Teleidoscope

Split-sexed Birds

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 16:40:17 GMT

There is a very cool article about sex determination in birds at Living the Scientific Life, incluing a picture of a chicken that is a hen on one side and a rooster on the other. Birds sex works way different from mammals.

Kitty Dentist

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 04:47:04 GMT

Dinah has been leaving food in her dish and losing weight. Last week I took her to the regular vet for her annual checkup and rabies shot and she checked out OK for liver function, and a little borderline for renal function (not bad for a 14 year old cat). The vet said her gums looked inflamed and I've noticed that she seemed to be trying to chew on one side, so today she went to the kitty Dentist. here isn't a full-time dentist at the vet clinic I go to: he's only there on Thursday. (I assume he works at other clinics other days of the week.) So today was the first available day after her lab results came back last week.

It's been a long time since Dinah had any dental work done: cat dentistry is done under full anesthesia, so it is a big deal, and expensive. She spent all day at the clinic, and is still acting a little odd. But she is eating some kibble I soaked in warm water, which is impressive. Besides a clean and checkup, she had two abscessed teeth pulled and some periodontic work.

There was also some re-sculpting of a tooth: they had to pull her right upper canine, so the dentist blunted the lower tooth so she won't be constantly stabbing herself in the upper lip.

In a little while I will try to give her the antibiotics and painkillers. The painkillers just need to go into the mouth, but the antibiotics need to go down the throat. At least the meds are all liquid: I'm not sure I would want to try pilling a cat who has a sore mouth.

Modern technology is amazing. Because everything is done digitally, not with film, they gave me a whole sheaf of paperwork about the work that was done, including before and after close-up photos of kitty teeth, and the x-rays they took. And the kitty version of the standard diagram of upper and lower teeth, with annotations -- I guess some things are a constant in dentistry, regardless of the species of the patient. There is even a whole series of x-rays taken during the removal and restructuring of the fang: they put some artificial bone into the socket (which is proportionately very large) so the jaw won't collapse from the absence of the tooth root.

There was a note on the paperwork that Dinah was a very good kitty today. Actually, I've had good luck with all my cats and never had one like some you hear about where the vets and technicians deserve hazard pay.

Broken 911

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 13:06:24 GMT

This morning I was awakened at 3:05am by the response to a 911 call I did not make.

I am actually glad for whatever glitch generated the call.

They said that the call actually came in at 2:45 and it took them 20 minutes to find my house because their display showed the address as 6969 Marshall -- an address that has not existed in this millennium, since the county invalidated it in 1999.

I sent the phone company a copy of the Boulder Land Use notice that changed the address in 1999, a few days after I received the notice, so they have had 11 years to update their records.

I was unable to get back to sleep, I was so annoyed that after 11 years Qwest still hasn't got their records updated consistently.

Having Qwest repair guys be unable to find the place because half the time their records show a non-existent address has been annoying and inconvenient. Having the 911 records wrong could be life-threatening.

So far this morning I have emailed

Qwest (the telephone company)
Boulder County Sheriff's Office
Boulder County Land Use
Boulder Daily Camera (our local paper)
Colorado Public Utilities Commission

In the email to Boulder County Land Use, I also complained about the fact that GPS units and on-line maps can't find my house. Their Geographical Information Service may not be able to do anything about that, but they probably come closest to being responsible for such things.

In the emails to the PUC and Daily Camera, I mentioned that X-Cel also had the address records screwed up at least as recently as 2008.

I don't really expect much to come of this, though it would be nice to get the 911 response fixed in case I ever have a real emergency.

Alice

Mon, 7 Dec 2009 03:37:42 GMT

The people who did the "Tinman" take-off on the Wizard of OZ have a new miniseries showing on Syfy based on the Lewis Carroll Alice books.

The first half is showing today and repeated tomorrow, followed by the second episode.

This is not a low budget show: the cast includes Tim Curry, Colm Meany, Harry Dean Stanton, Matt Frewer and Kathy Bates.

The story line is interesting and the visual effects are decent.

I'm definitely watching the second half, tomorrow.

