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Go Alonso, go!

Shell date and time tricks

One of the things I hate the most when programming is dealing with time and date functions and all the special cases which exists. Even more, I have the feeling I'm walking a path many times walked before, so it becomes one of the most unpleasant tasks for me.

Fortunately, it's true, so many others walked before that path so here are some quick tricks for shell programming using the wonderful date UN*X program:

1. Converting epoch:
1. From epoch to anything else: date -d @$epoch_value +FORMAT (where FORMAT is of course as described on date(1), and '@' makes the actual undocummented trick).
   
2. From anything else to epoch: date +%s
   
2. Calculating times
1. One day forward: date -d "1 day"
2. One day backwards: date -d "1 day ago"
3. Just imagine "1 month", "3 months ago" and the like. Not only google is so friendly with human language ;-)
   
3. More format conversion: '-d' option accepts several other formats as input, even with calculations:
1. date -d "1977-08-19 30 years", yeah! my 30th birthday was on sunday. Thanks date, and it was (as epoch): date -d "1977-08-19 30 years" +%s... 1187474400 :-D
2. Funny ls:

   
   ls -l | while read perms links user group size d t name
   do
   echo $perms $links $user $group $size $( date -d "$d $t 1 day" ) $name
   done
   

   You can, of course, change the way date is shown. That's because 'YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm' is also a valid input format for date as it is 'YYYY/MM/DD'.

So '@', '1 day' and 'date' saved me the day.

Update: This features and more are indeed described in the coreutils info manual. Thanks mp for pointing it out.

Be water (and light) my friend (part II)

Last night we were at Parquesur shopping center at Leganés, the place we are going to live in a year and a half. We had the chance to see the lights, water and music show is held there almost every summer night, so I was prepared, I had the camera and tripod at hand in prevision we would have the opportunity to take some pictures. Here are the best shots.

Night walk

This weekend, taking advantage of the full moon, we were walking without any other light (despite we carried it with us) on Navacerrada. The plan was reaching at Maliciosa to see the sunrise, but we arrived much before it and, as there was people sleeping there, we decided to go back but not before taking some pictures (Spanish comments).

For example, the TV station installed up there.

Or some other beautiful views.

Canon EF 24-105mm

This week my friend and photo master brought me a new lens from the States among other things like a grip. The winner lens was a Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 USM L IS which substitutes the old entry level Canon EF 24-85 I used for learning until I found it was not enough sharp (is anybody interesting on it?). Anyway, it was good enough for its price and for the very begginer I was. Indeed those days I though it was a big one (at least compared to the other ones) but now it seems so little...

But size well worth the difference if you take a look at the so different picture results where you can appreciate the influence of the image stabilizer.

70mm 1/50 f5.0

Let's see this weekend how it works at night.

Damn GFS

Just a few hours before the public release of the portal we work on one of the cluster machines get overloaded by issues no relevant for the point. The fact is once the machine started to not answer properly so it was fenced by some other node, but the problem was once this automatic action was held, the whole 6 machines GFS cluster went down letting all the machines unusable.

This, in addition to all of the previous issues we suffered on GFS, made us really thinking about purging GFS in favor of NFS. It was no an easy decision as it was fully against all our previous decisions but we weren't confident about GFS in the production systems. So we migrated it in a time record configuring everything by night so at six o'clock service would be held properly. And we managed to fulfill this purpose. We made it!

We are now tired after about 27 continuous working hours but the overall result was quite acceptable. I'm still proud about or design (not so much about my own decissions) which allowed us to make this king of changes so quickly.

But you can be sure I don't think we will never again think about installing GFS on any system as it seems not being production suitable (as RedHat even says so). And it is not only because the buggy GFS2 (at least, at present date) but for the sensation of instability all over the time we had it installed.

So in a few hours our architecture has been changed, but it was setup for the very moment we were accepting requests.

And ADN is out

In beta, yes: http://beta.adn.es

You will need a user (maybe 'adn' will be a good choice) ... and the password?. Ok, 'adnbeta'. And that is, you can finally see our effort results and become one of our beta testers. That will allow you to register your preferred nick in advance and reserve it for your own use.

Enjoy it!

Sunday working day

We are almost out. Quite soon you will experience a lot of changes at www.adn.es from its current aspect to a new and improved one. At least that's our hope and what we have been working for. Not all expected functionality will be included in this first release and not all the errors fixed mainly for a lack of time. But we are now in that stage when you must choose between releasing soon enough and begin competition and waiting until you can show a good enough product.

