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What I am not thankful for:

November 27 2009 by linc in Home Life, Humor |No Comments

A few days ago my storage facility emailed me and asked me to take a quick customer survey. I obliged.

Dear Lincoln, Is there anything else that you would like to tell us about your experience with Extra Space Storage?

My understanding is that you folks just took over the storage space I have been using for some time now so I am not entirely sure most of my problems are related to your company. What I can say for sure is when I initially signed up there, the clerk was really a jerk to us and obviously had no idea what he was doing. He made several snide comments and it took me 4 phone calls to get our access code. I would have left then, but this was the closest facility to me that didn’t charge exorbitant prices. You have since fixed the price point and are charging me as much as possible. The last time I visited my non-climate controlled unit, I found all my possessions covered in leaves and cobwebs and other miscellaneous flora, as if there has been some squirrel or rat or other critter in there. I didn’t bother even reporting it since I had such a horrible experience with the worker I ran into when I first signed up. At this point, the moment I can find a cheaper facility I am gone to take my chances there. At almost $50 a month for a 5×5 non-climate controlled unit with a crappy door and some mongoose living in it unattended I feel as if I am truly getting ripped off every time the bill comes due. And someone needs to fix the exit keypad that you literally have to hold up while you punch the digits. Apparently someone ran it over and the resourceful staff there have it professionally fixed with an old bungee cord.

Happy Thanksgiving

November 26 2009 by linc in Friends, Home Life |1 Comment

Today in the U.S.A. we are celebrating Thanksgiving Day, which is a day where we try and remember what we are really thankful for. I thought I would share my hot list.

I am thankful for my God. Many don’t like it and most don’t understand, but my life changed dramatically when I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior. Before that point I felt that I was simply spiraling into the abyss. I was in a bad place. He turned that around for me.

I am thankful for my family. I may not always say it, but these people are my immediate support system and it’s for them and because of them that I can manage to get up in the morning most days and function.

I am thankful for my friends. This includes all of you, who read this stuff and send me encouraging emails and such. Thank you wherever you are and I hope you have a great Thanksgiving day too!

Macaroni Salad

November 25 2009 by linc in Recipe |No Comments

Ok, one more recipe. I just love this stuff.

* 1/2 lb of elbow noodles
* 1 cucumbers
* 1 small onion (red is pretty)
* 1 cup your favorite mayonnaise
* Salt / Pepper
* 3 or 4 Tbsp Apple Cider Vinegar
* 3 or 4 Tbsp milk

Cook noodles, dice cucumber, dice small onion extra small, mix in bowl.
Mix together cup of mayo, 2 or 3 tablespoons of vinegar, salt, pepper and 2 or 3 tablespoons of milk to make the dressing. Taste it – you may need/want to add more vinegar. Should be thin enough to pour over macaroni mix. Mix it up and let it sit a while for best tastiness.

Note that I do not like eggs, so there are none in this salad, however, this macaroni salad recipe is particularly forgiving and you can easily add eggs, celery, bell peppers, etc. with a wonderful result.

This is making me hungry just reading it. MMMmmmmm.

Ugly Sweater Day

November 24 2009 by linc in Humor, work |No Comments

For quite sometime, as a little morale booster, we have been having Hawaiian Shirt Fridays at work. It’s fun and I, personally like Hawaiian shirts. The gaudier the better.

Well, recently, it has been decided that in lieu of the warmer weather, perhaps we should temporarily switch to Ugly Sweater Fridays instead. What you see included in this post is my first attempt. I asked my wife the day before to run to the thrift store and get me the ugliest sweater she could find.

She really deserves the credit here, although I did wear it proudly. I was *easily* given the title for the most hideous sweater. We’ll have to see what happens next week, but I believe this will be hard to beat unless someone finds one of those light-up Rudolph holiday sweaters.

Let’s see the pics of YOUR ugly sweaters!

