Matt D's Blog

Today was the first day of my vacation, which was spent traveling.

My initial itinerary had us (Leon and I) traveling on ANA airlines round trip from JFK to Narita Airport in Japan. However, due to issues with upgrades from economy to business, I changed it at the last minute to:

JetBlue from JFK to Dulles International Airport in Washington DC
ANA from Dulles to Narita in Japan.

Coming back will be:

ANA from Narita to Los Angeles International in California
JetBlue from LAX to JFK

The JetBlue flight wasn’t too bad. Smaller jet used for the short flight (little over an hour). Luggage wasn’t too big of a deal.

Then we had a much longer flight on ANA airlines (about 12 hours). Check in was easy. Tagged the luggage with “Star Alliance Priority,” dropped it, and was on our way. Also got entry to the “lounge” for before the flight. Complimentry fruit, ramen noodles, WiFi internet, private bathrooms, and plenty of tables with power to use. Flight was delayed for 50 minutes. Still made it to Narita on time though, amazingly. Crazily, the first class and business class people get on the plane with their own entrance. The “commoners” get on in the back of the plane, lol. (Just kidding, I think it’s good to have parallelism to allow more people to board at once, but some people on forums complained certain airports only had 1 gate. Seriously, get over yourself.) It was not the newest planes, as we had the old-style business-class seats. Still very comfortable, except in the “bed” position, as they’re too short. Food was very good. Service was excellent. IFE was OK. There was a program called Delicious Nippon, which was about Japanese food. There was a woman in it which was a terrible actress, her surprises were really forced…it just made it funny.

After that, we took the Narita Express to our station, Shinagawa. Our hotel was a short walk from the station, we didn’t have too much trouble finding it, thankfully. We ate in the Cafe24 on the lobby floor, which wasn’t too bad, but nothing exciting.

I took a Leica M8.2 with me on the trip, to get an idea of what the “Leica experience” was that everyone talked about. I took a 28mm f/2.8 and a 50mm f/2 lens with me. I will be adding info at the bottom of each post detailing my experiences with it.


The Leica: Took shots at Dulles airport, camera held up fine. Have been using the 28mm most of the time. In the plane, there were some shots which didnt come out as expected due to the parallax error in the viewfinder. Focusing can be a hassle some times.

Not sure how long it’s been messed up, but apparently PHP on the server has been broken. But I wouldn’t know, as I rarely update this page.

So, I’ve decided to make this my space to put my Android related items as well.

Items I’ve uploaded today:

HTC Fuze KeyMap for Linux, Changes in my build, and My current build.

These will work for Android on the HTC Fuze, and should produce decent results. Simply unzip the build to the root of the SD card, and run haret.exe. Then hit “Run” in the box.

Items in need of work:

Power button doesn’t work
Keymap is default QWERTY instead of Fuze specifc one
Audio recording crashes kernel - don’t use Shazam or Google Voice Search
Bluetooth and WiFi are in experimental stages, not included here
GPS does not work, being worked on by cr2
Camera
RAM amount is less then it should be


Feel free to let me know what you think, if you download this build.

-Matt

I’ve been testing out some VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) solutions for work, and so far I have to say I like XenDesktop 3 vs Vmware View, even though I have 20 licenses for Vmware VDI 2…But that’s another blog.

Right now, AT&T has started selling the Nokia E71x. It’s $99 after $50 rebate card (around $167 after stupid upgrade fee before rebate), BUT. Stupid AT&T requires it to be on your Main Line with a Data Plan in order to be eligable for the $50 back. So Real price again, $167. $167 isn’t bad, and it’s a nice phone. But then I’m locked into AT&T for 2 years. I think I’d rather the E63 in blue, which is $229, and no contract. That way I can get mom a nicer phone on contract, too, rather then spending $70 for pretty much the exact same thing she has with Bluetooth.

Damn you AT&T!

Unfortunately things are extremely hectic at my job, and I have not had any time to look into it further. I think the VMware chainload method will just have to be the way it is for now. Nice to know that GRUB can boot it though.

Right now I’m looking into VDI solutions at work, though, so I’m still focused on virtualization.

