Fine Wine

Domaine de l'Ameillaud 2004 Cotes du Rhone

The premium blend

While my wife was hunting for valuable stuff for the house at a store last night, I wandered around and found a canister of Buck Urine. Who knew that they made such a thing. On closer inspection, I was amazed at bullet point #2 on the packaging: "Proven, premium, blended scent." Evidently, the art of buck urine manufacturing (or god forbid, collection and packaging) has some parallels with the Whiskey industry (Premium, blended McPee?). I just know that Foxworthy (You might be a redneck if..) will get to this soon.

cmus is the bomb

I want to play music from my machine. Simple.

I don't want a running encyclopedia (a'la Amarok) while I play my tunes. I'd like something lightweight, simple, and clean. It doesn't need to make toast, integrate with my browser, or take a shit in my panel. Just play the tunes, Holmes.

Hello cmus. An amazingly feature packed audio player. For starters, you can throw just about any codec at it, and it doesn't get phased. Better still, it's an ncurses application that can pump to just about any audio output schema. And in the cluster of my Linux sound system, it seems to be able to understand (or maybe just intelligently default to) the right thing.



Here's the most freakish part. For a text based program that executes within my shell, it seems to boast more views and a better user interface than any other audio player I've used. Now, I just need to find the rest of my collection...

How many processors am I executing on?

If you're writing threaded code that's meant to be portable, it might behoove you to know how many processors the executing system has.

OperatingSystemMXBean osBean = ManagementFactory.getOperatingSystemMXBean();
int numProcessors = osBean.getAvailableProcessors();
System.out.println("Available Processors: " + numProcessors);

You could also interrogate the OperatingSystemMXBean to gather information about architecture that you are executing on. For those not of the faint-of-heart, you could cast the object returned from the getOperatingSystemMXBean call to the VM specific implementation to gather additional goodies. This dangerous assumption would predicate itself on the knowledge of the executing VM though- so probably not a safe bet.

Solaris, please don't overwhelm me

A few weeks back, I decided to try and play with Solaris. It's from Sun, it has some really nifty analysis that can be done on Java executables, and I had fond memories of it from a few years ago.

Install went great. Kind of. It takes forever, and it comes with all kinds of shit that I don't need. But then, I probably don't know what I need.. I'll say this much: it didn't have any trouble with any hardware at all. And, it even has the courtesy to let me know that my ethernet link is "copper".

Foolishly, I decided to opt for a DHCP setup knowing that I'd be switching to a static IP soon.
Once the box was up and running, changing from DHCP to a static IP was not quite fun. First, you've got to tell Solaris not to acquire an address on boot. From what I gathered, this meant deleting your NIC from a set of DHCP seeking set:

rm /etc/dhcp/nic.dhcp

Then, you've got to reconfigure the rest of the stuff. Which isn't as simple as what I'm used to on Linux. Multiple files, in multiple redundant directories.

ls /etc/net

gives you:

ticlts/ ticots/ ticotsord/

Anyway, lots of googling later, I stumbled through it and made the needful happen.

Then, I saw an ugly. For some reason, root is created with home set as /. And, you log in to CDE as root, as the first thing you do, which means that your root file system now has CDE's turd files for root sitting in it. Of course, there are some other goodies that get dropped in there too from anything you start as root. Quick change to /etc/passwd and this was resolved, but it was mighty irritating.

Pkgadd is marvelous. It's the equivalent of apt-get for Solaris, and it works fine. Until I ran out of space.

The auto-partitioning on Solaris didn't mesh with what I needed. And I seem to have filled it up in the wrong places so bad that I'm pretty much handicapped right now. I could spend some time debugging it and re-partitioning to get the system healthy, but then I remembered why I loved Solaris so much when I used it before. It's because I used it, and I didn't administer it.

If someone is willing to manage and administer it, I'd hop on in a heartbeat. Alas, I just don't have the time to make it my workstation just yet. Maybe at home, down the road.

Hello there xubuntu... Care to dance?