New Business Cards

November 23 2009 by linc in Home Life |No Comments

Nothing tool wonderful to post about today, just that I finally got some business cards. I have long carried some around for the LinuxLink TechShow and other things, but never seem to get around to anything general about me or more recently, anything that even has my name and number on it. Well, a few days ago I got an email from Overnight Prints about a sale they were having and decided to hit their website and take a peek. 10 minutes and 10 dollars later I had 100 business cards ordered and I think they turned out pretty well. This is a great service that turns out good quality cards fast at a reasonable price.

Pepper Pot

November 22 2009 by linc in Friends, Recipe |No Comments

Not to be outdone by Danns fantastic sounding fried wontons, I figured since it’s getting colder a little pepper pot would be tasty for those long days where geeking out is making you fiercely hungry.

* 1-2 lbs Ground Beef
* Couple cans cubed Potatoes
* 1 or 2 cans Carrots
* 2 quarts Beef Stock
* 1 Med Onion
* 1 bag Pot-pie noodle squares
* Black pepper
* Red Pepper Flakes
* Hot Sauce

Chop onion and put in large pot with ground beef. Add a couple shots of your favorite hot sauce and a quarter to half teaspoon of red pepper flakes. Brown ground beef with onions in large pot. When beef is cooked, add potatoes and carrots. Cover everything with beef stock until about 3 inches above solid ingredients. Bring to a boil. Turn heat down to simmer and add appropriate amount of noodles. Cook until noodles are tender. Add ground black pepper to taste. Serve!

Linux to the rescue again

November 21 2009 by linc in Linux, Ubuntu, work |No Comments

I have to keep a windows xp vm kicking around that I use almost never for those nagging few windows apps that the smart developers didn’t make at least a web version for. Well, I needed to to some modifications to a project on MS Project server (Firefox/Linux compatibility in next release BTW) so I fired up the xp vm to find that it was effectively out of disk space. Back when I built it 2+ yrs ago I only made it an 8gb vm and with all the little proprietary apps over the years is has just gotten full.

A quick google search on the subject showed that I could, indeed, increase the drive space in the vmdk with the “vmware-vdiskmanager” command (vmware serer 1 – I told you this vm was old). I simply went to my virtual machines directory (where the vmdk files are stored) and issued “vmware-vdiskmanager -x 12gb -t 1 winxp.vmdk”. This says (-x) extend the volume to 12gb and that the volume type (-t 1) is split into the 2gb files. The command did it’s job in just a few seconds and presented me with a warning that I would need a third party program in the virtual machine to expand the partition there to get use of the new volume free space.

I learned from my favorite windows admin that there is a diskmanager utility in xp that *can* do this, however, not on the system partition, which is what I needed. I just happened to have an Ubuntu 9.10 iso handy and told the xp vm to boot that up instead. From there I started up GParted and quickly told it to extend the size of the partition to fill all the remaining free space on the volume. I clicked on the green checkmark to tell GParted to “Go” and off it went. The entire resize for GParted took only maybe 10 seconds. It’s just amazing to me. I remember when Linux couldn’t even figure out what an NTFS partition and here I was fixing one in mere seconds.

Needless to say, only a minute later I had my windows xp vm booting up and working in it’s newly extended NTFS partition. Once again, Linux saved the day!

Rocks burn-in

November 20 2009 by linc in CentOS, RedHat, Rocks |No Comments

The other day I was talking about how to install Rocks Cluster. Well, today I’ll give you indication on how to test it out a bit. Now this is surely not the *proper* way to test the cluster out, which would be to run some fancy cluster-aware graphics rendering application or something of the sort, but this will put something on there and make it churn out some cpu cycles just to see how things look.

What I like to use for this task is Folding At Home, which is a protein folding program (hey, help cure diseases and stuff, right). You can get things ready by downloading the appropriate version of the client for your machine(s) from the download section. The current one that I am using is the Linux version 6.24 Beta.

