Category Archives: Personal

Taxi

TaxiRolling in some changes to the production system the other day required me to work through the evening and into the early hours. I finally left the office at 2.00AM, meaning that I was in need of a taxi ride home (104KM away). Two cabs turned me down; the third agreed to take me: it’s a long way out of anyone’s way, so I was grateful.

Being extremely tired, I had hoped to snooze whilst the taxi worked its way to deepest southwest Sydney, but I hadn’t reckoned on the fact that I had somehow managed to pick the worst taxi driver in Christendom. Straight bits of road he could mostly do, but anything involving the slightest curve seemed to compel him to cross the lane dividing line, so that one or more wheels continually bumped as the white dashes stopped and started. In this lane-straddling fashion, we’d limp our way home for long, bouncy minutes at a time.

I could have lived with that, I suppose, but that would have been to ignore the drivers strange desire to brake and accelerate, more or less at random, and never with any warning. If the road curved ever-so-slightly, we slowed -abruptly- to around 60km/h. If the road straightened out so he could see which way the lane was going (i.e., straight ahead!), then 130km/h seemed more his sort of thing, with heavy application of foot-to-pedal. And this was on a well-lit motorway, not the country lanes we get to as we near my house. The less said about his capabilities on them the better!

I’ve seldom spent an hour and a half in such fear, to be honest. But if you’re stranded miles from home in the middle of the night, what else are you going to do?

The final fare ($357) was enough to have hired a helicopter for the evening, I think. Never again!!

New PC

It being a wet and windy public holiday (in honour of Australia Day), I decided I had nothing much better to do than try to salvage something from the new PC debacle by actually building the thing from the parts delivered so far. Naturally, I first had to buy a replacement PC case, since that has never been delivered by the original suppliers; but after that, it was simply a matter of trying to remember how to build a new PC from its parts without making a total hash of it. It’s been a few years since I tried… and I was never very good at it!

I’m happy to report that I only scraped one knuckle and the wiring is not the ghastly spaghetti job of my PC builds of yesteryear (just a little wild around the edges, perhaps). I also managed not to pull any SATA connectors off the motherboard. The case has three 120mm fans -which concerned me in a theoretical sort of way, for I like my PCs to be as near silent as possible. To my surprise and relief, however, the thing just purrs, almost inaudibly.

I’m booting off a 128GB Samsung 830-series solid state hard drive; I’m storing most of my data (all my VMs, for example) on a 512GB Samsung 830-series solid state hard drive; and if I really need to, I have a Seagate 1TB traditional spinning disk. The thing boots and launches applications satisfyingly swiftly and smoothly.

For graphics, I am relying on the baked-in HD4000 integrated graphics. That’s fine for a bit of Solitaire! It also does quite nicely for Stellarium, producing a frame-rate of around 50fps, which is smooth and sufficient. As a bonus, being built into the CPU, there’s no additional graphics card fan to worry about, so I get the silence I crave. I was a bit concerned that Intel Graphics and Linux wouldn’t mix, but I really shouldn’t have worried: 3D graphics effects (wobbly windows, desktop cube, etc) were all one mouse click away, and my dual-screen desktop worked near-perfectly, first time of asking. For some reason, Centos decided to put the main menu bar on the right-hand screen, and I found no configuration tool to allow me to specify that the left-hand one should be regarded as my primary monitor …so I was actually reduced to physically moving the screens around on my desk! Apart from that, though, I have zero complaints about the way Centos copes with Intel graphics.

The 32GB of RAM were something of an extravagance, but I suspect I’ll never have to buy RAM again! They certainly leave lots of room for multiple simultaneous virtual machines, which is my main use-case these days. Here’s how the PC is coping with running five different Solaris VMs at once, anyway:

newpc

Nice.

I’d still rather it had come in one piece, pre-assembled, but I think my choice of components was good and this beastie will last me a good couple of years as a result. Happily, it lets me run a two-node RAC with a two-node Active Dataguard configuration on my desktop with ease… I may have to write about that soon!

