Warwick Folk Festival, and the Great Western Pub – part 3

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Sunday afternoon saw me returning to the Great Western pub for the Americana / blues bands they were hosting.  This time I carried my green chair with me, as the prospect of spending another 8 hours sitting on the wooden benches at the pub was not very enticing.  Acts included the Dustbowl String Band (featuring (reportedly) the best flatfoot dancer in the UK), Under the Influence, Wes Finch and the Dirty Band, Cindy Archer / The Dolly Rockets, Kel Elliott (complete with brass section), The Tree Horns, The Bellows, Clayton Denwood and the Street Shepherd Group.

The afternoon rocked past, with 300 photos or so ending up on my SD cards – time just flew.  Excellent music, decent hamburgers and plenty of water.  Also ended up chatting to a staff writer from Americana UK who was there to cover the event, and swapped details (and cameras).  Having played with a Canon 30D, I still don’t like it much – it’s an excellent camera, but I just can’t hold it properly, the grip is that fraction too shallow.  The 17 – 35mm lens was nice and fast on the auto-focus though.

Musical highlights for me were Kel Elliott and her band (or was it the Kel Elliott Band?) – the brass section really completes the lineup; Libby Fielding, the dancer in Wes Finch and the Dirty Band – whirling dervish seemed to describe her at points, and I’m sure if you look in a dictionary, you’ll find her as the definition of energetic; and Jack Blackman, a young man (not yet 16) who had blues dripping from his fingers.

The evening wrapped up with a performance by the Street Shepherd Group – flamenco guitar, cajon drum, violin and a percussion instrument I can’t identify.  The pace was slower and quieter than what had preceded for most of the day, but it was a nice way to cool off after a day of shooting, and just relax to some good music.

Picked up a ticket for the GW Fest as well, with the intent of coming back for more good music, and the chance at some more photography.

Warwick Folk Festival, and the Great Western Pub – part 2

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Having rolled home around 00:45 on Saturday (Oysterband ran long due to encores), I slept in a bit.  Decided to wander over to the Festival around 11:30 A.M., and looked for lunch.  Fortune smiled, and there was a Caribbean food stand offering curried mutton, saltfish fritters, jerk chicken and more.  Enquired after the curried mutton, and was told that it would be about another 30 minutes before it was ready.  At this point, the person who I assume was the main cook came around from the back for whatever reason, and heard me answering that 30 minutes was fine.  What ensued was her jaw dropping because of a Bajan accent (in hiding) coming from white guy, and then a bit of conversation in broad Bajan.  30 minutes later, I had one of the best curries I’ve had in the past year or two (and I’ve had some pretty good curries) – it wasn’t curried goat, but it was still damn good.

My next decision was to head over to the Great Western pub in Warwick for the afternoon, as they were supposed to be hosting a decent number of bands from 13:30 or so.  Well, who tell me do dat without directions?  See, I knew that the pub was near the train station, and therefore, the train station must be near the train line, and I knew where that was.  The only problem with that plan is I didn’t know where the station was, only where the line crossed a main road between Warwick and Leamington.  So, a bit of going ‘Huh, where the heck is it then?’ ensued, with me finally finding someone to ask.  Had I continued up the road for another 100 yards or so, I would have found the pub – life is funny like that.

I had intended to stay at the pub for the afternoon, and then cycle back over to the main Festival grounds in the early evening to catch the rest of the main stage performances, especially Kel Elliott.  Somehow (probably laziness, and good music), I ended up staying at the pub for the entire afternoon and evening, listening to music by acts such as Davey Looth, Lydia and Celestina, Matt Hernandez (who happened to be the organiser, and a decent flamenco guitarist), Shanade, Kristy Gallacher and 1/2 of Jamsons Nook.  I also shot somewhere around 260 photos of the performers – if my usual numbers hold true, 20 – 30 of them will be acceptable, and one or two will be excellent.  150 have made the first cut, but I usually iterate over the photos two or three times, chucking out the obviously bad ones first, then refining the selection until I’m happy.

I rolled back out of the pub around 21:15, and went back to the main Festival ground to find dinner – which turned out to be curried mutton again.  What can I say, I like curried mutton.  I pondered going in to the main tent, but opted to go home instead to catch up on my sleep, and re-charge the batteries for the D80.

Warwick Folk Festival, and the Great Western Pub – part 1

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It was the Warwick Folk Festival over the weekend just gone, and I decided that I should enjoy summer while it’s here.  Nipped down to the ticket office on Friday afternoon, purchased a ticket for the entire weekend, and then zipped home after work to grab the D80, lenses, flash, and battery packs.  Hopped on my bicycle, and headed over to the Warwick School grounds somewhere around 6 P.M – a nice, easy 3 mile ride, mostly downhill.

Turned out that the main show didn’t start until 8 P.M., so I kicked around a bit, taking a few photos of various stalls and people, growing hungrier by the minute – smart me forgot to stop at a hole in the wall to get some money, and I also forgot to eat dinner before I left.  Once the show started up though, I pretty much forgot that I was hungry, as I was rocking along to the music (if one can rock along to folk music).  Artists for the night were 4Square (a group consisting of 4 young musicians), The Maerlock (a jazz-folk mix), PJ Wright & Dave Pegg (the latter an ex-member of Jethro Tull) and Oysterband ended the show.

Oysterband.  I’ve attended rock concerts before, and I know how manic fans can be.  I never expected to see a folk group get welcomed by screams of adoration.  Except, Oysterband aren’t a folk band, they’re folkrock – a slightly subtle difference.  They’re damn good showmen, and pretty darn good as a band too – the music on their MySpace page is nice, but it doesn’t hold a candle to their live performance.

