The customer release mentioned in my last post is done. Numerous problems were had. Took about five times as long as it was supposed to, but I got there in the end. Seems I should write a help document on this clustering stuff since everything out there on the internet is rubbish.
*collapses*
*orders Japanese R2 DVDs for late January in anticipation of a good paycheck*
So I’m doing a rather complex software change for a customer’s production system tomorrow morning (Yes that’s right, on Sunday). Can’t do it on a weekday as preventing a few hundred people from doing their jobs for a few hours isn’t a viable option. The aim is to provide a bunch of their Linux-based Oracle application servers concurrent access to a shared Storage Area Network (SAN) device. For those unfamiliar with these terms think multiple computers which are all able to read and write from the same hard disc at the same time. That’s pretty much what it is except that in the SAN there’s actually more like sixteen hard drives, and they are connected to the computers with fibre optic cables so everything happens really really fast (Yes, this kind of hardware is crazy expensive).
My description makes it sound a bit easier than it actually is because if left to their own devices computers sharing a disc will normally end up overwriting each other’s changes corrupting everything. i.e. You lose all your data. The trick is to make the computers all think as one so that they can share nicely together without fighting amongst themselves. In computing terms this means putting them in a cluster. This aspect is really the trickier part of what I’m doing tomorrow.
I think I’m really well prepared actually. I’ve set up a number of clusters now for testing purposes and feel like I know the software and the fairly sizable process to set everything up like the back of my hand. I guess it’s just the complexity of it all and the the fact that it’s such a major system that I’m feeling rather paranoid about it all with only a few hours to go. I mean to make this all work there’s probably a good twenty or so pieces that all have to come together and if even one of them goes awry it’ll cause me a world of hurt.
Ah well. I think I’ve prepared as much as I can and everything I could do in advance has been. No point worrying about it I guess. All going well though there will be a big load off my shoulders tomorrow afternoon. *is optimistic*
Had a day trip up to Auckland last week for a RedHat sponsored event at the Langham hotel. I did find the event itself reasonably worthwhile in the sense it provided some case studies of the kinds of systems I’ve been working with myself in recent times. Overall though it felt very much like a hard-sell with little real technical meat. This was especially the case with the second JBoss session. Time doing something different is always welcome though.
Managed to do lunch at Kiraku on Elliot St which was just as great second time around. It’s definitely my new favourite lunch spot in Auckland. With the time we’d be getting back to Hamilton it wasn’t worth going back to work so instead we took our time coming home. It was a great day overall though. It was one of my tasks to choose the CDs for the journey and I attempted to cover the bases. Some choices were successful and others not so much. On a related note I really need to pick up more Suzanne Vega albums.
More recently one of my aunts has been staying with us for a few days. Today we had plans to go “somewhere”, but the decision on the actual destination was left to the last minute. When the time came to choose my aunt expressed a desire to visit Raglan so off we went. Of course there’s not a lot to the town of Raglan so we ended up at Ngarunui Beach which is probably one of the better surf beaches in the country. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve last been out there and I must say I’m really regretting not making it there more often. Back in the summers of my uni days there were times I’d head out to Ngarunui beach most weekends. I had two groups of friends who loved the place which meant I ended up there twice as often. (This reminds me, we really need to catch up and do this again sometime Kingsley). The day was perfect for it and I managed to completely avoid sunburn too so it was a total success all round.
On a semi-related note for those that know my reddish facial complexion and may wonder as to the cause, the real reason is unfortunately childhood sun damage. 
No doubt my skin cancer risk in later life is quite high, but unfortunately with my pale skin as a young child I used to get badly burnt with even the tiniest bit of sun exposure. My skin has adjusted in recent years such that I don’t really burn much these days, but of course that’s little help now. At this point all I can do is try to avoid additional damage.
Most of my other spare time lately has been spend with family and the like. 5-6 birthdays this month. (Yes, you read that right). I’m still not entirely back up to date with the anime this season. Caught back up with Shikabane Hime Aka which has tended to be a bit average lately, and Michiko to Hatchin while I’m really enjoying. Bring on the DVDs.
nostalgicThis is the first Sunday I’ve been able to spend entirely at home it in the last two months or so and it makes a nice change. Managed to tie up a few loose ends with various things I’ve been doing in a relaxed fashion. I’m so looking forward to my Christmas holidays and actually having the chance to make some proper progress on the various projects I have going as well as catching up with some well needed rest.