Log on to your cluster and create a directory for each node that you want to run the FAH client on. If you only have a couple,. it’s easy to just do that by hand, if not, you can use this simple script:

#!/bin/bash
rockslist=$(rocks list host | grep ‘:’ | cut -d’:’ -f1)
for name in $rockslist
do
mkdir -p $name
done

From there, extract your FAH client file you just downloaded into your headnode directory. Tip: you headnode directory will be named something *other* than compute-?-?. Take the fah5 and mpiexec files from there and copy them to all your compute-?-? directories.

This should really get better instruction, but you’ll want to install screen on all your nodes. If you have things set up well, you should be able to do this as root:

rocks run host “yum -y install screen”

Go into your headnode directory and start your rocks client “./fah6” and answer the configuration questions. Once you get it actually processing a work unit, you can stop it with a control-c.

At this point, copy the client.cfg file from your headnode directory to all the compute node directories.

Now, back in the headnode directory, “screen -d -m ./fah6” which will start your folding at home client in a detached screen session and leave it running.

Now your are ready to start it up like that in your compute nodes too:

for name in compute*
do
echo “Killing $name”
ssh $name killall screen
echo “Restarting $name”
ssh $name “cd $name ; screen -d -m ./fah6”
done

And you can also use that script to periodically stop/restart (or just start again) FAH on your compute nodes as FAH will sometimes hang. I normally run this to restart FAH every couple weeks just to keep things going. Also do jump in occasionally and “screen -x” to look and see if there needs to be an updated client installed occasionally. Either way, this will eat up your spare cpu cycles and make use of your cluster while you learn on it and figure out what else to do with it. It’s also a lot of fun and you can help study/cure diseases too.

Mom’s Hamburger Soup

November 19 2009 by linc in Recipe |No Comments

Boy, I wish I had a picture of this, or maybe smellavision or something to help share with. You’ll just have to trust me.

I have been looking for things to write about this month and, honestly, my topic list is getting pretty low. Then, I ran into Dann’s post about his cooking. Well, I love to cook too! I even did it professionally for a while. I am really into down-home comfort food stuff, and I thought I would share a recipe or two for those of you who are hungry fellows like me.

This is my Mother-in-law’s Hamburger soup recipe.

* 1 lb Ground Beef
* 1 6oz Can tomoto paste
* 1 14oz Can sliced carrots
* 1 14oz Can diced (or sliced) whole potatoes
* 1/2lb Farfalle noodles (bowties)

Brown ground beef in large pot with some worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper.
Add canned vegetables.
Add water to cover, plus about 4 inches. Bring to a boil.
Stir in tomato paste. Cook for 2-3 minutes.
Add noodles. Cook until noodles reach desired consistency. Salt and pepper to taste.

Makes 5 or 6 very hearty servings.

1000 Songs

November 18 2009 by linc in Gear, Music |No Comments

How would you like to pay 4 cents a piece for your music? Well, the price was definitely right for me. I stopped at BestBuy and bought a SlotRadio card to use with my Sansa Fuse.

Slide this little card in your Sansa Fuse and you get access to 1000 songs over a variety of genres. It works a lot like radio in that you cannot really choose what songs are going to play next, however, you can switch the genre channels and skip songs.

So far I am really digging this. The audio is encoded at a high quality and the actual songs are all popular (no bad B sides). For 4 cents a song, you just can’t beat this. It would be nice if the format was a bit more portable and I could get the songs somewhere other than my Sansa Fuse, but really, that is what I listen to most of my music on now anyway 🙂

While I was picking up my SlotRadio card I did also notice a few Slot Music cards as well. These are the pretty much the same thing as the slot radio cards but filled with one album. The price is about the same as the regular album and, word has it, this music is slightly more portable as an unencumbered mp3 that you can move from device to device. I will have to put one of these on my hot list of things to get and see for myself. I would have grabbed one already but the only albums available at the time in person were not to my musical taste. Ordering online seems to have quite a few more choices though.