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GRAFFITI -- August 28, 2006 thru September 03, 2006 >> Link to the Current Week << Last Week << Mon   Tues   Wed   Thu   Fri   Sat   Sun >> Next Week Search this site : Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable.     About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message.

MONDAY    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
August 28, 2006

2149 - Good evening. We're home from Maine. Details tomorrow. Whew!

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August 29, 2006

0921 - Good morning. Pictures:

We went to Maine, a ways outside of Augusta, to hang out with Marcia's sister Nancy, and her partner Tara. Nancy owns this cabin on the lake, and they live there year round. Ice in is generally sometime in December, and ice fishing usually starts in January. It's a good lake for bass, so there's summer tournaments, too. The cabin, built many decades ago, is right next to the water. Today's codes would require a 100 foot setback. Nancy and Tara have a pontoon boat, comfy for about 8 people. There's a little sailboat that we didn't go out on, and several kayaks that also were unused this trip. They also have two labrador retrievers: Saffron and Ty.

Saffron had a head-on collision with another dog while playing, about 18 months ago, and now she suffers from occasional, frightening seizures. Unfortunately, one of these happened while we were all across the lake. So we got the dog on the boat, motored back over to the cabin, and tried to get some valium into the poor puppy. She didn't keep that down, though, so I carried her to the truck, and drove Nancy and Saffron to the vet. A couple of shots, eventually she calmed out of the fit.

On Saturday evening, Marcia went fishing off the dock, after having no luck elsewhere on the lake during the previous two days. She caught a nice 2-1/2 pound big mouth bass. She was pretty excited. So was the fish, as you can imagine. We stocked the fish into a large bucket of water, and in the end, Marcia decided to release it. The day before I caught one or two small yellow perch, but let them off right away. Sunday we went shopping in Freeport, and in the evening had a lobster, clam, corn, etc. feed.

Overall, a wonderful trip. It was very nice to spend some time with Nancy and Tara. We also met a bunch of their gregarious friends, as people motor back and forth, and hang out, at all hours. A lot of driving, nearly 24 hours in all, going and coming, but worth it.

I'm taking today "off" to get caught up on chores and the like. So, I'll get to that now. Happy Tuesday!

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August 30, 2006

0912 - Good morning. I'm back to work today, after spending yesterday on chores, bills, and unwinding from a 13+ hour driving day on Monday. The people here seem generally glad to have me back, so that's a good thing, too. I'd best figure out what it is I should be working on, and do that. Have a great day!

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August 31, 2006

1120 - Good morning. I've got a couple of free minutes here while a Kubuntu install under VMware completes updating. I'm using this setup to build a GUI testing tool for QA purposes ... if I'm lucky. I'm going to experiment with Marathon and Abbot, see what use I can put these tools to.

The main reason for using a virtual machine instead of my workstation is that some of the tools require Sun's Java 1.5.mumble, and that has been known to break some of the other stuff I use that's dependent upon 1.4.2 or thereabouts.

Okay, that's done, on to the next step. Oh, yeah, we've got the bucket ready in case we need to bail out the basement as Ernesto sweeps in tomorrow. Lucky us (well, at least luckier than the Carolinas, they're getting a lot right now! Ciao!

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September 1, 2006

0959 - Good morning. Eight months down, four to go. My, how time flies when you're having fun. I re-introduced myself to a couple of tidbits of knowledge yesterday that I'd managed to forget. Forget? Well, yeah, in the sense that the knowledge was embedded in scripts I wrote a while ago, so I haven't needed to remember how they do stuff, just that the stuff gets done. But when I run a process manually, and leave out a configuration item, things break really badly, and confusingly.

For example, in my Kickstart file for configuring servers, I have settings for custom GRUB arguments to handle the requirements of interaction between ACPI, SMP, and RHEL4 on multi-processor Hyperthreaded Xeon machines. The trick is, running with an RHEL4 SMP kernel, the machine fails in variable and weird ways that look like a memory problem. It isn't. With SMP and Hyperthreaded processors, use the kernel boot argument acpi=ht and all is well. That limits the ACPI kernel activity to just managing the hyperthreading bits. No more weird failures.

