A self indulgence

Shit happens -- even to google

2009-02-04T01:23:00.003-05:00

Everyone knows of the now infamous google malware database corruption. Google was able to fix the issue quickly, which is great and all. But what really impresses me is their open attitude when it comes to their end user products, like this post on the gmail blog.

You may be a big headless giant robot, but you're our big headless giant robot.

Renaming MP3 by ID tag

2009-01-11T10:29:00.003-05:00

Ever tried to recover from an IPOD dump, and get a bunch of files with the useless names? Here's a script to fix that.

$ ls *.mp3 | ./rename.pl - | while read line; do OLD=`echo $line | cut -d, -f1`; NEW=`echo $line | cut -d, -f2`; mv "$OLD" "$NEW"; done

And here's the perl script:

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
#Your Love Means Everything.mp3: (tag v1.0)
#songname: Your Love Means Everything
#artist: Coldplay
#album: Varie
#year:
#comment:
#genre: Other(12)
#

while( <> )
{
chomp;
my %hsh = ();
my @info = `id3ed -i "$_"`;
foreach my $iline ( @info )
{
chomp $iline;
#print $iline . "\n";
if( $iline =~ /songname:\s+\b(.+?)$/ ){
$hsh{ song } = $1;
}
if( $iline =~ /artist:\s+\b(.+?)$/ ){
$hsh{ artist } = $1;
}
if( $iline =~ /album:\s+\b(.+?)$/ ){
$hsh{ album } = $1;
}
}

my $newname = "$hsh{ artist }" . "-" . "$hsh{ album }" . "-" . "$hsh{ song }" . ".mp3";
$newname =~ s/\s+/_/g;
print "$_,$newname\n";
}

Autologging in and running app in X

2009-01-05T11:20:00.003-05:00

I've been keen on doing this for some time, but a combination of:

lack of need
lack of time

have kept me from doing any real testing on a good solution. But someone has already done the work!

Coffee Roaster

2008-12-25T13:27:00.005-05:00

Just received my christmas gift, and it's the gift that keeps giving.

Lovely art from a co-worker

2008-12-22T09:49:00.002-05:00

Found this on the whiteboard next to my desk this morning...

... aww thanks.

My first fvwm module

2008-12-10T14:31:00.004-05:00

I've been using FVWM for some time now, but have never tried writing any kind of modules to extend it. Yesterday I tried it out, and I've got my first working FVWM module.

I wrote the module in Perl, and you can view there source here. Basically what it does is capture window focus events, and will set the transparency of the window to whatever is set in a configuration file

pblair@laptop:~$ cat ~/.fvwm/fvwmPeteTrans.cfg
XTerm:0.60

The above config will set all xterminals to 60% opacity when the focus moves away from it, but will return it to complete opacity once focus returns to it.

You can add as many types of applications (one per line). For instance, Firefox has

$ xprop | grep CLASS
WM_CLASS(STRING) = "Navigator", "Firefox"

So you could either place "Navigator" or "Firefox" at the left of the colon.

To install the module, place it somewhere where the .fvwmrc ModulePath will find it, then place it into the StartFunction section:

AddToFunc StartFunction
+ I Module FvwmPeteTransFocus
+ I FvwmButtons

P.S. You need "xcompmgr" and "transset" installed. And be sure to change the absolute pathnames within the module to the respective locations on your system.

Guerilla Refactoring

2008-12-09T09:45:00.003-05:00

In the world of software development, refactoring is the process of updating code (usually for the better). But the problem may exist where management sees the existing application as "good enough" and doesn't want to allocate any budget towards fixing what in their eyes "aint broke".

Enter guerilla refactoring.

I must admit that I fall victim to this. I find lots of things at work that could be expanded upon, or made better, which would drastically increase the use of the package, make it more robust, or simply more elegant and orthogonal. I ensure that it doesn't eat into my work time, and the end product is usually something that I will directly benefit from, but hopefully also something that will make someone else's life better/easier/simpler.

P.S. I recommend this podcast from NPR.

Long time no see

2008-12-09T08:50:00.002-05:00

It's been about a year and a half since my last entry. I had lost complete interest in blogging and any self self congratulations that come with the territory.

But I'm starting to feel like I have more to share again, and I hope to see more posts here in the near future.

Shiny new iPod

2007-12-06T00:01:00.000-05:00

Received a third-gen iPod nano on Monday as a thank-you for some work that I've been doing (at work), and just finally got the thing working!

These third-gen buggers require that the iTunesDB be signed with the device's serial number.

First I had to find the serial number by doing a "find" on "/proc" and grepping for "usb". The device came up, and I simply "cat"-ed the file to get the serial number.

Then, I used gnupod to sign my DB, using the command:

mktunes.pl -m /media/IPOD/ --fwguid=$(cat ~/ipod.serial )

Presto-- songs! No need to iTunes (well.. I don't run windows or OSX), but I just need to figure out how to get video and calendars onto this, and I'm set-- woohoo!