GreenboxIT – Avoid at all costs

greenboxI wanted a new PC for Christmas. I left it a bit late and only ordered on December 21st. But still, I thought it would arrive in time for my birthday (Jan 7th). It didn’t. In fact, parts of it still haven’t arrived -though the courier is claiming I signed for it. Which means I have very long hands, because I was in Melbourne when the signing allegedly took place. The vendor merely says it’s a matter between me and the courier…

The company responsible for this shambles goes by the name of GreenboxIT. They have a website, but it’s very slow and I don’t intend to drive traffic to them any more than I have to, so no link from me. Their prices are excellent (seriously -or perhaps that should be “suspiciously”- so: an Ivy Bridge i7, 32GB RAM, PC case, 600W power supply and an Asus z77 motherboard for $700 or so, some $200 cheaper than the best I could cook up on other sites). Their pre-sales customer service is excellent, too: a thread of 19 different emails built up over a couple of days, as I asked whether they would (a) assemble the components into a PC; (b) deliver to my rural part of the world; and (c) would get the couriers to take the goods for safekeeping at the local post office if I wasn’t at home to accept delivery.

In very friendly, speedy replies, GreenboxIT promised that, yes they would assemble. They even offered a 24-hour stress-test. Yes, they would deliver, though it would be $30 more. And (eventually), yes, they’d actually use Australia Post to do the delivery (for an extra $8), so dropping off at the post office would be fine.

Assurances on all fronts finally received, I placed my order. Then I waited. And waited. And waited. When I finally emailed them about it, they said the RAM brand I had chosen was out of stock, but they were expecting more the next day. Another 4 days passed, and when I chased them up again, they announced the goods were on their way.

Finally, on January 19th -4 weeks after ordering- I discovered that a courier company called Fastway had indeed delivered something. It’s just that they’d left it on my front doorstep (since I enter the house via the garage, I hadn’t noticed until the next day). And the package consisted of a motherboard, RAM, CPU and power supply. Separately. Each in its own box and packaging. So, wrong couriers, no assembly and no PC case.

I emailed them to ask what was going on. “Ah,” they said. “You asked for assembly in an email exchange, but if you’d really wanted assembly, you would have clicked the ‘service’ button on the order form on the website. So you got what you ordered”. I wait a day or so, and then ask where the PC case is. “Fastway say you signed for it, so if you are saying you didn’t, you’ll have to take it up with them”.

So, no PC case. No assembly. Wrong couriers (despite having explicitly paid more for AusPost to do the deed). And a company that thinks it’s OK just to wash its hands of the whole business. I don’t think so: Visa will be getting a call from me quite soon to dispute the entire transaction.

Which brings me to another peculiarity of the saga. I’ve been using my credit card to buy stuff on the web for a decade or more: music, books, Kindles and Nexuses, PCs and hard drives galore. I’ve never had a problem. On 28th December, though -just 7 days after having used my card to order goods from GreenboxIT- a charge for $3800 was put through on my account, for some air tickets with Emirates.

Now, ToH works for a different airline, so I get staff travel on that if I want it. So I don’t buy tickets on competitor airlines at the best of times. But I certainly didn’t buy seats to Dubai, which is not exactly high on my list of ‘must-see’ travel destinations. So I had to dispute that transaction as soon as the credit card company was open for business in the new year… and had my existing card cancelled as a result. The inconvenience caused was certainly a pain, but at least it was easy to get ~$4K back.

Now, it could well have been a complete coincidence that I was subject to credit card fraud just days after supplying my credit card details to GreenboxIT.

But it is beyond dispute that, as far as I’m concerned, GreenboxIT are a bunch of shysters: assiduous in offering pre-sales care, but completely oblivious to their customers once the cash has hit their bank account. They obviously don’t care about repeat custom, and I’d certainly strongly advise anyone thinking of trusting these people with even a single purchase not to do it.

