Markus’ Blog

In less than three and a half hours we’ll be on Cathay Pacific flight 888 from Vancouver to New York City. Yay! It’ll be an exciting trip. Hot, but exciting. They are predicting 30°C for today. Fortunately, it’ll be 5° less the following few days.

So, the next few postings will be from the East Coast. It’s my first time over there — other than Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Québec City (none of which is really on the “coast”).

I am still hoping that this one time there won’t be any delayed flights, missed flights, severe weather conditions and all the other fun stuff that we got to “enjoy” during our last vacation. It would be nice to not have to use the travel insurance we bought. lol

So, off we go, on our little adventure in The Big Apple.

The new computer’s up and running. Yay. Even the dual screen setup works (thanks to Xinerama).

All the data has been transferred over. The new box is nice and fast, quieter than the old one, too. And it has two screens. I am happy. A few kinks remain. Power saving sometimes doesn’t bring back the monitors from stand-by. That’s a little annoying. Once I find out what’s causing that and what to do about it, it’ll be pretty much perfect.

I’ll have to tweak and fine-tune the configuration a bit more, but that can wait till we get back from New York.

So my computer got here on Monday, a full two days earlier than projected by FedEx. That was good news. Even better news was that, unlike February of 2006, it wasn’t busted, which means I get to keep it. Everything is looking good and the box seems in perfect working order.

I began setting it up Monday evening. For the first time ever I used Solaris netboot to install the OS rather than burning CDs and installing from them. I started preparations to set up my current workstation as boot- and install-server on the weekend.

On Saturday, I downloaded all five Solaris CD-ROM images. On Sunday I set up the install directory, copying everything into a single directory.

The following list is of steps is more for myself, so I know where to look if I ever need to do it again. Anybody remotely sane can skip over the following list.

• Burn CD #1 onto a rewritable CD and making sure volume management for the CD drive is working properly. Both steps are necessary, due to the way SPARC boot CDs are laid out (several partitions on a CD). There’s no (easy) way to access all required partitions other then burning the image to CD and have volume management mount the slices (partitions) properly.
• Copy the contents of CD #1 into the install directory (./add_to_install_server /mnt/disk1/isostuff/solaris/INSTALL/).
• Mount CDs #2 through #5 through the loop-back (lofi) interface, saving myself the trouble of actually having to burn them onto CD, and copying the contents into the install directory.
• Do the same for the language CD.
• Finally, set up all services that need to be running on the install server: NFS, TFTP, BOOTP. ./add_install_client -e 0:3:ba:44:98:b5 titan sun4u
• The step about setting the MAC (ethernet) address of the client workstation on the install server is crucial. The install server has no other way of identifying who’s asking for a boot image. Before, I had just done ./add_install_client -d titan sun4u, which was rewarded with an error message about not receiving ARP/RARP replies when I tried booting the new system.

I enjoyed not having to watch the installation in order to swap out CDs. There were no CDs to be swapped. Everything was already sitting on the install server and got installed in one big sweep.

After that all the Blastwave packages that I am using on a daily basis went onto the box. From KDE to OpenOffice and from Apache to Samba and everything in between.

The “toughest” point here was to get a copy of wget up and running first in order to download the Blastwave packages. I decided to just install the SUNW copy of wget (/usr/sfw/bin/wget) and use that to boot-strap Blastwave.

Next on the list of things to do is to migrate all the data over. Once that’s done, I can start using my new computer as my main workstation and retire the old one.

Anybody interested in an Ultra 60 with dual 450 MHz CPUs, 896 MB of RAM, 36 GB and 18 GB hard drive? lol It’s still not a bad box, especially if used as a server. On the desktop, it’s not the fastest of the bunch.

Just learned from my dad that apparently my mom’s sister, Hermi, suffered pretty very wind damage to her house. Looks like parts of the roof truss were ripped away. My aunt was at work as it happened. Neighbours called Fire Rescue and they secured the site and had the roof patched up again with a makeshift fix by the time she got home. So that was good. And that nobody got hurt.

The house of my dad’s sister and brother-in-law lost a few roof tiles during the storm, but nothing too serious happened. My grandma’s house, very close by, sustained no damage.

This is the first time that actually somebody I know or am related with suffered severe damage during a windstorm. The hurricane hit Thursday and Friday of last week.

It must have been really bad. Probably not the last storm of this intensity, though.

An article on the website of the Austrian Broadcasting Station talks about some pretty scary temperature developments in large parts of southern and central Europe.

The report is based on a new US study that says that over the next few decades it will become unbearably hot in the Mediterranean. One of the co-authors of the study, Jeremy Pal, is quoted saying the extreme weather conditions of today will be normal in the future. The extreme weather conditions then will be unprecedented.

The study also says that a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions can greatly reduce the impact, but there will still be negative effects. Or in other words: if we do something (or a lot, actually) now, we suffer a little, if we don’t, we suffer a lot.

Now, the scary thing is that it is already noticeable. The changes in weather patters have already happened and are still happening. Last winter was pretty much the first time ever that even Alpine regions in Austria barely got snow.

Then, again for the first time ever, temperatures went up into the mid to high twenties (Celsius) for a brief period as early as April. Of course it cooled down again after a couple of days, but still. Now, Austria is experiencing 35°C weather along with many other parts of Europe. That’s definitely unusual, and it seems like change is happening faster and faster.

During the early 2000s everybody was noticing that spring (and to some degree fall) were getting shorter. It would stay cool fairly long, but then jump 10-15 degrees within a couple of days (from, say, 8°C to 20°C). Summer had arrived. No more gradual increase in temperature. I guess that’s just gotten even more extreme now. Just this past week they had tornadoes and other severe weather conditions in many parts of Austria and the neighbouring countries.

