

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ipnodes: files

You should then be ready to kick off the install of SunCluster, and everything else is exactly as per Dan’s guide.

My good friend Greg and his cohorts, known collectively as Married to the Sea, rolled into Darmstadt late yesterday to play an acoustic set at a locally (in)famous and unusual venue known as the Gute Stube.  It offered an ideal opportunity to bust out the camera and test out some low-light shooting of which I’ve done very little with the D700.  In short, I was blown away - not just by the music, but by the fact that I was snapping away quite happily at ISO 3,200 and coming out with fantastic results.

Anyway, yeah - the gig!  The band were fantastic, winning the crowd over not just with their music but also with their infectious charm and humour in this very intimate venue.  Even if the songs weren’t necessarily your cup of tea you couldn’t help but smile and just enjoy being a part of the event, it was great fun and hopefully I’ve managed to capture some of that.

Below is a few of my favourite shots from the night, and the full set is over on Flickr.

I dusted off the D700 last night to take some shots of Rox’s friend’s band, Immergrün, at the Schlosskeller here in Darmstadt.  It’s a pretty cool little venue but awkward to take photos, as while it’s fairly intimate there’s huge columns in the way (well, it is a cellar…) that kind of limit your options.  Anyway, I got a few decent shots - nothing groundbreaking, but it felt good to be at a gig and shooting some pictures.  

It’s always kind of hard to take photos of a band whose music you aren’t familiar with, as you don’t know when they’re going to build up and kick off, those being the moments that you want to capture.  Still, these guys were pretty tight and didn’t seem to mind me making a nuisance of myself at the front.

Check out the set on Flickr.

Mat is awesome as shit, so we decided to make a movie about him. —Spike Jonze, Jeff Tremaine, Johnny Knoxville

I’m super stoked on the trailer, right from the opening with Fugazi and of course Tony Hawk this seems like it’ll be spot-on.  Can’t wait.

Anyway, I noticed today on Ride’s site that Fudger put up an email chain started by an angry parent that ended up with one park that was about to allow bikes in changing their minds on the back of these few emails and keeping them banned instead.  The parent concerned claims to be one of the old guard, someone who has lived in the area all their life, grew up in the whole Dogtown era surfing and skateboarding and so on.  It’s because of this that I’m even more amazed at the level of hypocrisy that’s exhibited and that goes seemingly unchecked by the people responsible for the parks to which BMXers should be entitled.

Do you think the pools that people originally skated and rode around were meant for skateboarding?  Do you think that the street furniture that’s played such a big part of both sports was intended for something so creative?  What would have happened if, back when it was all starting, empty pools had been policed so fiercely that skateboarders never had a chance to ride?

I can understand the whole ‘concerned parent’ point of view, but at the end of the day your kid is involving themselves in something where danger is a huge part of the fun.  If it’s not a bike in a skatepark, it’s a car in the street.  Understand what you’re involving yourself in, and don’t complain when you get bitten every once in a while.  Oh, and teaching kids some basic park etiquette really, really helps.  Respect your surroundings.

On the flip side, the attitude that’s prevalent these days is doing BMX no favours.  There’s a level of arrogance that’s been layered on in both over the years, kids don’t really appreciate their roots nor were they around to witness the dark ages where there was literally fucking nothing to ride in terms of skateparks or whatever.  It’s that complacency that breeds the attitude we’re seeing now and mentioned in the email chain, and it’s a real shame as it’s inevitably going to widen the rift between the two and ensure that they’re kept out for good.

I don’t have a solution for this, but I do think it’s something that both sides need to work on.  I grew up riding with skateboarders, some of my best friends in fact, and I’d hate to imagine what it’d be like if the animosity grew to the point that both were kept essentially separate and at arm’s length from one another.  Let’s cut the bullshit and work together.

I did document my favourites back in 2007, but here’s an updated list now that we’re living in the future:

• AppTabs.  This is handy mainly for Fever, and while previously I used a Fluid-generated SSB for this it makes more sense (and saves on memory I guess) to have it right there in Firefox.
• AdBlock.  Despite the fuss surrounding its use, I find it a no-brainer of a plugin.
• Delicious Bookmarks.  I’ve been using Delicious for a long time now, and I’ve got bookmarks neatly arranged by tags so that I can have a specific ‘Daily’ section, ‘Social’, and so on.  It’s extremely convenient having this arrangement right there in your browser, and the service plays nicely with Quicksilver too (via the Social Bookmarking plugin).
• Download Statusbar.  The default download dialogue in all browsers seems to suck, but this plugin for Firefox gets it right.  It’s unobtrusive and offers at-a-glance progress for whatever you happen to have downloading at the time.
• Fission.  Purely cosmetic, it changes the progress indicator so that it’s in the Address Bar a la Safari.
• HttpFox.  I’ve been using this instead of the ‘Live HTTP Headers’ plugin which has been out of date for a while now.  It comes into its own when diagnosing problems with a particular website.  Provides real-time output of the entire protocol exchange so that you can see exactly what your browser is doing and each server’s response to every request.
• Omnibar.  Integrates the search and location bar, kind of makes the overall appearance a bit tidier.
• Web Developer.  The swiss army knife of plugins, this is handy for anything from CSS teardowns to analysing page load times.
• GrApple.  Ok, so this isn’t strictly a plugin per se, it’s a theme for Mac OS X only that makes Firefox actually look like an Apple application.

And here’s the end result:

Exciting stuff!