Con-men would be too strong, probably. Bastards, on the other hand, they definitely are.

 

Resumption

I am now back from the UK (and utterly exhausted… jet-lag impact seems to vary proportionately with age, I fear). It was quite cold and very wet (hope all my British friends are able to stay above the high water line), but I love the place still and was reminded of how so live-able it is when I got off the plane at Sydney and instantly met with 26 degree (Celsius) heat and humidity of 90% (which is pretty reasonable as far as Sydney goes!)

During my short visit to Blighty, my sister took me for a day out around Salisbury and Winchester Cathedrals, in which I discovered that the Rogers have a coat of arms all of their own:

In heraldry-speak, that’s apparently “Argent a Chevron gules between three roebucks courant sable attired and gorged with ducal coronets or branches of laurel vert”. Whatever it means, I intend to use it sometime. Oh, and I am apparently, by descent, a great spear-thrower. I’ve just been hiding it well all these years.

I just wanted to say ‘thank you’ to everyone who sent condolences,  either via comments here or via email/snail mail. They were much appreciated. It is true that I wasn’t particularly close to my brother and he’d been ill a long time, but it’s still a shock when it happens -so it was very helpful to know others were ‘on my side’, as it were.

Anyway, back to business: I notice that Mint 14 is now out, in both Cinnamon and MATE flavours (Cinnamon uses Gnome 3 code but not the Gnome 3 shell; MATE uses a fork of Gnome 2 code). I have had a quick look at the Cinnamon flavour in a virtual machine, but nothing stands out that’s particularly worth talking about. In line with my new policy, Gladstone will NOT be getting an update to deal with the new OS version. However, Gladstone’s replacement is lurking in the wings… so watch this space.

Sorted… and absent for a bit

Phew. It shouldn’t haven taken so long, but I have been a bit distracted and so it did. I have, however, finally worked out why my Oracle-on-Solaris 11.1 installations were failing at the point where Enterprise Manager gets configured. Somewhat unbelievably (to me), it turned out that my server’s timezone was wrong.

Yup. A timezone issue can stop the dbconsole from starting. If you skim-read the logs generated at the point where dbconsole fails, though, it might not be obvious! What you’ll see is something like:

WARN  http: nmehl_connect_internal: connect failed to (kelvin.dizwell.home:3938): Connection refused...

…and you will then spend several days wondering if your network configuration is wrong in some way, because connections to a URL are clearly not getting through. You’ll disable IPv6 and your firewall. You’ll rebuild your DNS server, just in case. You’ll do anything, in fact, except look a bit more closely at the emdctl.trc file, where you might just have spotted one line amongst dozens that reads, instead:

ERROR main: nmectl.c: nmectl_validateTZRegion, agentTZoffset =660,and testTZoffset for +10:00...

…which kind of gives the game away, if only you’d noticed it among the detritus!

Anyway, a quick echo $TZ revealed it was set to localtime, despite me having carefully picked a properly-named timezone during the original OS install. An even quicker export TZ=Etc/GMT+10 followed by yet another emctl start dbconsole and the darn’d thing started first time of asking! I feel very silly for not having spotted the issue earlier, but it’s a lesson learnt, that’s for sure.

I’ll write this up properly as soon as I can… but unfortunately, my brother died a couple of days ago, so I have been busy organising a hasty trip to London for the funeral. I won’t be posting anything here very much until after I get back around 26th November, therefore. Top of my list, otherwise…

Letters from the past

When I was a good deal younger than I am today, I would stumble bleary-eyed upon my father in the kitchen on Sunday mornings preparing that day’s roast lunch and, as he did so, listening to “the wireless”. Invariably, his choice of radio station was Radio 4 …and on Sunday mornings, equally invariably, Radio 4 would broadcast Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America.

