iBusy

Busy at work, busy at home. I wanted to post at least one post a week but it's become very difficult.

I have some Unix stuff ready but have to be cleared out bit. May be next week.

Movie: Billy Eliot

Stunning. Electric. Funny. Very strong.

I love films about dancing. Go watch it if you like dancing too. Very strong story. I totally love it.

And of-course it's not only about dancing it's also about life in England. Life without mother and wife. How hard it can be for men. How men can be sensible.

You better watch it.

Lonely afternoon

Wife and kids gone. They stayed at Petra's parents and let me enjoy a week without them. This is the firs day and it's OK but I already feel I will miss them tomorrow. Well, I miss them right now but it's no so intensive.

I spend half of the afternoon at the computer than I decided to go out for a while. First I wanted to climb the hill opposite our house but the sun discourage me from it. I went to opposite hill where the old orchard is. As we have been there the weekend before last weekend I knew that I can fine some forest strawberries and cherries. Strawberries were almost all eaten so I had to chose cherries. I climb up one old cherry tree and enjoy. There were not quite fledged but some of them were really delicious. I hope that when I get there at the end of week all of them will be fully fledged. They are BIG and juicy and nothing tastes so good as cherries in the tree-top.

I think that working in tree-top could have positive influence on my performance. I was feeling very good and thought were coming at sudden.

I regret I did not have our camera with me to take pictures during the way home. The air was clean and the light was perfect. I belive I could have taken some nice scenery photos today.

iSecret

I thought that I will hide this blog from my wife. That I keep it secret. No, I'm not that good at it. After some discussion we got to it and I let her read it. I'll keep it like that. I will write me thoughts and moods here, she'll read it and than we'll discuss it. I'm bad in expressing myself directly so we have to use this workaround. Bit stupid, isn't it? But at least something.

Mushrooms

Mushrooms, originally uploaded by miromir.

Teaching my wife how to shot macro with Canon A520.

WWDC 2007 Keynote

I haven't heard it nor seen it not even read it on engadget. I read some comments n Maler.cz. I like the new look of Apple home site. The navigation is better and more ... handy?

Desktop: 3d Dock doesn't make much sense to me but OK. I like the "Stack", it's a good and usefull feature but what for when I'm using Quicksilver.

Finder: Seems to be much improved. Cover Flow is nice but why?

Quick view: can be quite handy but I'm not sure I will use it often

Time machine: yes, I would appreciate something like this but I can live without it. Just copy System disk to External HDD regularly (e.g. weekly) and that's it. Or set up some nifty unix script in crontab and it's automatic.

Spaces: another handy feature. Long time used in Unix world. Don't know why does it take so long for Apple to integrate it in OS X.

Mail: Templates in Mail look very nice and could be usefull too, but mail is for text communication and I prefer it this way.

iChat: I don't use it. My friends prefer Skype.

iCal: I don't use it that much. Google Calendar suits my needs better.

Dashboard: don't use it but it's a good feature.

Safari: I'm not sure if it is the fastest web browser. Opera seems faster to me. But I like Firefox because of it's extensions. Right now I'm playing with Camino and that's OK too. I'm not quite sure which of them I prefer.

Parental Controls: don't use it right now but I'm glad it's there. My kids are growing and soon they will want to use computer.

Boot Camp: I got G4 + Virtual PC. Ok, well, hmm. Why not, sometimes I need Windows. Still I find Parallels or VMWare more useful. But it should be there as a basic feature.

Photo Booth: Don't have built-in iSight so I don't have Photo Booth. Looks nice to play with.

Front Row: don't have it and wish it. But that will come with new Mac sometime in the future.

DVD Player: Ok, looks better. But I'm not sure it's worth it.

Accessibility: don't need it but it should be there as a basic feature.

Automator: I like it very much and the recording feature will be quite help for me sometimes.

So these are the features and my opinion about them. I think I'll upgrade the OS with new Mac which I will buy but don't know when. We are still in setting our home and we would like to buy a house so I'm not sure I'll have enough money soon. May be next year or more probably the year after.

P.S.: I would like to have something like AIX LVM (Logical Volume Manger) in OSX. I'm new to AIX but I love it.

On searching things

Because we can not use Quicksilver/Spotlight/find/grep and others while searching for things around don't let your day spoiled by letting the guild on your wife.

I have that small paper with vital info on the table and this morning couldn't find it. Looking, looking around and nothing. So I thought she must have trough it to waste. I searched the waste. Nothing. Kids. Kids stole it. No. I was getting angry than I calm down and said to myself: "It's not her fault. It's my fault. I should have written it to computer the day I made that record.". I searched a little bit more and finally found it.

Conclusion: Look around first and search deeply. Don't blame your wife or kids for your searching inability. It can save your day.

iWant iBook

In critical times like now I would really appreciate to have it. I'm too kind to my wife and as result I don't have necessary timepiece with computer at home. Right now I need to prepare some stuff for roundtable meeting with fellow owners of flats in our block. And it's too late now for clear mind and thus I go to bed and leave it for tomorrow hoping that I will do it.

Usefull aliases


alias L='ls -FLb'
alias LL='ls -FLlb'
alias a='alias'
alias h='history'
alias j='jobs -l'
alias l='ls'
alias la='ls -la'
alias ll='ls -l'
alias m='less'
alias psx='ps -auxw ¦ grep $1'
alias dux='du -sk * | sort -rn'


Wisdom

"The best and most beautiful things in life cannot be seen, not touched, but are felt in the heart." — Hellen Keller

Fatal mistake

Always, always, I say, express your enthusiasm over your baby's anything!!!

