General

Together Again

This week we have the entire Zymeta team on location in Calgary, which hasn’t happened since Christmas Party 2004. In traditional Zymeta fashion, the whole gang headed out together to a local establishment for some pub food and beer; tonight’s location was Classic Jacks, which is pretty much next door to our Calgary office.

Classic Jacks is your typical pub, located on 17th Avenue just blocks down from Melrose Cafe, the originator of the ’Red Mile’. Classic Jacks reinvented itself a few years ago, changing to its current name and trying to be different. I think that except for the most successful restaurant/pubs (such as Melrose), this reinvention is part of a repeating cycle that happens every three years or so. Melrose is different in that they are in a constant state of change, continually trying to make the place better than it already is. It’s the better way to go, especially if you are already in a successful state.

I realized tonight that Classic Jacks is going this route now also. Since their dramatic makeover a few years ago, they’ve been slowly making changes to the place, trying to keep it a little bit ahead of what the public wants next. They’ve put in a fireplace increased the number of TVs (thanks to the Flames’ run for the Cup last year) among other things. The most evident change at Classic Jacks though is the staff; all the wait staff are now super ’friendly’ (you can figure out what I mean by that) and have a consistent look. Tonight it was tight peacock blue shirts. I don’t know what the significance of the blue shirts were but from a patron stand point, nothing says professional like staff that are all smartly dressed the same.

The one thing that doesn’t ever change, no matter how hard they try, is that pub food will always be just that; pub food. And tonight it was wings. I’m not sure where they get all those tiny chickens, but when you eat enough of the mini-wings and drumsticks and combine it with many, many beers all you get the next day is a headache, a rotten stomach and a wife that is not too pleased that you came home smelling like a brewery. I swear I’ll never drink again… until tomorrow at least.

But all that said, hanging out with all the Zymeta people was worth the rotten feeling the next day.
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Tak Falls

We spent the weekend at the Takkakaw Falls campsite in Yoho National Park. It’s a bit of a tongue twister so everyone simply calls it Tak Falls. The campground looks onto Takkakaw Falls, which at 254 metres, is one of the tallest waterfalls in North America. And although the campground isn’t a backcountry site, it’s the next best thing. The campground is tents only and is about 1000 metres from the closest parking lot. And although there is a cart for helping transfer your gear, the distance means that you tend to only get people there that want to camp and hike. Contrast that with most of the other campgrounds which are half filled with young, drunk fools. Yes, we’ve all done it, but at some point you just want to go somewhere without campers, trailers and RVs and where most of the liquid being drunk is water (with perhaps a couple beers or glasses of wine over dinner).

On Saturday Ali and I (along with a handful of friends) did the Iceline Trail, which is an absolutely fabulous hike. The first few kilometres are steep switchbacks through forest which bring you up to the top of the tree line. You then continue up along a rocky path until you find yourself higher than Tak Falls, which can be clearly seen across the valley. Then out of nowhere the Emerald Glacier appears, which makes you forget whatever miserable weather you are battling; in our case, looming thunderstorm clouds and near freezing temperatures.

We opted for the shorter loop route (17.7 km) which takes us past Laughing Falls via Celeste Lake, but if you have an extra couple of hours you can extend your hike another four kilometres and head up to the warden’s cabin and then back to Laughing Falls to meet up with the shorter trail. Then it’s back to the Tak Falls campground. Your time may vary but we did the hike in just over six hours, including several quick breaks, lunch at the top and stop at the Celeste Lake beach.

I think the only downside to this hike is the number of people on it. Unlike the Kindersley Pass hike I mentioned last month, on this hike I think we encountered 40 or more people. That’s great for deterring the bears but not so great for pausing and just taking in the scenery and the sounds of nature.
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Toronto Bound

I’m off to Toronto first thing tomorrow morning on Zymeta business. So it’s not likely that I’ll have much time to blog this week. I will however sum up my experiences (I’m sure that something will happen revolving around the flights there and back) after the long weekend. Or I may blog sooner if I get a few spare moments.

On a Zymeta-related note, we have the jukebox software working on the latest Linux kernel, 2.6.13. It seems pretty stable but will need at least a month of testing before we sign off on it. And with 2.6.13 of the kernel comes Mike’s Keyspan Digital Media Remote support so our next major release will support a remote using his driver. Congrats to Mike for having his kernel module accepted; I’m quite envious.
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Unions: Bad or Good?

I’ve never been part of a union and I can’t say that I have I ever wanted to. There are many that think unions have outlasted their usefulness and I tend to agree. Unions as we know them today were started around the time of the industrial revolution, where workers often found themselves in appalling conditions with no government legislation to protect them. Today, that is not the case. The Canadian Government has set in place a set of rules that must be followed with regard to working hours, conditions, etc. So today’s unions are all about ‘safety in numbers’. The mentality of unions is ’if we band together we can get a way better deal’.

That attitude makes me angry, more so the other day when I saw an ad on behalf of the Telus employees, who are currently locked out. The ad was a take off of Telus’ tag line ’The future is friendly’ and the ad instead read ’The future is NOT friendly’ and went on to encourage people like me to switch to a different provider. Where is the employee loyalty? There isn’t any. To these spoiled, cry-baby union members Telus is an evil entity, despite the fact that Telus is employing them. How do they pay the company back? They encourage people to switch to a different phone provider. Of course, the irony is that if people do switch then there will be fewer jobs, so all the union has done is shoot themselves in the foot.

That all said, a business is a two way street, but unfortunately for most companies management and employees have both put up blockades and it’s not likely any traffic will flow on that street again. When I owned a software development company, my partner and I had absolutely no reason to reward our employees any more than their salaries, which were already well above standard. Yet when the company did well, we gave out bonuses and raises. That, in turn, helped build employee loyalty which then makes me want to reward that loyalty as our success continues. That loyalty is something you don’t see in unionized companies like Telus.

