Logistics Nightmares and a Tribute to the Master
This week has been absolutely insane. Vanessa and I have been involved in the CBC Radio-Canada Jazz à Frontenac series.
Because I refuse to let movers handle my instruments anymore I somehow ended up getting suckered into moving all the organs for this show. 3 A-100s, 3 standard Leslie speakers and my rare 31H. Not only was this a logistics nightmare due to the sheer weight. Our rental truck had a bad timer for the light in the back, so it drained the battery overnight and we had to get Thierry to help us jumpstart it. And the same thing happened again after the show, where a nice lady were kind enough to help us start the bloody thing.
Lars Mikael was here from Peterborough and provided much needed and appreciated assistance with the schleppage. And the stage crew at the Frontenac were super, super helpful. Thanks, guys!
But enough about logistics. Vanessa played a great show with her Soul Project group Wednesday night. Last night Doug Riley played the first show and it was absolutely fantastic.
Then at 10pm we went on with the Altsys Jazz Orchestra playing a tribute to Jimmy Smith. 3 organs on stage and a big band. It was super, super fun. The show was broadcast live on Radio-Canada Espace Musique and on the internet. Hopefully we'll get a recording. We played some of Jimmy's greatest hits like "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", "The Cat", "Ol' Man River", "Walk on the Wild Side", "Got My Mojo Workin'". And Vanessa had done a really great arrangement of "Peter & The Wolf".
Moving the tallboy was such a hassle. But boy did it ever sound great. Haven't been able to really crank it here at home. Yeah, baby!
So now it is time to chill for a bit. Thanks to Vanessa and Jen for making this happen. And thank you, Jimmy!
Thu, 05 Oct 2006Vanessa and I went to see The Cat Empire at the Metropolis. What a great band!
Last week we went to the cinema (for the first time in ages) to watch Bon Cop, Bad Cop. Absolutely hilarious, although I suspect you must have lived in Quebec to truly appreciate it...
Fri, 29 Sep 2006
Insanity Ensues & Music Happens
Things have been absolutely insane since I returned from my last trip. And yesterday was no exception.
I woke up feeling uneasy. Went to check my mail - and I had no connection to my machines in the lab. Had to participate in a concall before I could run across the park and check it out.
Well, well, well. City of Montréal are putting in new sidewalks (instead of paving the roads which are in truly miserable condition). And obviously the backhoe operator had missed the fluorescent markings on the sidewalk indicating the location of the power cables going into the building where I have my office. They also hadn't marked the gas pipes. So the whole thing burst into flames. The short went all the way back to the transformer station and took that out as well. Thankfully the fire stayed outside the building.
So my office was without power for a while. I was fortunate enough that my part of the building was on a feed that hadn't been affected. So I only had power loss for a few hours. But I couldn't really run any of my machines as the air conditioning was without power.
In the evening I played a gig with Jim Bland and Thierry at The Phoenix in Ste-Anne on the West Island. After the show I was totally spent. What a day.
Wed, 13 Sep 2006
Boulder Bash and Spin Doctoring
I'm back home after attending design meetings in Boulder, CO. Quite pleasant trip despite the suck of air travel in general.
After I got back I spent some time working on Simon's M-100 rig. Cleaned the Leslie motors, new bearings, etc. The OC-3 tube had come loose from its base but amazingly it still worked!
The organ preamp was a bit cranky until I put a load resistor on the output. I also fixed two broken manual harness wires on the generator. So now it's good to go.
Finally, I converted an old Peavey stomp box for use with his Yamaha tone cabinet. Wired it so that the left switch controlled stop/chorale and the right one tremolo. Spintastic!
Tue, 05 Sep 2006Why is it that you marketing motörheads think that it is so incredibly cool to add umlauts/diaeresis to every bloody corporate logo?
Don't you realize that regardless of whether it is an umlaut or a diaeresis it alters the pronunciation? That is the purpose of said diacritics!
I don't care how hip it looks. Please stop! Now! Before somebody gets hurt...
Thu, 31 Aug 2006Nothing says I Love You more than being woken up at 6:30am by a KVM switch in Perpetual and Relentless Beep Mode.