And I want to dig out my DVDs of Tinman and rewatch it.

New Slider

Fri, 4 Dec 2009 04:40:02 GMT

Wow! The new sliding doors between my bedroom and the deck are impressive. It's 0 Fahrenheit out and I just stood next to the sliding doors, and might as well have been standing next to the solid wall. There was NO chill coming through the door or its frame. There is no wind to speak of tonight, which might make a difference, but this is still very impressive.

Standing next to the new basement doors I can feel a little chill -- they aren't as heavily insulated. But they are still a vast improvement, partly due to being installed and caulked properly, which the previous dorrs were not.

This is excellent.

Block Heater

Fri, 4 Dec 2009 01:51:39 GMT

Yesterday was very cold and snowy. Last night the temperature dipped to 0 Fahrenheit, and this morning my foxy little car (now officially named Reynard) was very cranky about starting.

Tonight is supposed to be very cold again, so this evening I plugged Reynard in -- I had a block heater installed last summer after I bought him. It's a lot cheaper to invest in a block heater than to build a garage to shelter the car from the cold and wind on this ridge.

I have had block heaters in some previous vehicles, and liked them. Besides making the car easy to start on cold mornings, the warm engine starts giving heat to the cabin and defrosters a lot faster.

A trick I have used in vehicles without block heaters is to buy one of those utility lights that consist of a wire cage around a light bulb. Placing a hundred watt bulb into the engine compartment over night, preferably near the battery, can make a big difference on a cold morning.

There is a battery heater available for the Forester. I don't think I need both the battery heater and block heater, and chose the block heater because I like the extra heat it makes available for the driver. If I were going up into the ski areas, I might consider adding the battery heater, but I would need to rig a way to plug both heaters in.

Corporate housing for any gig in a really cold climate should include covered parking, so I really only need the heater here.

Stuffing for Breakfast

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 19:15:07 GMT

It's national appliance-using day

So far today, I have baked squash and pumpkins, and pureed the pumpkins (food processor), roasted potatoes, made my usual stuffing (stand mixer and food grinder), put the turkey in to roast in my fancy oven (I'm using Alton Brown's recipe, same as last year) and made stuffed celery.

Later today, I may make some pumpkin pies and some eggnog (which will use the blender).

The dishwasher is on it's third load, and I've washed a bunch of stuff in the sink...

I ate some of the stuffing mixture -- bread, ground cooked meats and veggies, and broth -- for breakfast. The rest of the stuffing is baking in a corningware next to the turkey.

Ounce for ounce, I think the most expensive item on my menu today is the stuffed celery I'm nibbling on as an appetizer. I was able to find goat cream-cheese this year but it costs about five times as much as cow cream cheese. But having proper stuffed celery makes it feel like Thanksgiving.

Soon I will take the turkey and stuffing out of the oven, make gravy, and reheat the potatoes and squash.

Then I will eat. Lots.

Spending a day cooking makes a nice change. I've been on a paying gig since last Wednesday and also worked on some computer side projects, so this has been a very busy week.

Plumbing

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 20:45:10 GMT

My great plumber -- James Johnson of Nautilus Plumbing -- was here today to fix some small things.

The kitchen faucet was binding in the hot water lever and leaking slightly around the base of the spout.

I got a snazzy new shower-head gadget at Costco a while back that needed to be installed.

And the bathtub has been draining slowly and sort of burping air up through the water that is draining, which didn't seem right.

In 2002 I partially remodeled my bathroom. As part of the changes a company called Master Plumbers installed vinyl inserts to cover up my ugly old tub and deteriorating tile with the icky grout, changing the tub stopper mechanism in the process. It turns out they didn't remove enough of the old stopper mechaism and over time it had fallen down until it partially blocked the drain. James was able to clear the blockage and remove the offending components so the problem should not recur.

When I made the changes in 2002 I had James rig up the shower so I had both a flow control regular shower head and a hand shower head available. That has worked OK over the years, but the (slightly kludgey) mechanism for switching between the two heads never fully sealed -- whichever head was active, there was still a little flow through the other one. The new shower gadget is a single unit that is designed with both types of shower heads, with levers and seals to direct the flow as desired, or temporaorily turn off the flow completely at the shower head with changing the temperature and flow settings of the faucets. This should be nice.

