YetAnotherPersonalHomepage

Just a few hours before I leave. Unsubbed from a few mailing lists, backed up my palm pilot and retested my otp login. I am in touch with relatives and will meet them for the first time next week. I also contacted some Perl Mongers in both Sydney and Melbourne and they’re planning meetings. Should be nice. I don’t expect to have much in the way of net access and, if I should, I probably won’t have time to blog. Yeah, it’s a real loss to the world.

Add to the list of wsadmin annoyances that invoking some of the really useful methods on MBeans results not in a string or usable Java object but a unique string naming the instance of the class. Having this object identifier might be useful if there were some means of then manipulating it, except there isn’t. Thanks for the useless string com.ibm.ws.foo.bar08FA7100A0. This quirk makes it furiously hard to do anything with, for instance, clusters, like determining their members without enumerating every server in the cell and figuring out from each one if it is a member. I suspect that I’m going to have to write Jython or Java programs that directly use the Java classes rather than work around the limitations of wsadmin.

We want to hand off a first cut of WS5 to some developers for testing. I’ve fought and won making it to fit our deployment scheme (yay!) and then fought and won getting it patched (at least for ptf1 and the cumulatives) and I’m now fighting with the scripted administration (you know, put some lipstick on this pig– I mean some kind of value add on it). This is not pretty because:

• The MBeans for administration are, well, quirky. It’s a complex product and I get the feel that this was pasted together. Some methods return MBean ids, some return object names, others return object paths. Conveniently, these can’t be directly converted between one another and you have to pull them apart, reformat the pieces and use them to query other MBeans in order to act on your target. At least the examples in the RedBooks provide a nice starting point once you invest enough time playing to see how it fits together. Notice, I say "after", the examples don’t hide the slicing and dicing but because they are taken from interactive sessions they don’t clearly show that a fair bit of juggling goes on.
• The only supported language is Jacl (TCL). Jython ships with WS5 and is, in theory, an alternative but I can’t find a single example. I found on WSDD a good intentions mention of a future article but no info and after an hour of fiddling I resigned myself to Jacl. I’m not a big fan of TCL and writing a collection of administrative tools isn’t converting me. As used in the wsadmin shell Jacl is particularly crippled because it doesn’t allow creating native Java objects and calling their methods like it normally would, cutting off another possible route to efficiently working with WS5.

It was beautiful so we got in the car in the morning and hit the highway for the Connecticut shore to find a seafood lunch. Seemed like everyone else with a car, including quite a few that should have stayed in the driveway rather than break down on the roadside, thought the same. We did manage to get to East Lyme before our patience wore out completely and enjoyed a great meal at the Flander’s Fish Market. We learned of it from a review on Jane and Michael Stern’s Roadfood site. Quick description of the eats: The roll on which the hot lobster roll is served was a little different than expected- good, hearty whole wheat and tasty, but too firm for the contents and we discarded half of the bread- but the hot lobster salad itself was excellent, seasoned with sherry and spices. The fried seafood platter (I couldn’t make up my mind and it had some of everything) was also very good. A generous portion of crisp fried seafood without too much batter. I didn’t consider that a whole plate of fried food is too much of a good thing on a hot day and I couldn’t finish. Afterward, we headed inland and took secondary routes (154, 9, 202, 44) back through Hartford into Amenia. A much more pleasant drive than the coastal weekend scrum.

We’re getting ready for a two-week vacation. Drew up a packing list, struck things off it, added others and tested it for fit in the suitcase (going to have to take some in the carry-on or jettison something). We double-checked our itinerary, paperwork, checked the camera and did a pre-emptive cleaning of the fridge. I ran lists of one-time passwords (hey, you never know), made a list of things I need to buy before leaving and fired off emails to various contacts we hope to see. Pretty mundane stuff but we’re excited about it.

On Monday, our friend Paul returns from a couple of years of working in Japan. We’ll pick him up at the airport and he’ll be staying over. This nicely handles his matter of needing a base of operations while getting resettled in NYC and our concern of who will keep an eye on the place, water the houseplants and take in the paper.

The heat a few weeks ago was too much for my SS5/170, at least for the two Seagate drives. I was greeted on my return from visiting friends over the 4th of July weekend by I/O errors during my nightly cron jobs. The drive containing the root slice showed intermittent errors. The data drive, which I had unmounted a couple of weeks before (I didn’t need the space anymore), was offline. Fortunately, I had made backups a few days before. Other than the errors from that weekend, everything kept humming so I had time to plan the replacement.

This afternoon I brought it down and discovered that my intended spare was no good. After some appropriate profanity, I committed the disks to the trash and looked around for another Sparc. My U60, which I had been using to play with Solaris and NetBSD- it’s great compiling things on such a fast machine- was otherwise idle so I moved it from my desk to the rack and whipped out the OpenBSD CDs. An hour later I had it up and running with all the old content restored.

It’s massive overkill for hosting this static vanity site. One nice thing is that it’s blissfully quiet compared to the wailing of the SS5. I have to scrounge up another disk drive for the SPARCstation and bring that back up to resume it’s duties. Probably after I get back from vacation.