williamhathaway.com

I just watched Lee Trujillo give a presentation and demo of his Dirtrace, his cool tool for gathering support data on Sun’s DS.  The data captured is very helpful for troubleshooting Sun DS problems in a variety of situations ranging from hangs to replication problems to performance problems.  I’ve used it in the past, but the latest version looks even easier to use and captures more data.  If you manage Sun’s Directory Server on Solaris, Linux, or HP/UX, pull down a copy and check it out.

I ran in the CRVT 15k race this afternoon with Nate.  I didn’t have a goal time since my weekly mileage has been pretty low (probably a little under 20 miles/week for last month) and I still need to shed a few extra pounds that I gained around the beginning of the year. Shelly, Nate’s girlfriend, graciously offered to come along and help with logistics.  The race was a point-to-point course, so having someone to help shuttle the car from the start to the finish helped us avoid having to use the rented bus and gave us more flexibility, and it was nice having someone to cheer for us at the halfway point.

We had a 1PM start which was unusual (the CVRT folks had a full day of events and the 15k was the last one to start).  I prefer having a morning start time for races since I don’t need to mess with my meal schedule and don’t suffer from the pre-race nervousness for long, but I like running on rail-trails so was happy to enter the race and support CVRT.

Nate and I ran the first 3 miles together hitting 8:40s.  I started picking it up on the 4th mile and hit a 7:47.  At about this time the sun was coming out frequently from the cloud cover and it was definitely getting warmer than I’d like.  The temperature (70s?) would have been fine for me in June, but I could tell I wasn’t sweating effectively since almost all my training so far this year has been in the colder temperatures.  I could see my heart rate/pace ratio was climbing higher than usual so I decided to back off the pace to make sure I didn’t overdo it.

Mile 5 was an 8:13 (including a water stop).  Mile 6 was 8:00 and I was starting to feel my legs develop some fatigue.   I noticed  more people taking walk breaks.

Miles 7, 8, and 9 were fairly consistent with 8:21,8:16, and 8:22 splits but my heart rate at this point was in the mid to high 170s.  I was a bit discouraged to be working hard compared to the pace, but it is what it is.  I was able to pick it up to a 7:54 pace for the final .3 miles for an overall time of 1:17:12.  I felt exhausted at the end, but recovered quickly with  water and a snack.  The CVRT folks were offering freshly grilled barbecue chicken as a post-race meal, but Nate is a vegetarian so we headed out to a restaurant to get food we could all enjoy.

Overall thoughts: While I’ll always wish I went faster, I’m happy I entered the race.  This was the longest run I’ve done since the beginning of January and I felt like I gave a pretty good effort given my fitness level and the weather.

I took a brief look at Amazon’s EC2 info about a year ago, but my interest in it (and cloud computing in general) has been growing.  Last night I  read through a lot of  the EC2 documentation/tutorials and stood up an instance.  I’m sure my thoughts will gel more as I continue learning and experimenting. Here is my quick brain dump:

pros

• very simple to use
• inexpensive – I experimented for less than $1
• ability to stand up many instances quickly

cons

• internet  latency if interfacing between EC2 and machines in your own data center (not Amazon’s fault, it is just physics)
• can’t take advantage of non-generic capabilities like SSDs (seems like lots of technologies are growing up around using SSDs as 2nd level caches)
• load balancing options seem meager

So far I think there are some architectures that are perfect for EC2′s model, some that aren’t great, and many options where you mix some of your own gear with EC2 providing a few or a lot of resources where it makes sense.

Update:  I had a few questions from friends and co-workers  asking for clarification and where EC2 might fit for them.

Q:  Do I pay depending on how much CPU or disk space I am using?

A: You pay per hour for each instance youn have booted, regardless of if it is idle all the time or running maxed out.  Your hourly charge depends on the size of the instance (in CPU and RAM terms and potentially the OS and applications ).  There is some local disk space you can use for free but it doesn’t persist across instance reboots and isn’t necessarily fast.  If you want persistent storage on EC2 you should look into using S3 (object based storage) or Elastic Block Store (EBS) which gives you a raw volume between 1GB and 1TB that you can create a file system on.

Q: Is it worth using EC2 for web hosting?

