My Keepon - disappointing

Just this weekend my daughter purchased a My Keepon robot from the local outlet of toys r us. I have to say, I'm kind of disappointed. My expectations were set by two different videos of a Keepon robot dancing to Spoon's "I turn my camera on" and "Don't you Evah".

Compared to the Keepon robot in those videos, the toy my daughter purchased is unfortunately lame. Specifically, it'll only dance for perhaps 10-15 seconds before stopping for up to 10 seconds to reset itself. It's dancing is also notably less smooth and expressive compared to the videos.

Unfortunately, there also doesn't appear to be any capability for future software upgrades or other improvements. In short, it's not yet worth the money.

-- Pat

Allen PIttman Martial Arts Seminar

Martial Arts Seminar

(Flyer in PDF format)

with

Allen Pittman

Friday, Mar 11

through

Sunday, Mar 13

Featuring instruction in holistic health and martial arts training, both Eastern and Western

See Mr. Pittman's biography at: http://www.apittman.com/ptt/index.html

Hosted At:

MankatoMartialArts.com - 201 North Victory Dr, Mankato - (507) 386-7400

Friday	Saturday	Sunday
8:00-9:00 – Yoga for Physical Conditioning	8:00-9:00 – Yoga / Meditation open session	8:00-12:00 – Principles of Internal Arts (limited*)
Private Lessons (limited*)	10:00-12:00 – Introduction to Internal Martial Arts
	1:30-5:30 – Principles of Internal Arts (limited*)	1:30-5:30 – Principles of Internal Arts (limited*)
5:30-6:30 – Celtic Wrestling

(*) indicates limited attendance, contact Kyro Lantsberger for availability

FEES: $50 / 1 session ; $75 / 2 sessions ; $100 / 3 or more sessions

Private Lessons: $96 / hour

Contact: Kyro Lantsberger, kyro_lantsberger@yahoo.com 507-456-3697

Electronics triumph !

Last Sunday, I woke to find our house had no internet. This was puzzling, since we still had our landline phone service, and both our phone and internet come through the same fiber DSL router, provided by our fantastic locally owned community phone company.

Some dismayed investigation later determined that the issue was that our ninja cats had successfully bypassed the protective cover I'd devised for our router, and cat pee had dribbled into the actual router and fried at least one component.

Of course, while this is going on I get paged for a modestly significant VMWare outage for work, in which about a dozen virtual servers were effected; and before all this happened my lovely spouse got a call that her church's regular piano player was sick, and could she come and play; so I had all the kids and planned to take them to church with me; but one of the cars wouldn't start in the cold due to an old battery; and, well, you get the picture.

Yah, it was a pretty cruddy Sunday.

So, after getting back from fixing the issues at work later that night, and thoroughly but carefully cleaning the router's circuit board (with clean water, a old, soft toothbrush, just a tad of gentle, unscented dish soap, and more clean water), and drying it, I examined the board closely under a magnifying glass. I soon found this chip, which I had cleaned quite a bit of crud off of, with several of it's leads burned through:

New chip - top view	New chip - bottom view

The soldering job, my first surface mount work, turned out to not be nearly as scary as I feared (thanks to members of my local linux and hardware lug for great advice), other than the small size and considerable eye strain, even using a stand mounted magnifying glass.

I went back downstairs, plugged it in, and to my great joy, it worked!

Total cost, about $25.

I'd not at all mind doing a similar job again, the only thing I'd prefer to do differently is to have a better lighting and magnifying setup. Perhaps a large, stand mounted, self lit magnifying glass, or maybe some good work lights and one of those jeweler's loupes which can attach to a pair of glasses.

Anyway, all told, success! Much money saved, a yet more cat proof DSL router providing me service as I type this post, and a happy Pat. :-)

I just finished teaching an 9 week winter community ed taiji class that was perhaps the best community ed group I've taught. It was small, only 6 people, but no one dropped out, unlike almost every other class I've taught.