Anime-wise I had been slipping a bit behind with the admittedly excessive amount of shows I’d been watching recently. Managed to catch back up on Akane-Iro ni Somaru Saka and Toradora in the last few days. The more I see of the latter the more the internet hate for the show seems unjustified. Also started watching Astro Fighter Sunred which amuses me in many of the same ways the reecently finished Detroit Metal City did. Hoping to catch back up with Ga-Rei Zero tonight.
Not had any time for gaming in the last few days although Eternal Poison for the PS2 has arrived along with what I have to say is the best artbook I’ve yet seen included with a game. The Christmas game release lists have been especially poor this year. The only release I care about in the next month is Persona 4 and I don’t intend to start that until after finishing Persona 3 FES properly. In other Shin Megami Tensei related gaming news I applied to beta test for the upcoming Shin Megami Tensei MMORPG a while back. Hope I get accepted in. No word yet on an english port of Devil Summoner: Raid? Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon (another Shin Megami Tensei spin-off) yet either. I have no idea how well the first game did, but I thoroughly enjoyed it personally.
Also had the latest Sunn 0))) live album, Domkirke, arrive a few days back. It’s an album that I suspect won’t appeal to many but may prove of interest to the adventurous. The genre of Sunn 0)))’s music is typically referred to as “drone doom” or “drone metal”. Heavy with plenty of guiter, but little in the way of traditional beat or rhythm.
With Domkirke Sunn 0))) were invited to perform in the 12-th century Norwegian Domkirke cathedral and added the cathedral’s pipe organ into their sound. I’d describe it, but it’s easier to quote the cathedral curator Nicholas Mollerhaug.
Our idea behind this concert was to commission a piece of music from Sunn O))) referring to the gothic Gregorian hymns of the late Middle Ages. Hymns that flourished at Bergen Cathedral in its earliest years: the age of the Great Famine and the Black Plague. The Gregorian hymns of this time reflected the despair, the terrors and darkness of the world. Musically the hymns consisted of long slow lines of unison melodies. The unisonity, the dark mood and the slow melodic development are also elements that can be traced back to Sunn O)))’s musical universe.
The album was only released on 180 gram vinyl across two LPs so needless to say my turntable has been getting a workout lately. These are the heaviest and most well made LPs I’ve yet seen. The same can be said of the cardboard sleeve.
Oh, and Malcolm. I don’t know if you read my blog or not, but you need to write that Oblivion review on your blog that you keep talking about.
I mentioned car problems in my last post and these have thankfully been resolved. My car while not entirely on it’s last legs is at the point it’s going to start costing money more regularly. Due to this I’m actively planning to replace it early next year. I’d do it now, but the thought of adding car shopping into the inevitably hectic December schedule really isn’t appealing. At least in January I’ll have some time off to dedicate to the task.
No idea what kind of car I’ll end up with yet. I’m not someone who dislikes cars per-se. You might even say I’m somewhat enthusiastic about them, and there’s certainly many exotic and expensive ones I’ve love to drive. That said the running and maintenance costs extinguish my enthusiasm for anything outside of the square in ways akin to putting out a lit match with a high pressure water blaster. So I’ll probably end up with something boring that will ideally be good at the banal a-to-b malarkey while remaining reasonably cheap to maintain.
Valkyria Chronicles for PS3 arrived a week or so back now and any time I’ve had spare for gaming has been spend in that direction. I’m really impressed by what they’ve done with this game. When I first saw video of the game running in trailers many months ago I thought it looked promising (especially artistically), but there was little sign of any gameplay and I was skeptical. It also was being put out by SEGA and even the most die-hard SEGA fans would have to admit the company has put out little worth playing since they killed the Dreamcast.