Managed to wiggle myself into the front of the stage, and shot around 200 photos, all flashless.  Also managed to have a brief conversation with one of the professionals shooting the concert, and got confirmation that all of them were shooting ISO 1600 or higher to avoid flash use.

Autostarting Glassfish on CentOS

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I’ve been working with Glassfish recently, from the system administration point of view.  First task, after getting a good build with Maven (doing it with basic rpm methods netted me a massive dependency list, including things like Firefox!), was to write an init script so that Glassfish can be integrated into the CentOS boot sequence.

Because we might have multiple domains set up inside of Glassfish, I opted for a setup similar to the Tomcat5 init script – check the basename of $0, and use that to determine which domain to boot up.  The fiddling in start() gets around the fact that Glassfish doesn’t seem to write a PID file out where we need one.

So, just in case anyone else needs to do this:

#!/bin/bash
# chkconfig: 2345 85 15
# description: GlassFish is a Java Application Server.
# processname: glassfish
# pidfile: /var/run/glassfish.pid
 
# source function library
. /etc/init.d/functions
 
RETVAL=0
GLASSFISH_BIN="/var/lib/glassfish/bin"
 
# Basename works with symbolic links.
NAME="$(basename $0)"
unset ISBOOT
# Trim off the Sxx/Kxx prefix
if [ "${NAME:0:1}" = "S" -o "${NAME:0:1}" = "K" ]; then
    NAME="${NAME:3}"
    ISBOOT="1"
fi
# Trim off the glassfish- prefix
NAME=${NAME:10}
 
# /etc/init.d/glassfish should never be called directly.
if [ -z $NAME ]; then
        echo -n $"Cannot start Glassfish without specifying a domain."
        failure
        echo
        exit 1
fi
 
start() {
        echo -n $"Starting Glassfish V2 domain $NAME: "
        daemon --user glassfish --pidfile /var/run/glassfish-$NAME.pid "$GLASSFISH_BIN/asadmin start-domain $NAME >/dev/null 2>&1"
        RETVAL=$?
        if [ $RETVAL -eq 0 ]; then
                PID=`ps U glassfish | grep $NAME | awk '{ print $1}'`
                echo $PID > /var/run/glassfish-$NAME.pid
                touch /var/lock/subsys/glassfish-$NAME
        fi
        echo
}
stop() {
        echo -n $"Shutting down Glassfish V2 domain $NAME: "
        $GLASSFISH_BIN/asadmin stop-domain $NAME >/dev/null 2>&1
        RETVAL=$?
        [ $RETVAL -eq 0 ] && rm -f /var/lock/subsys/glassfish-$NAME && rm -f /var/run/glassfish-$NAME  && success || failure
        echo
}
 
case "$1" in
  start)
        start
        ;;
  stop)
        stop
        ;;
  restart|reload)
        stop
        start
        ;;
  condrestart)
        if [ -f /var/lock/subsys/glassfish-$NAME ]; then
            stop
            start
        fi
        ;;
  status)
        status glassfish-$NAME
        RETVAL=$?
        ;;
  *)
        echo $"Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart|condrestart|status}"
        exit 1
esac
 
exit $RETVAL

The alternative is to define a /etc/sysconfig/glassfish file, and insert a variable with the list of domains to boot, in sequence.  This is a little harder to manage automatically in Puppet, but might be a better solution if precise boot sequences are required (this method will boot in sequence based on the S numbers in the base script, and then the alphabetical ordering of the names).

Cutting my electricity usage

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I’ve been bitten by the ‘how much electricity am I using?’ bug recently – prompted by looking at my 6-monthly statement from my current electricity supplier.  $work happens to have a utilities component to it, so I asked if I could borrow one of our in-the-house whole-house electricity monitors to see if an offer for electricity service made any sense (vs my current supply).

The hookup is fairly easy – insert two batteries into the device, open the meter cabinet outside, and clamp an inductance sensor around the live tail going to the consumer unit.  Then power up the inside metering device, pair the two devices up, and get an instant reading as to how much juice the house is consuming.

So, what did I find out?

Continue reading →

Windows XP, VPNs and DNS

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I have a work-supplied laptop.  Until this week, whenever I activated the PPTP VPN to work, I was able to resolve all of our internal servers by DNS name.  This is good, it means I can navigate our network at work without remembering IP addresses.

This week I’m on call.  I had to VPN in to check out a failed Internet connection, and found to my horror that DNS resolution no longer worked.  I pondered for a moment, and then hard-coded the DNS server for the underlying network device to the work DNS servers and was able to get on with the job.

I’ve just been looking for what the heck has gone wrong; my home PC is able to open up the same VPN connection (I checked every single setting) and DNS resolution works.  What I found was a page describing a registry edit that fixes the problem.  Did said regedit, and presto, the VPN from the laptop works again.  The thing that bugs me is I don’t know how that setting got changed.  Mindboggling.

For the record, in case that page goes away, edit HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Linkage, double-click Bind and move the NdisWanIp entry to the top of the list.

Windows.  Feh.

Retro-Gaming take 2

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As I’ve mentioned before, I enjoy playing some of the games from my youth – Tyrian, Doom, Dune II and more.  While doing some fiddling with my D-Fend Reloaded configuration today, I decided to look into the Gravis Ultrasound support in Tyrian 2000.  A bit of poking around, and I found the required GUS drivers, stuck them in the right directory (for D-Fend Reloaded, it’s under Documents and Settings/user/D-Fend Reloaded/VirtualHD by default), and fired up the Tyrian 2000 setup and changed the configuration to use the GUS driver.

One word.

Wow.

The music for Tyrian is stunning when played via the DOSbox GUS driver.  Time to see what other older games I have will support it!  I’m annoyed that I didn’t know about the GUS when I was growing up.