Letter from America ran from 1946 to 2004, and Alistair Cooke’s ‘take’ on American life, delivered in round, warm and comforting tones, was enthralling and entertaining. Most things stopped in the kitchen so we could listen to him without interruption. His tendency to digress as though in ordinary conversation was, at times, infuriating; but his ability to digress in a full circle, as it were, meant that the concluding minute or two would usually wrap up in a satisfying way an intellectual yet genial jaunt through whatever topic had caught his eye that week.

I can’t recommend those broadcasts highly enough for an object lesson in clarity of thought and diction, an ability to express an opinion without rancour, to entertain by telling a tale well. And, praise be, the BBC has finally gotten around to making the entire 58 years’-worth of broadcasts available to anyone with an internet connection.

Can I therefore point you in the direction of the BBC’s new Letter from America archive? I particularly liked his remembrance of FDR and his analysis of Nixon’s response to Watergate. But all deserve listening to. And not just on Sundays.

OS Baby

On the day Windows 8 is finally released to the public (I used it for a month, quite liked it, but decided Linux remained more fun and thus wiped it last week), I realised that not only is Red Hat Enterprise Linux  ten years old, but that I remember struggling for days trying to get Windows 3 to run in 386-enhanced mode on a diskless workstation, some 22 years ago.

Yikes.

It took me a while to realise that if you were using a 80286 chip, you couldn’t actually do 386-enhanced mode. I should have guessed…

This was my favourite wallpaper of the time:

What sophisticates we were back then! :-)

I also have fond memories of the London Borough of Bromley Council, for they ran Xenix …in 1987, one of my first database-using clients. That was my introduction to the tar command and the mysteries of TCP. Ten years later, I spent six weeks wrestling with my HP Vectra, trying to get Red Hat 5 printing and dialling the nascent Internet via my 14 kbps modem. The printer, I finally managed. The modem never worked. Ten years later still, I finally persuaded my company to move its databases off Windows and onto RHEL 5 servers. Ah, the circular irony.

However, my first ever professional involvement with an operating system was with MS-DOS 3.1 in 1985, at an accounting firm. I was following the manual (OSes came with manuals back then!) which had a section on the format command. I dutifully typed in the sample command shown (format c:), turned the page and only then saw the warning that this command would destroy your data. I remember trying to hit Ctrl+C to interrupt the format… but discovered that wouldn’t work. Happily, there were only a dozen or so sets of client accounts on it, none of them backed up, all of them production data.

Everyone should be allowed to format a production hard disk once in their lives. Just not twice. That was my shot and, happily, it’s never happened since :-)

Should I mention the many Novell Netware 286 installations? Nah… no point. We only did them because DOS couldn’t handle volume sizes larger than 32MB anyway.

I like operating systems. Can you tell?

Dangerous Driver

Just what you want when driving home for the evening: some prat overtaking (which is fine), then pulling back into the inside lane only about 2 car-lengths ahead without any reason or necessity (which is not), then slowing down (which is just stupid):

When we inevitably pulled out to re-overtake, he decided to undertake (that is, speed up and pull in front of us, even though we’re in the overtaking lane). The distance between our front bumper and his rear one was, that time, probably less than 5 metres (at 110km/hour). He then proceeds to slow down again, and repeats the performance, left-lane overtake and all, only (it seemed to me) even closer than before.

The guy managed all of this one-handed, too:

Which presumably left one hand free to do what wankers best do.

Anyway: if you’re ever travelling up or down Sydney’s M5, I suggest you keep a keen eye out for maniac Suburu drivers. Especially if their number plate reads BK 66 TO. And avoid.

Odd Numbers

Two statistics that surprised me this week:

  1. The Titanic is lying on the bed of the Atlantic… but she’s only 14 times her own length down (12,415 feet v. 882.5 feet)
  2. The International Space Station is in low Earth orbit… but she’s only flying about 33 times higher than your average Boeing 747 (~370km v. 11km)

Also, I am only 2 degrees of separation away from having met Adolph Hitler and Benjamin Britten, though 6 from having met Disraeli, Gladstone and William IV.

