Observing report -- January 31, 2013

Out on the front porch again with Ranger, the Dob. I was only out for an hour and a half, but managed to see:

  • Jupiter, of course! Lovely at 100X, but did not stand up to Barlowing tonight. Met the neighbours a few doors down when they walked by, and showed them...they were pretty impressed.

  • NGC 2392, aka the Eskimo Nebula, which was surprisingly easy to find. Pretty sure I was able to see the central star at 200X with an O3 filter. This may be my first Caldwell object (#39).

  • Struve 1083, which "Turn Left At Orion" describes as a yellow-blue pair. I could see some difference in colour, but it was quite hard for me to detect. Pretty, as far as double stars go.

  • NGC 2420, an open cluster in Gemini. Faint, but responded well to a long stare. This page has tons of detail on it, including Herschel's notes (!) and what I think may be the best thing ever: a diagram of the Milky Way galaxy showing what arm it's in. I've really, really wanted to get a good sense of our galaxy for a long time, of where things are in relation to the sun and the galactic core, and this is awesome. I did a quick sketch, and it compares not unfavourably with the one on that page. (--What an awful sentence.) That's surprising, given that person used a 12" scope. Couldn't see any of the stars they reported seeing with AV, though, nor any glow of unresolved stars.

  • Looked for NGC 2331; found where it should be, but no luck seeing it. Bleah.

Tags: astronomy

Slow FreeBSD tape access with Bacula?

A while back I migrated Bacula, along with my tape library, from a Linux machine to a FreeBSD machine. The FreeBSD server is a whitebox with a bunch of hard drives, and those + ZFS == 30 TB of backup space. Which is sweet.

This lets me try doing disk-to-disk-to-tape with Bacula. Mostly working, but one thing I notice is that it is damn slow getting to the end of a tape to append data when I want to migrate -- like, half an hour or more. This is way longer than the Linux machine ever took, and that's doubly weird because I moved over the FC cards with the migration so it's the same hardware (though perhaps different drivers). So WTF?

Turns out, I think, that this is a shortfall in FreeBSD. Follow the bouncing ball:

  • Tape drives write one EOF (end-of-file) marker for the end of a file.

  • Bacula writes its jobs in chunks -- I have it set up to write 8GB chunks -- and the tape driver marks each one with an EOF.

  • When a tape is loaded, Bacula needs to get to the end of a tape. That means lots of "please look for the next EOF marker", which takes a while.

  • There's a shortcut, though: the MTIOCGET ioctl can (I think) keep track of how many EOFs are on the tape. That means the driver can just tell the tape drive "please fast-forward to the nth EOF marker."

  • Linux implements MTIOCGET.

  • FreeBSD does not.

Now, this is all stuff I've put together from various mailing list posts, so I might be wrong...but it seems to explain what's going on. There's also a suggestion that I'm wrong about this -- that FreeBSD does support MTIOCGET. So much for conclusions. Stay tuned.

Tags: bacula sysadmin

Observing report -- January 24, 2014...or, SUPERNOVAAAAAAAAAA!

Today I stayed home from work; my oldest son had come down with a cold, and it was a mitzvah to keep him from breathing on his friends. We had fun: we set up spy bases, extracted DNA from strawberries, and after supper I set up Ranger, the 8" Dob. I showed the kids Jupiter; even got brave and used the 10mm Plossl, which is a tiny hole to look through -- but they got it. Not like the old days...Then I asked them if they wanted to go back inside or see a star cluster. "STAR CLUSTER!" they fairly shouted, and maybe not just because it put off bedtime another 15 minutes. So I showed them M35, and they were happy (though it was fainter than they expected)

After they went to sleep I packed up Ranger (didn't want to be bothered by dew; good choice) and went to the local park. Another quick look at Jupiter to see how it was doing (damn good) and then off to Ursa Major for...SUUUUUPERNOOOOOVAAAA!

SN 2013J is -- was -- lighting up M82. It's been clear for a few days in Vancouver, but life has been busy. Not tonight, though. And thanks to new starhopping instructions from Astro Bob (seriously, he makes it SO EASY) I was able to get to M81 and M82 with no effort at all (not like last time). Couldn't see the SN at 30X, but damn if it wasn't there in averted vision at 46X, and obvious at 100X. First supernova!