Also, one thing to note about Xen which I am not happy about - they don’t have Point-in-Time snapshots as of yet…(you can do it via a hack, but).

Synergy is one of the greatest programs ever written…if you need it. Here’s what it does:

Lets say you have 2 computers, with 2 monitors on your desk. You don’t want to use two keyboards and mice. You do want seperate monitors and don’t want to use a KVM. This is the program for you.

I have MacOS 10.5.5 running on my main machine, and next to me is a second monitor which is now connected to a Sun Ray client. I simply move my mouse to the right boundry, and it goes to the Sun Ray system instead of using the Mac. Cool eh?

At the moment, I’m not sure how it determines it, but when loaded using GRUB, it does not know it’s bootfsUUID. So you have to chainload it instead.

title ESXi
root (hd0,4)
makeactive
chainloader +1


That works and saves state correctly. It also means no modification to ESXi’s boot process.

-Matt

I searched on Google, and found nothing on this subject, so I figured I’d write it here. Perhaps it’ll get indexed. I’ll probably post it on a forum as well.
Basically, the short answer is Yes, it can be done. The long answer is, are you sure you want to? It’s not particularly difficult, I just had some trouble with the format of a few files.
You CAN install both to the same HD, and use GRUB to boot between them. Easier would be to install each to a different HD and use GRUB.
Here’s what I did to make it work. I’m going to (after backing up the config files I created) try it another way soon. But this works:

You’ll need:
ESXi installer disc.
Citrix XenServer 5 Disc
Some Live CD (Like Ubuntu or Gentoo)

Install ESXi. Once that’s working, reboot to live CD.

The Partition Layout is as follows for ESXi:

1 - Extended
2 - “Ghost of VMware” as they call it
3 - VMFS
4 - Hypervisor0 - 4MB boot partition that determines if to boot from primary or backup partition
5- Hypervisor1 - Primary partition
6 - Hypervisor2 - Backup partition
7 - Type FC - Diagnostic partition (blank)
8 - Hypervisor3 - Locker


Here’s what you need to do (assuming disk is called sda):

Open a terminal
sudo -s
dd if=/dev/sda2 |gzip > /sda2.gz (~5000 MB partition, shrinks down)

cfdisk /dev/sda

Delete sda2 - Type 06 FAT16
Delete sda3 - Type FB - VMFS

Create a new partition, logical, 18 GB, beginning of space (this is the primary partition for the Xen install), type Linux (default)
Create a new partition, logical, 18 GB, beginning of space (backup partition for Xen, leave blank), type Linux (default)
Create a new partition, logical, size (Space - 5G) /2, beginning of space (Storage for Xen), type 8E Linux LVM
Create a new partition, primary, size 5000 MB, beginning, type 06 FAT 16
Create a new partition, primary, size Remaining, beginning, type FB

Take the “Boot” flag off partition 1. Add “Boot” flag to partition 9 (18GB primary Xen partition), as you will be using GRUB.

Save and Exit.

When done, this should be the layout:

Disk /dev/sda: 499.9 GB, 499989348352 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 476827 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 5 255381 261506048 5 Extended
/dev/sda2 255382 259476 4193280 6 FAT16
/dev/sda3 259477 476827 222567424 fb Unknown
/dev/sda4 1 4 4080 4 FAT16 <32M
/dev/sda5 5 52 49136 6 FAT16
/dev/sda6 53 100 49136 6 FAT16
/dev/sda7 101 210 112624 fc Unknown
/dev/sda8 211 750 552944 6 FAT16
/dev/sda9 * 751 17916 17577968 83 Linux
/dev/sda10 17917 35082 17577968 83 Linux
/dev/sda11 35083 255381 225586160 8e Linux LVM

Partition table entries are not in disk order

Copy the files from the Xen CD in packages.main/.bz2 to somewhere on your LiveCD environment (ie, copy them over ssh from another machine with the CD mounted).

