Spring? Syke.

Well this has been an interesting day. Woke up “on time” (alarm went off at 8, slept in until ~9 when I got up for class), and found out my class was online since my professor got stuck at home due to snow. At that point there was only an inch or two at most on the ground which isn’t much for Rochester, but that was sure changed by the end of the day. So essentially I got to act like my first – and only – class of the day was at 2 in the afternoon :)

 An inspirational technical text from RIT:

Earlier this evening, some email messages going in or out of campus, or to/from Exchange and Google Apps were delayed unusually long due to the weather.

While this doesn’t necessarily make sense, I’d be curious to know the actual details behind the incident. Sleep and homework comes first though.

Minor Dot Update

So I updated this site/blog a while ago when I changed hosting servers with the intent of actually updating it. It’s now over 3 months later (wow, time travels fast) and that same Pardon the Dust posting is still at the top. I guess that’s generally how college goes, no? Around the end of a semester or quarter one suddenly has lots of free time, it stays like that for a while, and then a new session of classes starts and your free time goes downhill.

My general amount of free time has definitely decreased during this spring quarter, and we’re only in the third week. It seems the mixture of classes that I’m taking, which aren’t incredibly hard (so far), have just taken over with work whether reading, writing, or analyzing texts.

2010-3 Courses:

• Information Security Policies (4050-360)
• Introduction to Databases & Data Modeling (4002-360)
• Computer Crime (0501-507)
• Financial Accounting (0101-301)
• Cultural Anthropology (0510-210)

Hopefully even though it’s the spring quarter I’ll be able to reprioritize my time make it so that I’m not up until 1 (or later) in the morning on a Tuesday doing homework for a class at 8am that same day. Last I checked this was still possible, right?

Well, I certainly hope so; we’ll see though, won’t we? :)

Pardon the Dust

Please excuse the broken links around the blog and my site in general currently. I’m in the midst of migrating everything to a new server, as well as upgrading some things like Gallery (from 2 to 3). If you see something broken, feel free to email me, otherwise I’ll hopefully get around to it when I can :)

Mu

ec2-download-bundle issues

I’m trying to download a bundle I recently uploaded to the S3 bucket I created, but am getting some fun/interesting errors from $EC2_HOME/lib/ec2/commons/curl.rb:

Curl without verbose enabled:

./download-bundle.sh (this is a simple script I created to make sure variables are set and such)
Downloading manifest osol-2009.6.manifest.xml from srepetsk to /mnt/downloaded/osol-2009.6.manifest.xml ...
Failed to download "osol-2009.6.manifest.xml": Curl.Error(77): error setting certificate verify locations:
CAfile: /etc/curl/curlCA
CApath: none.
ERROR: Failed to download "osol-2009.6.manifest.xml": Curl.Error(77): error setting certificate verify locations:
CAfile: /etc/curl/curlCA
CApath: none.

Curl with verbose enabled:

./download-bundle.sh
Downloading manifest osol-2009.6.manifest.xml from srepetsk to /mnt/downloaded/osol-2009.6.manifest.xml ...
Failed to download "osol-2009.6.manifest.xml": undefined method `<<' for nil:NilClass
ERROR: Failed to download "osol-2009.6.manifest.xml": undefined method `<<' for nil:NilClass

Trying to download the bundle to an OpenSolaris 2009.06 64-bit instance created not long ago. Has anybody else had experience with this kind of thing? I’m passing ec2-download-bundle what I think are all the options it needs:

ec2-download-bundle -b $MANIFEST_PATH -a $EC2_KEYID -s $EC2_KEY -k $PRIVKEY  -p $MANIFEST_PREFIX -d /mnt/downloaded

The thing I’m most unsure about is whether the –k parmaeter is correct, since that’s what it seems to be complaining about the most. The CA file (which the *.pem file should accomplish) that it’s looking for should be passed in from the –k parameter I’d think, but I’m wondering if this is a bug in the ec2 commands? or if I’m just doing something wrong. I’m still trying a couple things, but this has got me puzzled at the moment.

debian-main

Another ZFS departure

Another ZFS departure

Jeff Bonwick is leaving Oracle.This is a huge event, because Jeff has been one of the main innovators in operating system technology during his tenure at Sun. While you may know him best for ZFS, he's also the inventor of the slab allocator, which revolutionized memory management when it was created. (And now, pretty much every modern system uses some variation of the slab allocator.)And he's not just an Oracle VP. Jeff has made integrations into Solaris' ZFS code base on an ongoing basis. This is a guy that has led with actual actions and innovation, backed by code, rather than some boffin who's risen to management and no longer contributes. At some level, he's the model for the kind of technologist I aspire to be.With so many innovators leaving (and yes, there are other key players in flight), its going to be very interesting to see how Oracle is able to continue to be a thought leader in the OS technology that they've acquired.One the one hand, its really a shame to see to much of the heart and soul of the Solaris engineer core slowly disintegrating.On the other hand, I think illumos may be the place where Solaris innovation happens, more so than at Oracle, even sooner than I previously expected.

[Planet Illumos]