No Pity for the Hummer

GM is closing its Hummer brand.

Good riddance.

Sonic Boom + Ice Crystals = Pretty

Via BoingBoing, a video of a rocket breaking the sound barrier amidst a layer of ice crystal clouds. Pretty, and Scientific!

Solaris Zones + pkgserv Hose Zone Boots (Nerdity Level: High)

So SunOracle Solaris has Zones, which are a light-weight virtual server platform that we use a lot at work.

We're finally rebuilding our "chassis" servers -- the ones that host all of our virtual Solaris servers (mostly web and mail apps). Our normal zone creation script kept crapping out )at the point of first booting the new zone) with

zoneadm: zone 'ZONE': These file-systems are mounted on subdirectories of /fs/zones-1/ZONE/root:
zoneadm: zone 'ZONE':   /fs/zones-1/ZONE/root/var/sadm/install/.door
zoneadm: zone 'ZONE': call to zoneadmd failed

(I've redacted the hostname to protect my company. :-))

The first boot of the zone happens — or rather, fails to happen — after zoneadm -z ZONE install and some file copies into the new zone directory tree.

Doing Internet searches for these strings doesn't really help much.

After many hours of digging, I discovered that I could run zoneadm -z ZONE boot and get the zone to boot — but only if I waited quite a while after doing the zoneadm -z ZONE install — at least ten minutes.

I was able to see that a pkgserv process was running:

root 23107 1   0 14:55:27 ?  0:02 pkgserv -d /fs/zones-1/ZONE/root/var/sadm/install -N pkgadd

— and that took between 3 and 4 minutes to quit out.

Now, pkgserv seems to be part of an effort to speed up building and patching zones, which can take a long time. The particular setup we're seeing appears to have shown up with the 2010-01-08 Recommended Patch Cluster (though it might have shown up earlier -- we stepped from the 2009-05-08 cluster to the 2010-01-08 cluster, so if it showed up earlier we wouldn't have seen it).

Once pkgserv finally quit, if I immediately tried zoneadm -z ZONE boot or zoneadm -z ZONE ready, it would give me the same "call to zoneadmd failed". truss showed me that a call to zone_create() was failing with EBUSY, and that was propagating up the stack. The thing that's bizarre is that it never seemed to clear. (If I left it alone, it would eventually clear [as I saw empirically] but I never actually managed to pin down how long the error would take to clear — the loop time was way too long.) I think that running zoneadm -z ZONE ready actually prolongs the error.

I finally gave up and tried

umount -f /fs/zones-1/ZONE/root/var/sadm/install/.door

(plain umount didn't work), and that magically cleared the problem. Both umount and umount -f threw errors, too:

umount: warning: /fs/zones-1/ZONE/root/var/sadm/install/.door not in mnttab
umount: /fs/zones-1/ZONE/root/var/sadm/install/.door not mounted

(The door file was never showing in /etc/mnttab or in mount output. I could never find a clean way to find the mount.

I think it's clear that the pkgserv setup is a bit buggy and needs to be fixed.

How Gay is the Super Bowl?

Mark Dery asks How Gay is the Superbowl?

What the Oracle-Sun Merger says about U.S. Politics

Interesting article from a Sun employee laid off in Germany, and how the Sun-Oracle merger and resulting layoffsreductions in force illuminate the political landscape in the US.

Context Sensitivity

If you were going to install a new version of, say, apache, and saw

lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root   13 Jan  9  2009 apache -> 
                                           apache-1.3.29/
drwxr-sr-x   9 root root  512 May 10  2001 apache-1.3.26/
drwxr-sr-x   9 root root  512 Jan 27  2004 apache-1.3.29/

in /usr/local, how would you install your new version of apache? I would hope that you wouldn't just install it into an "apache" directory like this:

drwxr-sr-x  10 root root 512 Feb  9 09:38 apache/
drwxr-sr-x   9 root root 512 May 10  2001 apache-1.3.26/
drwxr-sr-x   9 root root 512 Jan 27  2004 apache-1.3.29/

I swear, this needs to be an interview question with a hard FAIL mode (as in "Sorry, we're done. Goodbye."). If you can't figure out to preserve the existing pattern, you shouldn't be a sysadmin.