mkfs.ext3 -L root-primary0 /dev/sda9

mkdir /tmp/root
mount /dev/sda9 /tmp/root
cd /tmp/root
tar jxvf /PATH/to/packages.main/.bz2 # Not sure this works, I did it one at a time. Might need to use xargs. Here’s the order the installer does it in:

license
el4.5-binaries
dom0fs
xapi
tools-iso
el4.6-binaries
xha
el5.2-binaries
el5.1-binaries
el5.0-binaries
el4.7-binaries
sm
docs

The high level view of the rest of the install is:

Un-tar files (done above)
Setup GRUB
Setup initrd
Setup swap
Setup networking
Setup Xen Inventory File
Set up FSTAB
Set up Time Zone, Keyboard, Internationalization
Set up storage

Because my blog software is having fits, I’m going to link to a simple html with the rest of the instructions:
ESXi and Xen Install
I am sorry for having to do that.
-Matt

Today has been an interesting and annoying day so far. Everyone has off at my job for Martin Luther King Jr. day.

I slept over Leon’s house. I got up at around 9 AM, after not sleeping so well. Took a shower, got dressed, and moved my car so as not to get a ticket. In my haste to get to the train station on time (by the time I cleaned the car off enough to see, it was 10:20, and the train was at 10:33.), I left my keys with Leon in case he had to move my car. I also didn’t realize that I didn’t have my office / engineering room / and server room keys on me.

So I realized all this, at 125th street, almost into Manhattan. I got into Grand Central and started calling people. While waiting for them to call back, I was approached by 2 panhandlers in a matter of 3 minutes…I never see that during peak travel hours…it has to be an off-hours thing, annoying to say the least.

There were two co-workers close by…however, one was at his parent’s house which is anywhere but close. The other, I got ahold of, and went up to 86th street (from 42nd) to meet him. I got the keys, but didn’t take a good look at them. Went down to 30th street, where it turns out the building was open anyway. Went up to our floor, and the key for the office doesn’t work. So I started calling others, and nobody’s answering…so finally, I head back home, after a complete waste of 3 hours.

Work is being a pain, as I migrate everyone to our new Exchange server. It thankfully is working fairly well now, but unfortunately a few unrelated items at work have been annoying. Even though I just got an email at 10:30 PM asking for information, it only took a minute to get it, so it wasn’t too bad.

Life is ok. I did restart exercise, but unfortunately didn’t go an entire week due to exhaustion from work. I will attempt to exercise as much as I can each week, but progress is going to be slow I think. Leon and I are ok again, but nothing new really.

The LS is mostly repaired - the car doesn’t seem to overheat anymore (I say seem, because I’ve been there, done that, with the cooling system many times before), but now I have no heat! I couldn’t leave the car to be fixed because it would have been on the street, and I would have gotten a ticket as my registration expired today.

Leon has picked out a new car, with my and Amin’s help. We went to Yonkers Honda and we found a very nice 2004 Honda Civic Sedan for a very reasonable price. So he put a deposit on it, and will be returning his Cobalt on Monday most likely, and picking up the new car on the same day.

I still have no idea how I’m going to get rid of the LS. I am going to try Ebay, but hopefully it will work out better then the BMW.

One down, one to go.

I went back to Car Cash today, after trying to sell the BMW Coupe on EBay. The auction did not meet my reserve of $8,000, only making it to $7,300. Here’s the reason why I didn’t take it - the highest bidder had a reputation rating of only 9. As a result, I went back and tried to bargain higher on the transaction, but was told that the market had gotten even worse (which I can believe), and that the most I could get was $5,000. In the end I got $5,500, which is total crap compared to my purchase price, but it pays off half the debt I owe on it, which helps a lot. Yes, I took a loss vs EBay, but it would be done with here and now.

The lesson here is - no matter how quickly you think you need to get something done, if you are in a situation where there is something you don’t understand, back off before you get burned.

As an aside, I asked about the LS and got offered $1500. I hope to get about double that on EBay.

