February 9, 2008: Working All Day

Oreo was “featured” in an episode of 60 Seconds.  See if you can spot him.

I woke up early this morning. At a quarter after five I woke up and found myself not to be sleepy at all. I tried going back to sleep but had to luck. So I got up at five thirty and got started on the day. I did a little reading and a little writing. I hopped onto the office network since I had work coming up at eight in the morning. One of the advantages of working my weekends with people in Bahrain is that we are often able to start early as long as I am awake. Today we were able to start at just a quarter after seven which worked out perfectly.

Dominica got up at eight thirty which was very surprising for a weekend day. This is a good sign that she won’t be exhausted all week. Her shifting weekend sleep hours are really tough for her to make up for in a week of sleep. She watched License to Wed while I was working. Oreo was sleepy and didn’t want to get out of bed so they just snuggled in for a while.

I finished reading Simon Winchester’s “Outposts”. It is a fascinating look at the remaining British Crown Colonies as visited by Winchester in the 1980s. It seldom that we, as Americans, think about far flung British possessions such as Saint Helena, Pit Cairn Island, Ascension or others. And yet there are populations there, cultures and history.

Breakfast for me this morning was coffee and pop tarts. Doesn’t get much better than that. After her movie Dominica went on to watch the television show Dexter that she picked up for herself on DVD. I have seen one episode of it and it was okay but I am not into murder, serial killer, gross-out shows. Even light hearted ones, if such a thing exists. I am really tired of entertainment involving unhappy subjects. That really is not entertaining. I have no idea why people enjoy that. It isn’t like a thriller. At least a thriller is suspenseful and “scary”.

It was a busy morning for work with Bahrain. I was expecting the usual one hour of work but we started early and they ended up needing me for support into late in the afternoon. I ended up working more than eight hours!

I took the ASP.NET 2.0 Brainbench exam today scoring a Masters and ranking at number five in New Jersey and tying for thirty-fifth in the nation. I then took the older ASP.NET exam based on version 1.0 and also scored a Masters tying for ninth in New Jersey.  My final test for the day was the ASP.NET Fundamentals exam.  I know have all of the ASP.NET tests done and out of the way.

Dominica decided that it was a lazy day and she spent the entire day in bed with Oreo watching DVDs.  Oreo loved it.  It is often that he gets to spend the entire day actually in bed.

I listened to some IT Conversations tonight – Bill Buxton from Microsoft and Jon Udell talking about “Sketching User Experience“.

My evening project was working on an OpenSUSE 10.3 32bit AMD workstation (HP d325) for Castile Christian Academy.  While I worked on that I started listening to Garrison Keillor’s latest book “Pontoon“.

I ended up working until after one in the morning.  Dominica watched almost the entire first season of Dexter in, more or less, a single sitting.  Only two more episodes to go to save for tomorrow.

Rsync on Solaris 10

I was interested to get Rsync up and running on my Solaris 10 server – an UltraSPARC based SunFire V100. To my dismay the Rsync package is not available for Solaris 10 from SUN. So I decided to set out on a journey to discover how exactly to get Rsync “the right way” and to get it installed and working.

After much searching I discovered that the obvious SUNWrsync package does, in fact, exist but not, at this time, for Solaris 10. Rather it is only available in Solaris Express (aka Solaris 11.) This means that it is not available in the standard Solaris 10 Update 4 or earlier installation CDs. Rsync has not been available on any previous version of Solaris to my knowledge either. The version of Rsync available from Solaris Express is currently 2.6.9 which is current, as of November 6, 2006, according to the official Rsync project page.

Fortunately SUN has made Solaris Express available as a free download. Unfortunately it is a single DVD image that must be downloaded in three parts and then combined into a single, huge image. This is not nearly as convenient as having an online package repository from which a single package could be downloaded (hint, hint SUN!)

You will need to download all three files from SUN, unzip them and then concatenate them into a single 3.7GB ISO file from which you can extract the necessary package.

# unzip sol-nv-b64a-sparc-dvd-iso-a.zip
# unzip sol-nv-b64a-sparc-dvd-iso-b.zip
# unzip sol-nv-b64a-sparc-dvd-iso-c.zip
# cat sol*a sol*b sol*c > sol-nv-sparc.iso
# mkdir /mnt/iso
# lofiadm -a sol-nv-sparc.iso /dev/lofi/1
# mount -F hsfs -o ro /dev/lofi/1 /mnt/iso
# cd /mnt/iso/Solaris_11/Product/
# ls -l | grep rsync

You will now have the list of the two available Rsync packages: SUNWrsync and SUNWrsyncS. It is SUNWrsync that we are really interested in here. I like to move all of my packages that I am installing to my own personal repository so that I can keep track of what I am installing and to make it easier to build a matching machine or to rebuild this one. If you are going to use a repository in this way be sure to back it up or it won’t be very useful during a rebuild.

