(no subject)

hard cider

Three weekends ago, I bought 2L of unpasteurized cider at the Downtown Farmer's Market. And it was good. But I only drank half before I went to visit dan. When I got back... it had become applejack. And it was very good. $4 well-spent.

Something to look for in the Market, I suppose.

Working Centre: Linux User's Group

Last night was the monthly Linux User's Group. The topic was Xen / Server Virtualization. It was a pretty good high-level overview of the Server Virtualization products. The presenter is a rep for IBM Canada; he knows his stuff, though he really knows mainframes and VMWare, less so, Xen. Apparently they don't have many companies asking about virtual servers, yet; which surprises the heck out of me; I've been hearing of them for over a year now.

I *love* the ideas behind virtualization; such as: replicating a production virtual machine, using that copy as a test-bed, and perhaps spawning that to serve as another test, and discarding the ones you're done with. Disposable computers, hey. 3% overhead for running most services in a virtual system. 0.2 second relocation between hosts (with good bandwith). And moving services from overloaded hosts, if you think ahead and start off with many services on virtual machines on one physical machine.

This isn't quite a mature technology, it's a bit kludgy still. But I've read of some people doing production stuff on Xen, so I know it'll be there soon. My boss may have me working on linux/xen before too long. I hope.

Neat things I learned:

By roughly the end of the year, Intel/AMD VT processor additions will allow virtual machines to call privilaged instructions cleanly, so virtualization won't require modifying the guest's kernel; so, say, Windows can be virtualized in Xen.

It looks like Xen is much faster than Vmware, though I'm suspect of their tests. I believe they were comparing VMWare workstation against Xen, while it's really more like VMWare Server (or VMWare Infrastructure, new product, announced yesterday).

Oh, and I learned you can talk about your organization's NAS (Network Attached Storage) and sound all modern, when really you're using old-skool NFS.

Anyhow, that was my evening yesterday. After the meeting I had some good conversations with Charles and pnijjar, helping them pack up. I even walked off with some books that Charles doesn't necessarily want back.

Working Centre: Prayer Vigil for Peace

This morning, driving to work, I caught part of an interview with Jim Loney on The Current, along with his partner, Dan Hunt. He spoke eloquently about the need for continued peace work, though he was firm that he would not be going back to Iraq himself. It was a fairly good interview. [I've gone back and listened to the beginning; he talks about more of the captivity; will probably be in tomorrow's paper.]

Tonight, I went to the monthly Prayer Vigil for Peace, held at the Working Centre. I showed up early; people were working on a banner to carry in an upcoming march in Ottawa (June 13-15) to call for justice for five Muslem men who have been held by Canadian Security for between four and six years without charges. They are being held on Security Certificates, which suspend the right to trial and allow indefinite detention of non-citizens and permanant residents. Amnesty International has a good writeup on them and the Security Certificate process.

Now, I have no idea whether these men are at all connected to terrorist activities; but it seems clear that they are in a position remarkably similar to the hundreds in Guantanamo Bay, in a weird legal limbo with no recourse, and it isn't clear whether the Canadian Government plans to deport them to countries where they face torture, as Amnesty says they might.

It's not a simple situation, and I wish I had more clarity on what should be done. At least I can say in principle I don't think people should be held indefinitely with no contact with families or lawyers, for five years.

Back to tonight: the man in charge of putting together this banner, Andy Macpherson, lives around the corner from the Quaker Meeting House. I believe he's come to Meeting a while back. He's involved with Catholic Worker as well as local Menonnite groups. The reason I bring him up is that I discovered that he was responsible for the design of a ( beautiful poster )

which I saw at the Working Centre five years ago, when I first moved here. The other designer was Jim Loney. It's a small world.

The prayer vigil was... oddly relaxing. It was a small group; I knew most of them (at least by face); and the prayers were tremendously similar to the ones you might hear in a Quaker Meeting (if one happened to be in a Meeting where prayers were read from the Bible).

I say "oddly relaxing" because there was a band playing electric bass upstairs, people cleaning kitchen equipment in the same room, and a stream of fire-sirens over the course of the first 30 minutes. Also, the ritualized prayers still felt weird to me as a Quaker; though I felt the sentiment behind the words was familiar.

We also sang; particularly pretty and simple was "Ubilate Deo" (not Jubilate; I would like to find out the origin of Ubilate, whether it's the same latin word with a different spelling; google doesn't seem to help much).

Hm. I learned a few other things; one's neat but not public knowledge, so I'll keep my lips buttoned for now.