Fan

At work, my desk is located at a very hot place. :(
It means just it's far from the duct of air conditioning, but anyway I don't feel like doing anything there. :(

Here is my solution. :o

YUASA "FAN TERIOR" YFC-18H(GN) -- \1,280- at Kodaira Kojima
A 18cm desktop (partition top?) fan. :)

Ramen Jinanbo

Well, tonight dinner at Ramen Jinanbo (らーめん 次男坊).
My choice was a pork soup ramen with green onion, boiled egg and sliced roasted black pork.
I like it very much.

Hey Harada-san, this restaurant seems to be affiliated with Tamazou (たまぞう) in Fuchu city.
I believe you will also like it. :)

HA Again

Well, this time, it's about a High Availability Cluster System issue, not a Human Assesment training. :o

Sun Microsystems seems to have decided to make their HA cluster software, Solaris Cluster, open source. (Available here)

• http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/06/27/Sun-donates-Cluster-to-OpenSolaris_1.html
• http://itpro.nikkeibp.co.jp/article/NEWS/20070628/276146/

Some colleagues of mine are working on heartbeat, but practically speaking it's a troublesome software unfortunatelly. Indeed, one of the best engineers among us (Hey Takenaka-san, it's you :) is always captured by troubles of hearbeat. :(

I'm wondering why they don't choose that. :o

ThinkPad X61 : Act4

Let's go setting up the hardware anyway. :)

Act 4-1. Plugging in the memory extension module

First of all, I need more memory. :o



2G bytes in total. :)

Act 4-2. Astonishing fact

Here is a picture of ThinkPad X31 and X61 AC adaptor connectors.
Well, in short, X31 is DC 16V and X61 is DC 20V.
I should have bought one more AC adaptor... :(



Act 4-3. Power ON!

Left is X31 and right is X61. :)

ThinkPad X61 : Act3

Finally delivered! :o

But, today I was busy at work and got home very late. :(
It's tomorrow work...

OLS2007

Tomorrow morning, a colleague of mine sets for Ottawa to attend at Ottawa Linux Symposium, 2007. I really wanted to be there too. But, this time, his turn, and I'm looking forward to seeing the colleague being touched off very much. :)

BTW, while looking at the time table of the symposium this year, I was grabbed by one presentation, "GANESHA: A Multi-Usage Large Cache NFSv4 Server" by Philippe Deniel.

Well, Ganesha is one of the most popular Hindi deities.
You can find several pictures in Wikipedia.
Yes, actually she looks like a pink elephant. :o

The colleague is very familiar with NFS architecture, and I hope he will enjoy the presentation.

Here is a brief list of the presentations I want to hear.

• "Keeping Kernel Performance from Regressions" by Tim Chen
• "Why Virtualization Fragmentation Sucks" by Justin M Forbe
• "Ptrace, Utrace, Uprobes: Lightweight, Dynamic Tracing of User Apps" by James A. Keniston
• "Kernel Scalability: Expanding the Horizon Beyond Fine Grain Locks" by Corey D Gough
• "KDDM: A Generic Basis For Distributed Kernel Infrastructure" by Renaud Lottiaux
• "Precise Process Accounting: Improving CPU Utilization in the Linux OS for Mission Critical Environments" by Mario Smarduch

22 Weeks

Well, now thatsdone 3.0 is 22 weeks and 6 days and 735g. :)

I want a boy, but the doctor says the baby looks like a girl.
Anyway it's OK so far as the baby comes on the world without any trouble. :)

FAT Filesystem and Timestamp

I found an old friend of mine wrote an interesting article about FAT filesystem timestamp handling in Linux.

Summary (in Japanese) is here, and his points (in English) are:

• Linux FAT filesystem implementation interprets timestamps as localtime where the kernel is running
  
• Linux kernel gets timezone information from the user land via settimeofday() system call
• The FAT filesystem translates the localtime timestamps into epoc (GMT) format on request of stat() system call.
• ls command translates the epoc format timestamps derived via stat() system call into localtime format AGAIN! :o
  

Thanks JR0BAK for the interesting issue! :)


BTW, note that 'ctime' of POSIX is 'Change time' not 'Create time', thus in principle it's impossible to know when a file was created under general UNIX environment.

Meadow and Mew (take 1)

On Windows, I usually edit text files using Meadow and read/write e-mails
using mew. They are pretty good for me. :)

So far, I kept using a bit older versions.

• Meadow 2.10
• mew 3.2 (!)

Today, finally I began to upgrade them to:

• Meadow 3.0dev
• mew 5.2

And here is a brief list of problems:

• global gtags mode does not work under Meadow 3.0 :(
  
• ispell doesn't work :(
• It complains language environment.
  
• packing folders of mew seems to be obsolete.
  
• This is against my custom. :(
• mew 3.2 and 5.2 requires different versions of ImageMagick
• They cannot coexist as they require PATH not 'exec-path'. :(

Anyway, I need some time to fix the upgrading problems and the older versions have to co-exist some more time...