But I think I'm going to stay away from Master Plumbers in the future -- not difficult since I have had no contact with them since 2002.

Reconnecting ClearQuest to DB2 after changes

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 20:22:33 GMT

When changing the password of the DB2 database itself (as set in the CQ Maintenance tool), it is not enough to create a Connection in the Maintenance Tool that uses the correct password. Even though the Connnection succeeds, the other CQ
tools will not be able to access the database, and the connection will act as if the new password value is not sticking.

After creating the connection successfully in the Maintenance tool, Select Schema Repository->Update->Current Connection and set the new password again, then apply the changes. At this point the schema repository will be accessible using the ClearQuest Designer tools.

Then update the user database(s) if the password changes affect them too. The usual Database->Update User Database Properties tool in the Designer seems to be effective once the schema repository is connecting properly.

This update requirement is documented for Options changes. It just isn't clear in the IBM docs that it applies to password changes, too.

DB2 settings

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:51:11 GMT

After a lot of thrashing with DB2 partially working, I finally dug out some DB2 error codes that were googleable.

SQL1084C Shared memory segments cannot be allocated. SQLSTATE=57019

SQL5043N Support for one or more communications protocols failed to start successfully. However, core database manager functionality started successfully.

The first problem, which was preventing runing of most of the dtabases on ykchaua itself, turned out to be shared memory limits inthe OS.

Running "sysctl -w kernel.shmmax=2147483648" seems to have made DB2 runnable on the server, but may be overkill. Checking some old backups, I found a section in sysctl.conf like:

kernel.shmmax = 1610612736
kernel.sem = 250 256000 32 2048
 kernel.msgmnb = 65536
 kernel.msgmni = 16384
 kernel.msgmax = 65536
 kernel.shmmni = 4096
 kernel.shmall = 3774873

The existing values (for the values other than shmmax are) :

kernel.sem = 250     32000   32      1024
 kernel.msgmnb = 65536
 kernel.msgmni = 1680
 kernel.msgmax = 65535
 kernel.shmmni = 4096
 kernel.shmall = 2097152

So I added the block back into the new /etc/sysctl.conf. And this time I commented the changes (which were probably made automatically when I first installed DB2) as DB2 related, so they are less likely to get lost again in the future. Having sysctl.conf set up should make the fix last across reboots.

The other error message I was receiving turned out to be because of a missing entry in /etc/services -- another case of updates stepping on config files.

After appending "db2c_db2inst1 50000/tcp # DB2 first instance" to /etc/services, DB2 seems to be running cleanly on ykchaua. Finally.

And....

My applications in the Windows images are able to connect... technically. I was able to configure the connections without error messages, But I can't seem to login to the apps, and the error messages are not being helpful.

WICD

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:07:32 GMT

In my ongoing quest to get samba working again with the vmware images, I realized that part of the problem may be that the network was not getting set up soon enough at boot time. (Samba worked for a couple of days after I get it set up, but I'm nt sure it came back after the next reboot.) The vmware images were coming up with their network connections in strange states after the main machine rebooted, which seemed suspicious... or at least unhelpful.

The NetworkManager tool that comes with Karmic Kubuntu was not setting up the link until after I logged into the X window system. This could be a problem for samba because the authentication module that wanted to talk to the Active Directory server could not reach it until networking was running and vmware was up. Getting the networking stack to be active as soon as possible after boot would help the handshaking initialize properly.

The lack of a working network at boot time may be making DB2 unhappy, too.

I had given up on Network Manager completely in previous OS versions. But that meant I needed to manually edit the /etc/network/interfaces file whenever I needed to use the wireless connector in a different environment -- at the office, or a hotel, for example.

I hoped there was a way to make my wireless connection more flexible, even with the vmware subnet bridged off it. One of these days I want to get wired ethernet run to the livingroom and bedroom from the study where the DSL modem and router live, but for now I need to use the wireless connection for things it's not really configured for.