# cp -r SUNWrsync/ /data/PKG/
# pkgadd -d /data/PKG/

You will now be able to pick from the available packages in your repository to choose which to install. [Helpful hint: If you have a large number of packages in your personal repository, consider placing each package into its own directory. For example, make a directory called “rsync” or “rsync_client” and symlink (ln -s) back to the installation directory. This makes it easier and quicker to install a single package. You can simple “cd /data/PKG/rsync” and “pkgadd -d .” Much quick and easier for large repos. By using the symlink method you maintain a single directory of the files while also having handy individual directories.]

Once you have installed the Rsync client package it is ready to be used. Because we are not using Rsync in a server based configuration we have no configuration to worry about. Rsync is most popularly used as a client package over SSH. Unlike most network aware packages that require that an SSH tunnel be created for them Rsync has SSH tunneling built into it making it extremely easy to use.

Let start with an example of moving files from one server to another without using SSH.

/usr/bin/rsync -av remote-host:/data/home/ /data/home

In this example we are synchronizing the remote /data/home directory with the local one pulling files from the remote site to the local. This is a one way sync so only files missing locally are brought over and files that exist locally but do not exist remotely are left intact. This is a relatively safe process. Files of the same name will be overwritten, however, so do this with test directories until you are used to how it works. You can run a test command using the -n option. With this option you will get the output of the Rsync command without actually moving any files so that you have a chance to see what would have happened. Here is the same command run in “test” mode.

/usr/bin/rsync -avn sc-sol-nfs:/data/home/ /data/home

With this particular Rsync package, the default mode of operation is to use SSH as the transport. This can be set explicitly but that is not necessary. By using SSH you have the security of the SSL tunnel to protect your traffic and you have the security and ease of use that comes with not needing to run a daemon process on any server that you want to sync to or from. The final command that you will normally want to run will involve the “-z” option which turns on file compression. This will normally decrease the time that it takes to transfer files. The gzip algorithm used for the compression is very effective on text documents and general files and is quite fast but on already compressed files such as tgz, Z, zip, jpeg, jpg, png, gif, mp3, etc. it can, at worst case, actually expand the files and will use a lot of CPU overhead without increasing the transfer speed. So best to be aware of the file types that you will be transferring. But for most users gzip is the right compression to use. So our final transfer command is:

/usr/bin/rsync -avz sc-sol-nfs:/data/home/ /data/home

Issues Sharing Automount Home Directories from Solaris to Linux

I discovered this problem while attempting to share our automounted home directories from my Solaris 10 NFS file server to my SUSE and Red Hat Linux NFS clients.

automount[10581]: >> mount: block device 192.168.0.2:/data/home/samiller is write-protected, mounting read-only
kernel: call_verify: server 192.168.0.2 requires stronger authentication.

It turns out that the solution is quite simple. The issue is with a mismatch of anonymous credentials. Let’s take a look at the erroneous entry in /etc/dfs/dfstab on the Solaris NFS server:

share -F nfs -o public,nosuid,rw,anon=-1 -d "backup" /data

The piece of this configuration that is an issue here is “anon=-1”. In theory this is designed to block users who do not have accounts on the local system. However this causes issues with Linux systems. You can solve this problem by simply removing the anon setting from the configuration file. Not an ideal fix but it does solve the problem.

share -F nfs -o public,nosuid,rw -d "backup" /data

Simply run the “shareall” command and you should be back in business.

Children of Mana

Two things stand out the most when you first start playing Square Enix’ Children of Mana: the hand-drawn graphics are positively beautiful and the gameplay sucks. I had high hopes for Children of Mana. I have been a fan of the series since I played the first installment, Final Fantasy Adventure on the original GameBoy and later played its sequel Secret of Mana on the SNES. But CoM doesn’t add much of anything to the series. This game is definitely just playing on its Mana heritage.

Children of Mana is saddled with a tradition of being an action RPG which is always a difficult role to live up to. Action RPGs are, by their very definition, not very “RPGish” and have two distinct conflicting personalities that are nearly impossible to integrate well. CoM does far worse than that though by using an archaic “Legend of Zelda” style of action interface which is cludgy and extremely unrefined. It feels like a cheap afterthought or, more likely, just old code borrowed from some late NES-era game.