BGP + RBL == Scary?

2007-06-02T02:28:00.000-04:00

Well, we'll see.

http://www.pch.net/documents/tutorials/maps-rbl-bgp-cisco-config-faq.html

It makes sense, but something in my gut worries me when the router is automagically null-routing based on a RBL. Maybe I don't grasp the power of it... I'm looking forward to any discussion on this at MAAWG.

A new house

2007-06-01T23:40:00.001-04:00

Katharine and I bought a new house last week. I'd say more, but she already has.

Change of view

2007-05-13T11:39:00.000-04:00

This is entirely premature, but...

It looks like I'll be changing departments at work. The paperwork still needs to go through, but it looks like I'll be working in the Abuse department at work. I'm really looking forward to the change and the challenge. I was told that they need someone with both system-admin and programming skills, and that I suited that nicely.

With a mailbox count in the millions, email abuse (as well as abuse in other departments) is a critical aspect to the company. Untold dollars are wasted by abusers who eat bandwidth, annoy customers, ruin our reputation as a provider, etc etc.

Once things become official, I'll post more details. Until then, here's to counting the days!

Children of Hurin

2007-04-19T02:59:00.000-04:00

Just picked up a copy of the Children of Hurin from Book City earlier tonight-- It's been a while since I've had any time to read any fiction, and am really looking forward to this book. I only learned of it three days ago via radio, and was surprised by the low media attention that it has received-- I would imagine that following the critical hype of the LOTR films, that any new material from JRR Tolkien would be met by more attention.

Apparently not.

Perl programmer, who me?

2007-03-24T02:07:00.000-04:00

Yikes-- it's true. Just purchased Programming Perl, 3rd Ed., from Chapters and am starting to pick it up.

First impressions: It's a damned ugly language to work with, but is very flexible, so I understand why so many sys-admins love it; you can really hack together a quick and dirty application in no time flat.

We'll see how much I like it as time goes.

Video: Advanced Python

2007-03-13T01:31:00.000-04:00

An interesting hour and fifteen minutes:

Spammers... damned spammers

2006-12-30T11:49:00.000-05:00

Here's a screenshot of a little python application that I wrote to manage some spammers on the system. I've 'sed'ed their domains to example.com, but it basically shows how many messages are currently queued on one of our outbound smtp servers.

Every shift, I run an application that monitors the queues, and when an individual account exceeds the maximum number of allowed egress messages, my application logs it, and removes it from the queue.

But, spammers are smart little buggers, so they of course create multiple accounts from which they spam a little bit from.

My software is smart enough that it keeps track of all found spammers from the past 30 days, and simplifies their email address, then compares that to all of the email addresses in the current out queue. If the simplified "known spammer" address matches any of the current addresses, then those current addresses are treated as a single address and their queues are aggregated. If the aggregate exceeds the threshold, then all messages are removed and the synonymous accounts are flagged as spammers for later termination.

Note: The addresses in the above screen cap are the ones that come out of the filter against the known/previous offenders. Only usernames that have been previously declared spammers are aggregated.

Oh, and here's a little graph showing the outbound message queue on a single server. The drop was when I started work that day.

New phone

2006-11-06T15:38:00.000-05:00

Just replaced the broken phones with some non-broken ones. Attached are some pictures taken on them.

Python: Functional programming

2006-10-25T14:41:00.000-04:00

I'm trying to get used to functional programming and I must admit, it's kinda fun!

Here's a trivial example using both generators, and built in functions to acheive the same result:

Leslie Lamport

2006-10-05T15:55:00.000-04:00

I just stumbled upon Leslie Lamport's website, which has electronic copies of most of his published work.

I've studied some of Lamport's work in the past (mainly in regards to Lamport Logical Clocks & totally ordered multicasting, etc) and was recently doing some digging to find out how & why he created the LaTeX extensions to TeX.

That was when I came upon his papers.. wow.

Graduate school

2006-09-15T23:56:00.000-04:00

Katharine has submitted her final MRP to the school of graduate studies, and will do her oral defence in just under a week. Should all go well, then she'll have her MA.

This has gotten me thinking about my own future possibilites in graduate school. I have the marks, and just have to maintain my average with the requisite math courses (Calculus, Linear Algebra, Statistic) and my current courses.

I spoke with a professor with whom I'm aquainted, and I must admit that he's piqued my interest in pursuing a M.Sc at Trent.

This means that I'll have to pay higher attention to my studies, since I've (until now) been treating my B.Sc. as a terminating degree.

First day of class

2006-09-13T11:41:00.000-04:00

New semester started up yesterday and I captured the telemetry of my drive. Below is a screencap from an internal application used to inspect data drom our onboard electronic recording device (nice name, eh?).

kd-tree creation tutorial

2006-09-09T23:58:00.000-04:00

I've started work on the walkthrough mentioned in my previous post. It doesn't touch on topics such as searches of the completed tree, but sticks to the theory behind the creation and balancing of the resulting tree.