Tried at 200X, and amazingly it held up. I checked with with the AAVSO chart; I got to 12th mag at 200X, but not 13th mag. Rough estimate for the SN itself was about 11 - 11.5...hard to be sure. (The light curve would seem to indicate I'm not completely wrong, so yay!) Maybe hint of mottling at 200X, but nothing definite.

It was really neat to look at it and think "The gold in my wedding band came from one of you...one of you shocked my sun into being, and my planet into coalescing..." And here I sit collecting your photons beside a busy road. Man, I love this hobby.

After that I tracked down M46 and M47. The last time I looked at M46, I really loved it; this time, not so much. Still, nice to be able to find it.

Then it was time to for the gusto...M1! Which I finally found, though in the barest barely-there way. O3 filter did nothing (not that I can remember if an O3 filter's meant to do anything.) Checking with Jeremy Perez' sketch I definitely had the right location, but I assure you it looked nothing like his sketch at all...mostly just like a large faint fuzzy cloud. Enough to say you saw it, but that's it. Still, brings me to 58 Messiers!

At this point I went back to Jupiter, which seemed shockingly clear to me. Held 200X; Callisto and Ganymede both seemed disks, not dots. And hte belts were very, very nice.

Home again to warm up -- which I've only just now acomplished.

Tags: astronomy geekdad

Observing report -- January 20, 2014

Another clear night -- and less than a week after the last one too! Nothing for it but to set up on the front porch again and show the kids some stuff. I picked Ranger, the Dob, again; I wasn't sure how long the clear skies would last, and it's quicker to set up than Neptune.

So after soccer practice and supper, it was time to show the kids the Orion Nebula for the first time. Eli wasn't really able to pick it out, though he did see the Trapezium; Arlo picked it up, but said it was faint. And fair enough; the 40mm made it small, and the 12mm spread it out a lot. But it was fun to see, and they seemed to enjoy the thought of what they were seeing.

After they were in bed, I went back out to see what I could see. Started with M42 again, of course. The O3 filter really brought out the clouds, but the only hint of M43 I could see came without it -- and I'm still not sure I actually saw it.

Searched for M78 -- not sure I found it. Took a quick sketch to compare w/the hive mind, but I'm still not sure.

M35 -- the last few times I've looked for this have been full of frustration. Not tonight, though -- the stars aligned (ha!) and I was able to track it down w/o problems. I love that sad-face arc of stars inside it. Tried looking for NGC 2158, but pretty sure I was skunked.

M36, M37 and M38 -- If M35 has been frustrating the last few times, these clusters have been frustrating since day one. Not tonight, though -- got the hat trick! Not only that, I was able to find NGC 1907 by M38. The seeing was really good tonight, and I was able to take a quick sketch of it through a Barlowed 12mm -- unusual for me. (Compared it to the barlowed 10mm Meade that came w/Neptune, and I love the 12mm. That 10mm is going up for sale.) Favourite was

M37, though...what a gorgeous sight.

Finally over to Jupiter, which stood up well to the barlowed 12mm. Not perfect, but damn good. Got my first good look at the GRS, and yeah, it really is redder this year -- very obvious even a couple hours past the meridian. Swear I saw Ganymede as a small disk, not just a dot...bigger than our moon, so I guess it's a possibility.

All in all, a very fun and enjoyable night.

Tags: astronomy geekdad

John Dobson: 1915-2013

Today I found out that John Dobson, inventor of sidewalk astronomy, of the mount that bears his name, had died at the age of 98. Miracle or tribute, the skies were clear (ish; it is the West Coast in January), so I dragged out Ranger, my 8" Dob. I haven't had it out since getting Neptune, the Meade LX10, and frankly it was a treat; simple to set up, easy to point, and quick to cool.

I took out the kids to look at Jupiter and the moon. We saw equatorial belts and Sinus Iridium, where Chang-E has landed. I told them the story of John Dobson: how he wanted to show people their universe and made his own telescope to do so; how he ground his own mirror from porthole windows and sand, and made the mount that bears his name. Up, down, spin around -- the simplest thing that could possibly work. How he took his scope to the sidewalks to show people stars, planets, galaxies -- the universe where they lived.

There are times when what I want and what the kids want are mismatched, and we bump heads. This was not one of those times, and they seemed genuinely interested. (I have to say, though, what they really liked was looking through the eyepieces and seeing everything upside down.) And when it was bedtime, we read "This Is Me And Where I Am", one of my favourite books. (They like it too.)

