Quote of the day

My favorite quote from our esteemed manager during our Course Development meeting today, regarding a situation he was trying to avoid where we'd need to pad some content to fit a full day:

"we'd have to add filler, and that's for cheap hot dogs"

Master Chef Scone Recipe

Master Chef scone recipe from tonight's episode:

150ml milk +

150ml cream +

one egg

wisk wet ingredients

3 cp self-raising flour +

(if regular flour add 1.5 tsp baking powder)

2 Tbsp sugar +

1 cup chopped date +

lemon zest

mix dry ingredients

(can put dill, feta, olives, etc to make savory)

now put wet ingredients into dry

give a mix to bring togther in bowl

put out on bench with flour

form into big chunk, relatively flat, to cut pieces out of

don't need to work it too much (don't want to overwork dough)

cut into shape, put on baking pan

use milk+sugar mix as a glaze on top

bake until golden brown, temp? maybe 180C?

cut in half, serve with jam and cream

SMF and jumpstart

SMF is Sun's Service Management Facility, and is their method of controlling startup and shutdown, enabling and disabling, and dependencies of services. Traditionally in Solaris and UNIX this was done with inetd and RC scripts. Here are some links:

• Good overview: http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/selfheal/smf-quickstart.jsp
• The more detailed Sun Admin guide on SMF: http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-1985/hbrunlevels-25516?a=view

Unfortunately with most "how-to" on SMF they just talk about how to use svcs of svcadm to quickly show you information, or start and stop services. What I wanted, however, was to find out which file(s) this information was stored in, so that I could set it up on a server without using the commands (specifically set it in the "finish" script of jumpstart)

Turns out it this can be done with a service manifest / site.xml file, as shown in these posts:

• http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=695&tstart=0
• http://forums.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5382608&tstart=3
• http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/selfheal/sdev_intro.jsp

Solaris version - update matrix

Not so easy to find this information online. I had to go to the Sun site, and pretend to download various versions of Solaris just to get this mapping:

Solaris 10 5/09

- update 7

Solaris 10 10/08

- update 6

Solaris 10 5/08

- update 5

Solaris 10 8/07

- update 4

Solaris 10 11/06

- update 3

that's as old as I can find on the 'legacy downloads'.

PUPPPs

No, not something cute like triplet puppies, PUPPP stands for "Pruritic Urticarial Papules and Plaques of Pregnancy". What it means is "itchy belly". This is what Jen got during pregnancy, and it sucks. Basically, this combined with the usual squished-bladder-and-having-to-pee-all-the-time meant that Jen slept in 1 hour increments, and about 2-3 of these a night.

At first doctors / nurses / midwives would just say "oh it's just stretching skin from pregnancy". However due to Jen's vigilant Google searching, she found sites like these:

• http://dermatology.about.com/cs/pregnancy/a/puppp.htm
• http://members.optusnet.com.au/westhoff/puppp/Gallery/index.htm

...and so it turned out this is a recognized super-itchy condition that some woman go through that is a bit more than the usual.

Unfortunately in her case she went through the vast sample of creams, antihistamine, and hydracortizone / steroid creams, however they helped little to not at all. In her case the only thing that worked was using ice cubes or ice chips and rubbing them over her belly (fortunately it was summer!). This would eventually make the itchiness go away enough to fall back to sleep for 30-60 minutes until she needed to pee, wake up, and find her belly itchy again. Sounds fun, huh.

Arrive in Japan / Odaiba

Flew on Japan Airlines (JAL) to Narita, Tokyo from San Francisco. Although they have a good reputation for food, I was very disappointed with this flight's fair. Jen sometimes gets motion sickness due to flights and such, but with the help of some medicine called Bonine (with Mezcline) the flight went great. I watched The Royal Tenenbaums 1.5 times. Great movie. Great music.

Arrived in Narita Airport, Tokyo. We took the Limousine Bus to the Grand Meridian Hotel in Odaiba, where my friend Kyoko lives. She met us at the hotel, and brought a small wheelcart with her, which helped greatly in carrying my big, heavy bike box.

She lives on the 12th floor of a large dorm, and her dorm room is of a nice size (a comfortable fit for 2 extra people - not quite like the last dorm, eh, Howie). Although we were tired on and off for the next few days, Jen and I pretty much went straight into the Japan time zone.

Narita Airport

Need Jen?

My clever adjustment of an ATM add.

Dorm View

View of Odaiba, and across the bay, Tokyo, from Kyoko's Dorm

Kyoko

In the hall of her new dorm