The graphic(s) for the walkthrough were created using graphviz. I wrote a small utility module in python that is used by the tutorial to generate the images.

New school semester

2006-09-08T15:56:00.000-04:00

Starting a new semester at school next week. Will be at school three days and at work three days, with Sunday off.

Will post more once classes have begun.

Here's a screenshot of some trip data aquired from a test device installed in my car.

I hope to post a demonstration of kd-trees using Python in the not too distant future. It should be fun.

Cisco Switch -> NIC problems

2006-08-11T10:07:00.000-04:00

The other day I noticed terrible transfer rates between two UNIX servers at work. Both were autonegotiating to 100Mbit/full-duplex, but the switch port that the slow server was on was showing a lot of 'orange blinks'.

I figured that the switch wasn't setup for 100Mbit/full, so I sent an email to the manager of that switch and he replied that all ports were forced to 100-fd.

After googling, I came accross this table which outlines all of the possible mis-matches in switch/nic configuration that could cause duplex-mismatch and create a ton of collissions.

I forced the server's nic to 100fd and was able to transfer at 80Mb/s again.

Then I started thinking...At our remote location we were experiencing terrible transfer rates of ~200Kb/s on the Internet. I double checked, and found that the firewall's (a freebsd 6.1 machine) internal nic which is serving as an 802.1q vlan trunk had autonegotiated to 100Mb-half-duplex!

I logged into the switch at the co-location and forced all ports to 100-full then did the same with all nics on the server.

After the switch & firewall renegotiated, I was able to get 40Mb/s transfer rates through the firewall to the internal servers.

Unbelievable.

How not to make coffee

2006-07-13T10:57:00.000-04:00

In the past few weeks we've had a number of humourous (and dangerous!) coffee experiences such as mixing boiling water in the coffee grinder, turning the coffee maker off after the first cup, etc etc.

Here's a picture of today's coffee.

Online storage with Box.Net

2006-07-12T14:43:00.000-04:00

Signed up for a free account with box.net today. You get 1GB of storage space with the limitation of 10MB files.

This size limitation on the "free" account is a little annoying, but it's easy enough to split my files first.

We'll see if I'm still using the service in a month.

Some benchmarks

2006-07-06T12:40:00.000-04:00

Did a few simple benchmarks on a couple of FreeBSD machines at work that are used to VPN our Hamilton & Toronto locations.

tpgvpn1:

OpenSSL 0.9.7e-p1 25 Oct 2004
built on: Wed Apr 12 10:24:56 EDT 2006
options:bn(64,32) md2(int) rc4(idx,int) des(ptr,risc1,16,long) aes(partial) blowfish(idx)
compiler: cc
available timing options: USE_TOD HZ=128 [sysconf value]
timing function used: getrusage
The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes
md2 1638.20k 3516.44k 4954.45k 5548.25k 5704.30k
mdc2 5364.32k 6914.55k 7521.42k 7624.97k 7705.83k
md4 12433.45k 47035.26k 136420.21k 306165.92k 481776.95k
md5 11107.62k 38561.00k 109706.75k 210811.74k 287746.12k
hmac(md5) 14013.40k 49112.06k 131354.82k 229386.40k 291448.39k
sha1 9059.35k 25369.27k 57307.40k 88381.24k 105989.38k
rmd160 7511.49k 22129.82k 46165.80k 67428.84k 78017.10k
rc4 93653.74k 109422.32k 113919.20k 115308.83k 115680.63k
des cbc 58475.17k 61181.88k 62006.46k 62025.47k 61894.47k
des ede3 21643.57k 21967.56k 22083.05k 22130.20k 22114.93k
idea cbc 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
rc2 cbc 20740.90k 22695.78k 22893.82k 23239.87k 22849.82k
rc5-32/12 cbc 147578.81k 158957.43k 168257.95k 171201.41k 171239.86k
blowfish cbc 94637.96k 101551.60k 102807.14k 103450.35k 103305.91k
cast cbc 83145.40k 88404.94k 89604.76k 90079.13k 89946.25k
aes-128 cbc 62447.41k 62234.48k 64136.66k 64602.90k 63681.85k
aes-192 cbc 55820.88k 55668.59k 56812.85k 56763.62k 56988.42k
aes-256 cbc 50017.98k 50337.99k 51038.58k 50574.14k 51127.44k
sign verify sign/s verify/s
rsa 512 bits 0.0009s 0.0001s 1115.8 11984.3
rsa 1024 bits 0.0044s 0.0002s 228.6 4268.8
rsa 2048 bits 0.0265s 0.0008s 37.8 1308.3
rsa 4096 bits 0.1756s 0.0027s 5.7 368.7
sign verify sign/s verify/s
dsa 512 bits 0.0007s 0.0009s 1370.6 1118.1
dsa 1024 bits 0.0022s 0.0027s 455.8 370.8
dsa 2048 bits 0.0073s 0.0087s 137.3 114.3

core1:

