I love meetings, I hate meetings, I love meetings... Okay, okay, I have a love-hate relationship with meetings. There are three types of meetings (no, it's not the good, the bad and the ugly) that I've found myself in. The first type of meeting is the useful meeting where the right people get together and figure out a solution to a problem.
The second type of meeting can also be useful which is the information meeting. This type of meeting is when one person needs to pass along information to a group of people followed by a discussion or questions. Type 2 can be tricky, though, because it can easily become an useless meeting if the information being given out is ill-prepared or not useful. Also, don't drag out these type of meetings for too long 'cause people have a limit on how much they can take from one person droning on-and-on.
The third type of meeting is the bad one, and unfortunately, the most common one that gives meetings a bad name. This is the meeting that someone has in order to show he's doing something to justify his existence at the company. There is often no true purpose at this meeting or to collect the people there together, yet it seems to last forever. Sometime this can be disguised as type 2 where the person talks forever on a topic that nobody needs to hear about and probably could've been done more efficiently in an email. There is often a lot of people in these meetings but no clear action items results from it. People might say something just so they can meet the "I participated" criteria but there is very little investment by the group. Occasionally there is one person who tries makes it his soapbox, but given the lack of interest by the group who soon just wants to get out it doesn't result in any positive action. In the end, everyone leaves feeling that they just lost a few hours of their lives.
My point? Make sure there is a clear purpose for calling a meeting and make sure you stay focus on the topic to be addressed/solved. If it's for information, get to the point and keep it clear.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Monday, July 9, 2007
Camera Gear update
Bought the Canon EF 100-300mm f4.5-5.6 USM for my long range zoom.
Canon Speedlite 430EX for my flash needs.
Got myself the Canon BGE2 Battery Grip.
Sharding
Shard, or sharding, has become the new buzz word lately. The term seemed to have been popularized by Google and made more prominent by Flickr and Digg who credits it to helping them scale up performance. Not being familiar with the term, I started to do some research around the web to try to understand what this new technology is.
My initial investigation made me more confused. Based on description by Digg, it sounded like all they are doing is traditional data partitioning (vertical or horizontal, I forgot) or maybe database clustering to distribute load.
When I look at the comments made by Google they also only spoke about the physical layout of their database, but on closer examination it revealed that they work more with Hybernate's sharding mechanism, which is a software ORM (object relational mapping) solution, along with their database architecture. ORM is not new either. Essentially, it means to create an object for accessing data that abstract it from the underlying database architecture. What Hybernate takes one step further is to allow multiple data sources and still create one data object to be used.
In the end, it seems like sharding is a new term to describe the use of ORM with database partitioning together.
My initial investigation made me more confused. Based on description by Digg, it sounded like all they are doing is traditional data partitioning (vertical or horizontal, I forgot) or maybe database clustering to distribute load.
When I look at the comments made by Google they also only spoke about the physical layout of their database, but on closer examination it revealed that they work more with Hybernate's sharding mechanism, which is a software ORM (object relational mapping) solution, along with their database architecture. ORM is not new either. Essentially, it means to create an object for accessing data that abstract it from the underlying database architecture. What Hybernate takes one step further is to allow multiple data sources and still create one data object to be used.
In the end, it seems like sharding is a new term to describe the use of ORM with database partitioning together.
Fedora 7 First Impressions
Now that I've had a day to soak in F7 here are my initial impressions of the new distribution.
While F7 should be more of significant upgrade, I'm not sure if the average user would feel that way especially if they just upgraded from FC6. At least, I felt a bigger leap was made between FC5 and FC6. One problem with Fedora's upgrade process is that all it really does is to upgrade your existing packages to newer versions. If you were running Firefox or Thunderbird, you get version 2.x instead of 1.x. Fedora's upgrade process never asks if you like to try the new things they've added such as Xen virtualization which is a pretty major portion of the new version. The same thing happened in FC6 where the much heralded Compiz desktop effect didn't get installed if you just do an upgrade from FC5 so the user would have to know to find the package and install it themselves.