Another fun re-learning moment was provided courtesy of VMware, Ubuntu, and a specific memory-intensive application that's part of our product line. I knew that the software has minimum requirements for 768M of RAM in the machine. But I managed to not implement that knowledge when setting up the virtual machine for the test fixture system I'm building an image for. So, installed, booted and updated Kubuntu - no problems. Installed the application. No problems. Fired it up and did all the initial configuration ... no problems. With configuration complete, the app started requesting far more memory than the default 256M allocated to the virtual machine. Swap-O-Rama ensues. I finally just pressed the big red button, gave the VM a bump up to 1G of RAM (there's 2G of real memory on my workstation), and everything's playing happy now.

Time to get back to work. Have a great day!

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September 2, 2006

No Post......

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September 3, 2006

1026 - Good morning. We had a busy day yesterday. Although we weren't directly affected, there were a fair amount of power outages in the greater Metro DC area. Lots of trees down all over, including all over our neighborhood. A lazy day yesterday, out to dinner at On The Border for the first time in a few months last night.

I missed last week because of travel, but that doesn't mean I wasn't thinking of our troops in the field, and the lives lost on our behalf...

• Pfc. James J. Arellano, 19, of Cheyenne, Wyo., died on Aug 17 in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries suffered when his patrol encountered enemy forces using improvised explosive devices and small arms fire.
• Pvt. Joseph R. Blake, 34, of Portland, Ore., died on Aug 17 in Turkalay, Afghanistan, of injuries suffered when his platoon encountered enemy forces small arms fire.
• Staff Sgt. Jeffrey S. Loa, 32, of Waianae, Hawaii, died on Aug 16 in Ar Ramadi, Iraq, of injuries suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his dismounted patrol.
• Hospitalman Chadwick T. Kenyon, 20, of Tucson, Ariz., died Aug. 20 of injuries suffered when his vehicle was struck by an improvised explosive device while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in the Al Anbar province, Iraq.
• Cpl. Adam A. Galvez, 21, of Salt Lake City, Utah, died Aug. 20 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
• Lance Cpl. Randy L. Newman, 21, of Bend, Ore., died Aug. 20 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
• Sgt. Gabriel G. DeRoo, 25, of Paw Paw, Mich., died on Aug. 20 in Mosul, Iraq, of injuries suffered when he encountered enemy forces using small arms fire during combat operations.
• Sgt. Wakkuna A. Jackson, 21, of Jacksonville, Fla., died in Kunar, Afghanistan, on Aug. 19 when an improvised explosive device detonated near his convoy vehicle.
• Spc. Robert E. Drawl Jr., 21, of Alexandria, Va., died in Kunar, Afghanistan, on Aug. 19 when an improvised explosive device detonated near his convoy vehicle.
• Spc. Christopher F. Sitton, 21, of Montrose, Col., died in Kunar, Afghanistan, on Aug. 19 when an improvised explosive device detonated near his convoy vehicle.
• Master Sgt. Brad A. Clemmons, 37, of Chillicothe, Ohio, died Aug. 21 when an improvised explosive device struck his vehicle.
• Sgt 1st Class Ruben J. Villa Jr, 36, of El Paso, Texas, died on Aug 18, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, from a non-combat related cause.
• Chief Petty Officer Paul J. Darga, 34, of Alpena, Mich., died Aug. 22 when his Explosive Ordnance Disposal Team was struck by an improvised explosive device while responding to a previous strike.
• Cpl. Jeremiah S. Cole, 26, of Hiawatha, Kan., died in Bermel, Afghanistan, on Aug. 16 of injuries sustained when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle during combat operations.
• Lance Cpl. James D. Hirlston, 21, of Murfreesboro, Tenn., died Aug. 23 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
• Spc. Thomas J. Barbieri, 24, of Gaithersburg, Md., died on Aug. 23 south of Baghdad, Iraq when his patrol encountered enemy forces small arms fire during combat operations.