Or what usually happens: that it is finally a marketing decision not related to any technical issue.

Anyway, we were working hard today. Something that is getting on their nerves to our families and beloved girlfriends. Mine, for instance, decided to take her holidays at her village near Gredos. A very quiet and calm place I would like to be at... right now!.

At least, the project is being quite interesting, we have done (what we think is) a very good work designing everything so we expect result will be rather good. Let's see.

Forgetting stress

Here goes a selection of pictures I took while trying to relax before the final release week.

"Relaxing" leaf ;-)

Water arc (at the place we are going to be married).

Crystal forest.

Oohhhhhmmmmmmm...

July, 13rd: new (final) scheduled release date

Do you need more information? :-)

Perfect!. That's our business.

Transformers (So, am I freak enough? part II)

"Many millions of years ago, on the planet Cybertron, life existed, but not life as we know it today. Intelligent robots that could think and feel inhabited the cities. They were called Autobots and Decepticons. But the brutal Decepticons were driven by a single goal: Total Domination. They set out to destroy the peace loving Autobots and the war between the forces of good and evil raged across Cybertron, devastating all in its path and draining the planet's once rich resources of energy."

And then, they moved on to planet Earth... as a TV show of my childhood!.

Now they are back as a movie whose premier was being programmed near my work place (a lot of premieres are indeed) so we started once more to talk about those shows we saw when we were "young" :-)

So finally I was told about another one freaky video related:

Yeah, that is, people disguised like Transformers... transforming!

IPMI

IPMI stands for "Intelligent Platform Management Interface", an interesting feature deployed on nowadays servers. I can't forget that question I made some months ago about an extra ethernet port on the IBM server machines we were working with on those days. The answer was quite simple: it is almost of no use at all; at most you can get some stats and diagnostics but it is mainly intended for hardware technicians.

Liars (or ignorants)! Anyway, it is quite useful. It is the IPMI port which can be used for several managements actions (even from the running system) such as power cycle the machine, get some stats, establish a watchdog interface and the like.

Uses?, are they need to be told?. As a first glance you can get reports about the machine from the operating system itself without the need of physical access to the datacenter. You can also restart a machine which is failing to reboot by itself in case you can login one more time in the system. But... even more, you can do all that (and more) from a remote system (don't exhitate, it is password protected, at least, in case you configure it so). So the next obvious uses are for cluster fencing and stonith (shot the other node in the head) without the need of power control hardware.

It is a pity we didn't knew that when we configured the SAP cluster in my previous job despite the serial cable almost did it work. Sure Mr Navas will be interested in knowing about this technology :-)

Oh, a simple example:

# ipmitool -I open chassis status
System Power : on
Power Overload : false
Power Interlock : inactive
Main Power Fault : false
Power Control Fault : false
Power Restore Policy : always-off
Last Power Event :
Chassis Intrusion : inactive
Front-Panel Lockout : inactive
Drive Fault : false
Cooling/Fan Fault : false
Sleep Button Disable : not allowed
Diag Button Disable : allowed
Reset Button Disable : not allowed
Power Button Disable : allowed
Sleep Button Disabled: false
Diag Button Disabled : true
Reset Button Disabled: false
Power Button Disabled: true

Another one:

ipmitool -I open chassis power reset

Ooooooops. Next post after crash :-)

New home

Marriage is like a "love contract". Time of your live to say to everybody you are in love (and the person you are with). So my fiancee and me decided to sign it next October to demonstrate and celebrate something we already know (and for the trip, wow :-)).

But a more obvious and true compromise is the time of your life of buying a new house together with somebody. A point of our lifes we have already reached but that we haven't planned doing so soon until we saw a new building which is being built and we thought it was perfect so "if you see something that fulfill all the requirements you asked for, why don't do it?". And that's the reason we bought that house that we will get in two years. Because it is in a place we like, with good transportation links, a price maybe expensive but in the range we can afford and dimensions and number of beedrooms we wanted to. Indeed, maybe when we get it, it will be the time to get pregnant and use those extra beedrooms we were looking for in a new house.

Despite all that, the real thruth is we are looking forward to use both swimming pools the outdoor and the indoor one we will also have on the building (just another "stupid" requirement). Great!

For those interested in, this is the plan. The only thing we have by now (in addition to some new debts).