This time it wasn't the power supply. The KVM firmware simply decided to commit suicide in the middle of the night due to an apparent attention deficit attack. Unplugged all cables, let it sit for a bit and it's now working again (for an extremely liberal definition of "working" as indicated in my previous blog entires about this manufacturing marvel of man).
Mon, 28 Aug 2006My Dell test box finally arrived. It was ordered on June 13th and finally showed up today. Impressive! To spite me it had been shipped to the corporate office in Montréal instead of my home office as indicated on the PO. So I had to take the metro downtown and cab it home. But it's here...
I have an APC AP7900 switched rack PDU. Tonight I got so frustrated with the nested menus of the telnet interface that I wrote a config file for powerman. The config file is here: apc7900.dev.
Fri, 25 Aug 2006Looks like my blog push script has been defunct for a while. Fixed...
Thu, 24 Aug 2006My Fibre Channel switch (an HP 16B née Brocade SilkWorm 3800) arrived a couple of days ago and it gave me a hard time. I've dealt with Brocades before but this thing was really whacky. Some ports worked, some ports didn't. Some ports were able to negotiate speeds, some weren't. I also couldn't connect to it via neither serial port, nor network.
After mucking with it for a day or so I finally bit the bullet and submitted my first support ticket ever!
HP support in Atlanta pointed me in the right direction. The switch needs a straight through cable and not a null modem. And obviously I hadn't gotten the right cable with the switch. USB dongle + gender bender and I was in business. So there you have it, Google, in case somebody else runs into this.
The reason the port routing and speed negotiation was funky was some really odd zoning rules. Fixed.
The second problem was my HP ds2405 fibre channel tray. It was one of the first 2 Gbps-capable arrays and like many other leading edge devices it has compatibility issues. Lots of googling (yes, friendly Google trademark lawyers, I am explicitly referring to your search engine) and looking through docs and no go. I ended up getting a firmware from a friend at HP but it didn't come with any instructions. So I had to experiment a bit. Procedure documented here for posterity:
- Unplug ds2405 from fabric and hook it up directly to controller. In this case a QLA2312.
- Install latest package containing Qlogic ISP23xx EFI drivers on my rx2600 proto.
- Get the latest package containing HP disk firmware updates .
- Unpack firmware updates on the EFI partition. Copy ds2405 fw there as well.
- Reboot and run ode dfdutilu from the EFI shell in the firmware dir. Use the download command (as opposed to update) and it will query you for the disk to upgrade. Point it at the LCC target id and voila!
- Move FC cable to other LCC and lather, rinse, repeat.
So now I'm all set with Fibre Channel again. Time to muck a bit with tachyon in my copious spare time.
Sun, 13 Aug 2006Had two organ service gigs today. First an M-100 belonging to Puff and the Pillpoppers that needed lots of lovin'. Ripped out speakers to save weight and did quite a bit of rewiring. Percussion tube was broken. Leslie needs cleaning too but I ran out of time.
The interesting part was the Yamaha Electone speaker cabinet the owner had. And RP-50. Nobody has ever heard of this thing. Not even the Internet. So I guess I'll have to resort to trial and error when I go back to hook it up.
The other organ was an old acquaintance whose owner moved to Japan before I got a chance to fix it. The current owner and I have been playing phone tag all summer and I'm glad I finally got around to fixing it up. Exploded rectifier tube. Glad the guy powered it off before the transformer melted...
Fri, 11 Aug 2006Back in May I tried to buy some big Seagate drives for backups and failed miserably in finding a company willing to take my money . I'm happy to announce that CompuSmart in Montréal were willing to take my order and I had the drives two days later. No problem!
Now, if only the Dell I ordered in June would show up...
Fri, 04 Aug 2006Went down to HQ in California for a team meeting this week. We all went gokarting Wednesday (well, I didn't given my lack of driver's license). Nice to get to know everyone.
The worst part about hanging out at HQ is that my todo list keeps growing. But so far it's cool stuff, so it ain't so bad.
Sun, 23 Jul 2006I've been in Ottawa all week attending OLS. Good hang. It was great to see Uncy, Hugh, Jes and everybody else again. It's been a while...
I'm obviously biased given my XFS background, but my favorite part of the conference was Dave Chinner's filesystem scalability talk. Great research, great results, great presentation.
Vanessa came down last night and we went on the Hacker Bike Ride today. Before going home we went to the weekly HPVOoO gathering.
