Rock the Fat Knot

While cleaning up around the house today, I ran across some notes from grad school. I took a networking course from Mike Westall while I was at Clemson. I never took that many notes (probably should have) but I ran across a piece of paper where I had written this:

Westall’s Law

for any theory there exists a workload that will prove it correct and other theories wrong

I thought Westall was the man back then. A true hard core computer scientist. After almost a decade in industry, that quote reminds me that he’s still the man.

Today’s my brother’s birthday. So, it’s fitting that I wrap up the series of “Birthday Fat Knots” with this post. I really like this tie. Combined with the poplin suit, it’s a dominant fat knot.

Another tie from my birthday!

My wife got me some ties for my birthday. I’ll be rocking them over the next few weeks. Here’s the first in the series…

It’s Easter and the ‘Easter Bunny’ brought me a new tie in my “easter basket!” Check out the new version of the S.C. Fat Knot. Clemson orange with the SC palmetto tree and crescent. I had planned to wear a seer sucker tie today, but I couldn’t let the Easter Bunny down! I’ll rock the seer sucker tie in a week or so.

Today I rocked a bow tie in honor of Zach Hyleman and Collins McCraw. I think I’ll stick to Fat Knots(tm), though. If you’re interested in Rocking a Bow Tie, check out this video for some good instructions for tying a bow tie. (Video from South Carolina, even! True Southern Players!)

Chris Gause sent in this Polka Dot Fat Knot. It is from the Perry Ellis Portfolio Collection and he found it on sale at Dillard’s. Price was $25 with tax. Dominant fat knot, Chris G!

I thought it’d be cool to try out Animoto with a set of Fat Knots that have been posted over the last year or so. Check it out:

I’m a hard core vi user. You just can’t beat it for a quick file edit. (This is where my friend, Jack Lunn, would argue that Emacs is better… but I think we can agree that both are faster to crank up than most IDEs.) Recently, I’ve switched to Netbeans for Java development at work. I had been using IntelliJ and it almost drove me insane. (See my post about the Corrupted Cache.) Netbeans has been working well for me, though. (It’s no vi, but it does have features that are very useful when working with large projects.) With Netbeans 6.5, you can get Python support. I’ve been using this for a few weeks now. It’s nice to have all of my Java/Python code open in one IDE. This morning, I ran across a screencast showing some upcoming code coverage support for Python in Netbeans. This looks impressive.

I’ve been using OpenSolaris 2008.05 at work since it was made available. I use it as my primary OS on my work laptop (an HP Compaq 6910p My wife refers to this laptop as “the ugliest laptop in the world.” Compared with the Apple products she’s used to working on, the HP is not very attractive.) From the beginning, I’ve had issues installing/updating packages with the new IPS packaging system. I’m not dissing IPS. I just ran into a lot of issues trying to run pkg install and pkg image-update. Other people have reported similar issues with timeouts and such. Anyway, in a recent attempt to update my version of pkg, I managed to hose up my system. Having so much trouble at the command line with pkg, I decided to try out the Package Manager GUI. It allowed me to just select the latest version of pkg and install it. Everything processed successfully. I was excited! I closed the Package Manager GUI and went to the command line to try out my new and improved version of pkg. It didn’t work. Even worse, I started having issues with ls and every other command I tried. Core dumps were running wild on “the ugliest laptop in the world.” From another machine, I went to google and started searching to see if other people had encountered similar issues. I found one post that lead me to believe I had “updated too much.” I couldn’t find any posts that described how to recover from this. Determined not to give up on OpenSolaris, I started trying to get my laptop back in order. I didn’t want to lose my home directory. I have tons of valuable code snippets, settings, documents, and huge subversion checkouts of various projects and branches of those projects (about 80GB of data total). So, I’m including the steps I followed to get my laptop running again (along with all of the data in my home folder) below. There may be a better way to do this, but this worked for me.

Step #1: Boot from an OpenSolaris Live CD Boot up with an OpenSolaris CD. We’re going to use the live CD to help us backup the home directory. Step #2: Backup your home folder Open up a terminal and execute the command:

pfexec zpool import -f -R /tmp/rpool rpool

Then take a snapshot of your important data:

pfexec zfs snapshot rpool/export/home@pre-reinstall

I didn’t have an external drive with enough free storage space, so I shipped the backup over to another machine via ssh:

pfexec zfs send rpool/export/home@pre-reinstall | ssh user@myhost.com " \
          cat > ~/homedir.snapshot"

Step #3: Use the OpenSolaris Live CD to do a Full install of OpenSolaris With my home directory safely backed up, I wiped the machine and did a reinstall of OpenSolaris. Step #4: Boot into single user mode (login as root)

ssh user@myhost.com "cat ~/homedir.snapshot" | \
pfexec zfs recv -F rpool/export/home

Your home directory should be ready to go now. Reboot and enjoy.

Update: I recently used pfexec pkg image-update to update my 2008.05 installation to 2008.11. OpenSolaris 2008.11 is awesome! I’m loving the Time Slider functionality. The pkg image-update worked flawlessly. My upgrade was a complete success. None of my tools or applications were broken during the upgrade. The folks working on OpenSolaris have really been putting in some hard work to resolve a lot of the early issues that I experienced.