After they went to bed I sat outside on the porch, watching Europa's shadow transit and pass Jupiter. I saw the moon, Tycho and Copernicus, the bright craters spotting it everywhere. I saw the Orion Nebula; not well, because the clouds were rolling in, but well enough. Rest in peace, John Dobson.

Tags: astronomy geekdad

He went to a lot of trouble.

The other day, my wife mentioned an Internets I had to read. "Ooh, that sounds good," I said, and since I had my laptop on I visited the site. Sequence went like this:

  • Pop-up window asking permission to set a cookie; denied.

  • Site looks like crap, so fiddle with RequestPolicy and allow the site to request from the CDN.

  • Site still looks like crap, so fiddle with NoScript to temporarily allow the site and its CDN to run JavaScript (grr).

  • Each of these steps prompted a refresh, which took a while because I mostly surf with TOR on these days. (Good thing the site didn't just block me because I'm coming from a TOR node, the way some sites do...)

All this was reflex. My wife watched what I was doing and smiled. "Your epitaph is going to be, 'He went to a lot of trouble. No adversary was too small.'"

And I smiled because that's true. Each of these things slows me down, is a pain in the ass, is one more thing that leaves other people shaking their head and wondering "Why bother?" But each one has its reason:

  • Cookies: do I really have to explain? If you're reading this, probably not.

  • NoScript and RequestPolicy really cut down on ads, plus there's the whole privacy benefit of not requesting every single web beacon out there.

  • TOR: a few reasons. First, to piss off the NSA. (Yes, that's a bit juvenile.) Second, to make bulk surveillance harder for them and others. Third, to provide cover for people who really need it (human rights activists, say).

All this reminds me of the "just one more thing..." breadcrumb trail that'd leave me, say, gradually funnelling all my money to a 419 scam. (I think it's unlikely I'll go too far, though. How private can you be when you're on Twitter?)

I'm starting to run into this sort of question with the kids. They want iPhones and Android phones and iPads and laptops and PS3s and I don't know what-all. My response so far has been to say "No," then "Not 'til you're 16 and you can give me an essay on 'Privacy before and after the Snowden revelations.'" And then my son asks, "What do you mean by that?" Trying to answer that, while simultaneously trying to figure out how to explain opsec and why it's necessary to a seven year-old, while simultaneously second- and third-guessing myself (I really do realize how crazy this all is), leads to about a 20 bit-per-minute communication rate during these conversations. And then the kids just wander next door to use the neighbour kid's iPad and dream of the day when they can buy their own.

It's enough to make me want to look up an NSA analyst and ask how they deal with it. (I bet I'd have to disqualify the answer on the grounds of "'If you have nothing to hide...' isn't acceptable." But maybe that's unfair.)

And since I can't think of a good way to end this, I'm just going to post it.

Tags: geekdad security

DEITYBOUNCE

Bruce Schneier is beginning an NSA-exploit-of-the-day series with DEITYBOUNCE, a BIOS exploit aimed at Dell 1850/1950/2850/2950 servers. The info comes from the leaked NSA exploit catalog, and he's inviting comments about how the exploits would likely work and have been improved since the catalog's preparation in 2008.

Tags: nsa security

Observing report -- December 18, 2013

Another easy night out on the sidewalk with Neptune, the 8" Meade. It's not the best place to observe, but dang it's close to home.

Luna: And where would we be without it? Darn close to full, but that didn't stop it from being wonderful. Found Sinus Iridum and Mare Imbrium, right where Chang'e 3 and the Yutu rover have landed.

Jupiter: This really, REALLY showed me the downside of not cooling Neptune for 3 hours first, because it was low in the sky and the seeing was terrible.

M35: So nice to have the handset on this thing, it really is. Faint, mainly because of being around so many lights.

Struve 742: I don't usually pay much attention to double starts, but this was right by M1. 4.1" separation, and it was just barely split with the 40mm eyepiece.

M1: Tracked down where this should be...but no sign at all. It was extremely helpful to have "Turn Left At Orion" with me, because the detailed finder chart let me find both E742 and the general neighbourhood; without it, I would've been lost.

M42: Again, pretty but faint. No sign of M43, even with 12mm and O3 filter.

Sigma Orionis: A/D/E split, but no sign of C in 26mm. Seeing too crappy to support the 12mm

Struve 761: Faint but easy, at 8" separation.