Just thought I’d mention it.

Stephen Fry was wrong

A simple question: if I fire a bullet from a gun, and drop a bullet from my other hand (which is held at exactly the same height) at the same time, which bullet will hit the ground first? This questioned aired on an episode of Qi last night here, and got me thinking.

According to Stephen Fry, host of Qi, the fact that both bullets fall the same vertical distance, and must therefore both arrive on the ground at the same time, is “counter-intuitive”.

The trouble is, Stephen, it’s counter-intuitive because it’s wrong, and your post-programme justification is just as wrong. It’s got sod-all to do with air resistance and experimental error, either. Allow me to explain…

With apologies for my atrocious inability to draw (and thus my excellent ability to borrow bits of clipart from around the globe), the scenario being posited is as follows:

From which it is clear, I hope, that both bullets traverse the same vertical distance, from shoulder to ground, regardless of the horizontal distance traveled. It is therefore (I would have thought) quite obvious, not counter-intuitive at all, that both bullets must arrive at the ground at the same time, given that both are falling the same distance in the same gravitational field.

Except, of course, that the real situation is this:

That is, the Earth’s surface is not flat and therefore the bullet which moves horizontally finds that the Earth’s surface is dropping away from it, a little bit. Putting in a couple of guidelines to make it a touch clearer:

Not only must the fired bullet fall the same vertical distance, x, as the bullet dropped from the hand, but it must then additionally fall a further vertical distance, y, resulting from the curvature of the Earth. The fired bullet must therefore fall very slightly more than the dropped bullet… and therefore will arrive on the ground slightly after the one dropped from the hand.

Now, you may argue that the extra falling distance is trivial, but it isn’t. Different firearms have different ranges, of course, but a reasonable generalisation, if a bit on the conservative side, is that an unimpeded bullet can fly 1600m (1 mile, in old money). Over 1600m, the Earth’s surface curves away from the tangent (the ‘true horizontal’) by about 20cm (the old “8 inches per mile” idea, mentioned here and governed by the formula Δ=√(R²+L²)-R, where R is the radius of the Earth, L is the horizontal distance traveled and Δ is the extra vertical distance caused by the curvature of the Earth).

So, the fired bullet has to fall 20cm further than the dropped bullet. Given a gravitational constant of 9.8m/s², and assuming a standing start, that extra 20cm will take about 0.2 seconds to fall… which isn’t much, but it’s easily within accurate measurement possibilities and certainly well outside “experimental error”.

If we generalise, therefore, any object which travels a certain distance horizontally away from an origin will, on the Earth, end up having to fall further to reach the Earth’s surface than if it had been dropped exactly at that point of origin. The extra fall might only amount to a fraction of a millimetre, but it’s there and will affect ‘drop time’. Anyone suggesting otherwise must be a Flat-Earther.

Unfortunately, in various parts of the Internet, lots of people get this point gloriously confused with the practicalities of aerodynamics, wind resistance, rifling and whether the gun’s ‘kick’ when fired affects one’s ability to fire perfectly horizontally, and much else besides! Forget all that irrelevant stuff: the problem, as described, is merely one of idealised falling bodies in a gravitational field. If you idealise a flat Earth while you’re at it, sure: you’ll get Stephen Fry’s asserted result. Unfortunately, the one thing you can guarantee in a gravitational field is that your surface won’t be flat… and that makes all the difference.

Dropped bullets really do arrive at the ground earlier than fired ones, assuming only that it’s a curvaceous world lacking an atmosphere… so Stephen Fry is accordingly wrong. (But Qi is still an entertaining programme!)

Oh… and Mythbusters measured a difference but then declared it was insignificant and that the two bullets arrived simultaneously after all. They got it wrong, too (too many factors at work to detail here, but little things like air resistance, their choice of drop mechanism, their firing mechanism and so on… all mean their results are irrelevant to the hypothetical case).