Frustration

Dear Firefox,

Please don't suddenly and randomly flip the value of the "Always use the cursor keys to navigate within pages" option. Having the down-arrow key change from "scroll the window down a few pixels" to "jump to the next link" is brain-shearingly annoying.

 

 

Dear Web Application Programmers,

If your web page presents a very complex form to fill out, which can take up to 20 minutes to do correctly, PLEASE program it so that if the user hits Backspace when not actually clicked into a form entry field, it doesn't just happily do the equivalent of hitting the Back button. I.e. ask me if I really want to navigate away from the form I just spent 20 minutes filling in and let me click "no" so I don't scream "NO!" and want to poke out my own eye.

Sincerely,
A Nearly One-Eyed Ranting Nerd

 

P.S. Feh.

Howard Zinn, RIP

Howard Zinn has died.

Immorality of Power

Jonah Lehrer has an interesting post up about how having (or even just remembering having) power over others make people far less empathetic than normal.

The conclusion is not surprising, but is well put:

Of course, we live in an age when our most powerful people - they tend to also have lots of money - are also the most isolated. They live in gated communities with private drivers. They eat at different restaurants and stay at different resorts. They wear different clothes and skip the security lines at airports, before sitting at the front of the plane. We shouldn't be surprised that they're also assholes.

Avatar

The Spouse and I saw Avatar yesterday. We enjoyed it. It's spectacular (in the sense of being a spectacle). Pity about the script, though.

ETA: The Spouse and I both think that the movie would have been much more interesting if Sigourney Weaver had played Colonel Quaritch.

TorchWTF?

Fox is developing a US version of Torchwood.

Favorite quote from the story:

A more straight-faced spin-off of "Doctor Who," "Torchwood" is about a covert group that investigates and fights alien activity.

("straight-faced"? Have they watched this show?)

(Thanks to Wilmar for the heads-up.)

SF Reading Protocols

Jo Walton explains how reading SF takes different kinds of reading skills from other genres.

(Via BoingBoing.)

Attention Grumpy Old People

(And I count myself as one....)

Complaining about the Youth Of Today is far from new:

An Assyrian clay tablet dating to around 2800 B.C. bears the inscription: “Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.”

(Via Making Light.)

Up! In the Air! It's a Bird...it's a Plane! No, it's a Double Movie Review

So The Spouse and I finally watched Up last week, and then saw Up in the Air (in an actual theater) over the weekend.

Up, while technically brilliant and often gorgeous to look at, is one of the bleakest movies we've ever seen. The first 10 minutes of the movie are fascinating to watch, but veer into serious tear-jerk territory fairly quickly. The rest is just bleak and weird, with a few minutes of heartwarming content at the end. The dogs are cute, though.

Up in the Air is also bleak -- but it's supposed to be. It's a very sardonic, and an actual adult comedy (R-rated, even), and has some real bite. It also has George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, and Anna Kendrick (who is (a) young and (b) very good). It may not make cinematic history, but it's a solid couple of hours of film, and I strongly wish there were more movies like it.

Happy New Decade

Good riddance to the Aughties, the 200X's, the Big Zero, or whatever else we want to call the last decade.

Geek Mashup Heaven

Via BoingBoing, there is apparently a cottage industry in mashups of Star Wars or Star Trek as if they were action TV shows from the 1980s:

The A-Team in the Star Wars Universe

Airwolf with the Star Wars people (rebel edition)

Airwolf with the Star Wars people (Imperial edition)

(The user page for the person who created most of those)

Star Trek + Monty Python's Knights of the Round Table

Star Trek characters as the A-Team

The Fall of Barad-Dur Was an Inside Job!

The Fall of Barad-Dur was an inside job!

I'm actually surprised that it took this long for someone to do this.

Mumps Outbreaks in the US

Mumps is breaking out just north of NYC.

<wonders if this will modify anyone's behavior with respect to childhood immunizations>

Testosterone, the Cooperation Hormone?

Well, not quite. But new research shows that the expectation of becoming more aggressive with a testosterone boost is as strong, if not stronger, than the actual effects of testosterone.

I love simple experiments like the one detailed in that article.

Serious Color Nerdity

Dumpster color fixed (at BoingBoing).