OpenSSL 0.9.7e-p1 25 Oct 2004
built on: Sun May 7 03:08:51 UTC 2006
options:bn(64,32) md2(int) rc4(idx,int) des(ptr,risc1,16,long) aes(partial) blowfish(idx)
compiler: cc
available timing options: USE_TOD HZ=128 [sysconf value]
timing function used: getrusage
The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes
md2 689.54k 1497.71k 2116.48k 2362.59k 2444.21k
mdc2 2582.80k 3138.69k 3315.10k 3368.65k 3376.00k
md4 5538.51k 20431.26k 66112.68k 150588.74k 239281.97k
md5 4837.07k 17335.76k 52498.88k 106514.46k 152909.54k
hmac(md5) 8870.64k 29192.61k 75483.85k 126350.29k 157551.74k
sha1 4349.97k 13238.35k 34171.43k 56445.42k 69773.18k
rmd160 4158.92k 13428.72k 33624.91k 53853.32k 65470.42k
rc4 131339.75k 149218.64k 159794.61k 162431.71k 163566.16k
des cbc 29754.63k 30797.61k 31205.75k 31267.00k 31324.31k
des ede3 10977.26k 11112.41k 11175.22k 11194.61k 11194.92k
idea cbc 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
rc2 cbc 11394.78k 11796.30k 11897.23k 11932.45k 11929.00k
rc5-32/12 cbc 82203.59k 94505.04k 100379.68k 101657.50k 102098.28k
blowfish cbc 45409.02k 48400.70k 49780.22k 50007.64k 50007.22k
cast cbc 44914.14k 47809.21k 49023.44k 49306.77k 49333.89k
aes-128 cbc 30723.93k 31820.69k 32113.55k 32244.90k 32282.16k
aes-192 cbc 26401.29k 27386.46k 27623.19k 27743.82k 27753.52k
aes-256 cbc 23762.41k 24460.65k 24633.90k 24730.52k 24737.95k
sign verify sign/s verify/s
rsa 512 bits 0.0012s 0.0001s 856.6 8413.9
rsa 1024 bits 0.0053s 0.0003s 188.3 3317.8
rsa 2048 bits 0.0305s 0.0009s 32.8 1069.9
rsa 4096 bits 0.1997s 0.0031s 5.0 320.0
sign verify sign/s verify/s
dsa 512 bits 0.0009s 0.0011s 1095.4 921.7
dsa 1024 bits 0.0026s 0.0031s 390.3 321.2
dsa 2048 bits 0.0084s 0.0103s 119.4 96.9

And now for the bandwidth:

[peterb@tpgvpn1] netperf> /usr/local/netperf/netperf -H 204.15.193.30 12865
TCP STREAM TEST to 204.15.193.30
Recv Send Send
Socket Socket Message Elapsed
Size Size Size Time Throughput
bytes bytes bytes secs. 10^6bits/sec

65536 32768 32768 10.04 5.75

Been offline for some time

2006-07-05T00:42:00.000-04:00

Just writing to say that I haven't abandoned this blog. Just with work full time, and family full time, I haven't found the time (or motivation?) to sit down and write anything of substance or worth in a while. Here's a quick list of things that have happened in the past few months:

Winnifred started pre-school
Started work full-time
...
That's about it

Well, the list is rather small and not very impressive, but its contents have been keeping me very busy!

A finish to exams

2006-04-27T16:00:00.000-04:00

Just finished my last exam. Now I just have to finish writing a report on AFS and my semester is complete.

I've backed up all of my unix/netware files to my new flash disk (1gig) that I bought last night along with a new laser printer (brother hl-2040) for Katharine. We've been without a printer for ~6months, and it's been a real pain in the neck. After being able to print out all of my course notes to study with last night, I was regretting having put off the printer purchase for so long.

If anyone is in the market, I highly recomend getting a monochrome laser. The quality is beautiful, and how often are you really printing colour?

Davis' Computer is Vegetarian

2006-04-26T11:23:00.000-04:00

I recently did a 'w' command on a shell server to see who was online, and my friend's remote hostname came up as: "CPEbadbadbeeeef...".

Now, that hostname belongs to Rogers internet, and they (appear to) use a combination of strings and hex values to denote their customers' address.

I just find this (arbitrary) address funny.

Note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0xdeadbeef is a funny little bit of trivia

Messy Girls

2006-04-12T12:23:00.000-04:00

Since Fin is tube-fed, she hasn't really developed much of an appetite, but she still likes to get messy with the rest of us during meals.

Attached are a few pictures of her eating palenta & pesto.

Oh, and Fin's learning to crawl:

Personal Web News Aggregator

2006-04-07T15:47:00.000-04:00

I've just written a little python programme to pull a number of news xml files, and present them on my website for viewing.