Linux World Memorial DVD Book 2001-2007

Linux World Memorial DVD Book 2001-2007
Magazine Code: 61503-71
ISBN978-4-87280-271-9

Well, I didn't buy this issue.
Last year, I wrote an article for the magazine and I got this issue for free as one of the authors. :o

What kind of article?
Please find out that. :)

ThinkPad X61 : Act2

The extension battery set was delivered today ahead of the X61 itself.
A bit surprised by the size of the box. :o

HA?

I had a two days Human Assessment training course at work.
This course is intended for people shooting for being or expected to be a manager.
When my boss asked me to have the course, I asked him like "Hua? Is that a High Availability training course? Perhaps, I will be redundant and I can have a standby instance of myself?" :o

BTW, want to be a manager?

No way. :o

A Burning Project

From this April, I was assigned to a special task force team intended for trouble shooting of IT systems, and from this April I'm working with a troublesome project that has already cut over from their previous system last year.

Since my team joined to the trouble shooting of the project, we pointed out several technical problems ans their solutions. But, the customer does not seem to like to change their current configuration parameters.

Yes, the essential problem is not technical ones but ones of process. :(

In other word, none of them does not want to make decisions.
Furthermore, for me they look like that they don't want to take responsibilities doing so.
IMHO, that's why the project is burning.

BTW, the direct customer of my team is not the customer above, but a system integrator that built the system for the customer. The system integrator team is also trouble some in the same sense. I mean a system integrator SHOULD show the correct way to operate a system and persuade the customer to convince what is correct even the correct solution has risks somehow.
But, the project team of the system integrator accepts whatever the customer says like a slave. :(
Sometimes I speak with colleagues of mine, "Perhaps they (the project team of the system integrator) are masochistic?" :o

That's another problem of process.

What can I do for them?

DesignWave Magazine '07/07

Today, I bought a DesignWave Magagine, 2007/07.

Well, it's a Japanese managine intended for hardware engineers.
This issue includes an FPGA board with Xilinx Spartan-3E.
As I wrote in this entry, I got an NEC V850 board 2 months ago, and I'm thinking to build a reconfigurable embedded system using the V850 board and Spartan-3E board.

But, the problem is that still I cannot make enough spare time to play with the boards. :(

Hennesy and Patterson 4th edition

Computer Architecture, Fourth Edition: A Quantitative Approach
John L. Hennessy (Author), David A. Patterson
ISBN: 978-0123704900

I bought this book on Saturday (June 16) and it's delivered on Monday(June 18). :o
Amazing, Amazon... :o

Note:
Corrected the subject from "P... and H..." to "H... to P..." (2007/06/25)

Scratch

My car got a scratch...orz :(

A New Ramen Restaurant

As I wrote before, Shin-Koganei-Kaido(avenue) is called as Ramen Kaido(avenue).

Today, another new Ramen restaurant, Jinan-bo(次男坊) opened next to Menya Kotaro.
I'm wondering if they can really do well under a close-packed situation.

Jinan-bo(次男坊) means 'the second boy (in a family)', and I guess the chef must have learnt at some famous Ramen restaurant. Maybe Harada-san can tell me the details. :)

BTW, my gourmet report?
Not yet, and stay tuned. :o

ThinkPad X61 : Act1

Well, I like ThinkPad very much.

Actually, I bought 4 ThinkPads in these 10 years. :o

• ThinkPad 230CS
• ThnkPad 535X
• ThinkPad 560
• ThinkPad X31

The last one, ThinkPad X31 worked really good for me.
But, in these days I've been feeling a bit inconvenient because PentiumM does not support PAE mode and I want a mobile 64bit with virtualization environment.
At work, several weeks ago two colleagues of mine bought ThinkPad X60, and I also requested for decision for my wife and got one immediately. :o
I'm not sure it was unfortunate or not now, but anyway I've been very busy for these two months and could not make time to place an order. :(

Recently, when I got time finally to do so, it turned out that now ThinkPad X61's available, and finally I placed an order today. I'm really looking forward to having the new one. :)

Quicken

Today, I felt thatsdone 3.0 is moving in the womb for the first time.
It's amazing...

To tell the truth, I thought "Oh my god, it's as if there is an creature in the womb."
But, this is the case. :o

20 Weeks

Finally, thatsdone 3.0 is 20 weeks (and three days).
Our doc says, "Hum... maybe this baby is a girl." But, not determined yet...
Anyway, the baby passed the 20 weeks barrier which thatsdone 2.0 could not go through.
Thus, we are happy today. :)

Guin Saga 114

Guin Saga 114
The Crypt of the Crimson Crane
ISBN 978-4-15-030891-9

114!

But, the story develops veeeery slowly in this volume.

I like more rapid development. :(

Note: Bought on June 8 and finished on June 9.