No, each time I saw more about Valkyria Chronicles the more I could see it was something I wanted to play…no HAD to play. At that point buying it was not an option, it was a necessity. This contrasts with my experience of Mirror’s Edge where each new bit of information served to put me progessively more off the game, but I digress.Valkyria Chronicles is not without it’s flaws, but those that are there pale compared to the rest of the experience. I think I’d go as far as saying it’s the best 2008 game I’ve played so far. Still a few weeks for something to edge it out though. *is optimistic*
As a final note I have to take an obligatory swipe at the Linux Clustering and Global File System suites. You wouldn’t think when you’re spending tens of thousands on severs and SANs full of more hard drives than you’d feasibly count on your fingers that you’d have any trouble sharing a few files between cluster nodes. Why is the documentaton for these tools so bad and why is the diagnostic output so archaic? We’re not talking your garden-variety open source here where they could accuse people of not being willing to pay. RedHat want to charge thousands of dollars for the priveledge of even enabling these features. Not impressed.
The last few days haven’t been especially great for me. To some degree it’s just too much to do but so little time. I also have had some unexpected costs rear their head (car, etc) which have clawed back all of the cash I mentioned was happily accumulating in my last post. I can’t complain too much, but my financial sixth-sense is telling me to minimize costs now lest the Christmas season require significant money micro-management.
Gaming-wise I’m mostly killing time until my copy of Valkyria Chronicles for the PS3 shows up. I didn’t want to miss out on the download-able content and it was substantially cheaper so I ordered from overseas, but the downside of course is that this leaves me waiting now. I’m still playing Persona 3 FES. I could have finished it ages back, but I’ve been trying to play it in the right way to max all the social links. Not far to go at this point, and it’s a special game to hold my interest for so long. After that I’ve still got Persona 3 FES’ bonus “The Answer” arc to play. Fallout 3 can sit on the shelf until it has a patch or two under it’s belt. I’ve also got the enhanced edition patches for the Witcher now so should finish that sometime. This should all work out well as there’s no games on the November or December release lists that interest me.
I’ve been watching a lot of anime lately. A lot from the current season in Japan. There are some shows I’m still undecided on, but overall I think I’ve enjoyed what’s come out this year (in terms of the Japanese and US markets) more than I have the last few years. I’m not about to claim it’s all A-grade stuff or that 2008 has been the best year for anime, but it’s certainly had more shows that resonate with my personal tastes…or perhaps even just shows that have been the right thing at the right time for whatever mood I was in at the time.
My enjoyment of this year’s shows has probably been reflected in me having purchased more Japanese Region 2 DVDs this year than in previous years. These DVDs have no English audio track or subtitles of course, but I find some shows the Japanese audio track alone is fine and in others I’m re-burning them myself to insert subtitle tracks. Thanks to my new ability to play/rip Blu-ray discs from any region too I’m going to do some tests to see how easy it’ll be to re-burn a Code Geass R2 Blu-ray with English subtitles. Personal use only of course, I’m not about to start dabbling in the black market selling BD-Rs out of a car boot. I’d hope that subbing on Blu-rays will prove a less painful process than doing so on DVD can be at times.
I know it’s been ages since I posted something here. Partly because I wanted to upgrade my Wordpress install first which I hadn’t been looking forward to. It actually went much smoother than I was expecting though so I can’t complain. I had actually started a few drafts posts over the last 2-3 months, but never got around to finishing them off. In summary, I was sick a lot in August, had eye problems in September (resulting in anti-histamines/new glasses/contacts) and was hit hard with pre-orders/exchange rate drops in October. Been doing all the usual stuff in between like gaming, movies, music, anime and heading to the Armageddon expo. This month to date has mostly been very busy and my free time has tended to go on gaming with a bit of video encoding on the side. Nice to see the bank account numbers going up again this month as I had little on pre-order for November.
I mentioned back in June about a computer upgrade I was looking at and how I was holding out for the release of Intel’s LGA 1366 platform. Funnily enough these parts started showing up on local stores lists in the last few days. I’m a little disappointed with the early Core i7 benchmarks. It’s faster than the Core 2 line sure, but in many cases it’s not enough so that it’s worth caring about. This appears to be because they cut back on cache memory with the design which is IMHO always a dumb idea.
Looking at what I actually use Windows/Linux PCs for though (games and video encoding) it still appears to be worth the jump. The benchmarks for x264 video encoding especially (something I’m using more and more) are much faster on the Core i7 CPUs and given they are all quad cores it will be a huge speed boost from my current dual core Opteron.