And now back to writing some code...
Mon, 10 Jul 2006The Jazz Festival is over. It has been a crazy two weeks. Lots of hard work but the jam is always super fun. Thanks to everybody who came out...
Fri, 30 Jun 2006
Nobody Wants My Money - Part III
I have mostly been doing Itanium work the last 5 years and consequently I don't have much in the x86 department. I decided to look around for an AMD64 system. I don't have a lot of faith in machines build from random parts found at the local corner store. The big companies use the same components but at least they are fairly well integrated.
Sun's Ultra 20 looked pretty decent on the low end. Standard Tyan motherboard and a good power supply. So I decided to sign up for their widely hyped^wadvertised Try and Buy programme. They say it's Risk-Free! And that's easy for them to say. Because I got absolutely no response to my request. Zilch. Nada. Not even a bugger off mail. So it ain't gonna be a Sun...
Mon, 26 Jun 2006Went to California to hang out at Oracle HQ a bit. Lots of new faces and lots of old ones too. Cool beans.
I have a lab! Finally bit the bullet and rented a commercial space a couple of blocks away. Awesome to get the hardware junk out of the house. Proper cooling and ample power. Ahhh!
Sat, 20 May 2006After a long hiatus due to work I'm now back to hacking on my tachyon fibre channel driver. Fun, fun, fun!
Thu, 18 May 2006My last day at Wild Open Source was May 15th. It feels weird leaving a company that you helped build, but it feels even weirder ending my tenure at HP. I have been doing work for HP since we started the PA-RISC Linux port. First The Puffin Group, then Linuxcare and finally at Wild Open Source.
I did the maths and over the last 6 years I have spent a whopping total of two years contracting for SGI (14 months on XFS, 10 months on Altix). But between different contracts I have worked over 4 years for HP (PA-RISC, Integrity, LEK, XC). Which means that effectively I have spent more time at HP than I have at Wild Open Source. q.e.d.
Thanks, HP! And special thanks to Alan, Fred and Jeanette.
On Tuesday I start my new job at Oracle. I'll be working on block I/O and filesystems for the Linux Engineering group. I am really looking forward to getting back in the storage business. And it's going to be great to work with old friends again.
Wed, 10 May 2006
Nobody Wants My Money - Part II
Despite my unnatural and disturbing affinity for SCSI and Fibre Channel I decided to get a bunch of SATA drives for experimenting with some RAID code.
I was particularly interested in Seagate's NL35 NearLine drives as their error handling claims to be better (Guaranteeing correctness as opposed to the consumer grade drives whose firmware is tuned to look good in Windows benchmarks).
I contacted 3 local resellers of Seagate drives. 2 out of 3 got back to me.
Company 1 responded that they couldn't get the Seagate NL-series but recommended a different brand instead. They also couldn't get most of the other items I had requested.
Company 2 hadn't actually read my email and sent me a quote on the consumer drive plus a bunch of other incorrect items. As a matter of fact, none of the parts I had asked for a quote on were listed in the quote. None!
I reponded to Company 2's email and they sent me a new one with roughly 50% of the correct items listed. Again, no response on the NL35 inquiry. Once again I responded, this time asking about the NL35 only. I got a reply: That drive was not available in Canada.
So I contacted Seagate's Canadian sales manager who quickly responded that the drives were indeed available, and that he'd contact the distributor dealing with Company 2 to set the record straight.
I waited a week. Nothing happened.
I poked the Seagate rep. again. Great guy, immediate action. He put me in contact with the distributor, who in turn pointed me to their contact person at Company 2. This contact person turned out to be the CEO of Company 2, which is a chain of computer stores in Quebec. I sent the CEO a mail explaining the sitution.
I waited a week. Nothing happened.
So I'm sticking with my SCSI drives for now. Bonus points to Seagate for being extremely responsive. Too bad their resellers are not willing to do business.
Sat, 06 May 2006I recall that back when I ran the computing department at university I was getting increasingly frustrated with the sales people from various computer companies. It was often hard just to get a quote. And apparently this lives on:
The facility in Ottawa where my machines are colocated is going out of business. So I went looking around for a colocation provider in Montréal. I started sending out mails. 3 out of 4 did not reply to my inquiry. The one that responded only did so after a few resends.