Tags: astronomy

Debugging

In order to write this blog entry, I had to shave yaks...not once, but twice. First, my Emacs functions were all messed up, and I couldn't figure out why. Hadn't I figured this out already? Then I realized I had, but on another machine. I keep dotfiles in git, of course, so it was a simple pull away...except for all the changes that had accumulated in the meantime. Merge, commit, pull, merge again and now it's working. Swear blind not to do it again, knowing full well that I will.

$WORK is busy; I got mad a while back and finally moved Bacula from one server to another, which meant moving FC cards and the tape library to the new server, and it works now but oh god did that take time and effort. It's worth it -- things are smoother now, and will be even smoother once I get job migration working. (Disk-to-disk-to-tape for the win!) But it takes discipline to keep working on it, along with all the other things I'm supposed to be working on.The next two months at $WORK look like they're going to be busier than usual, and I'm already having to say things like "I can do that for you in mid-January." I hate that; it's nothing that can't wait, really, but I still hate it. Add to that War in Heaven (buy me a beer and I'll tell you the sordid tale), paperwork catchup, mid-year changeover and the Temporal Anomaly Zone.

And so but. Yesterday, Torturedpotato sent me off to a homebrew club meeting. I was reluctant to go -- it's a fun time, but I hadn't thought about it in advance or made sure it worked for everyone. And she sent me off anyway, saying things would be all right. They were. I had some really good homebrew (plus some of my own...WAH, this year's Xmas stout is a hot mess), and got to take my mind off things for a while -- think of something other than work, computers, devops, Sysadvent, distributed in-memory databases.

Tags: sysadmin

Observing report -- December 8, 2013

Tonight I sat out on the front porch w/Neptune, the new Meade LX10, and saw what I could see. I was expecting it to cloud over at any moment, so this wasn't my most relaxed or attentive observing run...but it was the first in a a month, so it was nice. On the porch, the field of view is pretty restricted; I've got a 30 degree or so wide window from about 20 degrees above the horizon to a little past the zenith. That slice of sky changes as the night goes on, but also as the seasons change.

Tonight, M31 and M32 were easy to see. I tried tracking down M110, and I think I might be mostly sure I got where it shoulda been -- but no luck at all. After that I let the Magellan hand controller decide what to show me. Up came NGC 1342 was up first, and then came NGC 1502 -- apparently right by Kemble's Cascade, which I didn't know. Damn! Pretty, though, and this page has an amazing number of sketches of it. Then there was NGC 1622. All nice open clusters, and all observed in a hurry.

Finally, got a chance to look at Jupiter for the first time since the summer. Beautiful as always. I think I might have seen the GRS -- if true, it was a great deal obvious than last year (which'd match what I've heard about this apparition.)

Tags: astronomy

Random reading

  • Did you know there was a fork of Bacula named Bareos? Not I. Not sure whether to pronounce it "bar-ee-os" or "bear-o-s". Got Kern Sibbald, Bacula's creator, rather upset. He promises to bring over "any worthwhile features"...which is good, because there are a lot.

  • Post by Matthew Green titled "How does the NSA break SSL?". Should be reading that now but I'm writing this instead.

  • Sysadvent!

  • I have not read The Phoenix Project, which makes me a bad person for reacting so viscerally to things like "A personal reinterpretation of the three ways" and the self-congratulatory air of the headshot gallery. I'm trying to figure out why I react this way, and whether it's justified or just irrational dislike of people I perceive as outsiders. Seriously, though, the Information Technology Process Institute?

  • Got Netflix at home? Got IPv6? That might be why they think you're in Switzerland and change your shows accordingly. In my case, they thought I was in the US and offered to show "30 Rock" and "Europa Report"...until I tried to actually stream them and they figured out the truth. Damn.

  • Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef. Have not used Chef before, but I like the approach the author uses in the first half of the book: here's what you need to accomplish, so go do it. The second half abandons this...sort of unfortunate, but I'm not sure explaining test infrastructure libraries (ServerSpec, etc) would work well in this approach. Another minor nitpick: there's a lot of boilerplate output from Chef et al that could easily be cut. Overall, though, I really, really like this book.

  • Mencius Moldbug, one of the most...I mean...I don't even. Jaw-droppingly weird. Start with "Noam Chomsky killed Aaron Swartz".

Tags: rant ipv6 bacula sysadmin programming chef

Two patches. Wait, three.