I picked up the first part of my new PC late last week anyway. A LG Blu-ray burner. It’s not really that I want to burn Blu-ray media just yet, but the drivers are fairly cheap now and it seemed pointless to buy a Blu-ray reader combo drive only to pay money on a burner later a few months down the track. I’m going to go with the Intel Core i7 920 CPU (The others just aren’t worth the money for so little speed gain) and a nice quiet Zalman ZM850 power supply. I’m still undecided on the case, motherboard and RAM although for the case I’m leaning towards one of the more basic Lian li designs mainly because everything else is either huge, ugly or overpriced. With the Core i7 RAM works best in triple channel configuration but looking at the benchmarks higher clocked DDR3 RAM provides little gain so I’ll probably just go with something basic and reliable. Other parts will just be taken from my current PC.
I know it’s a kind of dull post for my first in ages, but I think I’ll just leave it here for now. I don’t want to ramble on too much and it gives me an excuse to write more posts later anyway.
As some may know, I’m a bit of a figure collector. I’ve been collecting them for years now in some form although it’s rare I post about it here. Mainly laziness on my part I believe. ^_^;
For quite a long time now (literally years) I’ve been keen to pick up some Ikki Tousen figures. For those that don’t know Ikki Tousen is a story loosely based around the Chinese novel “Romance of the Three Kingdoms”. I’ve long enjoyed the anime, manga and games but oddly just hadn’t found any figures I particularly liked with the majority being a bit over the top for my tastes. In recent months though this has changed with the release lists looking more to my liking. Seeing Nork22’s quality photo sessions of his own Ikki Tousen figures has also only increased my desire to own some of my own.
So I’ve had a number of these figures on preorder for months now, but of course when you’re waiting for something to ship it always seems like forever. Today though the wait ended with the arrival of Alter’s 1/8th scale Kanu Uncho PVC figure, and Musashiya’s 1/6th scale cold-cast of Ryuubi Gentoku (limited to 300 units). It’s kind of appropriate in a way that they arrived together in the same box given Kanu’s (Guan Yu from RotTK) role as Ryuubi’s (Liu Bei from RotTK) protector.
While night photos under fluorescent lights and with dull backgrounds aren’t exactly inspiring, I felt the urge to post some kind of picture, so here we go.
I’ve not really been keeping up with comings and goings here lately. Mostly just been distracted or busy with other things, but I do want to get back to more regular posting and commenting. I don’t say that in the sense of it being a chore; I’ve always done so because it was something I wanted to do and there’s no change on that front.
I mentioned in my last post the slow cleanup after the Hamilton 400 street race. I had assumed within 2-3 weeks it would be all cleaned up and all would be well. Last week though the Hamilton City council apparently aiming for new lows in cost cutting and laziness announced in a local paper that they planned to leave most of the concrete barriers along the pit lane in place until next year. The article also mentioned that only one day remained for submissions to be made. I got a submission in on time, but utlimately I can’t comprehend what would make them think this is a good idea. These things are a complete hazard to vehicles and pedestrians alike and while thankfully the metal cages are gone the place looks like it’s in a state of perpetual road works. I think it’s safe to say that none of the councillors live in the area.
I’ve been considering a full update of my gaming PC for a while, but looking around much of what’s available is very old technology at this point. I figured something new must be around the corner that would be incompatible with any parts I buy today. To my surprise it seems AMD’s Fusion platform is still years away, but Intel is bringing out a new “Nehalem” micro architecture in the second half of this year. It’s unfortunate, and the CPU design geek in me doesn’t like Intel’s work, but buying AMD processors currently simply doesn’t make much sense and it looks to stay that way for the time being. Buying AMD only seems a good choice if you want to build a cheap PC (even for basic gaming) or a very low power (under 45 Watt) media PC with a 780g motherboard and 4850e processor. But I digress. So anyway Intel’s Nehalem architecture has an on-chip memory controller (one of the few benefits AMD has left) and as such will introduce a new processor socket (LGA 1366) making it incompatible with everything that came before. Makes me glad I didn’t pick up any of the Intel LGA775 parts today. Of course these new CPUs and motherboards are substantially better in other ways too, but this isn’t a tech blog. ^_^; Suffice to say short of the unexpected I intend to build a system around this platform when it becomes available.
