Peter Heydon | Peter Heydon ~ Personal Space

Unexpected Surprise

I was driving home this evening and had an unexpected technological surprise – the anti-lock braking system (ABS). Not that I didn’t know I had it in my vehicle, but in the three years I’ve owned my Nissan X-Trail, I’ve never see it in action, until today!

Many years ago when I first got my licence, my parents insisted I complete a defensive driving course. During that we learnt how to stop in the wet and the method for that was to pump the brakes. ABS was only becoming standard on new cars some 11 years ago when I did that course. Although the exercise of stopping in the wet was only about 30 minutes of the day, its something that I instincly remember how to do.

On a few occasions in some older model cars, that stopping technique has saved me.

Today when I had the person in front of me decide to stop in the middle of the road during peak hour and in drizzling rain, I instinctively pumped away – and that is when the ABS kicked in!

Thinking about it, I marvelled at a technology we pretty much take for granted. I wondered how many other people would have known how to react in a similar situation without what is nowdays such a standard feature of most modern cars.

VMFS Recovery on a Broken Array

[Originally posted August 2009]

Yesterday, one of my colleagues swapped in a replacement disk we received from IBM for an x3650. It was part of a RAID 5 array for one of our development ESX boxes. Unfortunately, ESXi 3.5 didn’t seem to like that too much, and the whole volume was dropped. After some effort, rebuilding of the array and other jiggery-pokery, we had no luck in getting ESX to see the disks. Development team now out for half a day.

Today, we called one of our partners with a swag of VMWare certified engineers, and they couldn’t offer much help other than try a few warm and cold restarts, they suspected the array was at fault. We had the option of re-adding the array to ESX to see if it would work but everything pointed to wiping of the LUN, which was not what we wanted. We needed that data! At this point I started to look for some options:

1. Use an Ubuntu Live CD (Jaunty) to try and see the volume – no joy, as I found out VMFS is a proprietary file system.

2. Try and download Ubuntu Karmic Koala Alpha 3 which looked to have some VMFS tools available – started the download then continued to look for options
3. Came across what appears to be some good work by one individual who has created a live CD toolkit just for this purpose. Unfortunately I had to wait for administrative approval before I could download, so I kept this as a backup.
4. While downloading Karmic, I came across Open VMFS and a comment in the VMWare forum that provided some hope.

So I proceeded to try option four on an old bit of gear with ESXi 4 installed. After some fiddling I had booted Ubunutu Jaunty, tried to load the Open VMFS driver but it did not recognize the VMFS partitions. Gparted provided confirmation on the ‘unkown’ volumes pertaining to the size of the data store. Not to be deterred, I tried on the same kit with ESXi 3.5 and I could read my vmfs store!

With a 1TB USB disk connected, the VMs got extracted with one exception – a virtual disk for one of the servers was giving I/O errors and I couldn’t get it off. Had to use the filecopy parameter for large files (>4GB) and successfully retrieved a 70GB virtual disk.

Our Dev team was now out for 1.5 days, with a public holiday tomorrow it will mean everything should be fully operational for the next business day.

Joomla to WordPress

My website, heyweb.net has been around for some years now (6+) and taken many different incarnations. As my roots lie in the African continent, I originally had made the website in kinyarwanda. But the amount of times the website visitors had to make a kinyarwanda translation of the website to English made me change the site language to English.

For the last year I had been running Joomla, an excellent content management system in it’s own right. It had initially done a fine job for what I wanted and very feature rich. However it wasn’t perfect. I repeatedly experienced a lot of formatting issues and it was always a pain to make what should be a simple change. I also found it cumbersome to write blog posts. It was such a chore, so the notion of blogging was soon abandoned.

However, the desire to blog became too great, and I wanted to do something about it. I had previously played around with WordPress on a virtual, and admired the simplicity. I yearned to use it, but I had invested a significant amount of time in setting up Joomla so I had a difficult time convincing myself to make any sort of transition.

Very recently, I decided that enough was enough, and if I really want to make the change, I just need to get in and do it. I sat down a few weeks ago, setup WordPress and test-drove a few -templates. After several hours of not getting quite what I wanted, I came full-circle with the TwentyTen template, with minimal customisations. The content I had on my Joomla site was fairly lean, so I figured some good old fashioned copy and pasting would be much quicker than trying to find a migration tool.

I was now ready to upload WordPress to heyweb.net. A quick SQL export/import and FTP and I was pretty much done. Just needed to make a few configuration modifications but overall the experience from my development machine to live was fairly seamless.

I felt a sense of satisfaction and joy. The WordPress experience was much more streamlined for what I was wanting to do with Joomla – and the overall effort took much less time. I’m very happy with this experience.

Now that I am a convert…I just need to keep the content up!

One Year of Harmony

About a one year ago, when my one year old son was getting into just about everything, we found that our media centre remote control stopped working. Seems that dropping the device multiple times, and regular drops of baby drool don’t mix with reliable working of a remote control. So off shopping I went.

I settled on a Logitech Harmony 525. There are plenty of sites around reviewing this remote, which ultimately led me to its purchase. Over a week or two I had tuned it my liking, and even my wife fell in love with it. We ensured that this remote stayed away from little hands, and that it was for Mummy & Daddy only. Luckily my son learnt this quickly, so whenever we left the remote within his reach, and he wanted to watch the Wiggles, he would most delicately carry it over to his mother or I for action.

A few days ago, we started experiencing problems with one of the composite inputs on our TV. Everything that came out of the DVD player was a redish/blue. Not that it bothered my son that Dortothy the Dinosaur looked like Barney, but it was annoying for the adults to watch. After I changed inputs, I thought I had better update the remote. I had since rebuilt the lounge laptop, and the software loaded up on Windows 7 with no problems. Then, panic set in…I was being asked for a login and password…which had not been written down.

Nothing in my password safe, nothing in my email. What could my credentials be? So clicked the ever-so-used “Forgot Password” button, and got prompted to plug in my Harmony remote. All I had to do was answer one security question an volia – I was up and running with all my settings I had painstakingly tuned.

I was pleasantly surprised by the experience, which prompted me to reflect on the engineering gone into this product. Not only had I retrieved my configuration almost effortlessly, but I hadn’t needed to reattach the thing in almost a year! All our vendor supplied remotes have been retired to the cupboard and we’ve been flying solo for quite some time. We’re very happy to be living with Harmony.

The Book is Mightier than the Internet

My wife was online this evening trying to find some information on a particular issue. It was very specific information, and she had spent a good twenty minutes looking for it. Later after we had finished dinner, I asked if she had found her answer. While the keyboard was again pounded and Google interrogated, I went to our library of books. It didn’t take me long. I grabbed the most relevant book, and within about five minutes I had located the information we needed. My wife meanwhile was still trying to find something relevant, with about eight words being searched upon!

So what went wrong? Why wasn’t the mighty internet (& Google) able to find this information quicker?

I suggest its time for a little more search helpfulness and better understanding of what someone is trying to search upon. Be suggestive – a little more beyond spelling mistakes.

For example, a search on the word java could hold several meanings – the programming language, the island, the coffee etc. But in Google it returns simply the highest ranked (ie Java from Sun/Oracle) and perhaps not the most relavant (eg if I was looking for a holiday).

Wikipedia seems to do a good job of disambiguation, perhaps something that a giant search engine could incorporate and offer a more guided search.