It by no means compares with certain browser based news aggregators, but there are times when I'm at a computer that cannot run such aggregators, so it's nice to be able to simply go to my website and view them there.

There's also a link at the bottom my news page to the script's source code.

Deletion in RET Gene / Fin's Gear

2006-04-04T00:44:00.000-04:00

Today the geneticist called with results from her DNA tests which confirmed the suspicion that her RET gene was "garbled" in some manner. Our next step is for Katharine & I to get tested to determine if we're carriers of the faulty gene, or if Fin developed the gene deformity all on her own.

It really doesn't make a difference to us, but it helps the greater research in Hirschprung's & genome mapping.

I've decided to post a couple of pictures of Fin and her gear for a few people who've shown interest in what kind of gear she sports.

Fin's Ostomy:

Fin's G-Tube (her feeding tube):

Fin all dressed:

Just Fin:

Dinner

2006-04-04T00:23:00.000-04:00

On Friday we had a friend over for a nice light dinner. Now that it's spring time, we decided that a lighter dinner was in order (plus, it leaves more room for desert!).

Stephanie is always a good person to have over because she never gives any of our vegan recipes a funny look.

I think that the salad was a hit with everyone. Also, we had some neat sodas.

Down with protected class variables?

2006-03-31T09:56:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure.

Kasia writes in her blog entry:

If a variable is not final then it should be private. If you need to make it accessible to another class and there is no accessor then you're probably not doing something right.

While true, that making fields/attributes publicly available via an interface of sorts (not "Interface in the sense of an abstract class, but just in the sense of certain known methods), and not directly from a "friend" class/function or a derived sub-class.

But, unless the compiler is doing some inlining for you, then the performance hit on making those extra accessor calls, and the extra layer of indirection seems prohibative.

But, then perhaps I'm forgetting that computers are constantly evolving and these kind of pre-conceived bottlenecks aren't actually anything to worry about.

Programming languages and their relationship styles

2006-03-27T10:23:00.000-05:00

http://maradydd.livejournal.com/293666.html

I particularly like the comment on C:

I don't think C gets enough credit. Sure, C doesn't love you. C isn't about love--C is about thrills. C hangs around in the bad part of town. C knows all the gang signs. C has a motorcycle, and wears the leathers everywhere, and never wears a helmet, because that would mess up C's punked-out hair. C likes to give cops the finger and grin and speed away. Mention that you'd like something, and C will pretend to ignore you; the next day, C will bring you one, no questions asked, and toss it to you with a you-know-you-want-me smirk that makes your heart race. Where did C get it? "It fell off a truck," C says, putting away the boltcutters. You start to feel like C doesn't know the meaning of "private" or "protected": what C wants, C takes. This excites you. C knows how to get you anything but safety. C will give you anything but commitment

In the end, you'll leave C, not because you want something better, but because you can't handle the intensity. C says "I'm gonna live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse," but you know that C can never die, not so long as C is still the fastest thing on the road.

I love this:

"You start to feel like C doesn't know the meaning of "private" or "protected": what C wants, C takes. This excites you. C knows how to get you anything but safety."

I love it!

It's very much worth the read.

C++ Exceptions: Continuance

2006-03-24T15:56:00.000-05:00

In designing a language that supports exception handling, one must consider the aspect of continuance: where does execution resume after the exception has been raised?

I recently came upon an online conversation of Bjarne Stroustrup, in which he discusses why resumption directly after the statement that raised the exception wasn't implemented.

Basically, someone resuming from an exception handler can never be sure that the code after the point of throw was written to deal with the excecution just continuing as if nothing had happened. An exception handler cannot know how much context to "get right" before resuming. To get such code right, the writer of the throw and the writer of the catch need intimate knowledge of each others code and context. This creates a complicated mutual dependency that wherever it has been allowed has led to serious maintenance problems.

This is probably of very little interest to many people, but I find it rather facinating to see why certain decisions were made.

The Art of UNIX Programming

2006-03-22T00:50:00.000-05:00

The current quote above ("When in doubt, use brute force") was retreived from the following book:

The Art of UNIX Programming

It's an interesting read (and free too!). It isn't a technical manual on how to write applications for the UNIX environment, but rather a philosphical approach for programming according to the (so called) UNIX philosophy.

The 17 rules are good rules to follow iregardless of the platform/language/environment that you work with. Also, the Interface Pattern page has a lot of insight on how to organise your tools. Make a number of small, flexible tools that can be used in conjunction to accomplish a number of tasks, instead of making a monolithic utility that tries to do everything itself.

I could go on & on, but instead you should go and check out the book for yourself. (Even if you're not a UNIX person)

Gak!

2006-03-22T00:23:00.000-05:00

Over the weekend, Fred Fin and I made Gak. It was our first time, and everyone had a lot of (messy) fun. Fin really got into it and required a little more cleaning off than the rest of us.

Software Eng.: FIT & JUnit

2006-03-14T00:51:00.000-05:00

Check out this article on IBM regarding a unit testing framework that enables business people to develop test cases using tools like excel.