By 6 weeks, the entire group had picked up the whole first section of the Yang long form. By 7 weeks, they felt confident enough that they asked me to stop verbally coaching through the form. Additionally, by the end of class they all looked reasonably good doing it. So, the last two weeks, I was also able to spend time introducing and playing with taiji sword and bagua circle walking.

This class was a real pleasure to teach. I managed to grab a short video of us tonight at http://qik.com/video/5558201. Although the camera angle could have been better, nonetheless I congratulate them on a job well done!

-- Pat

I just had an unpleasant realization, due in part to a similar comment from Bob Nix. (Gee thanks Bob, even though you feel the same, way to share. :-S ).

Due to recent team reorg pulling linux into the windows group, nearly everything I've done in the past 5 years is now completely irrelevant. For me it's a real bummer 'cause I've either solely implemented, been the driver for, or worked on nearly every major process, standard, cross platform project or initiative in my prior team, as well as all of the linux specific infrastructure.

Now, almost none of what I did will matter or be used by the windows team - for the simple reason that it's 40 people's worth of stuff to my 1, and in a team that big common standards outweigh nearly everything else short of outright technical impossibility. Also since I've leaving the old unix team, everything I'm leaving there will bitrot and be irrelevant to them in 1-2 years, too.

I'm really rather bummed.

Funky hardware linux install failures and making redhat enterprise install/rescue isos

So, at work we've got several racks worth of 5 year old IBM 8832 blades, with dual Intel Xeon 3.2 Ghz cpus, Broadcom CSB6 ide raid controllers based on an LSI Logic 1030 chip, and Broadcom CIOB-E ethernet adaptors.

The problem is that the IDE raid is old and whacky enough that the standard redhat boot images don't successfully auto-load the correct modules when it scans the hardware, ergo the raid set isn't seen, only the component drives, and whacky and evil things happen.

However, it looks like these controllers work happily with the LSI fusion mptbase/mptspi/mptscsih series of modules. So, the challenge is to get a base redhat install to load these modules, so I can remotely kickstart the blades for provisioning.

To document my first, failed experiment, here's what I did.

Grabbed as a starting point the boot iso image from images/boot.iso in the unpacked redhat 5.3 cd's.

Mounted the image

• mount -o loop boot.iso /mnt/iso

and copied the contents to a scratch area to work with

• mkdir /var/tmp/iso ; cp -rv /mnt/iso/* /var/tmp/iso

Copied the most recent kernel my current box happened to be running into the new iso directory

• cp -v /boot/vmlinuz-$(uname -r) /mnt/iso/isolinux/vmlinuz

Now, I also have to re-create an initrd for this iso with the appropriate modules pre-loaded. I wanted to leave most of the auto-probing in place, though, so I'm only going to specify --preload= for the mdt* modules I care about.

First, extract the initrd image, and get the list of modules it currently has. This is a two step process since the modules appear to be a compressed cpio image inside the initrd, which is itself a compressed cpio image.

• cd /var/tmp ; gunzip -c iso/isolinux/initrd.img | cpio -iv '*modules.cpv';
• modules=$(gunzip -c modules/modules.cpv | cpio -it | cut -d'\' -f3 | sed -e 's/\.ko$//' | sort);

note I'm using bash's embedded command syntax $( ) instead of the traditional backticks above.

Now the shell var 'modules' has a list of modules. I still need a few preloaded modules, and to convert the module list into a useful '--with=... --with=...' argument for mkinitrd

• with="--with=$(echo $modules | sed -e 's/ /\-\-with=/g')"
• preload="--preload=mptscsih --preload=mptsdi --preload=mptbase"

Now, finally, make the initrd:

• mkinitrd -f -v $with $preload iso/isolinux/initrd.img $(uname -r)

And package it up into an iso:

• mkisofs -J -R -T -v -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -o blade-rhel53-boot.iso iso/

The problem is, when I do a "linux rescue" boot using this cd image, it still didn't load the mpt* modules! Can anyone point me to what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks!
-- Pat

Edit:

Re-reading this this morning, I noted several typos in the commands as I typed them up last night. Also, the fonts looked like crap.

