Author: Paul Tomblin

Need some artistic judgement

I’m thinking of replacing my 17″ Powerbook G4 (aka “AlBook”) with a 17″ MacBook Pro (MBP), although I’m waiting to see if they announce something with the new three-touch touch pad like the MacBook Air (MBA). Rumour has it that they’re waiting for Intel to bring up production levels on a new chip before they do, and that’s why it wasn’t announced at the same time as the MBA.

SnowbirdsThe best feature of my AlBook is that I got a custom “skin” made featuring a picture of the Snowbirds in flight. I took it to the Wings and Wheels air show in St. Catherines last year, and got all the Snowbirds officers (including Snowbird 10 and 11, and their public affairs officer) to sign it. Several of the pilots expressed admiration for it, and asked where they could get one for their own laptops. The skin is made of vinyl, and the web site said you could peel it off, but I very much doubt it would transfer. And I don’t want to risk damaging it, especially since one of the pilots who signed it died in an accident this year. So it’s going to stay on the Albook. But I definitely want one for the new MBP.

I went to the Snowbirds web site and downloaded some of their high resolution promotional pictures, and their logo and wordmark which are available in EPS files, and played around in Photoshop a bit. I definitely wanted one with all 9 planes, and I think I like this one best, but I can’t decide on the placement of the logo and wordmark. First time ever I wished I’d installed that poll plugin, but please look at the following two pictures and tell me in the comments which you prefer. (As always, clicking the thumbnail will take you to a bigger version.)

Option 1 Option 2
Option 1 Option 2

And before you ask, yes, I am procrastinating. I need to re-engineer one of my tables and the classes that use it, and I don’t want to.

On the other hand, maybe I *can* have too much screen real estate

Well, after working with the two screen setup for a couple of days, I’ve started to get a terribly sore neck. A bit of self-evaluation shows that when I’m looking at the laptop screen, I’m craning forward and down, which is ruining all the good effort that my chiropractor and the stretching exercises he gave me over the last three weeks have done.

So I’m now running with the laptop screen closed, using the KVM to use the big screen for both laptop and desktop use.

Unfortunately when I came in this morning, my desktop was totally unresponsive. I couldn’t get it to wake up when I switched to it on the KVM, and I couldn’t ssh to it from my laptop. So I power cycled it. That required manually fsck’ing the disk, and then when it did come up for real, the mouse went nuts and started opening programs and moving stuff around on my screen like it was being driven by a demented ghost. It had also booted the wrong kernel (one that didn’t support MVFS). So I booted it with the proper kernel and it was ok. Except that as always, vmplayer complains that I haven’t run /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl, so I ran it again. Don’t know why that never “sticks”.

Better, better…

I discovered a new monitor mode for the 24″ CRT that gives me even more screen real-estate. That’s nice.

I also managed to borrow a KVM from the lab downstairs so I can occasionally look in on my Linux box to see if I’ve got any new Lotus Notes “mail”. That’s nice.

Unfortunately the PS2 KVM doesn’t work well with my USB mouse – I have a USB to PS2 adaptor that I was using at one point, with the USB mouse going into the PS2 mouse adaptor, which was then going into my PS2 to USB adaptor. That was mostly a proof of concept (to make sure I could take the output of a PS2 KVM and plug it into my USB-only laptop), and also it made it easier to switch the PS2 keyboard and the USB mouse between my USB-only laptop and my PS2-and-USB Linux box. But plugging a USB mouse into a PS2 adaptor into a PS2 KVM didn’t work so well for the mouse. Every time I switched the KVM I had to reset the mouse by unplugging it and plugging it back in. Not good. So in the meantime I’m using the PS2 mouse that came with the computer instead of the USB mouse I brought from home, and it sucks. No wheel, and it uses a ball rather than optical. Oh, and it’s a Belkin, so it will probably fail in 5 minutes.

Oops

I’ve mentioned before that in order to help defray the costs of putting my stuff on a colo box, I partitioned the box in 3 Xen virtual machines, and rent two of them out. Well, yesterday one of the renters, Terry, asked for a bit of help with his Apache set up. Not knowing his root password, I mounted his hard drive in the “dom0” Xen controller, using “mount /dev/xen-space/xen2-disk /mnt” and started poking around. Well, evidently that managed to confuse ext2 because a few hours later he emailed me to say that his disk had gone “read-only”, and when he tried to reboot it didn’t come up.

Looking at my munin graphs, it appears that when he rebooted, it took down the whole box. I had to email the owner of the rack to power cycle my box, which he can do remotely. When it came back, 2 of the 3 virtual machines came up fine, but Terry’s was asking for a root password to run fsck. I shut down his virtual machine and did a fsck from within the dom0, and it found several things out of whack. But after those were fixed, I was able to restart Terry’s virtual machine.

So lesson learned. I’m not sure if things would have been happier if I’d mounted it read-only, but in the future if I need to mount one of the partitions in /dev/xen-space I’ll shut down the xen virtual machine instance first.

You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much screen real-estate

Below the cut is a highly illegal picture of my 17″ Powerbook G4 (1440×900 screen resolution) at work, connected up to my 24″ SGI/Sony GDM-90W11 CRT monitor (1600×1200 screen resolution), with the big screen being used for Eclipse, and the small screen showing my web browser open to Sun’s Java API documents, as well as a couple of convenient Terminal windows including one dedicated to pgsql.

The Safetype keyboard and mouse are also plugged into the Powerbook. All I really need now to make my work environment complete is a KVM so I can actually switch over to Linux and check my Lotus Notes and build in the dynamic vob.

So this is what I do now – I bring my laptop into work, hook it into the corporate network, and rsync my laptop’s /vob to my snapshot view on the Linux box. I run clearviewupdate on the snapshot view to get everything I’ve changed overnight checked into the vob, and then rsync it back so that everything that got checked in gets turned back to read-only. At that point, I’m good to go and I can plug the keyboard, video and mouse into the laptop and work. When I’m ready to leave at night, I unplug the laptop from the monitor and put the keyboard and mouse back on the Linux box, and run the same procedure all over again.

I also have a dynamic view of the same development stream, so I can build the bits of code that are actually working. (I can’t build in the snapshot view because you can’t make a snapshot view anchored at /vob, and far too many Makefiles have hard coded full paths instead of relative paths).

It’s all pretty sweet so far.

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