SlickRun deserves its name

2006-03-14T00:36:00.000-05:00

Thanks to my friend Mirek, I've installed SlickRun on both my home & work Windows workstations.

It's quite neat -- after setting up some "magic words" for my most frequently used applications & websites, I rarely use the start button anymore.

Very neat.

Back in the hospital

2006-03-12T02:00:00.000-05:00

Today Fin started outputing more than usual. Katharine picked up some paedialites at the pharmacy & began replacing Fin's food with the paedialites 1:1.

At three-ish, I left work early to pick Katharine & the girls up and together we headed to Emergency at SickKids. She's been put on IV fluids & taken off of foods to give her stomach a rest while her virus runs its course.

It's 2am, and Winnifred & I just recently arrived at home -- unfortunately Katharine and Findley are still in observation until around 3 when paediatrics will finish their rounds and admin Findley into a room.

While we were waiting in Emergency, Winnifred and I were looking at a poster of cats when we heard:

"What, are, you, doing, here?"

We turned around to see Findley's surgeon, Dr. Annie Fecteau, who was on call that evening. She looked a little horrified to see us standing there, so I brought her up to speed on Findley's condition.

The thing about Findley & Dr. Fecteau is that as soon as Dr. Fecteau first operated on Findley, she, Dr. Fecteau became Findley's primary physician. Findley still has a Paediatrician, a GI team, a Nutruitionist, a Geneticist, a General Practitioner, and a few other teams that I'm forgetting at the moment. But, even if Findley develops a cold, Dr. Fecteau is her primary physician.

Imagine that, having a transplant surgeon being the first person you see as soon as you get sick.

Hopefully this stay at the hospital won't last more than five days or so. It will be interesting to find out what a stay in Paediatrics will be like. Most of our experience is on the surgical ward.

That said, here are a few comparison pictures of Fin in August, and her in January:

Spring Break

2006-03-06T11:14:00.000-05:00

Over spring break Katharine, Winnifred, Findley and I packed up the car and headed north the Mattawa to visit Katharine's grand father before driving west to Sudbury for two nights.

I hadn't been to Sudbury in about 14 years, so the visit experience was completely new to me. We all got a kick out of Science North, and seeing the Big Nickel was fun. But I think that the biggest hit of all was the swimming pool at the hotel. I didn't know it was so easy to impress a three year old.

After two nights in Sudbury, we got back into the car and headed south to Katharine's family farm for a stay at the cabin. The snow was about 2-3 feet deep, so we had to park the car at the house and walk all of our stuff back to the cabin. It was nice and insular; Having a wood burning stove was super cozy.

Unfortunately the girls were asleep at the time, but at about 5:30 - 6:00am when I was up putting more wood on the fire I saw some wild turkeys and a deer out of the window. My camera was burried deep in the bag so I wasn't able to snap any shots for Winnifred. Although later on, she and I treked through the snow looking at all of the animal tracks.

Most people don't head to Central/Northern Ontario on their Spring Break (in February), but it was quite fun.

Kick Sun out

2006-02-09T16:31:00.000-05:00

My school's SunLab is a collection of aging UltraSparc5 machines, and an Enterprise server running NFS & NIS for the workstations.

The workstations run fine if you limit your session to CDE, but if you try to log in with JavaDesktop (a Gnome variant) the systems quickly run out of their 256Megs of RAM and begin to thrash the swap space.

The funny thing is that my school has no Linux/FreeBSD/whatever workstations available (that I know of), but is content to limit its UNIX activities to the 20-something Ultra5s that are rotting away.

My solution would be to install a high-end x86 Linux server, offering account management via LDAP, and a number of mid-range servers running KDE as remote sessions.

The Ultra5s would be upgraded to Solaris 10 (currently sitting at 7) and be able to either:

Additionally, the school should offer a customized Linux BootCD with which students could place into any Windows XP workstation on campus and boot into Linux, and connect to the remote KDE servers.

The only additional hardware requirements would be the Authentication Server, and the Application Servers. The school could keep their crappy Ultra5s (they have nice monitors) and expand their UNIX footprint with Linux/KDE applications etc.

That said, a place like that would never be implemented.

Chubby Fin

2006-02-07T15:08:00.000-05:00

Findley's doing much better. She was only in hospital for about a week. It turned out that her inability to hold down food wasn't surgically related, but instead she had (at some point) contracted a stomach virus that was causing her to throw up.

The surgeons had her on an IV to keep her fluids up, and after a week, the virus seemed to have run it course, so she was discharged. She has since been putting on weight again, and is finally back on her growth-chart curve!!

It's nice to have the girl back at home.

Time away from computers

2006-01-26T13:24:00.000-05:00

It's been a month since my last post and a number of things have happened since then:

Finished exams
Findley had surgery to have her G-Tube inserted
Started winter classes
Findley re-admitted to surgery five days after being discharged due to an inability to tollerate her foods

Number one was good. Two was good. Three was good. Four, not so good.

