Southern Maryland games has come and gone for another year. COLD and dreary weather, but a fun day. The MacMillan Pipe Band (I’m the Pipe Major) won the Grade 3 event. Saffron United and Greater Richmond put on fine performances as well.
A big shout-out to pipers making their debut with the band — Andrew Chalfoun and Nate Wahlgren. “You have our gratitude”
Feb 2
Not much time for writing today, but here’s a clip from the very first Winter Storm Workshop Concert in January 2002. This is me playing a hornpipe, jig, and hornpipe. The tunes are The Tatty Man From Knotty Ash (by Charlie Glendinning); Wanderinig Home (by Willie Bryson); Honey In the Bag (also by Charlie); and The Champion of the Seas (Traditional). The pipe is a MacLellan, with Rocket drone reeds, and a Kron chanter. Chanter reed is possibly a Higgins, or maybe a Gilmour. Fun time!
Jan 31
Well, the class, “Managing Oracle on Linux for DBA’s” went very well. It reinforced things I already new, and I picked up lots of new information as well. The instructor, Joel Goodman, was first-rate.
The class environment was very impressive. You connected over the internet to the Oracle VPN (Virtual Private Network), and joined the audio (or video if desired) conference. The instructor’s computer screen was visible to all, and questions and interactive chat were easily handled by the software. Then, for the labs and exercises, Oracle provided a pre-configured virtual machine (also accessible over their VPN) for each student. The VM was running Oracle Enterprise Linux, and the exercises focused on configuring the server and installing / configuring Oracle. The machines (probably all running on the same physical box) were separate environments and quite snappy in performance, even over the internet, using NX software. A real sandbox for each child, as it were.
To add another layer of interest on top of this, I was running the entire class environment in my own virtual machine – Windows XP running on my new Windows 7 box, since the Webex and NX environments were not supported in Windows7 or 64-bit environments. Amazing performance … through it all, you’d never realize the whole setup wasn’t running native right in front of you.
Ah, I love technology … Star Trek, here we come!
I got a new Logitech web cam .. a WebCam Pro 9000 … to complete my hardware setup. I was missing a good microphone, but this all seems to work well.
On the down side, I also bought a Koss SB-45 Headset/Microphone to use for the class or Skype or whatever. What a horrible product. The headphones delivered fair enough sound, but the microphone was DOA out of the box, and never was able to work on Windows XP, Windows 7, or Mac OS X on three separate physical machines and five virtual machines. Really shite. So back it went to Amazon.com yesterday. Ugh.
Jan 27
I’m taking a two-day Oracle University class – “Managing Oracle on Linux for DBA’s” … It’ll be an online virtual class, coming from London, and kind of covering exactly what I’ve been doing at work these last few weeks. Nonetheless, it’s the final cog in my certification program, and a requirement! I hope to refresh my skills and pick up some new tidbits of knowledge.
Currently at work I’ve been running Oracle 10gR2 on SuSE Linux on an IBM z90 mainframe. Pretty cool stuff. Acts just like a “real” Linux box and is scary fast. Virtualization is definitely the wave of the future. I enjoy playing around with VMware Workstation or VMware Playerat home, and in fact I run Oracle on Fedora Linux in a virtual machine on my PC. Works great!
The key is having the horsepower. My new machine sure does … I configured it to be essentially two computers in one box. More on that later. I’ve got to get some sleep ‘cuz my class starts at 0430.
Jan 24
Well, I was expecting a full-day band practice, but it turns out that was only for the out-of-towners. So I have a free day! I’m furiously copying all my files from my various scattered hard drives and archives to the new machine. And yes, it’s a gem! The i7 is blazing fast and does great with VMware and Windows 7.
So, yesterday was a really fun band practice; followed by dinner at the Paul Kee restaurant in Wheaton. Every time I eat at another Chinese restaurant, I am amazed at how much better the food is at Gui Lin. For those who don’t know me well, my wife, Mei Xin Xie, aka Mandy, owns the Gui Lin Restaurant in Rockville. It’s the real deal -authentic food right out of Toi San and old Hong Kong. I’m a lucky guy!
Mandy on the Cruise
I think the replacement mouthpiece on my MacLellan pipes is causing issues, though. I’m getting lip fatigue and soreness and the only thing I can pinpoint is that this mouthpiece is much wider than the original … I have no idea where the original disappeared to since the last time I played these pipes in May 2007. I haven’t had the problem on my Soutar pipes. Time to swap parts and see what’s up.
