The Blog of Harald

As mentioned earlier, I’m upset (if not surprised) about the Rogers/Fido iPhone plans. I was still thinking about it, however, after looking at the calculations at “http://getthefactsonrogersiphone.com/facts.html”:http://getthefactsonrogersiphone.com/facts.html, it’s no longer an option for me. I’m simply unwilling to commit to giving Rogers between $2880 and $4320 (before tax!) of my hard-earned dollars (even if that would be spread over 3 years). We already spend too much on telephones around here; two cell phones and a land-line nets out to about $150/mo for us.

Now I have to decide: iTouch or EEE (or the HP EEE competitor, which alas, I don’t get an employee discount on…). Or stick with my current tactic of borrowing iPhones or BlackBerrys from my friends :-)

Daddy: “Why is ‘bealzebub’ written on our whiteboard?”
The Girl: “I don’t know. Does it have his phone number?”

Rogers just announced their iPhone plans; they’re hideously expensive! I was expecting Rogers to abuse their monopoly power, but I’m still a little surprised…

http://www.rogers.com/web/content/wireless-products/iphone_voice_data_packages

between $60 and $115 per month for basic voice and data. The $60 plan is 150min airtime, 400Mb data; not much really, especially if you start pushing images around. Ugh. Fido hasn’t announced rates yet, but they’ll probably be the same. So the options seem to be:

– buy an iPhone anyway, and suck it up. (That’s *three times* what I’m paying Fido for my voice plan).
– by an unlocked iPhone from the US, and only use GSM and WiFi. Lots of people are happy doing this.
– buy an iTouch instead.
– Abandon Apple; go with a “small factor” laptop instead, like the EEE or the HP/Dell equivalents. (Yes, I said Dell in my weblog!!! :)

We just returned from our annual gang weekend at The Pinery. We left Thursday and came back Monday this time, because the kids’ school schedule made that easy.

The forecast was for rain rain rain all weekend, but it didn’t turn out that way! We arrived and set up in the rain, of course, but Friday was absolutely gorgeous all day. Saturday morning we woke up to rain, but we had our giant pancake breakfast anyway, and by the time everyone was sitting around stuffed the sun came out. We were scared off the beach around 4PM by a line of thunderstorms, but most of them missed us. There was a severe weather warning for Sunday night, but again, that missed us to the south. The worst weather we had was probably the major hailstorm we hit just as we passed through Kitchener on the way home!

We spent two days at the beach, and one day on a “nature hike” (really an excuse to walk to the Camp Store and buy ice cream!). The boys had a great time exploring the beach and the woods by themselves; between GPS and FRS radios, there was no danger of losing them :). The bikes didn’t get used as much as they have in past years; maybe we’ll stop carting them around, which will leave more space for other stuff in the truck.

There was some excitement, of course! Brian and Nancy’s new dog escaped on Saturday afternoon, and spent almost 24 hours running around in the woods before they finally captured him again on Sunday. We “lost” at least one boy three times over the weekend (it’s hard to get truly lost there, since there are barriers everywhere; beach, campgrounds, river, and roads). I forgot to turn off the dome lights in our truck, and so by Monday morning it wouldn’t start. I’d already used my portable power pack to recharge the trailer; apparently the lights draw more power than we thought they did (either that, or Keiran accidentally turning on the furnace drained a lot of power :). Still, no harm done; Rick gave me a boost, and I was able to start again after running the truck for several minutes.

We now know that we don’t have to spend 30 minutes back and forth with the trailer in the campsite; it turns out that the position we finally picked we could have just driven straight in :). Ah well; hindsight is 20-20, and all that! On the other hand, Michelle et al and Paul/Anita are moving a bit closer to the comfort station next year, so we might follow them and switch campsites again.

Definitely a fun time, and I’m looking forward to our road trip this summer!

My orthopaedic surgeon is very happy with my shoulder; he thinks the joint has stiffened up nicely, and is unlikely to suffer stability problems. In his words, stiff is good; stiffness can be stretched out with physiotherapy, but looseness only gets fixed with his knives…

I have reasonably good mobility. There are certain directions I can’t move the shoulder, but since those are the “dangerous” directions, it’s all good. He says I’m unlikely to redislocate, at least in the short term, because I can’t actually move the joint into any of the stressful positions likely to cause a second dislocation. (I’m paraphrasing here).