As it turned out, Findley had contracted a stomach virus which was causing her to reflux and dump her meals/fluids. So she's currently back at SickKids on an IV for fluids while they monitor her & her fluid retention. I hesitate to say that she'll be home soon, because discharge dates always change as soon as you become attached to them. She is doing much better and the virus has almost completely run its course. We'll hopefully have her at home again soon.

Some sun links on ZFS

2005-12-10T15:59:00.001-05:00

ZFS is really quite amazing. My current hardware doesn't support it (well, my current hardware doesn't support solaris 10) so I haven't had a chance to actually try this new filesystem out, but from what I've read, it's tremendous.

Welcome to ZFS! (Brian Cantrill)
ZFS End-to-End Data Integrity (Jeff Bonwick)
RAID-Z (Jeff Bonwick)
Flash Demo of ZFS (Dan Price)
Flash Demo of ZFS - Self Healing (Dan Price)

People have talked about porting ZFS to Linux (which doesn't seem possible due to Linux's GPL licensing) and (Free/Open/Net)BSD.

Using "keychain" for FreeBSD

2005-12-08T23:59:00.000-05:00

Keychain is a really neat little application that makes OpenSSH's ssh-agent usable. ssh-agent (which comes with OpenSSH) is a utility program that reads your private ssh key, and stores it in memory so that it is used whenever creating an ssh connection. The problem is that you have to manually load it for it to work. And on top of that, every time that you load it, you have to enter your private passphrase.

Keychain takes care of all of that.

Keychain checks for any running ssh-agent, and attaches to it if found. Otherwise, it will execute it, and ask you for your passphrase. Now, whenever you open a new terminal, you won't have to enter your passphrase to use your private key!

This also works for the entire suite of SSH (scp, sftp, etc). So you can have a crontab entry that uses a scp call, and not have to use a key with an empty passphrase!

Below is a screenshot of keychain being setup on my FreeBSD workstation.

Once you've added your public key to your remote hosts' ".ssh" directory, you'll be able to log into your remote account without having to issue any passphrases!

Note: In the screenshot I type "killall keychain" which was wrong. I should've typed "killall ssh-agent".

Now I can log into my remote pine account by simply typing:

ssh -t username@remotehosts.com pine

Very handy.

Oh, and here's how I call keychain from my "~/.bashrc" script:

[p@bsd] ~ $ cat .bashrc
#!/usr/local/bin/bash

. /etc/profile

# start keychain
keychain id_dsa
. .keychain/bsd-sh

alias ls='ls -aFG'
alias pine='ssh -t username@remotehost.org pine'
[p@bsd] ~ $

Crash and Burn

2005-11-30T14:33:00.000-05:00

Over the weekend the power supply in my main PC winked out. One minute everything was fine, the next all was silent and the smell of burned wires & hair filled the room.

After replacing the power supply, my OSs were unable to boot. I think that the power supply took out some tracks on those drives, so I'll have to wait until the X-Mas break for some time to fix them. Until then, I'm working on my P2/FreeBSD machine which is working just fine.

On a side note, here's a picture of a former co-worker and I during a debug session.

Winnifred can write her name

2005-11-24T12:08:00.000-05:00

The other day Winnifred asked from the other room how to spell her name. This is what she wrote down (without assistance!)

(And she's not even three yet)

BST Assignment almost finished

2005-11-19T02:04:00.000-05:00

My partner & I just about wrapped up the coding portion of our DataStructures/Algorithms assignment 3.

It's a C++ application, heavy on the templates. Basically it implements a Binary Search Tree, balances it and displays the differences.

Here're a few screenshot of it in action:

Sun Tech Days: Toronto

2005-11-14T22:47:00.000-05:00

I won't be able to make it, but this event looks good.

It's too bad that they're charging $80 to attend.

Sun Download: Fatal Exception

2005-11-14T02:53:00.000-05:00

Here's the screen that I received after trying to download the new Java Developer IDE from Sun. Nice

Style and elegance

2005-11-09T23:15:00.000-05:00

http://www.alistapart.com/ is a nice site with lots of examples on CSS, design and philosophy.

Solaris 10 got it right

2005-11-08T22:56:00.000-05:00

Wow-- Finally someone has implemented this feature into their userland.

[28] /bin/rm -rf /
rm of / is not allowed
[29]

Beautiful!

Ring Ring! - New Phone

2005-11-05T23:17:00.000-05:00

Ok, I'm on my third cell phone in six months. It's better than it sounds.. I think.

Last week I switched cell providers and received a phone upgrade and a new number. Well, today I did it again.

I'm now the new proud owner of a Motorola V551 ( VGA Camera, Video & Bluetooth ) as well as (get this) a Peterborough phone number. Ha! It's ammusing to me considering that I live in Toronto, but I spend most of my days in Peterborough attending classes at Trent University. And since my phone is primarily used for talking with my wife, it was just a lot cheaper to get a 705 area code number.