The graphics of the non-action portions of the game are amazing but few and far between. The backgrounds are the best I have ever seen on the Nintendo DS and top anything I ever saw on the SNES. But a few amazing backgrounds only go so far. The sprites are okay but don’t mesh fluidly with the background being of a distinctively different quality and style. And the moment that you step foot into a “dungeon” you will get the impression that you have gone into a different game altogether.

RPG and Console RPG fans will be significantly disappointed in this game. The RPG elements are weak approaching non-existant. In fact, calling this game an RPG at all is truly misleading. If anything this is an action game with a strong storyline. The really unfortunate thing is that the action is so poorly executed. There is nothing wrong with an action game with a strong storyline but CoM’s action elements are by far the weakest portion of the game. The action is boring and juvenile.

Overall, unless you are a serious Mana aficionado I would suggest avoiding this title. Children of Mana is not going to live up to your Secret of Mana expectations. One would think that the series would have covered some ground since the early 1990s but apparently it hasn’t.

In the end I gave up on attempting to play CoM.  I found that just by attempting to force myself to work through this game it made me no longer have any driving desire to play the Nintendo DS and it was keeping me from playing games that are much better.

February 8, 2008: Dominica Finally Sees the Hudsucker Proxy

Boy was I tired this morning. Good thing that it is Friday. I am looking forward to having some time to get things done over the weekend. My class at RIT expects the work for the class to be done between Monday and Friday which is rough but at least it pretty much guarantees that I am not stuck doing homework all weekend. Although there is a bit of lingering class discussion into the weekends, so it doesn’t help as much as it should.

The weather was nice this morning for the walk into the office. Cool but not cold which is nice because you don’t tend to overheat during the long stretches of walking.

I had lunch with a colleague over at Chevy’s on the west side of the island near the World Financial Center which was a bit of a hike for lunch time but the exercise is always a good idea for me anyway as was the grilled fish and beans that I had for lunch. So no complaints. We mostly just hung out and were “geeky” talking about IT issues both technical and within the field at large.

Microsoft and Seagate have a cute “Heroes Happen Here” comic series out now. Good stuff.

I am consulting for Previsor / Brainbench again. It has been about a year, I think, since the last time that I consulted for them. This time I get to work on a Web Design certification which should be fun. My work starts on Monday.

This weekend should be pretty slow. My work isn’t scheduled late tonight. I have one small project for eight o’clock tomorrow morning but that isn’t bad. No Dungeons and Dragons this weekend as everyone else is too busy. We might have a New Orleans benefit dinner on Sunday afternoon but we don’t know yet if there is anything for us to eat there as neither Dominica nor I can handle eating much seafood anymore. Strangely scallops seem to be an exception for me which is funny since most of my adult life I haven’t particularly cared for them. Shrimp, lobster and crayfish – the mainstays of Creole cuisine – are definitely out though. I am still okay with lobster bisque, crab cakes and shrimp cakes and once in a great while, possibly but not likely, fried shrimp.

I placed a small Amazon order this afternoon. The free shipping option takes a little while but I figure if I place overlapping orders on a regular basis I get to have a continuous stream of books on their way to me which I can look forward to receiving. I am hoping that one book that I ordered not long ago will arrive today but I don’t think that it did even though it left Jersey City yesterday.

I didn’t have to work that late tonight which was nice for a change. I was able to escape the office at six thirty and hit the road for home. (Or hit the rails, more appropriately.)

I got home just minutes after Dominica and Oreo.  We ordered in some Italian from Nino’s for dinner and watched The Hudsucker Proxy on DVD that Dominica had just gotten last night from Netflix.  The Hudsucker Proxy is one of those truly great films that came out of the cinema renaissance of the early 1990s.  It is one of, if not indeed the, best performance ever given by Tim Robbins and Jennifer Jason Leigh who are the stars.  Other notable actors include Paul Newman, Charles Durning, John Mahoney, Bruce Campbell, Bill Cobbs, Peter Gallagher, Anna Nicole Smith, Steve Buscemi, Sam Raimi and John Goodman.  It was quite a Who’s Who of 1994 Hollywood.  Dominica had never seen the film and for some bizarre reason we only own in on LaserDisc.  I have seen it so many times on LD that it is hard to imagine that we didn’t own in on DVD but it has been one of those movies that I have told her about so much but haven’t seen myself since we unhooked the last LD player in regular use around 2002, not long after Nate and I bought the first DVD player in our group.

After the movie we pretty much went straight off to bed.  Dominica was really exhausted and was asleep before eleven.  I did a little work but went to bed not long afterwards.  I wasn’t very tired though.  But didn’t feel like staying up late either.  I do have to work first thing in the morning tomorrow so sleeping in late isn’t an option.  Never is these days.  It’s tough getting older and having responsibilities.