Today's problems:

  • pt-fifo-split doesn't like embedded newlines, which is fun to find out after 24 hours of loading data. I'm trying copying the approach in the Perl Cookbook; should have an answer in a day or two.

  • Some .debs (cough Rstudio) have an extra newline in their control file. This causes lots of fun when prm generates a Packages file with extra newlines. Patch going in to prm. Not sure whether this is a bug in packaging, or whether repo generators should be watching for this. Either way. This is actually my second patch for this project which, yes, makes me feel like a good citizen.

Cos man, it's been a busy couple of weeks. And that's not even the real stuff; that's just the yakshaving.

Tags: sysadmin

Documenting the options for the Cfengine provisioner plugin for Vagrant

I've just upgraded to the latest version of Vagrant, which includes a plugin that lets you use Cfengine as a provisioner. It doesn't seem to be documented right now, so here's my first stab at laying out the options. Apologies for the rough notes.

  • ampolicyhub: From the source: "Policy hubs need to do additional things before they're ready to accept agents. Force that run now..." Runs "cf-agent -KI -f /var/cfengine/masterfiles/failsafe.cf [classes]", then "cf-agent -KI [classes] [extraagentargs]

  • extraagentargs: Just what it says.

  • classes: Define extra classes; appends "-D [class]" args to cf-agent. Multiple classes must be separated by spaces. (or is this a ruby array?)

  • debrepofile, deprepoline: Specify a deb repo line, to be placed in debrepofile, before running "apt-get install [packagename]". debrepo_file will be clobbered.

  • filespath: Copy localpath to /var/cfengine using install_files method defined in cfengine/provisioner.rb. Example: you do a git checkout of your repo and want it copied to the machine.

  • forcebootstrap: Not sure; checked by cfengine/cap/linuxcfengineneeds_bootstrap.rb, but does not appear to do anything. FIXME: See where this module is called from.

  • install: "force" option seems to be the only poss. value, but not clear what it does. Doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere else but in provisioner.rb.

  • mode: Poss values are:

    • "bootstrap", which runs cf-agent --bootstrap from policyserveraddress (if set) or from the instance itself (if not set)
    • "default" -- I think just run once.
  • policyserveraddress: Just what it says.

  • repogpgkey_url: Just what it says.

  • runfile: Single run if set? Uploads to VM and runs "cf-agent -KI -f [file] [classes] [extraagent_args]".

  • uploadpath: Where to copy runfile. Default is /tmp/vagrant-cfengine-file.

  • yumrepofile: Default is /etc/yum.repos.d/cfengine-community.repo. Probably clobbered.

  • yumrepourl: Default is http://cfengine.com/pub/yum/.

  • package_name: For use by yum or apt. Default is cfengine-community.

Tags: cfengine vagrant

We interrupt this program

(tl,dr: Blog has switched to HTTPS served from a Raspberry Pi; please email me (aardvark at saintaardvarkthecarpeted dot com) if there are any problems. And now, on with the show.)

Back in, what, September? really can't remember, my aging P4 home server finally died. It was a discard from a previous job, and must've been close to 8 years old. I did my usual thing: scramble for backups and set everything up on Linode while I thought about what to do next.

(Linode is awesome, by the way; I can't say enough good. They're stable, they're cheap and I have never, never had a single problem with them. If they were Canadian I would seriously consider hosting my site with them permanently.

There was no additional spare P4 in the closet this time, and anyhow I was getting tired of the noise. I decided to bite the bullet and buy a Raspberry Pi. Yes, non-free, yes, lots of other small Linux machines, but this was cheap and I could buy it locally (and thus quickly). I splurged on a 64GB SSD for home directories, and gradually started setting it up. "Gradually" at least in part because Puppet takes about 20 minutes to do a single run; I'm writing my own modules and I'm sure there are about 20 things I'm doing wrong, but still.

At the moment I've got my site hosted there, including this blog. Mail for my domain gets delivered there too. SSL is turned on for much of the site and more as I get around to it. I've had to start rebuilding the blog (which uses the wonderful Chronicle blog compiler) on my laptop, because build times went from 5 minutes on the P4 (assuming memcache needed to be warmed up) to 5 hours, but that didn't take long to do. IPv6 is set up again, too, and I see a surprising amount of traffic through it.