• Staff Sgt. Dwayne E. Williams, 28, of Baltimore, Md., died Aug. 24 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
• Sgt. Jeremy E. King, 23, of Meridian, Idaho, died on Aug. 24, in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries sustained by enemy forces using small arms fire during combat operations.
• Staff Sgt. Gordon G. Solomon, 35, of Fairborn, Ohio, died Aug. 24 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
• Sgt. Marquees A. Quick, 28, of Hoover Ala., died on Aug 19, in Ar Ramadi, Iraq, of injuries suffered while conducting security and observation operations, when his unit came in contact with enemy forces using multiple grenades.
• Pfc. William E. Thorne, 26, of Hospers, Iowa, died on Aug 24, of injuries suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his HMMWV during combat operations.
• Cpl. Jordan C. Pierson, 21, of Milford, Conn., died Aug. 25 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
• Cpl. David G. Weimortz, 28, of Irmo, S.C. died Aug. 26 from injuries suffered while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
• Spc. Edgardo Zayas, 29, of Dorchester, Mass., died on Aug. 26, in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his dismounted patrol during combat operations.
• Staff Sgt. Jeffrey J. Hansen, 31, of Cairo, Neb., died on Aug. 27, in Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Landstuhl, Germany, of injuries suffered on Aug. 21 from a vehicle accident in Balad, Iraq.
• Spc. Seth A. Hildreth, 26, of Myrtle Beach, S.C., died on Aug. 27, in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle during combat operations.
• Lance Cpl. Donald E. Champlin, 28, of Natchitoches, La., died Aug. 28 at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Germany, from wounds received while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq, on Aug. 27.
• Sgt. David J. Almazan, 27, of Van Nuys, Calif., died on Aug 27, in Hit, Iraq, of injuries suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his HMMWV during combat operations.
• Sgt. Darry Benson, 46, of Winterville, N.C., died on Aug 27, in Camp Virginia, Kuwait, from a non-combat related cause.
• Spc. Joshua D. Jones, 24, of Pomeroy, Ohio, died Aug 27, in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries suffered when his HMMWV came in contact with enemy forces using small arms fire during combat operations.
• Spc. Kenneth M. Cross, 21, of Superior, Wis., died during combat operations Aug 27, in Baghdad, Iraq, when his M1126 Stryker Vehicle came in contact with enemy forces using an improvised explosive device and small arms fire.
• Pfc. Daniel G. Dolan, 19, of Roy, Utah, died during combat operations Aug 27, in Baghdad, Iraq, when his M1126 Stryker Vehicle came in contact with enemy forces using an improvised explosive device and small arms fire.
• Spc. Matthew E. Schneider, 23, of Gorham, N.H., died on Aug. 28, in Ar Ramadi, Iraq, from a non-combat related cause.
• Cpl. Christopher T. Warndorf, 21, of Burlington, Ky., died Aug. 29 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
• Sgt. Moises Jazmin, 25, of Providence, R.I.
• Spc. Qixing Lee, 20, of Minneapolis, Minn., died in Taji, Iraq, on Aug 27, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his M2A3 Bradley Vehicle during combat operations.
• Spc. Shaun A. Novak, 21, of Two Rivers, Wis., died in Taji, Iraq, on Aug 27, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his M2A3 Bradley Vehicle during combat operations.
• Spc. Tristan C. Smith, 23, of Bryn Athyn, Pa., died in Taji, Iraq, on Aug 27, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his M2A3 Bradley Vehicle during combat operations.
• Lance Cpl. Colin J. Wolfe, 18, of Manassas, Va., died Aug. 30 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
• Sgt. Joshua R. Hanson, 27, of West St. Paul, Minn., died on Aug. 30, in Khaldea, Iraq, of injuries suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle during combat operations.

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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.

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