A: If you want to do some generic web hosting (and typical small uses of MySQL or servlets, etc), I think you are likely better off using one of the many hosting companies where you can do it much cheaper and easier.  I think EC2 is most useful when you want to have great flexibility in how OS instances are configured and how many instances you want running at a given time.

OpenSolaris.org zones-discuss forum

Zones at forums.sun.com

Zones FAQ

Jeff Victor’s blog

BigAdmin’s zones section

zonemanager – a script to automate zone creation and post-install tasks

zonestat – print zone resource usage statistics

Solaris Resouce Manager and Zones documentation at docs.sun.com

I just sent in my registration request for The Amaz!ng Meeting 7.  I’ll also be attending Dr. Steven Novella’s Science Based Medicine pre-conference the day before and catching Penn & Teller’s show on Saturday night.

The best site I’ve seen lately that covers a variety of different events is Spotobe.

If you are more into the Harrisburg nightlife/restaurant scene, Sarah Bozich provides a lot of updates.

Mon – off

Tue: ran 5 miles with Nate along Front Street/PennDOT trail

Wed: ran 4 miles on the Conewago

Thur: ran 5 miles on the Conewago

Fri: off

Sat: 4 miles from City Island and along the river front in Harrisburg

Sun: 8.3 or so miles with Nate along the Appalachian Trail

Total: 26 miles. I think this is my 2nd highest weekly total since last summer.

I’m planning on running a 15k (9.3 miles for the non-metrically inclined) race next Sunday with Nate which will be held in Shippensburg.  They are also offering a 18 mile bike ride, 15k hike, and a 5k race on the same day.  Details are available at the CVRTC site.

If someone could offer a 21% return and had an iron-clad guarantee of return of principle I don’t think they would need to spend advertising money on a billboard along route 83 to attract investors.

I still don’t think Garmin Connect has pretty URL support like the Motionbased vanity naming, but now that they have a search feature that works I did find out how to make a URL that points to my workout list.

http://connect.garmin.com/explore#activityType=all&eventType=all&username=wdhathaway&currentPage=1&sortField=relevance

This is probably only interesting to experienced photographers and/or open-source geeks.

I recently came across CHDK (Canon Hacker’s Development Kit), an open-source firmware project for Canon’s  PowerShot line of cameras that adds a bunch of additional functionality to the cameras.  You basically copy the CHDK firmware to your flash card and then while the camera is on instruct it to upgrade the firmware (which takes about 5 seconds on my SD400).  The firmware upgrade to CHDK only lasts for the given power-cycle, so once you turn the camera off, it will revert to the standard Canon firmware.

Here are some of the main features:

• RAW – CHDK can record raw files, giving you access to every bit of data the sensor saw, without compression or processing. Raw files can be manipulated on the camera, or processed on your PC. CHDK also has experimental support for the open DNG raw standard.
• Override Camera parameters – Exposures from 64s to 1/60.000s with flash sync. Full manual or priority control over exposure, aperture, ISO and focus.
• Bracketing – Bracketing is supported for exposure, aperture, ISO, and even focus.
• Video Overrides – Control the quality or bitrate of video, or change it on the fly.
• Scripting – Control CHDK and camera features using ubasic and Lua scripts. Enables time lapse, motion detection, advanced bracketing, and much more. Many user-written scripts are available on the forum and wiki.
• Motion detection – Trigger exposure in response to motion, fast enough to catch lightning.
• Edge overlay – Detect the edges in a scene, and display them later. Ideal for timelapses, stop-motion, stereography and much more.
• Live Histogram – CHDK includes a customizable, live histogram display, like those typically found on more expensive cameras.
• Zebra-Mode – Displays under and overexposure areas live on the screen.
• GRIDS – Create custom grids and display whichever one suits your shooting conditions.
• Multi-Lingual Interface – CHDK supports about 13 languages, and adding more languages is simple.
• DOF Calculator – Display detailed DOF information on the screen.
• Customizable OSD – Improved display of battery status, free space, camera parameters, and much more. Fully customizable with an on-screen editor.

There are a number of other features ranging from the ability to hook two cameras together to take stereo pictures all the way to playing games on the camera’s LCD screens.