A bit of googling suggested that a tool called "wicd" would provide connect-at-boot, and also the flexibility to support some of the fairly strange networking requirements I have. I haven't tried a wired connection with it yet, but the wireless one seems to be doing what I wanted it to.

So far, so good.

Next step, get the samba permissions working again. Then get DB2 up. Then do the development and testing I'm really supposed to be working on.

VMWare 202

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 07:58:17 GMT

I refreshed the kernel modules (which should have just reinstalled the same stuff) and upgraded VMWare server to 2.0.2 and updated the vmware tools in all the guest OSs. VMWare seems to be working again now.

Samba permissions are still flaking out but I'll deal with that after I've slept.

I noticed when I was refreshing the kernel modules that even though I used an i386 installation disk, kubuntu seems to be using the x86/64 kernel modules. If I have any more problems, I should proably try to force it over to the i386 versions. I'm not entirely sure how to go about doing that safely.

Gah

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:37:53 GMT

Well, drat. Samba stopped working again, and now vmware has decided it doesn't like the current version of the kernel, which it has been running with happily for over a week. The samba problem may have been the first sign that vmware was breaking down.

So annoying. One step forward, two steps back.

I just got the local laptop version of this blog working again (replicating the paths at my ISP is a little messy). And manually edited kmailrc to get signatures added to my emails automatically - I think the app that changes kmail settings is flakey in the latest kubuntu.

But I don't see how either of them could have broken vmware. I updated some stuff earlier, mostly pieces of the cups printer controller app. Don't see how that could have broken anything either.

Sigh. I wish vmware support for new linux versions was less clunky.

Time to google.

Doors

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:36:25 GMT

My new doors were finally delivered and installed today.

Dinah Kitty was not happy, but she seemed less upset than she would have been in the past. I think she may be getting a bit deaf in her old age, so she doesn't notice people moving around the house as much as she once did.

The new sliders to the bedroom deck have a full inch between the double panes. The old doors were technically double paned, but had only a fraction of an inch between the panes. The screen door built into the unit actually is usable. And the new frame is vinyl with heat flow breaks. So my bedroom should be warmer in winter and cooler in summer.

The old doors were not original: the ones that were installed whe I bought this house were single paned and had flimsy aluminum frames that rattled in the high winds we get here.

The French doors to the basement aren't as insulated as the sliders, but they close and lock, which the old ones didn't since the landslide last summer, and they are very well caulked, which the old doors were not.

I suspect that some of the mice were getting in through the gaps around the old doors. I hope that in addition to being far more weathertight (which should improve heat bills) the basement is also a bit more rodent-proof.

I should probably invest in some carbon monoxide alarms now that the basement is not constantly ventilated, just in case. There have been radio ads saying it is now legally required to have them. I hope the new ones last better than the last time I put a CO alarm in the house. It was more trouble than it was worth.

If they are still offering tax credits for weatherization next year, I may see see about replacing the basement windows with insulated double-paned units.

Enable Local Display

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 21:36:16 GMT

Newer versions of Ubuntu have the X display locked down so that other userids cannot access the gui, plus there is a bug in 9.10 that makes it even less likely to work.

To fix the bug, I created a file. etc/X11/Xsession.d/60x11-localhost and filled it with contents I found at the online Ubuntu bug report 276357. It turns out that this file existed in 9.04, and the contents in my saved etc tree from before the upgrade matches. Which is encouraging.

Also useful:

emgrasso@ykchaua:~$ echo $DISPLAY :0.0 emgrasso@ykchaua:~$ export DISPLAY emgrasso@ykchaua:~$ xhost local:db2inst1 non-network local connections being added to access control list emgrasso@ykchaua:~$ su - db2inst1 Password: $ DISPLAY=:0.0;export DISPLAY $ db2cc

That gets me into the DB2 Control Center GUI, but DB2 itself is throwing some weird errors when I try to start up the database.

This is still the version 9.5 I restored from my backups -- I needed to install a down-level version of libstdc++ (libstdc++5_3.3.6-17ubuntu1_i386.deb) to get it to run at all.