Obviously, my very first impression of F7 wasn't that good because it didn't boot up! It wasn't too difficult to fix it, but still annoying especially because my FC6 instance was working fine and I didn't upgrade to fix a bug.
Beagle might be a good desktop search system and I do appreciate desktop search tools that Google and Yahoo provides, but I don't like Beagle or more specifically how it tries to do stuff without you knowing. First, it runs at the most inconvenient times and slows down the system. It doesn't make it easy for you to turn off because even after "turning it off" it still have scripts that runs without telling you. I had removed Beagle in FC6 and it appeared again in F7.
For those with a stable FC6 system and isn't dying to try the virtualization elements of F7, I'd suggest waiting a bit for all the bugs to be worked out. This is the first time I've recommended that for a Fedora release but it is only the second time where the kernel it comes with actually has a bug that effected me.
While F7 should be more of significant upgrade, I'm not sure if the average user would feel that way especially if they just upgraded from FC6. At least, I felt a bigger leap was made between FC5 and FC6. One problem with Fedora's upgrade process is that all it really does is to upgrade your existing packages to newer versions. If you were running Firefox or Thunderbird, you get version 2.x instead of 1.x. Fedora's upgrade process never asks if you like to try the new things they've added such as Xen virtualization which is a pretty major portion of the new version. The same thing happened in FC6 where the much heralded Compiz desktop effect didn't get installed if you just do an upgrade from FC5 so the user would have to know to find the package and install it themselves.
Obviously, my very first impression of F7 wasn't that good because it didn't boot up! It wasn't too difficult to fix it, but still annoying especially because my FC6 instance was working fine and I didn't upgrade to fix a bug.
Beagle might be a good desktop search system and I do appreciate desktop search tools that Google and Yahoo provides, but I don't like Beagle or more specifically how it tries to do stuff without you knowing. First, it runs at the most inconvenient times and slows down the system. It doesn't make it easy for you to turn off because even after "turning it off" it still have scripts that runs without telling you. I had removed Beagle in FC6 and it appeared again in F7.
For those with a stable FC6 system and isn't dying to try the virtualization elements of F7, I'd suggest waiting a bit for all the bugs to be worked out. This is the first time I've recommended that for a Fedora release but it is only the second time where the kernel it comes with actually has a bug that effected me.
Sunday, July 8, 2007
Fedora 7
Today, I optimistically decided to upgrade from Fedora Core 6 to Fedora 7. Given how smooth going from FC5 to FC6 was, I thought I could do it quickly in the morning before everyone was up. When will I learn...? ^^;
The install went pretty well initially. I popped in the install DVD, did a media check on it and let it work its upgrade magic. Everything looked okay when it said it was done and ready for a reboot so I let it. That's when I hit the first problem. For some reason, it did not update the GRUB loader so that it still defaulted to the FC6 kernel which no longer existed because it was upgraded to F7. Getting around it was easy because GRUB comes up again and ask you to pick another selection so I just picked the F7 kernel.
The next problem was that almost immediately as it start loading, it complained about a corrupted drive. Oh, oh... Fortunately, I quickly realize that it was talking about the external USB drive not being available. For some reason, F7 is unable to load USB devices at startup so my fstab entry that mounted the /dev/sdb* device failed since /dev/sdb* doesn't exist! This seems to be a pretty serious bug in F7.
Boot with the DVD again, I went into repair mode and commented out the entry in the /etc/fstab and restarted. It continued with the load and failed when it tried to start X. I had it retry the XConfig for my nvidia card and had it use the open source nv drivers which brought up X. I tried to switch to the nvidia vendor driver and it also failed resulting in me going back to the nv driver until after I did an 'yum update' to pull the latest changes.
'yum update' also had some issues. There was a FC6 package (kdebinding) that were more recent then the F7 ones and it confused yum so I had to first remove the FC6 package. There were also some i386 package installed along with the x86_64 ones that had to be removed in order to get past the dependency checks.
Once I got all the latest updates, I was able to reboot into Fedora (still no USB support at start-up) everything seemed spiffy except that for some reason the nmb service was not enabled to start up at boot which resulted in my windows machine not being able to find my shared drive. This was annoying but once I figured it out was easy to fix.