To top it all off, I just found on the web that there was snowfall in Western Austria and Switzerland at the end of May of this year. 28°C on the weekend, snowfall two days later on Tuesday.

This is what makes this study so scary to me. That we can already see and feel the effects of the change.

Apparently it’s geek weeks for us. New gadgets (I like to call them “toys”) all around.

First we got our new printer.

Then, Brigette bought her old LCD monitor from work for a whopping $25. That means LCD monitor for her, and two (traditional) monitors for me (I took over the Brigette’s old CRT monitor).

Next, I ordered my new computer, which is currently on its way from Michigan to Vancouver and is scheduled to arrive on June 27.

And finally, last weekend, Brigette and I got ourselves new cell phones. The old ones were three years old by now and mine had been looking really beaten up for a while. Brigette got a LG TG800 and I have a Samsung SGH-D807. They both have cameras, support bluetooth, play MP3s and are all around way more modern than the old ones. Of course, compared to what the really fancy phones (or Blackberries) can do these days, they are probably a little boring, but they’re plenty good enough for what we use them for. Our old phones we gave to Phones for Food.

I bought (well ordered) a new computer for myself today. It needs to get shipped now, which means I won’t get it till June 27 or so (that’s my guess).

It’s not really a “new” new computer. It’s refurbished. And of course, it can’t possibly be an ordinary computer, crazy Unix Geek that I am. lol I need my occasional fix getting fairly uncommon hardware (and running fairly uncommon OSes on it). While this might be a little bizarre to the ordinary person, I consider it — for the most part — a quite harmless trait of mine. My wife may beg to differ, of course.

But just think, schveetie, how much worse it could be. I could spend all my money on alcohol…err…wait, did I just go and buy an “emergency pack” of beer yesterday? — Never mind, then.

The computer I am getting is a Sun Blade 2000.

Let’s hope shipping goes better this time than it did last year. I attempted something similar in February 2006 and got a busted computer chassis delivered. UPS must have dropped it and dropped it good. The vendor was so nice to ship me a new chassis, but after swapping the guts from the busted chassis into the new one, nothing worked. I subsequently gave up and shipped everything back. Getting the money back from the vendor fortunately not a big deal. But then the 8 month ordeal with UPS began. That’s how long it took them to finally refund me GST/PST and brokerage fees.

This time it’s going to get shipped by FedEx — and by a different vendor. One I’ve (successfully) bought from before. We’ll see what happens. I am optimistic.

Our trip to New York is coming up fast these days. We’ll be going there the first week of July. So, just a bit over two weeks left till we leave. It’s Brigette’s favorite city ever, never to be surpassed. I have never been (except for a two hour layover at JFK six years ago ;-). I am very curious. The one thing everybody agrees about is how completely unique this city is. Besides, eight million people living in one city — that’s the entire population of Austria in one single city: According to Wikipedia Austria had a population of 8,199,783 in 2006, New York City had 8,143,198 people in 2005. That’s pretty close.

It’ll be awesome, I am sure of it. The only thing I am not looking forward to is spending time at the airport. I’ve had enough of that lately, especially spending extra time due to delayed flights.

We never expected that a one week trip would be even remotely close to enough time to do everything we wanted to do. However, it seems like our itinerary is already packed and we haven’t even included all the things that we thought we could fit in. Oh well, tough luck for us. Means we have to go back there soon-ish. lol Either during the course of the Montreal-Boston trip, which we’ve been thinking about for at least a year — or separately, for another dedicated NYC trip.

Yesterday, Brigette took the car in to be fixed. Since we are having the work done by Dueck (they are conveniently located, almost on Brigette’s way to work), I was joking last week that she’ll “get a Chevrolet Cobalt” as a courtesy car for sure. I was referring to how not impressed we both were with it, when I ended up getting one as a rental car in the Bay Area. We both drove it on our little road trip from San Jose to Napa and back to San Francisco. It sucked really bad. The worst “feature”: totally mushy breaks.

Apparently, it wasn’t just that one Cobalt that we got in California. The one they’ve given Brigette seems just as bad, which doesn’t really come as a surprise (the car in California was basically brand new, so it couldn’t have been worn out or anything). Here’s a picture of it (the red car in the foreground). It looks half decent, but it so doesn’t live up to its looks. I am not even kidding when I say that we are both agreeing that this must be the worst vehicle that either of us has ever driven.

Not that we had any plans on doing so before, but now we sure know that we aren’t going to get a Chevrolet any time soon. Especially not a Cobalt. While their other vehicles may not be that bad, it makes one still wonder: if you can build decent cars, why not do it consistently? And if you can’t, why are people still buying from you? There are plenty of good, affordable cars out there, these days.

Yesterday’s dinner was indeed a very lovely, memorable experience. This is us before getting on the plane:

And here’s an aerial shot of our lovely city:

There are more pictures in my photo gallery.

I didn’t take a picture of the food, but it was quite yummy. I had a big bowl of clam chowder followed by BBQed ribs and chicken. I had a baked potato with sour cream, bacon and cheese and some yummy salad on the side. For dessert we were served my all-time favorite: cheese cake. Unfortunately, I was getting too full to finish it. — And that’s despite my 2^nd stomach that’s reserved just for desserts. lololol I found it all quite tasty.

Brigette had the same appetizer and the same dessert. However, she opted for salmon — prepared in the kitchen, as opposed to my meal from the out-door grill. We both found her salmon to be a little bland.

After the meal we enjoyed some nice conversation with two British couples who were doing the same float plane + dinner + ferry + limo package that we had signed up for. Apparently, both couples travel quite a bit.

The trip back on the ferry was short, and the limo ride a classy ending to a lovely evening.