I have downloaded db2 9.7. I'm going to google for the errors I'm seesing. But I think my next step is to uninstall 9.7 and see whether 9.7 behaves better.

Belief

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 01:15:16 GMT

There is an online questionaire Belief-o-matic that rates your compatibility with different belief systems. My results seem pretty accurate. Maybe I ought to check out the Unitarians some time.

How did the Belief-O-Matic do? Discuss your results on our message boards.

1. Secular Humanism (100%)
2. Unitarian Universalism (96%)
3. Liberal Quakers (84%)
4. Neo-Pagan (73%)
5. Nontheist (73%)
6. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (72%)
7. New Age (68%)
8. Theravada Buddhism (67%)
9. Reform Judaism (56%)
10. Taoism (56%)
11. Orthodox Quaker (50%)
12. Mahayana Buddhism (49%)
13. Scientology (49%)
14. New Thought (45%)
15. Baha'i Faith (43%)
16. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (40%)
17. Sikhism (35%)
18. Jainism (34%)
19. Islam (27%)
20. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (27%)
21. Orthodox Judaism (27%)
22. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (26%)
23. Seventh Day Adventist (18%)
24. Eastern Orthodox (17%)
25. Roman Catholic (17%)
26. Hinduism (13%)
27. Jehovah's Witness (6%)

I found this at a Science Blog: Living the Scientific Life.

Samba

Tue, 3 Nov 2009 02:32:50 GMT

Argh. I finally got samba working, but it took all day and isn't based on making sense of the documentation (which is very sparse). At least the permissions bug that broke things after the transition from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04 seems to be fixed in 9.10.

I tried settings from a bunch of different sites that I googled, and even reinstalled pam, krb5 and samba when things had gotten very hung up at one point.

The final set of settings that worked were from HowtoForge.

There is still a problem with samba (even though it is working enough for the windows images to see the files on the host now). The utility for starting and stopping the samba services does not seem able to stop nmbd.

Tomorrow I will reinstall db2, the last major piece of infrastructure I need.

Followups -- Upgrades

Mon, 2 Nov 2009 14:17:09 GMT

The upgrade to Windows 7 and switch to Avira as antivirus seems to have fixed the processor-hangs. Other than that, Windows 7 is extremely annoying: Micrisoft is doing their usual thing of making it as difficult as possible to get anything done unless you are using nothing but Microsoft software. Since I use as little Microsoft software as possible, this obviously leads to problems.

The clean upgrade to Kubuntu 9.10 seems to have fixed the video hangs. It has been up three days. It has been a long time since I went a full day without X windows going unresponsive on me and being forced to hard reboot. I may be rebooting soon to see if that will bring dns-masq online (I need to recheck the config files first: I may have missed one), but it will be a clean boot, with everything -- especially the vmware images -- shutdown properly beforehand instead of having to crash them. Even if I still get an occasional hang, the improvement is wonderful.

Reconfiguring my main KDE apps -- KMail and Konqueror -- to behave the way I like after the clearing the config has been a pain. But they are also behaving much better now in the clean KDE 4.x environment than they had been with the settings that had been through the migration from 3.x.

For a while I was worried because I was getting very bad networking bandwidth. But I think that was an aftereffect of some power glitches and outages during the big storm last week. Power-cycling both the DSL modem and the router seems to have fixed things.

I can't really reconfigure samba and try to see if the permissions problem is gone until I have dns-masq working, but at the moment I am very hopeful.

I have much of my working infrastructure back in place. The main piece that still needs to be reloaded (also after DNS is fully working) is the DB2 database that provides the ClearQuest backend.

Wood-stove

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:48:54 GMT

I have a good wood stove in my living room. And a cord of firewood out in the yard that has been sitting there for a couple of years and should be well seasoned.

I haven't actually used the wood-stove much in the past few years, but it is nice to have it for backup. My furnace went out on Monday and wasn't fixed until yesterday (they needed to order a part) so I burned some wood for two days.

I may burn some wood later today, just because it makes things cozy, because we are having a major storm. But I will have to dig some firewood out of a drift to do so, so maybe not.