I’ll post some more sound clips and sheet music as time goes by.
Jan 20
My new PC should be arriving tomorrow (Jan 21) … it’ll be a box from PCs for Everyone. It’s got an Intel i7 processor (2 ghz), 10 gb RAM, 1 TB drive, yada yada …
I got the i7 ‘cuz I want to run Windows 7 -and- varioius Linuxes simultaneously using VMware Workstation. With high-end performance from each! The i7 has the VT instruction set which understands virtualization calls and optmizes them. Should be pretty sweet. And with 10 gigs of RAM, it’ll be like literally having two machines in one. Yeah, I skimped on the CPU speed, but I figure the VT and the mongo RAM should make up for it.
The beauty of the virtualization is avoiding all that nasty driver mess, and easy reconfig, and just plain fun. It’ll be a great sandbox machine for Linux/Unix, Oracle, and VMware/VirtualBox, while keeping my primary Windows 7 Professional desktop intact. No fuss, no muss!
Yeah, I’m a “crazy cat lady” style computer collector too. Adding this to my Acer cheapie PC, Mac Mini, LinuxCertified Notebook, MacBook Pro, ancient Dell Inspiron notebook, and Sun UltraSPARC 10 and I’m driving my wife crazy. Bagpipes … computers … what’s not to like?
Anybody wanna buy a used but excellent MacBook Pro 17″ ??
Jan 19
A Day Right Out of F-My-Life World!
So, I get up this morning … email says my business checking account is overdrawn … well, yeah, for like 0.5 minutes as the flurry of withdrawls and deposits was credited.
I finish getting dressed to the sounds of Keegan (aka Golden Boy, my orange tabby) peeing in the tub … he’s enthralled by the sound of the tinkling fluid gurgling down the drain.
I get a phone call at 6:40 saying our database is down … seems that turning on Oracle auditing at too generous a collection level filled up the the SYSTEM tablespace. OK, we’ll deal with that when I arrive.
I arrive at work 45 minutes later, to discover to my shock and horror that my ID badge and Computer Access Control (CAC) card are NOT AROUND MY NECK. This is a show-stopping omission, as I can’t do anything with that CAC. I call home, verify from Mei Xin that it is in fact sitting there right where I was distracted just before I put it on. Distracted by the Keegan’s theatrics.
I pay $4 to get out of the parking garage (30 minutes after arriving). I drive most of the way home and have Mei Xin meet me with the card down on River Road (saves 10 minutes or so) … decide to explore an alternate route back to work (heading down the Clara Barton Parkway to the Key Bridge). Not great, but may be useful at some point in the future.
So, get settled in at work. Got the Auditing thing disabled while I regroup and see why following the explicit directions from the security consultant caused 750 MB of audit rows to be written in 24 hours on fairly lightly loaded system. Apparently when they said to “AUDIT ALL” they forgot to include a free 120-exabyte drive along with it. (I was skeptical but thought I must follow orders … how’d that work out for war criminals, eh?) Messed with this all day but finally got it the various parameters and auditing level just right on all our databases, just as I was due to head out the door.
Original goals met today at work: ZERO
Crises averted / resolved: ONE
Could be worse! Pretty good drive home … and looking forward to dinner with my lo pah!
Trivia Question for the Day: Who were the two artists who had hit singles with the wonderful whimsical song “Come a Little Bit Closer”? And for bonus points, who was the female backup singer on the later hit, who went on to a successful solo career herself?
Have fun!
Jan 18
Hello, everyone,
This is my new blog. I don’t have any concrete plan for it … I’ll just take it as it goes, and ramble on, like I am wont to do.
Topics may include everything from bagpipes to Oracle to Chinese food to anything in between.
First up … check the Media section for a clip of me playing the original Peter Henderson Set # 001, manufactured by R.G. Hardie & Co. in January 2005. The drone reeds are (probably) Selbies. The chanter might be a blackwood Dunbar, I can’t recall exactly 5 years on.
Henderson #001 – Hornpipe & Jig – Chris Hamilton 2005
The tunes in the clip are my own compositions — The Remarkable Gummersons (hornpipe) and That Damned Double Life Syndrome (jig); both tunes were written in late 2004.