After much request tracking ticket bouncing back and forth I finally got to speak to a real person. We arranged a tour of the facility and off I went. I got the tour, no issues there. There were a few things that weren't to my liking. As well all know, rack compatibility is a major hassle. And obviously colocation providers can't standardize on one vendor's racks. So these guys went to the extreme and provided A/V style racks that work with almost no computer gear. Argh.
Anyway. The day after the tour I got a mail from the sales person asking me if I had further questions. And I did. Among other things I had forgotten to ask whether their facility had a fire suppression system, as I did not recall seeing any gas tanks. No response. I resent the mail after a few days. Still no response.
So in the end I ended up joining some of the expatriots from the colo in Ottawa. It is a drag that my machines are a 2 hour drive away, but at least these people know what they are doing and they are interested in doing business.
Thu, 13 Apr 2006
I've been in Palo Alto this week on business and yesterday Vanessa came down and joined me for a few days of vacation. We borrowed Granta's VW van and went up a road trip around the Bay. Up Page Mill Road, along Skyline, across Golden Gate, up in the Marin Headlands, lunch in Sausalito, up to Napa Valley, down through Oakland and along the East Bay. And at night we met up with Pete Fallico and had a great jazz organ hang.
Tomorrow we're going to wander through the streets of San Francisco and in the evening we're going to see John Scofield at Yoshi's...
Thu, 06 Apr 2006
After several weeks of complete madness with work, producing shows and whatnot, Vanessa and I went up into the mountains to enjoy a couple of days without phone and internet.
We went to an authentic cabane a sucre which is where the real Canadian maple syrup is made. We were fed amazing food and stayed in a cozy, cozy log cabin with a big fireplace. Aaahhhh...
Before going back to Montreal we went to visit Phil and Allison in their new house. Good times!
Tue, 04 Apr 2006
Kresten Osgood and the Danish Connection
Vanessa and I invited our good friend and famous jazz drummer Kresten Osgood to Montreal. We had booked Petit Campus for the event and the turnout was pretty good considering the miserable weather Monday night.
Joel Miller joined us on the saxophone.
As usual Kresten was a blast both musically and in terms of appearance. And Joel simply smokes. Lots of fun!
Tonight we went out for dinner with Joel, Christine Jensen and Kresten at the Blue Nile.
Wed, 15 Mar 2006This is the 4th installment in the Belkin KVM switch saga in which the antagonist dies a horrible death but gets resurrected by the protagonist...
Today while typing away my Belkin KVM switch (see previous blog entries about how much I absolutely loathe this device) entered constant beep mode. Console switching didn't work. I tried resetting it by pulling power but it kept beeping. USB cables out. Same thing.
Well - surprise, surprise. The wall wart had shorted. It was sitting in an APC power bar with plenty of ventilation and didn't feel hot at all. I guess it's just the usual Belkin build kwality.
Thankfully I had a spare 9VDC/1.1mA power supply in the lab and that shut the bloody thing up so I could get back to work. But this is great news - it means I have to deal with Belkin's non-existent customer support again. I can't wait!
I'm never, ever buying another piece of Belkin gear...
Sat, 11 Mar 2006About a year ago Mike Miller from HP was kind enough to send me a RAID Array 4100 fibre channel disk tray for my tachyon driver project. Apparently there are a lot of these arrays out in the field because we do get a lot of requests about them on linux-scsi.
Unfortunately the RA4100 doesn't look like a regular SCSI disk. It implements the abandoned SCSI Controller Commands specification and is quite possibly the only device ever sold that does so. The Compaq cpqfc driver had all sorts of nasty, evil code to deal with the RA4100 because they were sold as a pair. And since this device appears to have quite the following, I decided to take a stab at understanding what needs to be done to support it. Obviously we can't and won't have a device-specific workaround in every fibre channel HBA driver.
And so the fun begins. I hooked up the RA4100 to a QLA2312 controller and I could see the TYPE_RAID device. All attempts to send INQUIRY or REPORT_LUNS failed. Then I hooked it up to an HP Tachyon controller under 2.4 and loaded cpqfc. Same thing. Apparently my RA4100 hasn't been configured so it doesn't expose any LUNs. Even with the SCC mangling in the Compaq driver.