It wasn't a painless upgrade and I'll have to admit that I'm a bit disappointed after my good experience with FC6. The USB drive issue is big although for now I work around it by manually powering off-and-on the drive after Fedora boots and then manually mounting it to where I want it to be. [Update] Instead of reconnecting the external drive or powering it off-and-on, I ran 'modprobe usb-storage' which will get Fedora to recognize the device so that I can mount it where I want. For some reason, Fedora on start-up does the same thing but gets a "module not found".
There are some other bugs such as the firewall settings not taking into effect even after you "apply" and "ok" the changes. Hopefully these things will get resolved soon.
The install went pretty well initially. I popped in the install DVD, did a media check on it and let it work its upgrade magic. Everything looked okay when it said it was done and ready for a reboot so I let it. That's when I hit the first problem. For some reason, it did not update the GRUB loader so that it still defaulted to the FC6 kernel which no longer existed because it was upgraded to F7. Getting around it was easy because GRUB comes up again and ask you to pick another selection so I just picked the F7 kernel.
The next problem was that almost immediately as it start loading, it complained about a corrupted drive. Oh, oh... Fortunately, I quickly realize that it was talking about the external USB drive not being available. For some reason, F7 is unable to load USB devices at startup so my fstab entry that mounted the /dev/sdb* device failed since /dev/sdb* doesn't exist! This seems to be a pretty serious bug in F7.
Boot with the DVD again, I went into repair mode and commented out the entry in the /etc/fstab and restarted. It continued with the load and failed when it tried to start X. I had it retry the XConfig for my nvidia card and had it use the open source nv drivers which brought up X. I tried to switch to the nvidia vendor driver and it also failed resulting in me going back to the nv driver until after I did an 'yum update' to pull the latest changes.
'yum update' also had some issues. There was a FC6 package (kdebinding) that were more recent then the F7 ones and it confused yum so I had to first remove the FC6 package. There were also some i386 package installed along with the x86_64 ones that had to be removed in order to get past the dependency checks.
Once I got all the latest updates, I was able to reboot into Fedora (still no USB support at start-up) everything seemed spiffy except that for some reason the nmb service was not enabled to start up at boot which resulted in my windows machine not being able to find my shared drive. This was annoying but once I figured it out was easy to fix.
It wasn't a painless upgrade and I'll have to admit that I'm a bit disappointed after my good experience with FC6. The USB drive issue is big although for now I work around it by manually powering off-and-on the drive after Fedora boots and then manually mounting it to where I want it to be. [Update] Instead of reconnecting the external drive or powering it off-and-on, I ran 'modprobe usb-storage' which will get Fedora to recognize the device so that I can mount it where I want. For some reason, Fedora on start-up does the same thing but gets a "module not found".
There are some other bugs such as the firewall settings not taking into effect even after you "apply" and "ok" the changes. Hopefully these things will get resolved soon.
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
My Camera Equipment
I've had some time to play with my new camera and it's been fun getting back into photography especially with such cute subjects! While video is the latest craze there is a something nice about the simplicity of photography. Like Chess, the rules are simple but it is hard to master.
772
My starting equipment consists of the Canon EOS 30D body which has turned out to be an excellent and responsive camera. It feels solid in my hand and since I don't expect to upgrade my cameras often I was willing to spend a bit more to get a good quality camera. I've been able to capture some excellent baby smiling pictures and that is enough to make the camera worth it. :-)
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Along with the 30D, I got the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II (amazon). This seems to be THE starting lens to have. It performs very well and the price is excellent (~ $80). If I went with only one lens this would be the one and for most pictures is the one I use.
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I got the Canon EF 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 II also to be able to get those long range shots. This lens is also priced well compared to other lenses at ~$230. Some might feel the 105mm range is not enough and I can understand that. Sometimes I do wish for a 200mm lens, but that's for another time. ;-)
770
On the recommendation of friends, I bought the Canon EF 28mm f/1.8 for indoor shots. This lens costs more then the others at ~$400 so it required more deliberation. It's a nice lens to have, but the previous two lens should cover most basic needs.