It was very easy to do. So that’s done now.
I figured it was time to pick a new theme, as well, so this is Serendipity, version 3. Enjoy - I think it looks much cleaner now…

-Matt

Pretty mixed. I’m happy to have a family like I do, and for someone special who loves and cares for me. I’m sad in that my uncle John is now gone forever. I’m anxious being in debt - not as bad as some, but enough to have it weigh down on me. I’ve got a car that’s being rediculously hard to get rid of. Hopefully that will be done with tomorrow, we’ll see. I’ve got money in the stock market going topsy turvy. I feel tired all the time. I feel lazy. Every once in a while, I get these spurts of energy which allow me to get things done which I should have done a while ago. Today I finally finished getting the Slide Show together of my uncle John for everyone. I was supposed to have finished that two weeks ago.

I beat myself up for some stupid things I’ve done recently, but I then try to look into the future. My love for Leon is still there, but we are growing apart. We are two very dfferent people, and while we both love and respect each other, we just don’t mesh well any more. Time and life has changed us. It’s been almost 3 years, time will tell how far we make it.

Work drains me. I get bored easily, I don’t like working on the same thing for extended periods of time. Heck, I just had a tangent right now where I just looked at the bottom of the screen, saw the Serendipity version number, and checked to see just how old it was…The answer is very old. As an aside, I will upgrade this soon.

I have not stuck to it well enough, but I am making a resolution - it’s time for me to be alive again. I am going to be who I am:
a techno-wizard
a photographer
a musician
a traveller

Those are things I like, and things I should focus on. Starting this Monday, I will renew my commitment to my health, and start getting in shape. I had a good, but slow, start. Things took a turn off course, and I’ve been miles off the path for too long now.

I will forge forward, onward.

I have gotten it to the point where I have a nice little icon on my desktop which allows me to access all of the files on the OpenSolaris box. So far so good. However, I have realized just how much crap is in my old home directory. It’s quite daunting. I need to pick on specific items to be able to clean this up…

I’m about to make the MythTV changes in a moment. Then I can move that machine back downstairs.

On another note, I’m liking my Apple keyboard more now. Apparently it’s made by Mitsumi, who, in an earlier life, made really cheap CDROM drives, so I’m not quite sure what that says about the quality. All I know is that is’ not bad at all.

I’m also picking up on the shortcuts more. Apparently the MacOS equivalent of Home and End keys in text boxes are the up and down arrow keys. That seems to take you to the beginning and end of the field. In a text box, like here on a web page, it’s Command + Left for beginning, and Command + Right for end of line.

In the terminal:
Control+A - Beginning of Line
Control+E - End of Line
Control+D - Delete Character (Forward Delete)
Control+B - Move left (not disturbing existing characters)
Control+F - Move right (not disturbing existing characters)
Control+H - Backspace
Control+K - Delete everything past cursor
Control+W - Delete previous word

And a few others that I don’t quite understand yet, LOL.
I think those are just bash control characters that will work on all bash shells…

Oh, and I finally got my title for the black BMW a day or two ago. I can FINALLY get rid of it.

So it turns out I was a little hasty in my judgement that OpenSolaris 2008.05 was a “Full Stop.” It turns out that it’s actually quite easy to get it running, it just requires a couple of modifications, of which are not particularly difficult or intrusive.

So, I have OpenSolaris 2008.05 running with ZFS (file system that ensures your data is what you think it is..can detect and CORRECT hardware issues like if you have a bad powersupply messing with bits…), iSCSI (think a Hard Disk over a network connection) volume for Time Machine on my Mac Leopard desktop, and Sun Ray software for mom.

It turns out that using Solaris Express fixed my issue with the Sun Ray, but broke iSCSI, which was totally not acceptable. So that forced me to play with OpenSolaris again at work, and I got Sun Ray working in 20 minutes or so. I was just tired and impatient here at home.

All I have to do now is go through all my files on the server, clean everything up, make it available to me on my desktop, and then I’m done.

The MythTV machine is working, but I need to store the videos on the network eventually as well, because the amount of data will eventually fill it up pretty fast…But it’s ok for now, I only have 2 episodes of Hereos on it. The rest I watched online, sadly, not in HD. HD is only available for Windows. Yuck.

With regard to where else can I use OpenSolaris…well, not on my laptop, because my phone nor USB modem for Sprint work in OpenSolaris. However, I may set it up for a server at work. We will see.