Just a simple map on a piece of paper that makes us quite happy and we will enjoy for the rest of our lifes.

Bye, Tahur

Tahur is no longer with us. He passed away this morning once the veterinarian who attended him a month ago considered he was really sick (old indeed), without any hope, and just suffering pain so the better for him was euthanasia. In prevision of that posibility we were dinning at my parents home yesterday night to at least be able to say him goodbye. Yesterday he seemed so sad I really believe he knew what was going to happen. At least, he finally have rest after a plenty life loving us and being loved in return.

Along with him, for me another door closes, another stage ends. It is not only I'm near my thirties, that he was with us through all my twenties or the fact I'm getting married on October. The truth is we hoped he would last at least for that day, to be part of that important date, and to be seen by my brother one more time on his next visit. None of that will occur. Just mourn and remembers are now held, and also some pictures I took just some months ago in case this day was nearer than we desired (but as it finally was). I'm happy we made them.

For me death is really another stage, the final one, of life. Time to remember, look backwards and enjoy all the situations passed with the deceased which I feel grateful, lucky and happy for. I don't usually look at future at that time looking for moments I know will never occur. At most I feel melancholy for the lost and thankful, so much thankful for the time he gave us.

Thanks Tahur, I miss you.

Published photo

Two days ago I sent this photograph of our little cat to two free newspapers and today without any previous notice, it appeared published in one of them in the 'reader photo' section. This is my very first photograph published on paper which makes me think maybe I'm better than I believe (but for sure, worse than some people thinks I am).

Anyway, today many people will see our little kitty Val on their way to work. And some others, on the web readers photo collection.

This is one of those little things which can make you smile early in the morning. Today will be a great day!

Update: pdf version available.

GFS choice

We are designing at work a clustered architecture for the site we are developing. For that purpose we needed a clustered/distributed filesystem such as NFS, GFS, OCFS, and the like. We all have already had bad experiences using NFS as it usually hangs a client if server goes down. In addition, on that design we have a SPOF (single point of failure) we were trying to avoid. So we give up with it.

The following candidates were GFS and OCFS. Despite there are some other suitable filesystems they are not so widely supported in the linux kernel and distributions so we couldn't fit with our hosting service level agreements bringing them out of question. And before you ask, linux itself was indeed a requirement. On a housing situation, things would have been different.

Back on FS, at first glance on our tests OCFS results wasn't as good as GFS ones. In addition, no all distribution supported online resizing in the packaged version of ocfs tools so we finally decided to use GFS as the clustered filesystem. But once we have almost all infrastructure ready, later tests showed it wasn't as good as we thought, and not so documented neither supported by RedHat itself as we expected. In fact, performance was an issue which was worrying us as it would slow down the whole site. Fortunately, after several dark options tests the solution was much simpler than that: GFS is a distributed FS which relies on network performance. Switching to giga ethernet made the trick. It boosted performance enough to make us more confident about our design and inversion.

Now we can focus on another of all that matters remaining before our product launching soon, quite soon, frightening soon.

So, am I freak enough?

I don't think so.

• Kamehame contest (for spanish people, "concurso de ondas vitales")
• Anime parody

But some friends of mine almost are. Which position leave me that on?

Gym day

Another 'first time' achieved.

A couple of days ago some people from my job registered at the gym in front of our office and thursday, after a tiring day at work, I decided to give it the first chance to change mental exhaustion with physical tiredness. I went alone without any of my partners. As it was my very first day at a Gym the monitor told me what to do. I thought it would be harder and I would feel worse on friday but I really feel great. I think this was what I was needing to overcame work stress and reactivate myself.

It was another example of how much human body is amazing. Much better than any mechanical machine which usually broke with use. In the other hand, muscles and human body in general (brain is another usually forgotten example) works better with training and activity (despite the weekend pain, of course). In fact, almost nobody hardly uses full of his potential (I will risk even half of his potential; and yes, that includes me).

But talking about Gym is remembering Pons. He is an ex-work-partner too much involved with diets, gyms, exercise, and the like. He gave us a lot of master classes on the matter during lunch (is there any better time to talk about it?). And now I'm acting a little like him: going to gym, taking turkey for breakfast. Will I be soon taking protein alse?. We will see, hop, hop.

Be water my friend

Religion

I have always had a strange feeling about religion and finally a friend of mine put down in words that impression: "religion sets a backdoor in your mind".