This year's Halloween storm came a couple of days early, but it seems to be trying to make up for timing with volume. Yesterday they were predicting 8 to 14 inches between midnight today and tomorrow evening, but the latest weather report said 18 to 24 inches.

The reports are that the south side of Denver is getting hit hardest, but I think I already have 6 or 8 inches in my yard. There will be less snow on the roads on top of ice because the weather was fairly warm for a few days (it was 60 yesterday afternoon) and the snow melted at the beginning of the storm.

I'm going out now to sweep the front porch and shovel the walk (it's nice to have a walk to shovel) and maybe excavate some firewood.

Snowy Sunday 2009

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 20:51:43 GMT

Man, this is shaping up to be a nasty winter. It's not even Halloween yet, and this is already the fourth snowy day.

It melts fast at this time of year and today it isn't even accumulating yet. But this does not bode well for the season.

Melon Float

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 02:00:07 GMT

A new use for melon sorbet: 8 ounces of ginger ale (I used good stuff -- Canada Dry) and a couple of scoops of melon sorbet.

I spent half of today trying to trouble shoot the video crashes and lockups my laptop has been having. I think part ofthe problem is the transition from KDE 3.x to 4.x: I'm not sure the Ubuntu upgrade processes cleaned out the obsolete stuff thoroughly. I tried forcing a reinstall of all of the KDE components, but I'm not sure it did any good..

The official release of the next version of Kubuntu is due this week. I think I'm going to back-up this laptop completely and do a clean install next weekend, or as soon afterward as I can manage to download Kubuntu 9.10. Hopefully, that will fix both the video problems and the samba permissions problems I have also been chasing.

The samba problems may be related to a cluster of new samba config paramters called "idmap config". I'm looking for detailed documentation...

Variables

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 22:07:09 GMT

Yesterday I had a delayed allergic reaction to the oats with raisins, allspice and brown sugar. Today I tried cream of wheat with the same additions, and I seem to be having a partial reaction. I'll try oats without the additives next week and see if I still get a reaction.

I'm pretty sure I tested ok for allergy to oats when they did the scratch tests last year... I'm tending to suspect the allspice.

At the same time, I'm ending an experiment with Dinah's food. She has been eating dry Iams Weight Control for years, and I tried her with dry Iams Natural Weight Control. Dinah did not approve.

She has been leaving most of her meals in the dish and spending a lot of time in the basement catching mice instead (so I don't think she is actually going hungry). But the disapproving looks at meal times finally got to me: I tossed the last of the 'natural' food and opened a sack of the regular stuff.

I've given her a new automated feeder, too, in case I need to travel again. The old one only held 5 meals -- two and a half days of her usual meals. The new one is supposed to have more capacity.

Overnight Oats

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:03:43 GMT

I can't stand the texture of regular oatmeal, not even real as opposed to instant oatmeal, which is even more vile. I keep some real oatmeal in my cupboard for use in recipes, but don't use it as cereal. I like steel cut oats, but they take forever to cook at this altitude, so I don't make them very often.

Target was having a clearance sale the last time I shopped there. One item marked down was a basic 1.5 quart slow cooker for about 8 dollars -- the price of a lunch. I picked one up because it looked like a good size for overnight oats as recommended by Alton Brown: a reasonable-sized batch of oatmeal would be spread too thin on the bottom of my big 5.5 quart crock pot that I use for stew and be sure to scorch. My rice cooker -- being from Costco and therefore huge -- would have similar problems of scale.

Last night I tried the little slow cooker out for the first time.

At about 11 pm I put 1 cup of oats, 4 cups of water, some raisins, a small pich of salt and a dash of ground allspice into the cooker and plugged it in (this is a very basic slow cooker with no controls). At 6:30 when I fed the cat and took my morning meds I stirred the oats and unplugged the cooker to let it coast the rest of the way.

At 8 am I added some brown sugar to some of the oats and tried them for breakfast. Yum.

Next time I need to use more salt and spices, but the texture of the oats was fine and the flavor was good. The raisins had almost plumped back up in little grapes.

