Mambo Taxi

Not figuratively, literally. My bike has developed a (dangerous) tendency to lose its gear, often when I'm starting up from still, and also when I'm coasting. Not the chain, but likely the freewheel, according to elbie_at_trig, who was conveniently going home at the same time as me, just as I was thinking, "if only I could ask someone to jog along next to my bike..."

So, yeah. Tomorrow morning, cycle shop is my first stop on the way to work.

Otherwise, I feel like I'm not spinning wheels, quite the opposite.

Work is going, and the three active projects are interesting, if potentially long. But the structure of things allows me to interleaving the work, and I can't imagine getting bored with it. Really, this still feels like perfect job for me. And hey, I missed my boss, who was gone a week on vacation, but I can hardly fault her for that.

Life feels adequately social, these last weeks. Care and feeding of my introverted self- it sometimes feels like I need a push, but I'm getting most of what I need.

This Thursday evening is the third and final Quaker Seekers at Laurier session we have planned; we're speaking on Equality. I think there's an LJ post sitting in my brain, to help me organize what I'm saying in my two 6-minute pieces.

Last week I had a conference-call with co-organizers for the Quaker Quest Traveling Team. A month from now I'll be one of two presenters to a regional Quaker gathering, and in early May they're sending me to Pendle Hill for a weekend conference with other trainers. This work feels both like something I'm pulled to do, and a big side-order of "what the hell was I thinking when I said yes?" Where it goes nobody knows, but I am loving the finding out.

In late May melted_snowball and I are taking a vacation to Nova Scotia for my birthday; it's our first time to Atlantic Canada and I am already having dreams about rocky shorelines and whale-watching.

This week has featured two meals with duck (breast; and burgers), and two meals with pesto. It is a good life, my friends.

I'm midway through installing linux on a mac mini. I'm in love with this hardware; it's so quiet, runs cool, and is barely bigger than my hand. I'm putting Xen-enabled debian onto it, so alongside the web and email services it can run virtual servers such as Asterisk, or possibly freePBX. Anyhow, my coder.com server will move over some time in April, I hope.

Also in April, my geek crew of Perl Mongers are doing a hardware hacking workshop with Arduino microcontroller boards. So far, I've tested sample programs that play a simple tune; flash LEDs; and (sort of) replicate a Clapper but send a signal over USB to computer. My goals are to control a 600x200 pixel LCD display, and to precisely control a stepper-motor to... well, it'll be cool if it works, that's all I will say for now.

So, all you folks who haven't posted about yourselves recently- what's up with you?

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.

I'm quite glad to be done with the work week. I was able to finish everything I wanted to by this evening, so I won't think about work at all this weekend (I had many nights this week when this was not the case; trying to puzzle out an answer when I should've been sleeping). Aside from the annoying bits, there were some good puzzles, too; partly solved by reasoning, and partly by slugging through all the possibilities. (The most annoying of those involved copying a working computer's /etc tree onto the broken one, noticing that the broken one worked when it booted with the good /etc tree, and half-by-half, adding more of the broken files until it stopped working again. Bingo: it was Herr Doctor /etc/udev in the parlour, with a rules.d ! I'm glad there was nobody in the lab when I solved that, because they would've been put off by my cheering..)

The most satisfying problem was actually solved by: asking a student. Seriously.

I also had one moment of sub-genius that I think was funny enough to share. One bug's fix required logging out anybody sitting at the terminals. There was only one guy in the lab, so I carefully figured out which machine he sat at and ran it remotely on all the others. All of the monitors, except for his, flashed and restarted Xwindows. Including my own. Oops. (the reset wasn't interrupted part-way when mine logged me out, because it was running elsewhere via a 'screen' session, which wonderfully saved all my work and notes. So it was a minor inconvenience, more just amusing.)

This evening I also took a moment before leaving to talk to my boss's boss, who sent me an email earlier asking about the status of my current second-priority project, which I can now make a first-priority again; I'm glad I did because I thought he might've been grumpy about the status, but instead he congratulated me for getting this stuff done.

Now that the dust has settled, I can maybe pay a bit of attention to you all. I've missed you this week!

This morning I fixed my bike's front tire which sprung a leak on Thursday, went to the farmer's market with lovecraftienne, and relieved quingawaga of a rather scary number of carrots that had appeared in their organic food box and they weren't going to use. Yay! Stir-fry!

After lunch, I fixed my server. One of its hard-drives started whining loudly last night, which was scary, but thanks to the software RAID I use, fixing it was just a matter of dropping a new disk in.

Then I went to the Karen Armstrong talk, which I'll write up separately.

This morning, the purchasing guy at work handed me a new ergonomic mouse; which means I can take my other one home again.

This morning I handed off my article on drawing quilt patterns to the editor of perl_review. The issue will come out some time in the spring, and since my article is on a colourful topic, it gets the cover. Now I have something else to send dan's mom, who was the reason I started playing with these in the first place.

I also found out that my article for Linux Journal is in the March issue. I won't complain much, because they will be paying me. But about bloody time; this ain't acadamia. I think the author's bio is two times out of date, since I wrote the article about the same time I started my previous job last summer. Because the topic is decidedly non-colourful, (the Perl Debugger), it appears it did not get the cover.

Now I need to be less one-note and write something interesting that has nothing at all to do with a scripting language.