alan.lamielle.net

Memory upgrade courtsey of Daphne

You probably didn’t notice, but I just threw four times more memory into the server (the one pictured next to Daphne above).  While adding a few sets of images to the image gallery a few days ago, I noticed that the machine was swapping (using some disk space as memory) which is considerably slower than actual memory usage.  As this machine was originally my high school graduation gift (and therefore six years old this August) I figured a bit of an upgrade was in order.  I put in an order at NewEgg for 2x1GB = 2GB of Corsair XMS series, low latency, tested pair, screaming fast, super sweet memory.  This is exactly the same as the old memory, only four times as large (from 2x256MB to 2x1GB).  2GB is the limit of this machine, so I’m maxed out there.  I could find an old Socket A AMD 3200+ processor, but I don’t know how much of a difference that will make.

Enjoy the ramz!  Thank you Daphne!

I’ve pointed a few people at it already, but it hasn’t been ‘official’ until now.  My image gallery is finally up (click that link or the link on the right side of the page).  For those of you interested, it uses the Gallery 2 PHP image gallery application.  I currently have some more of my recent sets of pictures from hikes and during my SIParCS internship at NCAR in Boulder.  I have a decent backlog of other older pictures I’ll be adding to the gallery soon as well as new pictures I take from the vacations I have planned in the near future.

Wednesday night a group of SIParCS interns gathered for a night of sushi making and eating.  The group consisted of Evan, Kuo, Nick, Dan, Kate, and myself.  After work Evan stopped by Whole Foods and picked up some supplies, including sushi grade fish, rice, vinegar, wasabi powder, soy sauce, and vegetables.  It turns out someone just cleaned out most of the sushi-grade fish just before Evan.  We ended up with a small amount of tuna and around a pound of salmon.

Surprisingly, making a roll that tastes good was quite easy.  Not surprisingly, making a roll that looked good was very hard.  I can definitely understand why people can study sushi making their whole lives and never master the art.  There are so many interesting tastes, ingredients, and techniques to explore–the variations are so numerous!  I’m definitely going to have to make more of this type of cuisine in the future.

Following the sushi making/eating and beer drinking, we headed out (around 10pm) to play ‘bocce ball’ around Evan’s apartment complex.  I put it in quotes because, despite knowing the exact rules of the real game, I doubt we were actually following them at all.  Mostly we just made up a game using the ceramic balls from the bocce ball set Evan had purchased a few days before.  It reminded me of when I was much younger and we would make up games on our own and play for hours.  Apparently it takes late nights, sushi, and beer to do this now.  Regardless, it was lots of fun!

I recently posted about getting Firefox working in Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 x86_64.  Updates to Firefox 3.5.1 were recently pushed to the repositories, and after updating, Gears stopped working again.  Use the Gears build here for Firefox 3.5.1 Linux x86_46, linked to from this Google Groups post.

It really would be nice if 64-bit Linux was supported by Google rather than having to find these work-around builds.  Clearly it works for us, what is the holdup?

I am doing some MPI development on my notebook using the MPICH MPI implementation.  This implementation needs an rsh/ssh connection to work properly.  I was reluctant to run a full sshd instance on my notebook as I didn’t want to open up port 22 to the world to attempt to gain access (even with password authentication disabled, root login disabled, etc.).  I did some digging and found that the sshd_config setting 'ListenAddress' would allow me to force sshd to bind to the interface associated with the specified address.  So, for example:

ListenAddress 127.0.0.1

tells sshd to bind to lo, the loopback device. This means connections over eth* and wlan* will not work as sshd isn’t even listening on these interfaces. As far as I can tell this will do exactly what I’m looking for as I only want ssh working on my local machine and not over interfaces other than lo.

I’ve finally moved permanently to Firefox 3.5 in Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04).  Initially I installed it by following the instructions found here and here.  However, I didn’t put the time in to update my extensions, so I ended up reverting back to the 3.0.* series.  I installed by adding the Security Team’s PPA to my package sources list, but that is apparently no longer necessary.

The two extensions I couldn’t live without were Tab Mix Plus and Google Gears.  After some digging, I found a TMP thread with a link (xpi) to a development build that works with Firefox 3.5.  Also, I found a Google groups thread and a blog post with a few links to Linux x86_64 builds of Gears.

Once I upgraded these two extensions I was happy enough to continue using 3.5 permanently rather than just playing with it for an hour or so.

Note: The builtin support for OGG video is amazing.  The problem is it’s only in Firefox right now, so I don’t really expect to see widespread adoption of it.  However, it is one great step towards getting rid of plugin-based video based on flash.

This article discusses how to get the NVidia Linux graphics driver working with the real time linux kernel version 2.6.28-rt under Ubuntu (Kubuntu) 9.04 on AMD 64.

Read more…

Kate and I ran into a fox on our way to the car today.  He looks a bit thin and was out before dark.  Aren’t foxes normally an evening animal?  He may be very hungry and desperate for food.  We watched him for a bit.  He would slowly stalk some unseen animal and nimbly pounce into the tall grass where he disappeared only to be seen pouncing again above the grass and back down.

My UPS package was apparently delayed. I just checked the status on their site and it is currently in Commerce City, CO with the 2am status ‘EMERGENCY CONDITIONS BEYOND UPS’ CONTROL’. What exactly does that mean? It was the middle of the night and no storms that I know of. Did the truck get tipped over? Argh.

Update (2009/7/9 at 4:24pm):  I still need to make a few calls and see if someone at UPS knows what is going on.  However, there a now two more entries on the tracking pages, all of them are listed at 2am though I know the two new entries were recently added (within the last hour or so).  The first says ‘EMERGENCY CONDITIONS BEYOND UPS’ CONTROL’ again.  The second says ‘THE PACKAGE WAS MISSED AT THE DESTINATION LOCATION’.  Does that mean that the package was lost in transit from Salina KS to Commerce City CO?  Not sure…  Hopefully a phone call or two will provide some answers.

Update (2009/7/9 at 6:42pm): Thanks to a visitor who posted a link to a 9news story concerning what happend to our packages.  I never got around to calling, but this story pretty much answers my questions.  Turns out there was a fire at the shipping center.  ~500 packages were damaged and the rest are delayed a few days.  Unlucky!

Final Update (2009/7/12 at 2:22pm): Yesterday the status of my package was updated with ‘DEPARTURE SCAN’ at 4:11am.  Looks like it should be here in a few days.  Hopefully not too many packages were delayed much more than this.

Actual Final Update (2009/7/13 at 8:16pm): The package was delivered later this afternoon.

The pictures on the site have unavailable for a while now. I use Amazon S3 for image hosting as my server’s connection is far from sufficient. I’ve setup a CNAME DNS record for files.lamielle.net to point to the proper Amazon domain. However, I’m having problems with this since I’m using 3 dynamic DNS services for redundancy. The two redundant services are just ‘secondary nameservers’ of the primary, this uses AXFR DNS record transfers. For some reason the transfers aren’t working as they should and DNS queries to files.lamielle.net are resoving to lamielle.net, not the proper Amazon domain.

Anyway, I’m working on it. As soon as I get things figured out I’ll have a few nice posts to throw up (one is almost ready as it is): bouldering, 4th of july, hiking, etc. Stay tuned!