This morning I did not do it. More over when my wife came this morning with our youngest daughter and was expressing how unbelievable it is that she weights the same as our oldest in her tenth mount, I said bit bitterly that I don't thing it's so important. But, yes it is important especially for your lovely wife! I spoiled her morning and she got mad about me and that spoiled my morning because now I have to find out how to fix it.

Damn, I'm such a moron.

Love them Love them not

I love my kids, I love my wife but sometimes I need to do something. So that I have to go to bed on Friday as usual during the early shift week and wake up early to get some private time to do those things. Anyway I should be preparing one meeting agenda and instead I'm writing this post. Well, I already hear the voices from bedroom so I wouldn't get it done anyway.

I have to be more ... simply ... I have to learn to ask my wife to let me to computer or buy another one for myself. Which I would love to but got no money right now. Have to save them for bills.

I want this

Not log time I go I bought a external hard drive - My Book Premium 320GB - and this last addition speed up my Mac Mini so I finally reached the performance which does not slow me down. In fact I'm the snail now.

So, I'm thinking about buying some additions which would enhance tidiness on my desk. Sonet Tech recently released this mount for Mac Mini with which I instantly fall in love. With it you can place your Mini either under the desk or on your LCD if it supports VESA standard. Unfortunately it'll take some time till some distributor or reseller will start selling it in Czech Republic. Till then I'll have to wait or create one by my own (which is highly unprovable).

Afternoon weariness

I had to stay longer at work than pickup some delivery so I came home one and half hour later as usual. I was quite tired because all afternoon I had to focus closely on new thing I was learning and at same time performing on production servers. So I had to be very careful and in the same time also quick. My coach is that kind of guy who is still doing something and it must be very quick. I as opposite need little more time to absorb new knowledge in order to remember it.

So I came home, greet them all - kids, wife and for a while lay down on the floor and than it came. "Can you change his nappies, please.", it was very polite and her weariness was in the voice too but I simply could not do it. We both let him running around with his sister because we was tired. I my self was also bit upset because it's like that almost every day. The first thing after I came is usually "Do something, please." thing. It's pretty irritating sometimes. But I got over it yesterday. Thanks God.

After a while reminder came and I had to go check water consumption. I got up, took paper and pen, changed Borivoj's nappies and took him and Amalka with me. And in that moment I started to feel better. I simply have to learn how to get over it.

Parse line to variables in KSH

I needed to read information from line and store it in separate variables in ksh. After some googling and tests I finally found out the right solution. It's so obvious and simple. I have to learn to think in more simple way. So here it is.

File with infos:

Columns:"volume group" "mount point" "size" "mount group"

datavg /data/test1 10 data
datavg /data/test2 10 data
datavg /data/test3 70 data
datavg /data/test3 10 data


The script:
#!/bin/ksh

#
# Name: genfs.sh
# Auth: Miroslav Pilat
# Date: 5.6.2007
# Desc: Script will create LVs and FSs in described VG.
# Infos are read from genfs.txt
#

F_SRC="genfs.txt"
CNT=0
LPSIZE=16

while read VG MNTP RSIZE MNTG; do

if (( $CNT < 10 )); then
CNTS=00$CNT
else
CNTS=0$CNT
fi


LVNAME="L$VG""_""$CNTS"


if (( $RSIZE < $LPSIZE )); then
LP=1;
else
LP=$(( $RSIZE / $LPSIZE ));
fi

echo "mklv -t jfs2 -y $LVNAME $VG $LP"
echo "crfs -v jfs2 -d /dev/$LVNAME -m $MNTP -u $MNTG -a size=$RSIZE""M"
echo "-----------------------------------------------------------------"

((CNT++))
done < $F_SRC


The bold text in the code section is the magic. It took me almost 2 hours to find out how to do it. It's plain simple. KSH/Bash variable IFS is by default set to space tab new line (\n) so when you read from file or stdin the information is automaticly split in to variables you specify after read command. Very simple.

Some description to the script:
It's not a bulletproof script so it just echos the commands needed for LV and FS creation. Use it on your own risk.

Purpose:
Speed up creation of testing LVM enviroment on AIX machine.

Abbreviations:

• VG - volume group
• LV - logical volume
• FS - filesystem
• IFS - internal field separator

Bad mood

May be I had a bad sleep last night but I don't think so. I got mad yesterday evening when I realized that not many people are found of my computer enthusiasm. Yes, I'm a man and I want to play with my toys. With that I mean my Mac Mini and it's software (iPhoto, iMovie HD, iDVD, Terminal, etc.). But it seems like my wife don't understand it. She find all those tricks which I can do with iMovie quite useless - "do it simple" she says or "is it finished already? I want to see it". Well, she is right. The best things are usually pretty simple. May be that's why I like Unix. It's full of little tools each of them doing just one simple thing but doing it right.

Ohh, seems that I have to do some work. I'll have to finish it other time.

Why

I'm regular married guy and I want some private place where I can cry out. I don't plan to post here very often. I hope it'll help me to improve my written English. As a unix systems administrator and Mac enthusiast I will try to post some remarks or experiences from this field.