Osaka Groumet?

Today, I was sent to Osaka in order to do a kind of trouble shooting work.
It's a damn all-night work :( , but it's not the point of this entry.

It's my second visit to Osaka, and there were some discoveries for me.
For example, in Osaka there are good and cheaper plate menu restaurants than Tokyo. :)
The below is a photo of tonight dinner.
Well, the plate has a hamburger stake, a cream croquette, some pieces of fried chickens and a boiled sausage. It seems to be more than 1600K calories! :o

In addition, free for another bowls of rice.
Anyway, I had a happy dinner time tonight. :o

The below picture is a barbecue restaurant I saw on my way to the destination.
The red signboard says "情熱ホルモン" (Jo-netsu Hormon) in Japanese which roughly means "A Passion Barbecue." :o



If it was not before the work, I must have had a happy dinner with beer at the restaurant. But, unfortunately it's not... :(

Grand Central Oyster Bar & Restaurant, NY

I wrote several times about the Tokyo branch of Grand Central Oyster Bar & Restaurant, and I love the bar veeery much. :)

Today, finally I had a chance to go to the head quarter in New York. :)



Oysters were good, but the catfish plate I had was too well-done and actually it was a mistake. :(
According to a Japanese guy with me there who lives in New York, the Shinagawa branch is better, and now I'm feeling he is correct...

Day 258 : Oversea Communication?

Well, now I'm in New York (Of course, it's a business trip :o), and I had an oversea communication with my daughter.

The above is a snapshot during the communication via Skype at the hotel room which I'm staying at. :)

BTW, it's on June 22 for me, not 23 in New York local time. But, the day counter is based on my daughter's daily ife basis, thus the timestamp is June 23. :)

Day 254 : A Reverse Position?

My daughter moves well when she is sleeping.
In short, she is an untidy sleeper.

Today, I saw a funny scene after my daughter fell asleep, and the below is a snapshot. :o

Day 251 : Mama Down

My wife got a fever last night, and today she was in her futon whole day.
It's not so serious one and we're expecting she will be better soon.
But, anyway she was down today, and I was my daughter's baby sitter. :o



In the above picture, my wife is of course taking a rest, and my daughter is taking a siesta, untidily. :o

OpenSolairs 5/08

Well, about 8 years ago, I worked on SPARC/Solaris.
In those days, it was Solaris 2.6 which nowadays means Solaris 6.

Recently, I was trying to install OpenSolaris inVMware Workstation 6.0 running on Windows XP using ThinkPad X61. But, I got troubles and finally gave up it. :(

At first, I configured a VM with 512MB memory and saw progress bar of the OpenSolaris installer (which says transferring LiveCD image) stopped when it showed 84%. :(
After I read this discussion and gave the VM for OpenSolaris 1280MB memory, it passed the 84% barrier, but the installed instance of OpenSolaris never booted up. :(

So, I gave up VMware and tried VirtualBox which SUN recently acquired because OpenSolaris people mentioned that there many successful installations using VirtualBox.

The below is the first grub screen after my installation on VirtualBox.



The below shows the first OpenSolaris kernel message.
As you can see, the first line says "SunOS 5.11" that means Solaris 11, not Solaris 10 which SUN recently released the latest version of. In short, the relationship between OpenSolaris and Solaris is like the one between RedHat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Core.
That's why I wanted to try OpenSolaris. :)



BTW, there is one more thing I don't like.
The first line above says "32-bit," and this might be because of VirtualBox's limitation. :(



The above is the login screen of OpenSolaris, and I'm wondering if I can make time playing into Solaris Zones before setting for New York. :o
Well, yes, I'm looking into Solaris deeply (again) from a view point of virtualization.
Reading "Solaris Internals", sometimes I feel deja vu and at other times I'm concerned with the progresses of the years I was absent there.

BTW, I found that I forgot almost everything about Solaris system administration. :o

On VMI, Again

3 days ago, I saw linux console messages which says "VMI Rom detected" for the first time using VMware ESX Server 3.5U1 and vanilla linux kernel 2.6.25.

The below white paper by VMware says that we can get better throughput even using DBMS benchmarks such as sysbench.

