Post LugRadio Live

Right I’ve now had a week to recover from LRL and to internalise some of it.

Good Points:

A plethora of informative and entertaining talks. Too damn many in fact. I missed quite a few I wanted to talk to see due to scheduling conflicts.

My talk went quite well, although being scheduled against Bruno and Simon Phipps was a bit of a bugger. I can’t wait for the video of Bruno’s talk to be released.

Talked to a researcher from Coventry who was interested in the whole concept of Grid data repositories so something useful from a work stand-point may come out of it.

Dinner at some wetherspoons pub with a random bunch of (very nice) geeks a bumped into on saturday night.

The very nice beer called Titanic that they were serving in the afore-mentioned pub.

Bad Points

Completely failing to talk to any of the #lugradio regulars.

It was too damn hot.

Spending the whole of saturday in a complete haze due to talk anxiety.

Onwards..

Talked to a researcher from Coventry who was interested in the whole concept of Grid data repositories so something useful from a work stand-point may come out of it.

Met a chap from Southampton who was familiar with the OMII project and of course completely failed to get his email address. In the unlikely event that this is you, could you send me an email please?

After seeing Christian Schaller’s GStreamer talk I’ve spent all day looking at the python gstreamer bindings and have gotten as far as writing a noddy media player that prints out any metadata it finds in the media. Now I just have to work out how to re-write the metadata and I should be able to completely replace the tagging infrastructure in Peapod with a better version using gstreamer.

Here are the slides for my talk.

LugRadio Live: Pre Game

Having just had a look at the LugRadio Schedule (due to excellent work by popey) two things occur to me.

1) Buno Bord is a being of unimaginable evil. He kicks Andrex puppies for fun. And anyway how edifying is a talk about swearing going to be?

2)Do you really want to listen to an hour of Simon Phipps getting heckled about why Sun haven’t open-sourced Java yet?

Obviously your should come and listen to my talk about Grid Computing. I’m not evil, Java isn’t my fault and you’ll
learn something.

<fx=”tumbleweed rolling past”>

Oh Dear.

I’d better get my stuff packed

How Many Ways Can We Fail Today?

The SGI cluster here at WeSC is beginning to get me down. One of it’s nodes has been down since I started work here and I’ve finally gotten around to looking at it.

Step 1 was to try and get acces to the serial console. After hunting around for a cable I then had to fight with minicom to get it running. A process that would have been significantly easier if the terminals weren’t all runnning at a non-standard baud. Anyway a quick re-boot of the machine showed that it was finding it’s internal disk but failing to find it’s OS. Given the number of times the power has failed recently I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the partition table is corrupted. So it seemed like a re-install was worth trying before getting a replacement disk.

After finding a set of Irix install instructions that I could actually understand I hooked up the ancient external SCSI CD drive and put in the disk that contains the install tools. It took a couple of attempts to convince the drive that it should close but after that it made all the right kinds of whirring noises and I was quietly hopeful.

So boot to the command monitor and:

boot -f cdrom(1,1,7)sash64

And the monitor helpfully responds with a ‘no media found’ message. After trying several other CDs I realized that I couldn’t even ls them never mind run them. The conclusion? Knackered CD drive. Arse.

For my next trick: installing over bootp using an SGI Fuel workstation as a server.