All of which is to say: if you are having problems reading this blog, please let me know. (Hopefully the RSS is working for everyone...)

Tags: meta

Cultural District

So last week my oldest son came home from school after puking. Shortly after that I got it too; didn't puke, but spent the night feeling oh so close, like that bad stage of drunkenness when you've had too much to drink too fast and the hours don't go by nearly fast enough. We both spent the next few days feeling grey and pasty, but he's making a faster recovery than I am.

It may help that he's got the day off today, while I'm at work. It's true, as I tell people, that I sit down for a living, but it's still annoying sometimes. Constant alerts from Nagios for stupid things, having to put off reasonable requests because I don't have time...actually, just repeat that last bit about a hundred times. It's yak shaving all over the place, and it gets to me.

Not as much as the campus Senate-mandated rah-rah, though. Today's episode of geriatric profanity disorder was brought on by seeing the words "Cultural District" on a map of the campus. It's one more illustration of the incessant marketing, advertising, and desperate chearleeding that goes on here. "Start an evolution." "[Blah]. From here." "A place of mind." B-roll footage free with any story. Don't know what it's like at other campuses, and lord knows it's not unique to this place, but I really, really want to be done with it.

My wife and I were talking about this tendency to grumpy solitude we sometimes (hah!) exhibit. The occasion was a local self-congratulatory exercise, written up in the local paper with headshots, and we were trying to put our finger on why it bugged us so. We realize that shit gets done by other people, people who are not afraid to self-promote, and that we are the beneficiaries (to greater or lesser degrees) of that action. We're certainly not hurt by that backslapping. But it rankles, it really does.

Ah, well. As I like to tell people, someday I'll die and this'll all be over. And they give me funny looks like I'm about to slit my wrists, I try -- and usually fail -- to explain that someday, even the stupid, irritating things I haven't the grace to ignore will be a welcome alternative to never, ever doing anything again. I'm trying to remind myself that, all things considered, it's better than the alternative.

Tags:

Observing Report -- October 27, 2013

A month and more since I've been out. Though I have sat on my porch sketching the moon -- but it was awkward tonight; setting up Neptune felt foreign. Still and all, a good time out at Queen's Park. What'd I see?

  • Not M30 -- I was hoping for a brief window of opportunity as it cleared the local trees, but no luck.

  • Not Neptune or Uranus either, or at least not recognizably. I went out w/no cooldown time, and in the 10mm eyepiece everything looked non-stellar. Interesting discrepancy between Neptune's position calculated by the hand controller and what's on the chart in Sky and Telescope. I shoulda sketched both to see if I got lucky, but I didn't.

  • M31 -- easy, of course, but I also saw M32 -- from the burbs, no less No sign of M110. Well, maybe a little, but nothing definite.

  • M33 -- just for fun, and no. Again, maybe something, but nothing I could be even half confident in.

  • M39 -- now that's more like it! Lovely OC in Cygnus, bright and obvious and beautiful. Neat "5" shape as seen through the Meade. Big and sprawling and obvious...just the way I like my open clusters.

  • M72 -- tried again (though I'd forgotten about the last attempt), and nothing.

  • M103 -- very nice! Small. Reminds me of an Xmas tree.

  • M52 -- also pretty. Sketched, but I was getting cold and tired by this point.

  • Double Cluster -- ahhhhhh. It has been too long. Man, that's lovely. Found the red stars in NGc 884.

And with that I packed up and went home. Some other notes:

  • New Messiers: M39, M52 and M103 That brings me up to 57 Messiers -- whoohoo! Three more and I meet my goal of hitting 60 this year.

  • Scope was just starting to dew up when I packed up. Coulda been the few minutes w/the dew shield off while I struck camp, but I doubt it.

  • Made the mistake of not wearing proper boots out. Don't do that again.

  • Right when I was leaving I saw Auriga, and then Taurus and the Pleides right below them. Very nice!

Tags: astronomy

Observing report -- September 25, 2013

Tonight was the first time out with Neptune, my newly-named new-to-me Meade LX10. (Neptune because blue because Meade, geddit? Sigh.) It was also the first time out with [strikeout]The Horse With No Name [/strikeout] the Astronomy wagon, which really has to be seen to be believed. It's a repurposed wagon put together by my father-in-law and painted by my family: the kids, my wife, my in-laws and me. (M51's on the top, though you'd never know.) The OTA goes inside, padded by cushions, and the wedge goes beside it. On top is the tripod, held in place by steel rings (btw, marrying the daughter of a retired millwright who makes his own wine was a really excellent decision), and on top of that a chair I use while observing, all held down by a $10 tie-down from Home Hardware that really, really works well. Bonus points: I look crazier than ever.