I think that truly describes what I think. Religion is a kind of people control method as it stands some precepts you don't need to think about anymore. I don't mean religion is bad or of no use at all. Indeed, as Pancho pointed out, it is very useful for that people who in fact doesn't want to evaluate their principles. For those people, religion and control by fear is quite good as far as those precepts are fair (and not misunderstood or interpreted in own profit). For me it works just as inspiration. Some times about how to act. Some others about how I shouldn't. But in all cases, I try to choose my own way of living after a thoughtful evaluation.

One example of this is baptism. Its (supposed) original meaning was related with spiritual recleaning and rebirth, mostly for adult people who are the ones who really may need that kind of recleaning before embrace Christian cult by their own decision. Nowadays, baptism is done on infants who hardly can need any clean nor recleaning and of course have not taken any decision. Despite, by custom, some people believe by baptism they are educating their childrens. Weird.

Emulation vs. Virtualization

These days virtualization is the breaking new appliance for the enterprise. Everybody is migrating to this "new" concept but, which is the difference with emulation?

And interesenting one. Just for the sake of correctness:

• Emulation involves emulating the virtual machines hardware and architecture. Microsoft's VirtualPC is an example of an emulation based virtual machine. It emulates the x86 architecture, and adds a layer of indirection and translation at the guest level, which means VirtualPC can run on different chipsets, like the PowerPC, in addition to the x86 architecture. However, that layer of indirection slows down the virtual machine significantly.
• Virtualization, on the other hand, involves simply isolating the virtual machine within memory. The host instance simply passes the execution of the guest virtual machine directly to the native hardware. Without the translation layer, the performance of a virtualization virtual machine is much faster and approaches native speeds. However, since the native hardware is used, the chipset of the virtual machine must match. Usually, this means the Intel x86 architecture. VMWare is an example of this type of application
  for Windows.

Cats

Some months ago we adopted a little kitty we called Wifi as my girlfriend always had thought it was a (female) cat name. And I must say I agree with that. Unfortunatelly she was with us just ten days before a chlamydia infection take her from us.

That was the first time I positively tried to begin a blog, but I did not.

Now, a prudential time later, we have adopted another little cat we have called Val from Valentine, Ender's sister. She is our little panther!

Salamanca

We have been thinking about going to Salamanca for a long time, but we couldn't do it after Ranty's accident two years ago.

Now, we finally were able to go there. But again this is related to a tragic happening. We were there trying to give some support to Ele, one of those friends I left behind at IBM, who has now her heart broken, stolen.

You are stronger than you think you are.

Photo tech

In the last two weeks I've discovered (or was told about) some programs quite useful for an outdoor technician (amateur photographer):

• gpscorrelate which adds GPS tags on exif fields correlating gps tracks and photgraph shooting time. Finally, I am able to geoposition my trekking pictures automagically!. Next step: some way to create google maps paths with POIs.
• hugin for image blending. The following image was obtained in Gredos composed from four pictures.
  

ADN - Everything is connected

That's the company's slogan, whose offices we are working at. And I must admit it seems quite true.

Today, we have visited one of the data centers we are evaluating for our company hosting. It was a Tier 1 company, that is networking, connections... nothing special there. The amazing thing is one of the people we meet there was visiting Australia a year ago, and he is also a photograph passionated. I feel him a bit like a twin soul of mine as we are planning to visit Australia on our marriage trip where I will take a lot of pictures, of course. We were talking and he gave me some interesting URLs about his blog, travel agency and the like. So again everything seems connected, as Google knows so frightening well.

Anyway, we went there by motorbike which was a plus not connected to anything else, but too much funny in any case.

Keep going

I took this photograph last weekend at Consuegra where we went to observe the night sky, just for fun, as we used to do. I'm sure you don't need to be told that Polaris and Ursa Major are the start on the left and the constellation on the right side. And that's why I am not telling you ;-)

Anyway, the interesting thing for me here is the effect of the Earth rotation movement. Polaris is said to be in the Earth rotation axis prolongation (it is also said this will change with time, a lot of time indeed). But, by now, for us, it can be considered a fixed point in the sky: the north point which remains a point in the picture regardless of rotation. Every other star appears as rotating around Polaris, despite the truth is we are the ones rotating. I almost can imagine I see the Earth from outside.