So, I’m off to physiotherapy starting next week. If things get too loose in there, I may yet have to go under the knife, but for now, he recommends waiting.

!http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2120/2475530616_4904f2883b.jpg?v=0(There goes the neighbourhood)!:http://www.flickr.com/photos/anythreewords/2475530616/

I cannot possibly comment further without getting into trouble :-)

more news that’s finally public (the announcement was probably delayed because of the EDS leak :-):

“HP and Novell Announce Migration Program for HP Identity Management Customers”:http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/080516/20080516005043.html?.v=1

bq. As part of an agreement between the companies, HP and Novell will jointly offer migration services, HP will resell Novell identity and security management solutions and Novell will license HP Identity Center technology.

bq. Earlier this year, HP announced it will focus its investment in identity management products on existing customers rather than selling the products to new customers. To ensure that they continue to have access to exemplary identity management solutions, existing HP customers can take advantage of this program and migrate to Novell’s industry-leading offerings. Customers who choose not to migrate will continue to be supported by HP.

Still no concrete news on how this affects me; I still have a job until October 31st, and I’m in limbo beyond that. C’est la vie!

So last Wednesday I fell down stupidly and either subluxated or dislocated my right shoulder. I spend just over a week with my right arm in an immobilizer, after which the doc said “take it off”. I’m allowed to do a lot of things, but no “arm above the shoulder” movement and no “external rotation”. The shoulder is a little sore, especially when I first wake up in the morning, but otherwise I can do stuff again!

I’ve been tinkering under the hood recently (that is why I set up this server, after all!). I’m in the process of moving a bunch of the older sites around here to use WordPress MU as the underlying CMS. It’s going well so far, so I should be able to formally move the sites in a couple more weeks. We’ve also finally upgraded Gallery to Gallery2, and there’s an Ubuntu 7.10 → 8.04 upgrade to look forward to!

I need to take more photographs. Maybe it’s time to challenge a few of my friends to 365 (a photo per day for a year)…

A recent version of MythTV added some “special” searches; 3.5 stars or more, science fiction, etc. Between TCM and AMC I’ve been catching up on movies from the various lists on the blog, as well as a bunch of other classics:

“Top 50 Movie Adaptations”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2006/04/28/more-movies/
“102 must-see movies?”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2006/04/27/102-must-see-movies/

* The Graduate
* The Maltese Falcon

“sf film canon”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2005/11/13/sf-film-canon/ and “AFI Tpo 50 SF Movies”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2008/02/15/afi-top-50-sf-movies/

* The Stepford Wives
* The Thing From Another World
* 28 Days Later

Others:

* Singin’ in the Rain
* The Silence of the Lambs
* The Adventures of Robin Hood (Errol Flynn!)
* The Odd Couple
* Harvey
* The Philadeplphia Story
* Casablanca
* Key Largo

Well, to our American viewers, anyway. To the rest of us, it’s some less exciting number :)

Today I finally learned how to solve the NFS UID problem on Ubuntu.

You see, NFS normally does it’s permissions by numeric UID. If the UIDs on two different machines don’t match, then NFS permission checking doesn’t work; you don’t get access to your own files, and you might get access to somebody else’s files instead!

Ubuntu, of course, has no standard UIDs, not even for system services. So my four ubuntu boxes here each have different username <> UID maps.

Enter the ugidd package, which is an RPC daemon that runs on the client. The NFS server calls this daemon when a mount request comes in, and dynamically builds a UID map between the server and the client, based on the string usernames. As a side effect, it also seems to map userids that are not assigned on the client to ‘nobody’. In this way, the nfs server can map UIDs between systems, without the administrator (that’s me!) maintaining static map files.

The one downside is that this feature requires the user-space NFS server instead of the kernel nfs server, so performance suffers a bit. I have CPU to spare, though!