Setup at the park took about fifteen minutes -- not bad at all. After that it was time to start looking. What'd I see? M57, becoming a traditional first target and test of alignment; worked well. Almost a hint of green, but not like seeing it through a C11. Then on to M56, which looked a fair bit fainter than I remember from the same session...not surprising, since that was out at Boundary Bay and this is from a light-polluted park. M27 also found w/o difficulties.

For fun, tried M81/M82, but saw nothing -- not even the stars I usually use to hop there. Thought it was because it was low in the soup, but it might also have been alignment probs. I went over to M31, but had to dial it in manually -- it was off by about 5 degrees. Went to where the controller said M33 should be, but nothing there....hard to tell if I was in the righht place or not.

Tried for NGC 7009, the Saturn Nebula, but nothing -- not even after re-aligning and coming back. Found myself using the atlas to figure out where I was, which I hadn't expected. Tried for M72 and M73, but no luck; M72 wa incredibly faint (or I was just in the wrong place, but I'm pretty sure I found where I was in the atlas.)

And then...and then the clouds started rolling in, so I packed up and walked home. Nice: only ten minutes to pack up. Not so much: surprisingly heavy to carry up the hill.

Tags: astronomy

Building deb files with fpm and vagrant

At $WORK I need to package stuff up. Most of the time, I've worked with RPMs. Those are easy; it took, I dunno, an hour? to come up with my first spec file, and it's been pretty simple after that -- even with oddball software that uses "make configure" to mean "make build" and "make" to actually install it. But deb files...man, these are hard. There is a lot more policy built into making a deb file than there ever was in an RPM, and you overlook/override/ignore it at your peril. I want to do the right thing -- which means, since I'm stubborn and have thought idly about becoming a Debian developer someday, I bang my head against the deb files until it works. Except, that as Jordan Sissel has so rightly pointed out, sometimes I just don't have time.

So Jordan Sissel, being Jordan Sissel, has put together fpm, the Effing Package Management. And it's awesome: take your source files, point fpm at them, and you get rpms AND debs. But I want more: the pbuilder system is truly awesome in its you're-gonna-compile-on-an-empty-chroot-or-you're-borked brutish stubbornness, and I want that for fpm. So I'm using vagrant for this. My approach is not as nice as debuild or pbuilder, but it is so far working for me.

It's actually pretty trivial; I'm mainly putting it up here so that I remember it. Hopefully it's useful to someone else, too.

The heart is a dirt-simple shell script; here's what I've got for vmd:

#!/bin/bash

# Bail on error; want this to be as hands-off as possible
set -e

# Add build-essential
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y build-essential
# Install fpm.  FIXME: That check is borken; not sure about using vagrant_ruby to install it.
which fpm || sudo /opt/vagrant_ruby/bin/gem install fpm

# Where to look for stuff
ORIGIN=/vagrant
INSTALLROOT=/opt
BUILDDIR=/tmp/vmd
TARBALL=vmd-1.9.1.bin.LINUXAMD64.opengl.tar.gz
BUILDDEPS=
# FIXME: gotta put in all the "--depends" by hand.
DEPS="--depends libgl1-mesa-dev --depends libglu1-mesa --depends libxinerama1 --depends libxi6"

[ -d $BUILDDIR ] || mkdir $BUILDDIR
cd $BUILDDIR
tar xvzf ${ORIGIN}/$TARBALL
cd vmd-1.9.1
export VMDINSTALLBINDIR=${INSTALLROOT}/bin
export VMDINSTALLLIBRARYDIR=${INSTALLROOT}/vmd
./configure
sudo make -C src install

# And here's the fpm magic.  FIXME: Note the stupid assumptions about opt.
/opt/vagrant_ruby/bin/fpm -s dir -t deb -n vmd -v 1.9.1 -f $DEPS -p ${ORIGIN}/vmd-VERSION_ARCH.deb -x opt/vagrant_ruby -x opt/VBoxGuestAdditions* -C / opt