Lazy beggars

Yesterday in our way to the restaurant (an Italian buffet near Callao, or the "Pizza buffet" as we name it) we saw a funny beggar which asks money for "more beer", "whisky" and "resaca" (those two, his dogs names). Of course he also claims at least he is honest.

Talking about it, Jose Luis told me he had already seen that (them) in a web we managed to found again: www.lazybeggers.com

Globalization and technology has it curious side effects. And that has a lot to do with my job.

In case you are too lazy to visit the web, here you have some pearls:

• "One euro probably isn´t much to you but to us its half an hour in a cyber cafe (or a beer ;-)"
• " Those who travel on rivers of wine sometimes float."
• "We´re honest. We make you smile. What more can you ask?"
  

And that's true, I smiled, I laughed.

Old freaks, new geeks

This weekend I meet again two old friends from the debian planet. Zazu and Amaya come to our sweet home, that they liked a lot (we are very proud about decoration indeed). We talked about old and present time, saw a movie (a curious and not recommendable one), eaten Japanese food and taken some photographs with my new camera (I'm trying to do my best to understand how it works so I can shot wonderful pictures). Amaya pointed me out that camera was the one all the geeks have in the linux meetings. Great, I used to be a hacker, I though I was now a freak but the truth in seems I have came into a geek without pretending nor knowing it. I miss those days when we all were freaks ourselves and that was the cool thing to be. Of course nowadays nobody is plainly "cool" anymore, even more anybody is a freak now, one way or another.

Unfortunately, some other things doesn't change like my Debian inactivity Amaya also pointed me out. She told me I will lost my account unless some kind of activity on the project is shown on my part so I will try to do my best in the hope I won't disappoint her, I won't lost my account and the most important I will make some contributions to the community I say I support. She left me a bit worried about that, but also she motivated me.

You geeks join and conquer the world!. Oh, have we already done that?.

More than words

Surely you have heard that song by Extreme. I like it (mental note, maybe it has its place in the wedding, maybe not).

Anyway, it came to me when I was thinking about life is "more than work". Job switching is having much more good points than I expected. I've just finished the book I was reading for months in just a few days. Public transportation has also it benefits, despite some people can't see it. The book was "In cold blood", by Truman Capote. I liked it the same way I did with "The Talented Mr. Ripley" cause the authors in both cases made me fell and think the same way as the protagonists so I was really transported to the places and situations I was reading.

But, moreover than that, I fell again the vitality and the burning life of a huge cosmopolitan city like Madrid: people of several conditions and thinkings, a vast cultural offer, the news, theatres... intelectual activity, creativity!.

That is, just more than work, and just a few steps from the office.

Friendship

Maybe one of the learnings that shocked me the most was discovering friendship can end, just like love. I grew up thinking and hoping friendship was something which last forever, something you can always rely on. By that time I also thought everything was black or white, one or zero; a perfect binary world.

Probably, I studied computer science because I needed a closed system which I could understand and control. But life is far from that. And I learned that the day I realized a friendship could end even without knowing the reason. That day I left childhood to become an adult. That day my world turned into a colorful place for living with black and white, but also a lot of grays. A much more interesting place to live in.

Unfortunately, all that also open the door to feelings like lost and missing which are quite difficult to accept. A lot of people destroy their rememberings trying to bring them to life again just because they want to continue living from the past and not from the present time. They can't accept a relationship is finished. Obviously, it's hard and sad on that moment no matter in which side of the decision you are, but I think accepting it makes things easier.

Anyway, in any case, I'm grateful to all the people I ever meet as I really think all of them contributed to the way I am now, despite some of them are no longer part of my life, because, I learnt some friendships doesn't last forever.

The beginning of a new diary

Two weeks ago I left the job I had been for the last year and eight months at IBM. I promised myself and the good friends I left behind I would start a blog to keep in contact with them. So that is this blog: the accomplishment of that promise.

As usual, every job change I have gone through is on the spirit of a new challenge. This time it will be a really big challenge as it is the first time I will be in charge of a group, more concretly, in charge of the systems group. And of course, the first decision was to do almost everything with free software. Even more, with Debian. Great!

I will really enjoy all the investigation stuff I will need to do, so my mind is truly awake thinking, learning, testing and documenting, of course. That and the ubication of the new office right in the centre of Madrid, a place I like so much which have a lot of significance for me and my fiancee as we had a lot of walking on our first dates here, makes easier not missing so much the IBM people this first entry is for.

Keep in contact!