For union organizers, it’s a big numbers game; more members means more union dues. That’s why you see unions that represent odd groups collectively. And are unions really interested in getting into WalMart to protect the workers there? Absolutely not. WalMart has thousands of employees which translates into a lot of unions dues. And because it’s all about numbers, it means that all members are treated as equals and that unions protect their members no matter they do. Think I’m off base? I’d love for a pro-union person to explain why a shotgun toting employee who showed up drunk and tried to shoot his boss should have his job back. Or why it’s so hard to get fired from Canada Post (employees who’ve stolen cheques from people’s mail are still sorting mail at Canada Post).
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Time To Build an Ark

It’s now been raining in Calgary for the past 24 hours or so, though according to Environment Canada the end is in sight. Predications (and I say that rather loosely) are calling for it to start clearing up late this afternoon. Still, I think I’ll keep working the ark that I start building during our last battle with the rain (which lasted two weeks straight).
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Almost Out Of Free Space

One of Zymeta’s servers is almost out of free hard drive space. It’s hard to believe that we can fill up an 80 GB hard drive but we have. So we’re moving up to 200 GB of space, and when we fill that up it will be time to replace the development server anyway. The problem is that there’s no easy way (it seems) to muck around with our current software-based RAID-1 array. In theory you can resize some file systems on the fly, but things get much more complicated when your filesystem sits on top of RAID.

While I realize that there are ways around the problems, such as creating a new RAID partition and then copying over all the files, I am trying to minimize downtime. In an ideal situation, the server would only be down as long as it takes to shutdown the machine, swap a drive and boot up the machine again. In an even better world, we’d have hot swapable SCSI drives. Then once the drive was swapped, I could sync up the array onto the new drive, do the same for a second drive and then resize the filesystem.

Unfortunately, the RAID system is smarter than I am an although I resized the physical hard drive partition, it won’t let me increase the filesystem size, even if I unmount it. So, I’ve given in or given up; not sure which. In any case, the slick, minimal downtime route isn’t going to happen.

Update: We’ve decided to simply leave the current partitions as is and create new partitions on the larger drive as required and simply mount those to various points on the root filesystem requiring more space. It should work fine, will cause me far less grief, the caveat being that it won’t be nearly as slick and as seemless as resizing the filesystem would have been.
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Fence Building, Part Two

Fence building it turns out isn’t all that hard. All you need (other than the actual wood and a solid fence design) is a cordless drill, a spare battery, about 1000 deck/fence screws, a skill saw and a carpenters level.

I went with a simple fence design, one that was clean looking, stylish yet easy to build. Between each post (4x4’s) I have three cross braces (2x4’s), a top plate (another 2x4) and then, depending on the panel size, 15-17 fence boards (1x6’s). And usually I had to squeeze a thinner fence board in at the end as the panels never worked out perfectly.

In the end, as I said, the actual fence building wasn’t that hard. It just takes a lot of time, especially if you care about the project and take the time to ensure every fence board is level. And even more time is required if you care enough to trim shrubs, clear roots and clean up anything else that might be in your way. Or you could do what the last people did and simply cut your boards and adjust your fence around anything in your way. Personally, I like the clean look. And in the end, I got the best looking, most sturdy fence I’ve seen. At least I think so.
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Building a Fence

No metaphor with today’s title… this past weekend I was literally building a fence in my back yard. Since I’ve built exactly zero fences prior to this, I enlisted the help of Mike, Charles, and Alison’s Dad, all of whom have also built zero fences prior to this. It’s somewhat like the blind leading the blind, only since we’re all highly educated for the most part and have played with Lego (or Meccano in some cases), we were all pretty sure we could build a fence.

Phase one was to remove the old fence; if you could call it that. It was really just two boards nailed between each two foot post. Realistically it was more of a decorative fence gone wrong. Or run out of money. Or just plain lazy. But a few bangs from the trusty hammer removed all the boards, leaving only the posts. The posts, however, were a completely different matter. The posts, luckily, were driven into the ground using three foot metal post holders rather than cement. So, in theory, we should have been able to pry them out of the ground using brute force, a pry bar and some simple machine leverage. The posts had other plans and did their best to remain in the ground, going so far as to bend my new pry bar. Eventually, thanks mostly to Mike and Charles’ efforts, the posts gave in and we were free to continue with phase two, the building of the new fence.
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I Hate Our Society's Mentality

I read tonight on CBC News Online that someone has already filed a $75 million class action suit. That just makes me so angry. Not that they have decided to sue, though that is questionable as it is. What makes me mad is that they have filed a class action suit a mere three days after the accident. To make thing worse, they have named Air France, the Greater Toronto Airports Authority and Nav Canada in the suit, claiming all three were negligent in the landing of the plane.

I don’t know what’s worse; that people in our society are so quick to sue or that the lawyer(s) who filed the suit did so in the first place. We still don’t have much in the way of solid data in terms of what went wrong but apparently the Toronto woman who filed the suit knows. So instead of being grateful that she’s alive, she’s busy figuring out how to spend all the money she hopes to get. The article goes on to say that the Toronto woman is struggling to cope with minor back and neck injuries, along with psychological problems. Good grief. It’s been three days lady. I bruised my ribs playing soccer three weeks ago and it’s been a bit of a struggle for me too but you don’t see me suing the soccer association.

Update: Another class action suit has been filed. These guys are all money hungry losers. Disagree with me if you want, but society is full of hatred and war because of people like this.
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