Eric’s Blog

So on my Opensolaris server at home, Zelda has a bunch of messed up MP3s in one of my zfs filesystems. I have since made a snapshot of the zfs filesystem, and removed the messy files to tidy things up. The thing is that the snapshot eats up about 40GB of space, and I need that space. SO, the solution is really quite simple- put that snapshot into a file, and pipe it to my linux desktop (which is using a 500GB hard drive). So easy:

# zfs send tank/home@pre_cleanup_of_zeldas_music | ssh -t -c blowfish \
elysium "cat > /export/home-pre_cleanup_of_zeldas_music.zfs"

If I ever need it again? No problem- mount the snapshot, and grab what I need. God, I love ZFS.

It’s getting late, but I wanted to write about something I always scoff at when I see it. When we get milk at the grocery store, the ‘good stuff’ says “From cows NOT treated with rBST”. Basic logic says that because they are specific with a single hormone, they can use a different hormone, and not be accused of lying based on the tag (as I’m sure there are 10’s of different hormones available). I’m sure that if a farm used no hormones, that they would say “From cows NOT treated with any growth hormone, including rBST.” Of course, the majority of consumers looking at the tag believes that they use no hormones- which would be the company’s goal. Nice.

I’ve just about had it. This company (who both my friend Elaine and I thought would be good) American Grass Fed Beef (http://www.americangrassfedbeef.com/) has been sending us beef pretty much every quarter. She and I went in halves on getting a quarter of a side, and I have to say- all the meat has been embarrassingly low quality. I know that grass fed beef can be overcooked because it’s so lean, but that is not what is happening here. Most of the time it’s hamburger that we get - which means the scraps after butchering (usually from a variety of pieces) is given to us. Anyway, I have hamburger coming out of my ears. The first bad experience of many was with some T-Bones, I cooked them to ‘medium’, and they were SO tough, they were completely inedible, and we ended up giving them to our dogs.

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It was a sad realization last night. After being on call from 7a to 7p, Z and I thought it’d be nice to head over to Los Altos grill (a.k.a Bandera’s). Instead, we changed our mind to go to Nola’s instead. There, you can pick your nose, and no one would notice, but at Bandera’s, you have to be more…collected, so Nola’s seemed a better choice. I LOVE their fish tacos, and wedge salad. SO GOOD. When I got their fish tacos last time, they went from seared fish to breaded. This isn’t a big deal as it’s common to have breaded fish tacos. The drawback is that I don’t dig the breading, so the fish tacos are out.

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First off, for those that know me, I’m a geek. If you didn’t know that yet, then you CERTAINLY do now given that I’m all excited that KDE 4.0 hit the streets. The sucky thing is that there are no built RPMs or SRPMs available for Fedora 8, so I’m downloading the sources, and building them myself. I’m pretty sure they are nice enough to include a ’spec’ file to make this relatively easy.

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Ok, some people get annoyed with my obsessiveness with legal speak, but I can’t help it. I attribute it to a LOVE for logic and rhetoric, and it always puts a smile on my face when I catch something trying to pull a ‘fast one’ past me. The downside is that few if any read what is really written in corporate statements (whether on a ad board, or in a pamphlet). Two specific moments come to mind:

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I really do have a lot to be thankful for for being able to travel as much as I have. The one piece that I was never told was when I first left the country for the Army is how ignorance really is bliss with regards to how the world really isn’t like the United States. On one side, being able to say that I’ve been to Africa, South America, and ALL over Europe, and all the memories that follows is something that can’t be explained. On the other hand, when you come back to reality, it’s such a ache that is left in you that never leaves, and gnaws at you until you go again.

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Z and I wanted (well, I did more than she did due to the cold weather) to get away for a few days, and do some camping at our top-secret camping site. The picture below on the left was taken on our last night there when the clouds lifted. Our site is about 3400 feet up, so we get the opportunity to be above the clouds most of the time. This is a pretty typical view, and once the sun goes down, the stars are absolutely amazing.

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For about a year or so now, I’ve been running Solaris 10. It worked out pretty well when I had a account that I piggy-backed off of from work at Shutterfly. Those days are over now, and being over at Yahoo!, I don’t have that privilege anymore. That’s quite alright as OpenSolaris is available. So, OpenSolaris comes out with a new build about every two weeks, so it was time to go with b77, and do the migration. I had some key things I wanted:

1. All customization has been done in CFEngine. I’ve been faithfully keeping my Sol10 system’s config current in it, so building up a new system should be a breeze.
2. All PXE based (pxe + dhcp > bootparams + rarp).
3. Make it so that I can self-replicate the server to a new system, so I can replicate it back when done.

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Driving to work this morning, I’m reminded of something that frequently gives me the blues. It all starts when I’m listening to one of (at least for me) the ‘holy trinity’ of Jazz musicians- Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, or Miles Davis. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to Giant Steps, A Love Supreme, Kind of Blue by Miles (the album where I have an almost spiritual experience from), and any number of albums by Parker. The downer obviously is that I will never hear anything new from them. Oh well. Right now at work, I have Cousin Mary from Giant Steps going, and it’s absolutely sublime. I suppose I should just get over it. Cheers.