1455
Along with a new camera bag (~$60) and some lens filters (~$40 total), this completes my base set of camera equipment.
My starting equipment consists of the Canon EOS 30D body which has turned out to be an excellent and responsive camera. It feels solid in my hand and since I don't expect to upgrade my cameras often I was willing to spend a bit more to get a good quality camera. I've been able to capture some excellent baby smiling pictures and that is enough to make the camera worth it. :-)
Along with the 30D, I got the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II (amazon). This seems to be THE starting lens to have. It performs very well and the price is excellent (~ $80). If I went with only one lens this would be the one and for most pictures is the one I use.
I got the Canon EF 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 II also to be able to get those long range shots. This lens is also priced well compared to other lenses at ~$230. Some might feel the 105mm range is not enough and I can understand that. Sometimes I do wish for a 200mm lens, but that's for another time. ;-)
On the recommendation of friends, I bought the Canon EF 28mm f/1.8 for indoor shots. This lens costs more then the others at ~$400 so it required more deliberation. It's a nice lens to have, but the previous two lens should cover most basic needs.
Along with a new camera bag (~$60) and some lens filters (~$40 total), this completes my base set of camera equipment.
Saturday, June 2, 2007
Another video card bites the dust...
When I went to my Linux box this weekend, I noticed that the screen would flicker a few times and then go blank. It would come back for a few seconds and then the same thing would happen again. After checking all the connection to make sure they didn't come lose, I plugged another computer to the monitor to make sure it wasn't the monitor that was flaking. In the end, I determined that it was the video card, so I had to buy a replacement. I got a GeForce 6200 LE since it was wasn't too expensive and I don't need a fancy card for Linux. This is the second video card that has died on me this past year and it really shows that while technology advances the stability and quality of new devices often suffers.
Anyway, replacing it was simple. I popped out the old card and put in the new one. Restarted Linux which fell back to the generic NVidia (nv) driver so the screen was a little off so I had to tell it to use the vendor-supplied one which was already installed since the previous card was also an nvidia card. Fedora didn't list the card correctly (saying I had a 5200 nv30 card), but the Nvidia driver software did list the correct card as being installed. There goes 30 minutes and $80 of my time this weekend.
Anyway, replacing it was simple. I popped out the old card and put in the new one. Restarted Linux which fell back to the generic NVidia (nv) driver so the screen was a little off so I had to tell it to use the vendor-supplied one which was already installed since the previous card was also an nvidia card. Fedora didn't list the card correctly (saying I had a 5200 nv30 card), but the Nvidia driver software did list the correct card as being installed. There goes 30 minutes and $80 of my time this weekend.
Sunday, May 6, 2007
GAIM... Pidgin 2.0.0
Pidgin (formerly known as GAIM) 2.0.0 has been released to the public after nearly two years of development. There are some nice improvements especially on the UI side. At the very least, the UI doesn't feel like an outdated 10 years old application. :-)
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Decided to get a flash.
I got the basic set of lenses for my Canon EOS 30D to cover my needs. The last thing remaining to complete my equipment is a flash so I decided to purchase a Canon Speedlite 430EX. The reviews looked good and the price is reasonable if it lasts for a long time. With this last item, I think I pretty much have everything I would need for a long time unless I become a really serious amateur photographer.
Gaim... uhh Pidgin
Overall, I like Gaim/Pidgin and I use it regularly (especially in UNIX environments). Today, the "final" beta has been released as announced on their homepage. However, given their attitude and the April 22 posting. They should add to this quote, "We anticipate a final release later this week." the addition, "As that text states, that was an anticipation -- and we aren't quite ready, yet."
I'm not complaining on the release date. As an open source project, they have the right to determine when it is best to release a "final" version especially since the source code is available to everyone who are impatient and wants something now. The only problem is that they continue to set expectation then fail to meet the expectations and point the blame at the users.
I'm not complaining on the release date. As an open source project, they have the right to determine when it is best to release a "final" version especially since the source code is available to everyone who are impatient and wants something now. The only problem is that they continue to set expectation then fail to meet the expectations and point the blame at the users.
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