Gaming-wise I’ve mostly been playing Persona 3 FES and the latest MMORPG Age of Conan. I talked in detail regarding the original Persona 3 elsewhere, and the FES variant just enhances it and adds more making a great game even better. Age of Conan is kind of cool too in many ways and is the first game I’ve seen to give World of Warcraft a run for it’s money, but at the same time I’m not feeling the urge to play it much at this point despite levelling four characters of various classes out of the newbie areas. The game seems to have it’s fair share of glitches and some issues around level/class balance, but no doubt they’ll patch those problems. It does suceed though in ways that others of it’s ilk have failed. Graphically it’s a step up from the rest, the mythos of the universe is rich and the narritive works well. Even the voice acting is surprisingly decent. The combat mechanics work well too. Magic-based classes seem to play much as they do in World of Warcraft, but the melee classes have a more varied system and is simply more satisfying and visceral.
I’ve been meaning to post something here for a while, but keep getting side tracked with other things. I really think I need to organise my time better. At some level I’m actively opposed to organisation of time, but it’s preferable to some of the alternatives.
Got back from Wellington early last week. Had a great time while I was there as usually seems to be the case. The annual Wellington Armageddon expo seems to be in downsize mode with less and less interesting content each time, but that’s not really why I go anyway. It was great to catch up with friends and family and enjoy the city. Every time I visit Auckland or Wellington I’m constantly left wondering how I’ve managed to live so long in what feels to me like parochial backwoods towns for the past 15 or so years. I’m not claiming Auckland or Wellington are the definitions of a metropolis by any means, but they seem to be as close as New Zealand gets (Yes, I have visited Christchurch and Dunedin). Hamilton has been home in recent years and isn’t exactly a small town these days, but it still still retains a small town mentality which I’ve never been able to adjust to. It’s really just not me, and I do wonder how long I’ll keep it up. Of course all of my immediate family is here these days which complicates things.
My presence in Wellington happened to coincidentally coincide with the Hamilton 400 V8 race back at home. In many regards it appears to have been a convenient turn of events. The road I live on is attached to the circuit a few hundred meters away from my house. I got back after driving for many hours to find the road still closed. It remained this way until Thursday afternoon. We’d been told by the council it would be open again by 6AM Monday so it was a surprise, but given how much of a damn daily disruption this race has been to me for the past month or more it really seemed par for the course. Maybe next year they’ll actually employ people who actually have something resembling brain tissue to arrange it?
It’s decidedly difficult to describe what the race preparation has been like without using words like “debacle”, “fiasco” or “snafu”. Oddly enough I’m saying this as a casual motorsport fan. I’m certainly more of a fan than the those making the usual “Oh I watch Bathurst.” comment. I may not have minded so much if it was a proper race with half decent cars rather than a lame duck Ford/Holden handicap race where all the viewers are supposed to pretend that the cars of each camp are somehow different in ways other than the body-kit. I’ll stop complaining as long as they start to move the damn concrete blocks and wire fencing allowing the streets to be less easy compared with Alcatraz or Birkenau.
For numerous reasons I’ve been planning to permanently drop buying Madman’s anime DVDs and today started putting this into action. On the whole I’ve been favouring high def titles in general over the past 6 months or so and anime had really represented the only remaining DVD purchases I’ve been making. Of course anime has only started trickling out on Blu-ray at this point, but until the pace picks up the remainder of the DVDs I buy will be region 1 US titles (thinkpak collections where possible). For many years I’ve supported the local industry at what I’d estimate to be a significant cost to myself, but at this point I’m seeing little worth supporting in the AUS/NZ DVD industry as a whole and certainly no reason why I should subsidise them. I’m especially sick of the shitty encodes Madman feels comfortable in foisting on us. I had been planning to finish off any series’ I had going, but as it turns out I recently have by-and-large. School Rumble is the only remaining Region 4 show I’m collecting with discs outstanding. That’ll be finished soon enough, and today I put in the first significant R1 orders I have in a quite a long time. So much better value for money.