• Performance of VMware VMI
  

I did a kind of DBMS benchmarks, and I expected lower CPU consumption rate against the same macroscopic workload because in general lower CPU cost is one of the major advantages of para-virtualization. But, what I got was almost the same CPU consumption rate and I was a bit disappointed. :(

But, there is only 32bit mode of VMI support and I guess it's still early stage.
That means there can be a room working on that area. :)

BTW, for me, the biggest problem is that reducing sleeping time is the only way for me working on such issue. I'm wondering if someone can employ me instead of my current employer ... :o

Day 247 : Ayako Notes

My wife takes very much detailed notes of our daughter.
Of course, I also write lines sometimes such as, "Today, she began to laugh out loud and express emotion somehow."

The first notebook was "10 Little Rubber Ducks,"
the second was "The Very Hungry Caterpillar."

As we are finishing the second notebook soon, my wife ordered new ones several days ago, and today delivered! :)

The new notebook is "The Pippi Longstocking." :)

VMWorld 2008

As I have written several times recently, I'm working on virtualization at work.

At this moment, we are in a research and planning stage especially on gathering best practices of applying virtualization technology for production systems.
Thus, I often have meetings with engineers from various departments of my employer and various companies these days, but I got almost no useful information. :(
For example,

• What is the typical successful use case of virtualization?
• Can we say simple horizontal consolidation is one of best practices?

or so.
I just want to hear something from their actual experiences, but anyway they usually clam up as if they were being interrogated. :o

Today when I was searching presentations given at VMWorld 2008 Europe, I found a lot of presentations which give me what I wanted.
I'm wondering if engineers in Japan working on (at least) VMware read them...

BTW, here comes to the point.
Hey, Uchikawa-san, Ushida-san,
I want to be there at VMWorld 2008 held at the Venetian Hotel, Las Vegas, in September because there are many important and attendees only technical sessions. :)

Weight

Well, since I turned 30 years old, I kept getting weight almost monotonically.
It's more than 85Kg when I got married about 3 years ago, but since then my eating habit was greatly improved.

Today, I was astonished with my wife when we found that my weight is less than 80Kg now. :o



Hey Jade, are you reading?
I guess I lost about 10Kg since I met you in Tokyo last time. :o

Engrish

Well, I do not speak English natively, and I know there are a lot of mistakes in my English.
But still, today I thought the below was too silly. :(



Of course, what they wanted to say is, Ladies'.

BTW, the title comes from an web site, www.engrish.com, where they collect funny (and of course, wrong) English expressions found in Japan.

One more thing.
I wrote "natively" in the first line above, and Blogger's spell checker says it's wrong.
But, Merriam Webster indeed says it's an adverb of "native."
I'm wondering why...

Guin Saga 121

A Foul Flower
Guin Saga 121
Kaoru Kurimoto
ISBN 978-4-15-03092705

Hahaha, 121st book! :)
Guin got a big trouble (again) !

On VMI

Here, VMI stands for the "Virtual Machine Interface," not Vendor Managed Inventory, nor Virginia Militia Institute. :o

As I wrote several times recently, I'm working on virtualization these days.
At work, I did some benchmarks and saw not negligible CPU cost using VMware ESX Server.
But, I've been thinking paravirtualization using VMI would improve the situation greatly.

Since then, I got a draft version of VMI and tried to run VMI aware Linux kernels on top of that.
Although I'm still struggling doing so at work, today finally I saw VMI ROM detection message using VMware Workstation 6.0 and Fedora Core 9 (i386).
Hoho, what kind of benchmark should I do? :)

BTW, reading the VMI 2.5 specification, I thought why they didn't include a special I/F intended for SMP configuration, something like a 'SpinLock Ops.' As early implementation of Virtual Iron did, that can be a good clue for constructing SMP virtual machine.
I heard that a VMware guy mentioned at VMWorld 2007 that they made a design choice forcing to schedule all virtual CPUs of a guest simultaneously mainly because of spinlock consideration. But, I think the spinlock ops could be a clue for them.

Day 239 : Egg Allergy

Today, my daughter had the 8th month medical check.
Well, she suffered from eczema on April 25 just after having egg based baby food, and we were afraid that she could have an egg allergy. Unfortunately, that's the case. :(

But, it seems that usually the allergy will be cured till about 15 month.
I'm looking forward to eating egg based sweets with her. :)

Day 237 : The First Piggyback Ride

Today, we tried to give our daughter a piggyback ride.
I'm not sure saying the above "a piggy back ride," but my dictionary gave me the expression.
Maybe "on my shoulder", not "on my back" which I guess usually means "a piggyback ride."
Anyway, my daughter looked happy, and of course we were. :)