Anyhow, it's a very slick little phone. Especially for someone like myself who treats their cellphone like a toaster. If it makes/receives phone calls, then I'm happy. Everything else is icing on the cake.

Here's a link to a review if you care.

Also, I think that I'll buy a USB Bluetooth dongle so that I can get the pictures off of my phone and to play around with it a bit. After spending 2+ years co-developing a bluetooth stack for embedded devices, you'd think that I'd be sick of the stuff... guess not.

Oh, here's an awesome link to some Motorola/Linux stuff.

Design Patterns

2005-11-03T14:16:00.000-05:00

Well, it looks like I am learning some things at school.

In my Object Oriented Design class, we were discussing the usefulness of the singleton class. I've been doing just this before, but in a less than elegant manner.

First, a singleton is an object that can only be instantiated once. It handles this by making its construtor(s) private, and having a class method called "instance", which returns a pointer to an instantiated object. This pointer being a class attribute of the said class.

Now, the elegance of this method is that it doesn't pollute the global namespace (in C++). I've always done something along these lines:

static Whatever * instance = NULL;

Whatever * Instance(void)
{
if( instance == NULL )
instance = new Whatever();
return instance;
}

Now, in my implementation, there's a big ugly function "::Instance()" in the global namespace, which is fine for small applications, but lousy for larger ones, or libraries.

The singleton fixes this by having its initializer scoped by the class name.

Nice.

=====

Some handy links:

Surgury number 3

2005-11-03T12:33:00.000-05:00

Findley's surgery went well. It was only a day surgury, so we were out of the hospital by 3pm(ish) which was really nice. The surgeon is letting us take care of her aftercare instead of ordering a daily visit from the nurse. We have a surgical clinic visit in about three weeks to review the recovery and healing of the surgury.

A nice thing happened while being discharged. When Findley was recovering from her 2nd surgury, her doctor/surgeon went on a two week leave and another staff surgeon took over Findley's case.

While we were being discharged by our surgeon, the replacement surgeon walked in to take care of something, and our surgeon mentioned to him who Findley was ("This is Findley Blair"). The 2nd surgeon couldn't believe Findley's progress and was just a little taken by her.

It's really nice to see (from the Doctors) that your kid isn't just a body part that needs to be fixed, but is a person and someone's child. That was really nice to see from both of them.

Halloween

2005-11-03T12:31:00.000-05:00

Halloween came and went, and I missed the entire thing.

Had to be in Peterborough that night, and missed the fun of trick or treating with the girls. Winnifred was a lion & Findley was a mouse. I'll post some pictures as soon as I download them from the camera.

Queueing Theory

2005-10-31T00:16:00.000-05:00

Finishing off an assignment for my Data Structures and Algorithms course and felt like posting a small snippit of my work.

The assignment is fairly straight forward, and once you've wrapped your head around the problem, everything pretty much falls into place.

Basically, the assignment is an exercise in Queueing Theory. In particular, it's a simulation of the length of the wait queue of a bank, given a certain number of tellers, the time it takes for a teller to service a customer, and the interarrival time of customers at the bank.

It's not due for another week, so I can't post any more code until it has been handed in. But I would like to explore this topic more in the future as it can be applied to a whole variety of simulations ( eg network traffic, etc. ).

Well, back to coding!

Programming Challenge

2005-10-30T04:04:00.000-05:00

Looks like Sun has yet another programming challenge. I think that these are great, but I can't help but laugh a little because Sun is getting a bunch of students to write software for projects that ( I assume ) don't have enough interested engineers at Sun.

The prize ( a Ultra 20 Workstation ) is an apealing prize, but you mustn't have much on your plate if you're willing to pour enough time into a project that may be profitable.

Well, good luck to those who try this one!

Some time at the cabin

2005-10-26T23:31:00.000-04:00

Katharine, Winnifred, Findley & I spent a few nights away at the cabin. I have a week away from classes and it was just the excuse that we needed to get away from everything and enjoy some time to ourselves.

Attached are some random pictures taken during the trip. One picture of a large "puddle" in the road is actually the result of a beaver dam overflowing a swamp over the road. We weren't able to get any good pictures of the beaver, but he didn't seem to care that our car was idling feet away from him while he worked.

Algebra

2005-10-21T00:20:00.000-04:00

Working on a Linear Algebra assignment and needed a bit of a break..

I'm solving systems of linear equations, and thought that Maple might be helpful, but unfortunately it doesn't show its steps, so it's not the answer to my prayers that I was hoping for.

Well, I guess that after tonight I'll be able to say that I can balance chemical equations using Gauss-Jordan elimination.

Well, I should get back to the pencil & paper method. Perhaps some tea first...

A first

2005-10-19T04:01:00.000-04:00

Just setup my first blog, so here's my first entry.

Nothing to say yet, so a couple of images will have to suffice.