I'll store the rest of this batch in the fridge and nuke them for breakfast later in the week.

Another trick I found online is to put a spacer between the bottom of the crock and the heating element, to make the bottom of the oats even less likely to scorch. People with large cookers talked about using empty tuna cans, but I don't need any that large for the little cooker. I think if I try this trick, I will use a metal canning jar band -- probably the small size I use on jelly jars. I had been thinking of using something like a biscuit cutter or metal cookie cutter, but the jar band will be sturdier, and I have LOTS of them in various nooks and crannies of the kitchen and pantry.

Antivirus and Progress

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 01:37:44 GMT

It looks like the lockups in the XP image weren't entirely the fault of XP itself. I started seeing the same pattern of pegging the processor and hammering the hard drive in the other windows virtual machines.

Googling led me to believe that the problem might be with the AVG antivirus I have been using.

I downloaded samples of Avira Antivir and Antivir server and loaded them into the 2003 server and Win7 images after uninstalling the AVG tools, and things seem to be behaving much better. It will be a day or two before I know for sure whether the lockups are gone, but the disk isn't running constantly, and it is nice to have reasonable keyboard and mouse response again.

Uninstalling AVG was ugly: I had to reboot the Win 7 image about 4 times to get the uninstall to take.

In other news, I'm now doing my TomTom updates from the 2003 image. The Win 7 one can't see the GPS, probably because the VmWare tools module is tuned to 2008 server rather than Win 7 itself.

And Samba on Ubuntu seems thoroughly hosed. I'm trying an installation of a newer version, which I will try to reconfigure from scratch. I really need to mount a share from the ubuntu server to get the Rational tools installed on the new image, though I have some ideas for workarounds. It's very annoying: samba worked fine on ubuntu before the 9.04 updates, and I can't find anything in google that explains what has changed. The next ubuntu update in at the end of this month... I hope they have fixed whatever the problem is in 9.10.

Windows 7

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 19:12:31 GMT

I'm loading a Windows 7 virtual image.

My Windows XP image has been getting erratic, as well as obsolete, and I need to do some script development and testing. I have never put any flavor of Windows Vista on any of my machines or images.

I decided it was time for a new Windows workspace: the Win XP image is several years old, which is problematic for Microsoft products at the best of times. I'll move the XP image from the laptop to my server once the new image is populated.

I have to admit, the installation process has improved a lot since the XP/2003 days. The Microsoft downloads are very fragile and fussy about the DVDs they get burned to, but once I had a clean iso the install went quickly and smoothly.

The VMWare tools seem to be working well even though Windows 7 isn't officially supported yet, except that the video for the console is insisting on being fullscreen mode.

I have the OS installed, and linked into my Active Directory domain. And Firefox downloaded and installed. Now I'm working on the rest of my infrastructure.

Firefox (done)

AVG anti-virus

Textpad

OpenOffice

winzip and its commanline utility

apache

TomTom

ClearCase 7.1

ClearQuest 7.1

printer drivers

I will probably move my 2008 tax software across from the XP image so I have it readily available for reference, too. The previous years can stay on the Xp

1.	Secular Humanism (100%)
2.	Unitarian Universalism (96%)
3.	Liberal Quakers (84%)
4.	Neo-Pagan (73%)
5.	Nontheist (73%)
6.	Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (72%)
7.	New Age (68%)
8.	Theravada Buddhism (67%)
9.	Reform Judaism (56%)
10.	Taoism (56%)
11.	Orthodox Quaker (50%)
12.	Mahayana Buddhism (49%)
13.	Scientology (49%)
14.	New Thought (45%)
15.	Baha'i Faith (43%)
16.	Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (40%)
17.	Sikhism (35%)
18.	Jainism (34%)
19.	Islam (27%)
20.	Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (27%)
21.	Orthodox Judaism (27%)
22.	Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (26%)
23.	Seventh Day Adventist (18%)
24.	Eastern Orthodox (17%)
25.	Roman Catholic (17%)
26.	Hinduism (13%)
27.	Jehovah's Witness (6%)