williamhathaway.com

Check out the whats new doc (mostly ZFS updates, but there is some other good stuff) and then download.

Note: if you want to use ZFS as your root file system, you’ll need to either run the installer in ‘console’ mode or use jumpstart.  The GUI installer still only has the UFS code.

I just signed up for my favorite race, the Lehigh Valley Half Marathon.  It will be held on Sunday, May 3rd.  The price goes up $5 (to $55) on 11/1, so if you are interested in running in it, consider signing up now.

I broke down last week and ordered a Garmin Forerunner 405 (the black watch above).  I’m not quite sure what to think of it yet. The 405 definitely looks a lot less dorky than my trusty 305 (red one above), but the 405 has its share of quirks and limitations.

Pros

• While still bulkier than the average watch, the 405 can actually be worn while not working out and people won’t wonder why you have a brick with an LCD strapped to your wrist
• The wireless syncing is neat (sent workouts to computer when I set it on my desk and even did a firmware upgrade that way)
• A few new options (like showing a graph of your heart rate)

Cons

• They definitely had to make some usability trade-offs to ensure the battery life isn’t completely horrible when in normal watch mode
• You perform many functions on the watch by touching the bezel (like an iPod).  Unfortunately like an iPod, you can’t be wearing gloves.
• The elevation accuracy appears to be much worse than the 305
• You have to push the ‘start/stop’ and ‘lap/reset’ buttons at the same time to lock the bezel.  I can see myself easily dorking this up during an event and either stopping the watch or adding an inadvertent lap
• I had a weird lock-up occur and had to dork with the watch for a few minutes to get it to come back to life

After uploading data tonight on the 405, I got a notice that a new firmware update was available and installed it.  Hopefully that will fix some of the quirks.

Note that even though the 405 looks less dorky, I am sure I looked like a complete tool tonight when I wore both of the the watches while running.  I lucked out in that it was almost completely dark out by the time I ran, thus hiding my gadgetry shame.  I did have a real goal though, I wanted to see how close the two devices would be for my run.  From a distance measured perspective, they were pretty darn close (and I’m sure I added a second or so on stopping and starting since I couldn’t hit them both at the same exact time).

Garmin 305: 5.03 miles (auto-laps of  8:00, 7:51, 7:40, 7:13, 7:03, :08)

Garmin 405: 5.02 miles (auto-laps of 8:02, 7:50. 7:42, 7:12, 7:03, :07)

(Side note, best run in months!)

From an elevation perspective, the 405 was chock full of fail.  It showed about 3 times the elevation variation that the 305 had (and the 305 isn’t super accurate elevation-wise to begin with).  I really hope Garmin is able to update the firmware to deal with the elevation better (or at least at their MB gravity service to Garmin’s Connect service).

Update: To be clear, if I didn’t already have a perfectly functioning device, I think an argument could be made for the 405.  If you do already have a 305 that works fine, it is hard to make the case for the 405 except out of love for gadgetry.

I recently spent some time in a Sun class “Solaris System Performance Management“  and wanted to give a brief rundown on my experience.

Pros

• I think the class was helpful in incorporating some performance concepts that I knew about but hadn’t fully baked into my mental model.
• A few of the lab exercises were really good.
• I got to use SWAT (a disk and tape workload analyzer) again and it definitely seemed a smoother experience than when I used it a about a year and a half ago. I’ll definitely put it my bag of tricks.  Follow Henk’s blog to stay up to date.

Cons

• There was a lot of material to cover, especially for students without some level of a computer science background
• Some of the labs didn’t work
• The books were last updated in 2006 and while it had some modern touches (DTrace scripts were sprinkled in a few times), you could tell it wasn’t a modern course.  I think most of the material was probably written in the late 90s and incrementally updated.
• The instructor wasn’t good about letting students know what parts of the book contained practical advice that they would use frequently versus other aspects which were much more theoretical.
• The instructor wasn’t following the non-OS tools mentioned in the book.  For example, SWAT and vdbench are available to all users now (previously it was just Sun employeers and resellers).

Overall Rating
Based on my experience, I wouldn’t give a recommendation for people to take this course.  I’m sure there are some instructors that deliver more value than the one I had, but I also think there is much stronger material out there now than the aging textbook.  There was a lot of material to cover, and for people without some level of computer science background, it seemed tough.  Covering things such as the difference between a “direct-mapped” versus a “set-associative” cache seemed not to be a good use of time when there was still a lot of student misunderstandings about the basic info provided by tools such as vmstat.

What I Recommend

I think a better use of time is to get a copy of the excellent Solaris Performance and Tools book (and potentially the Solaris Internals book as well) and be prepared to spend some time reading through it and trying the tools out on a test machine that has some load on it. Also, take a gander at the Solaris Internals Wiki, which has a lot of great information about performance and tuning of Solaris for a wide variety of sub-systems and situations.  For a quick tour around Solaris 10 performance and observability, check out Jim Mauro’s latest presentation.

I’ve been following the (sometimes controversial) OpenDS project for a while now.  This morning I woke up a bit earlier than usual so I decided to try out the latest build.

It is very straightforward to use, and took about two minutes to download, extract, setup, and start running.  I needed a resonable number of entries to test with, so I created a million synthetic users (via makeldif) and then kicked off the import process (which ran at about 3-4k a second).  After the import finished, I ran a modrate job and forgot about it.  When I returned home this evening, I saw in an open SSH session that it was still crunching away, averaging about 7,000 modifications a second.  I accidentally performed a 13 hour stress test and it held up just fine (after approximately 327 million mods!).

This was on a 2 processor quad-core Sun x4150 running Solaris 10.  No settings were changed from the default.