Drop this in a directory along with the vmd tarball:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 hugh hugh     1153 Sep 12 14:40 build_vmd.sh
-rw-r--r-- 1 hugh hugh 22916955 Sep 12 10:05 vmd-1.9.1.bin.LINUXAMD64.opengl.tar.gz

Vagrant up, then build:

$ vagrant init precise64    # That's Ubuntu 12.04, yo.
$ vagrant up
$ vagrant ssh -- /vagrant/build_vmd.sh

If all goes well, you now have a deb in that directory:

$ ls -l *deb
-rw-rw-r-- 1 hugh hugh 22396738 Sep 12 14:41 vmd-1.9.1_amd64.deb

Like I say, it's dirt-simple -- but it does make stuff a lot easier. Thanks, Mitchell and Jordan!

Tags: fpm vagrant sysadmin debian packaging

Observing Report -- September 7, 2013

Tonight I set the new scope on the front porch; I'm getting a wagon tricked out for it, so for now I don't have the energy, time or money (four tanks of gas last month thanks to three trips out of town for dark skies; yikes!) to drive out right now. I figured I'd just sit and see what I could see...wouldn't be much, but better than nothing. Since I can't see Polaris from my porch, I couldn't do a proper alignment. Instead, I did the next best thing: stood ten feet back where I could see it and eyeballed it. Align on Vega and Altair, and see how we do.

Regular point-to crash test subject M57 was right there, and M27 showed up too -- nice! M57 was nice and bright, but M27 was faint...big, hard to see, not much contrast. I was still able to see it without the O3 (though that definitely helped). Lights from neighbours threw out my night vision to a surprising degree -- surprising because there are two big lights right across from me, close enough I could reach out a broom handle and nearly put them out.

Looked up M29 and confirmed it with The Messier Album, by Mallas and Kreimer...not much to see, just like last time, but it's very nice to be able to run inside and grab a book when you need it. I let the hand controller show me NGC 6883, a very pretty open cluster nearby. Sketched it, but it's really hard for me to compare this to other sketches...the new orientation of the cat versus that of the Dob is throwing me off. I'm going to have to start marking down North/West arrows or some such. Tried for the Blinking Nebula (NGC 6826), but I don't think I saw it. Found M15; just on the edge of resolution.

NGC 6811 was another one the controller showed me, and this was interesting. There was a very bright asterism (as it turns out) nearby, and the cluster proper was a faint, ghostly, but pretty collection just out of the FOV. Originally, I thought the asterism was my cluster, and was trying to figure out what the hell this other thing was -- must be some cool obscure thing I should be glad to see from a well-lit suburban porch, right? Well, maybe, but the faint fuzzy was my cluster and the asterism was part of the Deep Sky Hunters catalog -- Teutsch J1935.3+4633, to be exact. (Oh, and btw 6811 has exoplanets -- Kepler 66b and 67b. I had no idea this was in Kepler's FOV. Sadly, both stars are, at mag 15 and 16, 'way out of my league.)

At that point I called it a night and headed home...which meant taking five minutes to drag the tripod, OTA and books inside. Which, let's face it, is AWESOME. No, it's not a dark site by any means, but it was nice as hell to be in and out so quick.

One last note: I'm reluctantly beginning to think I need to name my scopes; it feels awkward to refer to "the Dob" and "the Meade". Why reluctant? Beats me; I name computers all the time and it feels natural as hell, but for some reason it's just too cute with the scopes. I've come up with half a dozen names for the Dob that never stuck; latest is Ranger, after the series of satellites NASA sent to the moon to take pictures until they were destroyed on impact. The Meade? Still working on it.

Tags: astronomy

Slow Java app over SSH? Try i3.

Yesterday a user asked me about a Java application that was unusably slow when running over SSH X forwarding. This was using Ubuntu 12.04 + Unity; weird thing was, it was fast on a laptop that was also running Ubuntu 12.04 + Unity. Other X apps were fine over SSH to the same host.

Turns out there are a lot of complaints about Java applications being slow over SSH. This bug in particular looks likely. If I read this bug correctly it's been fixed in 12, so I'm not sure why I'm seeing it. There were some differences in packages between the laptop and the desktop, but nothing jumped out; both were using NVidia graphics + the proprietary drivers.

In the end, a workaround was to use i3, a spartan (but oh so good) window manager. Interestingly, the app showed faster performance under XFCE than Unity, but not as fast as i3. Maybe a problem in a couple of different libraries?

Tags: sysadmin java