Time for an update on my cunning camera plan: how am I getting on with my Panasonic GF1? I think it’s fair to call my old Nikon D50 neglected; I last used it on Christmas Day because I needed the SB25 flashgun that goes with it for some early morning indoor shots (yes, that “Wake up Daddy, it’s CHRISTMAS!” moment around 5am). In fact, I’ve just discovered that I used it a few times in the autumn, mainly with a telephoto lens, and I still haven’t processed and catalogued some of those shots. But on the whole, it gets left at home because the GF1 fits into a small shoulder bag and is less of a burden to carry around in your hands. It’s about the size of a rangefinder, which makes it good to go.

CyanogenMod (CM) is an Android release based closely on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) source code from Google. It offers an alternative to the stock Android experience on most vendor phones.

If none of that makes sense, stop here.

My eulogy from my father’s funeral service on 10th April 2013 is here.

I’m constantly staggered, often exasperated and occasionally flabbergasted by the way in which one can slowly and clearly explain something verbally to another individual, only for them to completely miss the point of what was said or even to derive the exact and opposite meaning.

Maybe I’m just extremely poor at communicating my thoughts, or many of the people I know can be unusually obtuse, but judging from the frequency with which I’ve witnessed the same phenomenon between others, it seems like a defining feature of verbal interaction. You asked for chocolate, you got vanilla. You said you were driving; here’s a pint of vodka, cheers. You agreed fifty, here’s a bill for five hundred. Your coruscating attack on Thatcher’s handling of the miners is received as a vehement dismantling of the environmental lobby and a repudiation of the EU and foreigners in general, to the keen approval of several elderly racists present.

Next time, put it in an email. Because it’s always the people who have most difficulty understanding words in either written or oral form that will insist on a follow-up phone call “to make sure we’re all on the same page”. Amidst all the concern about education standards, it’s often forgotten that schools are also responsible for teaching comprehension.

Recently I needed to add a second IP address (“virtual IP”, “floating IP” or “IP alias” in other jargon) to the primary network interface of my OpenIndiana-based NAS server. Turns out the traditional Solaris way no longer quite works if you’re using NWAM:

# ifconfig rge0:1 plumb
# ifconfig rge0:1 192.168.1.30 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast + up
# tail /var/adm/messages
Jan 22 21:29:32 server1 nwamd[509]: [ID 188115 daemon.error] 1: nwamd_ncu_handle_if_state_event: address 192.168.1.30 not managed by nwam added, removing it

(I know, I know; I went with NWAM because at install time, it seemed to be The Future so I thought I’d better get used to it. If you stick with traditional static interface configuration via the network/physical:default service, you probably won’t have this issue.)

The workaround is to create a virtual NIC (VNIC) on top of your physical interface using the Crossbow goodness, and then assign the IP to that:

# dladm create-vnic -t -l rge0 test1
# ipadm create-addr -t -T static -a 192.168.1.30/24 test1/temp
# ipadm show-addr

(I used the -t ‘transient’ option because I didn’t need this configuration to persist after reboot. test1 and temp are just arbitrary labels for your new VNIC and address.) Still not sure about NWAM, but I kinda like this method.

Putting this here because it seems extraordinarily badly documented (i.e. not very Googleable).

I was able to dig out the “UNIX Handbook” hardcopy manual I referenced in my last post. My memory was slightly at fault; it isn’t so crude as to be in a monotype font, being properly set with troff (except the cover page, which was typed). It’s actually a collection of various introductory UNIX articles from the early V7 and BSD distributions, covering topics such as basic command line use and text editing, along with some useful man pages. Although it is obviously dated, it’s still straightforward and well written by some of the pioneering UNIX engineers like Brian Kernighan and Bill Joy. I’d be surprised if any of the examples would fail to work on a modern UNIX equivalent (note: init system not covered ;-).

Just popped up on my radar thanks to @mattwillsh, Paul Eberhart’s Linux Future post from last August is a great read/rant about the current direction of Linux development, that is garnering a lot of relieved agreement from long-time UNIX hands. The spark, as it usually is at the moment, was another longwinded discussion about the merits or otherwise of systemd, Fedora’s recently adopted init (and ‘everything else’) replacement, but Eberhart perceptively identifies this as only a proxy for general concerns, often inarticulately expressed, about the apparent direction of the Linux OS. Worth reading for the comparison of ‘The UNIX Philosophy’ against what he terms the ‘FLOS’ (FreeDesktop Linux OS) philosophy alone.

This week I will mostly be playing with Adobe LightRoom 4 and Nik Silver Efex Pro in a Windows 7 VM under VirtualBox on Fedora 16. All in the name of fixing a few problems with my existing workflow, taking it up a notch and determining a secure future path. Yes, it involves running Windows - this is serious.

‘Augeas is a configuration editing tool.’

My take: Augeas is what the Puppet crew integrated after years of various people saying that editing files in place was the Wrong Way to do things and hence the EditFiles facility in Cfengine was Evil.

Sometimes, in this imperfect real world, you have to edit a file in place.

@stuherbert started it: “Portishead’s Dummy is 18 years old next week, and it is still one of the most beautiful albums to listen to. What classic albums are you listening to that are older than you might suspect?”

Dummy came out in 1996 (see, I can do mathz); I remember buying it - from a record store (HMV - what happened to them?). But hey, I can go further back than that: for my 18th birthday, I received the recently-released Floodland by The Sisters of Mercy, probably one of the first contemporary albums I owned. Around the same time, I would still have been listening to ‘old’ albums like Foxtrot by Genesis, which came out sixteen years previously.

Floodland is now twenty-four years old, half as much again.