In the interest of hopefully better accuracy, here's just a (trimmed) copy and paste of my shell history:

• 2103 mkdir iso; cp -rv /mnt/iso/* iso
• 2109 gunzip -c iso/isolinux/initrd.img | cpio -idv "*modules.cgz"
• 2112 modules=$(gunzip -c modules/modules.cgz | cpio -it | cut -d'/' -f3 | sed -e 's/\.ko$//' | sort)
• 2113 echo $modules
• 2116 with="--with=$(echo $modules | sed -e 's/ / \-\-with=/g')"
• 2117 echo $with
• 2120 uname -a
• 2121 cp /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-128.1.10.el5 iso/isolinux/vmlinuz
• 2123 preload="--preload=mptscsih --preload=mptspi --preload=mptbase"
• 2124 sudo mkinitrd -f -v $with $preload iso/isolinux/initrd.img 2.6.18-128.1.10.el5
• 2129 chmod u+w iso/isolinux/isolinux.bin
• 2130 mkisofs -J -R -T -v -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -o blade-rhel53-boot.iso iso/

St John's Block party review - Cloud Cult and Rince na Chroi Irish Dancing

Okay, enough of this tedious LDAP shite, I'm not getting anything done on that series anyway. So, here's something a bit more fun.

I just got home from the 2009 St John's Block Party and they had another really good line up this year. I donno who puts together the music for them, but I'm continually impressed.

While I didn't get to see one of my old favorites, Boiled in Lead, this year, two really fun acts were Rince na Chroi (pronounced Rink-a na Cree) and Cloud Cult.

Rince na Chroi had some good Irish music from two of the members of Two Tap Trio, played on guitar, penny whistle, and flute. About half the dances were performed in soft shoes, and half in tap. The apx 12-15 dancers were all students at the 170 student plus school, ranging from older teens to about 8 year olds. There were two younger boys, but the majority were girls.

Irish dance is fascinating because of the intricate and amazingly energetic footwork, yet the torso is nearly completely still. The dancers did some really neat and well choreographed and coordinated movements, too, joining and releasing hands and dancing around each other in patterns and figures.

I tried to grab a few short videos of some of the dances, and put them up on qik.com but fair warning -- the quality is crappy. (I'm really disappointed in the qik application for android, but I'll add that to the android / g1 phone review I'm writing)

The other group I spent a lot of time on was Cloud Cult. My end opinion: their status as one of the, if not the, current top rock band in the twin cities area is well deserved. I'm really glad I got to see them, because I wasn't able to stay for their gig last year at the block party, and they're stopping touring after this summer. (I'm guessing that might have to do with the band's lead singer and his wife, also in the band, expecting a child. Congrats to them!)

For those unfamiliar with them, well, start with this youtube video of one of my favorite songs of theirs. Here's another good one of them live last year. Also here's a few still photos of them from their show tonight.

Musically, they do several things I like - they range from quiet, nearly spiritual strings which creep up my spine in tingles to eardrum cracking jam sessions that I could literally feel the wind produced by the subwoofers from 150 feet and a intervening crowd between. Their lyrics are imaginative and poetic. Their choice of instruments combinations and musical styles is eclectic, but original and effective - combining brass, strings, glockenspiel, voice, synthesiser, and traditional rock driving bass, guitar, and drums. They occasionally drop back into a-cappella or minimal accompaniment with great harmonies.

Additionally, they did some neat stuff in their live show - most of the songs were cleanly segued one into the next with no pause, making it non-obvious where and when the one song ended and the next began. This isn't entirely unknown, but is still unusual. Of course, they had great energy. The other cool and unusual thing was that two of the band members who are artists set up large canvasses and painted during the show, only taking small breaks to come in and sing parts or play an instrument. The paintings are apparently auctioned at the end of each show.

My recommendation: go see one of the last live shows this summer (on their web site). Make a strong effort. It's definitely worth it. Also buy their music -- I've greatly enjoyed listening to their albums, and you likely will, too.

-- Pat