Now I can use NFS between my MythTV boxes :-)

It seems the “news” has finally leaked out to the general public:

* “http://identityblog.burtongroup.com/bgidps/2008/03/hps-identity-re.html”:http://identityblog.burtongroup.com/bgidps/2008/03/hps-identity-re.html
* “http://stage.vambenepe.com/archives/171”:http://stage.vambenepe.com/archives/171
* “http://blogs.sun.com/IdentityCrisis/entry/hp_is_withdrawing_from_identity”:http://blogs.sun.com/IdentityCrisis/entry/hp_is_withdrawing_from_identity

I’m not allowed to say much in public, so I’ll link to these stories without comment.

vapour lock isn’t really the right term, but I can’t think of a better fluid-dynamics term right now.

In the sudden torrential snowfall this afternoon, I got stuck south of an intersection for about 20 minutes, unable to move. The traffic lights were synchronized, which works for normal traffic flow, but with the snow everyone was going slowly. The net result was that:

* when the light was red to me, there was space north of the intersection for cars, but that space was quickly filled by people turning from the cross street.
* by the time the light was green to me, there was no space left on the north side of the intersection. In fact, there was no space *in* the intersection, because the turning traffic was consistently filling the intersection. So I was stuck, along with everyone else.

I finally gave up, turned around, drove all the way around the block, and came at the intersection again from the cross street :). After which I encountered another roadblock; York Mills eastbound was closed at Don Mills, because cars could not make it up the hill.

It took me 1:45 to get from my office to the school…

SCI-FI Wire “announced today”:http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=3&id=48610 that AFI has picked a “Top 50” list of science fiction movies. I’ve taken their list and bolded the ones I’ve seen. I have -18- 16 movies to see to catch up!

* A.I. Artificial Intelligence
* *Alien*
* *Altered States*
* *The Andromeda Strain*
* *Back to the Future*
* The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms
* *Blade Runner*
* Children of Men
* A Clockwork Orange
* *Close Encounters of the Third Kind*
* *Cocoon*
* *Contact*
* *The Day the Earth Stood Still*
* Destination Moon
* *E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial*
* *Escape From New York*
* Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
* Fantastic Voyage
* *The Fly (1986)*
* *Forbidden Planet*
* Frankenstein (1931)
* The Incredible Shrinking Man
* *Independence Day*
* Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
* The Invisible Man (1933)
* It Came From Outer Space
* *Jurassic Park*
* *Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome*
* *The Matrix*
* *Men in Black*
* *Minority Report*
* *Planet of the Apes (1968)*
* *Repo Man*
* *RoboCop*
* Rollerball (1975)
* *Silent Running* (one of my favourites)
* *Soylent Green*
* *Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan*
* *Star Wars: Episode IV–A New Hope*
* *Starman*
* *The Stepford Wives (1975)*
* *Terminator 2: Judgment Day*
* Them!
* The Thing From Another World
* *The Time Machine (1960)*
* *Total Recall*
* *Tron*
* *2001: A Space Odyssey*
* *The War of the Worlds (1953)*
* Westworld

after a long drought, I added another country to my “419 spam list”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2004/11/07/nigerian-fraud-countries/ : Iran!

The entire development team here in Toronto has been “WFRed”, HP’s fancy term for “your job no longer exists, thanks for playing”. (To be fair, HP’s process is actually quite generous; they offer everyone lots of time to try to find another job inside HP, resume services, interview skills training, and so on).

I’ve been asked to stay on, because my job has always been customer facing, and they need someone with that experience to help with the transition. I’ve always joked that I’d be the last one let go; I didn’t actually believe it though! Anyway, for a lot of different reasons, I’ve decided to accept. So while everyone else is out looking for work now, I’ll be looking for work in November.

It’s going to be a lonely 9 months. On the plus side, I don’t have to start commuting to Mississauga every day! I’ll have the ever so challenging “three flights of stairs” commute…

The very nice wildlife guy replaced the shingles that blew off my roof in this week’s windstorm, and refused to take a tip afterwards; he said he needed the practice :).

So if y’all need wildlife extracted, I continue to highly recommend “AAA Wildlife”:http://www.aaawildlife.com/. They’re friendly and knowledgeable and professional!

At least it’s not raccoons; this time there are squirrels frolicking in my attic…

Options:

* status quo
* update the weblog more often
* switch to LiveJournal
* switch to FaceBook
* become a luddite

* dual, built-in convection ovens
* stand-up mixer
* cookie sheets, baking pans, etc.
* oven mits

Charlotte and I are off to make some chocolate chip cookies :)