./modrate  -p 1389 -D cn=directory\ manager -w password -b uid=%d,ou=people,dc=example,dc=com -M ‘description:60:[a-z]‘ -r 1000000 -K -t 16

….
(this is the output I came home to)
Avg r=1955.44/thr (6257.40/sec), total= 31287
Avg r=2005.94/thr (6419.00/sec), total= 32095
Avg r=2035.00/thr (6512.00/sec), total= 32560
Avg r=2040.62/thr (6530.00/sec), total= 32650
Avg r=2013.12/thr (6442.00/sec), total= 32210
Avg r=2301.25/thr (7364.00/sec), total= 36820
Avg r=2397.00/thr (7670.40/sec), total= 38352
Avg r=2443.69/thr (7819.80/sec), total= 39099
Avg r=2748.69/thr (8795.80/sec), total= 43979
Avg r=2899.12/thr (9277.20/sec), total= 46386
Avg r=2475.25/thr (7920.80/sec), total= 39604
Avg r=2333.06/thr (7465.80/sec), total= 37329
Avg r=2673.19/thr (8554.20/sec), total= 42771
Avg r=2652.88/thr (8489.20/sec), total= 42446
Avg r=2371.06/thr (7587.40/sec), total= 37937
Avg r=2065.69/thr (6610.20/sec), total= 33051
Avg r=2228.38/thr (7130.80/sec), total= 35654
Avg r=2326.81/thr (7445.80/sec), total= 37229
^C

Not shabby at all!

I’m happy to say I’ve had my best running week in at least two months. I’ve also started getting back into push-ups and sit-ups on a most mornings.  My best effort for push-ups so far was 2 sets of 20 with a break in between for 50 situps.

What $300 orthotics look like

On Friday I picked up my orthotics.  I’ll be breaking them in by wearing the orthos for increasing periods of time over the next week while walking and then start phasing in running with them the week after next.  It feels weird to have something touching my (high) arches, but the pressure distribution graphs at the PT sure looked a lot better when the orthotics were in.

Mon: 3.25 mile run w/Jon and Mark around Camp Hill

Tue:  3.6 mile run w/Jon and Mark around Camp Hill

Wed: After work got dressed to run and drove to PennDOT to put in a few miles on the greenbelt. After getting out of my car decided I my legs were feeling kind of beaten up so just headed home.  I wish I had decided this before driving to PennDOT, but I think not running was the smart move.

Thu: 3.1 mile run w/Jon around Camp Hill

Fri:  1.6 miles on path outside work (2 loops). Forgot HR strap and pushed the pace.

Sat: 6.6 mile long run with Mark at Conewago.  I was pretty cold in the beginning but warmed up about 1/2 through.

Sun: Successfuly resisted urge to workout since Sat was my longest run in a while

Weekly total: 18 miles

I’m not sure what this coming week will be like.  I’ll be down in Columbia MD Mon-Fri for a training session, and then in Baltimore Fri-Sun for a company meeting.  Hopefully I can find a nearby park or trail to get some running in.

This morning I met up with Mark Rebuck at the Conewago Trail near Elizabethtown for a 5 miler.  This is by far my favorite place to run.  I love the sound of the crunching cinders underfoot, and the trees and stream add some nice visual variety.

The run went well, we averaged about a 9:30 pace and I didn’t have any leg trouble.   This was my furthest run by about 1.25 miles in a while.  After the run Mark headed back up the trail to add on a bit more.  I was tempted to join him at first but realized that would be pretty dumb so just walked back to my car and stretched.

There are definitely some advantages to not running as far these days.  I didn’t have to worry at all about making sure I had appropriate energy bars/gels/fluids, etc since I knew we would be back in well under an hour and it wasn’t hot out.

MotionBased

I went out for a run today after work and it turned out a better than I expected.  There is paved loop that circles a field out behind our building that is just over .8 miles long and I ended up running it 3 times and then adding on a few seconds to make the run as close to 2.5 miles as I could get.

I started out running pretty conservative for the first two minutes, and then realized I was annoyed at running slow all the time, so I decided to change it up.  I picked up the pace and was pleasantly surprised when I hit the first mile in 8:07.  This was the fastest mile I’ve ran in quite some time (and if I hadn’t dawdled during the first two minutes I’m sure it would have been significantly faster).  I tried to keep an even effort and hit the second mile in 7:15, and then I put a bit of extra effort into it (but not close to 100%) and ran that last .5 miles at about a 6:52 pace.

I’m definitely not in anything like 5K PR shape, but I also haven’t lost as much conditioning as I feared.  The experiment is over though, back to slower running for a while.

Summary: 2.5 miles in 18:50 (7:32 average pace)

Motionbased

I just got back from my physical therapist checkup.  I’ve been running a few days a week, but still getting some calf tightness.  The PT staff asked me how my legs were feeling and then placed me back in the foot pressure sensors and had me perform some walking.  I’m still not where they would like to be from a pressure distribution standpoint.  Mark, the main PT recommended that I should get orthotics since we weren’t getting rid of my problems with exercises alone (definitely some improvement, but apparently not enough).  To create a mold for the orthotics, he pushed my feet into what looked like a shoe box filled with a blue dense foam.  I go back in about two weeks to get the orthotics.  Hopefully they will reduce my injuries and get me back to running full-time.

I spent most of today helping support my friend Jon as he ran in the “Blues Cruise 50k” trail ultra-marathon today.  I took about 500 pictures and have started uploading them to smugmug.  It will probably take until tomorrow to get them all uploaded.  You can view the gallery here.

The race was really well managed and the weather was fantastic .  Jon cut 35 minutes off his time from last year.   Way to go Jon!