Unfortunately (grr, Compaq!) you can only configure the RA4100 using Windows NT or 2000. And I don't happen to have any Windows machines. At all. My sister in law's retired Dell Celeron, however, could deliver in that department. I plugged in an Agilent Tachyon controller hoping to get Win2K to use it. But no. The Compaq driver only works with the Compaq branded (I assume PCI vendor id) boards. And I don't have a Compaq branded controller. Tons of Tachyons, but not a Compaq. So that was a no go.
Instead I started poking at the cpqfc driver to see what it does to
mangle the cdbs being sent to the RA4100. Oh My God. It's
*so* ugly. Look at IssueReportLunsCommand(),
ScsiReportLunsDone(), fcFindLoggedInPort()
and build_FCP_payload() in cpqfcTSworker.c and
go throw up...
The sparse LUN mangling and INQUIRY snooping we can avoid. So all we need to handle is the addressing mode. But I'm still not sure how to attack this.
Wed, 08 Mar 2006
S.W.A.M.P.E.D.
gaaaaaaaaahhhh......
Last night the boys (the Certified Organic Jazz Quartet) and I played at Cheval Blanc, one of the local microbreweries.
I hadn't expected much given that it was a Monday night but I was in for a surprise. The place was packed and the crowd totally dug the music. So we had a ball and ended up playing four encores!
I have to get some more gigs booked this spring but I've been so busy with work. I, however, have another couple of shows coming up next week. This time with The Free Oxygen Band. Wednesday at Peel Pub, Thursday at Rouge. Gon' be funky!
And in early April Danish drummer Kresten Osgood will be playing with Vanessa, Joel and I at Petit Campus. Fun times ahead...
Mon, 06 Mar 2006
Aside from being extremely busy with HP work I have also been doing an organ restoration job. My good friend and fellow Hammond organist Kevin Dean wanted his gig organ made lighter. The whole job took over a week to complete. Lots of sawing and waiting for glue to dry and lots of time spent sourcing the parts I needed. But the net result looks smashing (IMHO).
And after seeing how slick Kevin's organ ended up looking, I gave my own gig organ the same treatment. I present to you: Twins separated at birth!.
Mon, 06 Feb 2006Busy. I'm so busy with work it's not even funny. But that's good. Idling drives me nuts...
Belkin's tech support finally responded to my response to their response to my request:
From: mkp
To: Belkin Tech Support
Thanks for your reply. However, I already pointed out that I run at the supported 1600x1200 @ 60 Hz. See my original post below.--- 8< --- snip
From: Belkin Tech Support
For further assistance please contact our technical support hotline:
1-800-bla-blah
Awesome! World class customer dedication!
Bounteous. I sold my Roland VK-7 clonewheel organ. Said bounty will go in the Hammond B-200 replacement bucket. We'll probably end up getting a Hammond Suzuki XK-3 + XLK-3...
Tue, 31 Jan 2006On January 25th I submitted the following ticket to Belkin's tech support regarding my KVM switch:
Problem: A few days ago I bought a Belkin OmniView KVM switch (F1DD102U) so I can toggle between my workstation and my Mac. According to the specifications, the switch supports resolutions up to 1600x1200 @ 60Hz.
Both the workstation and the Mac have DVI outputs and are configured to run at that resolution. However, there's a lot of flicker on the screen (HP L2035 20" LCD). It's especially annoying when using dotted lines or when the screen is black (screen blanker, DVD viewing).
There's no flicker when using 1280x1024 @ 60Hz. I've now tried several DVI cables including the official Belkin KVM USB/DVI/Audio ones. Same thing. There's also no flicker when I connect either computer directly to the screen.
Today (January 30th) I receive the following mail from Belkin:
Thanks for contacting Belkin. Try turning adjusting your refresh rating. For further assistance please contact our technical support hotline.
Now I'm left wondering: What exactly is a "refresh rating" and how do I "turning adjust" it? I guess I need to contact Belkin's technical support hotline for further assistance. Because techsupp@belkin.com clearly isn't it...
sigh
Fri, 20 Jan 2006
The last couple of days we've had the world famous jazz organist Rhoda Scott in town. Vanessa and I produced a couple of shows with her at the Upstairs Jazz Club, and Rhoda also gave a clinic about improvisation at McGill University.
Rhoda performed for an almost full house on Wednesday night which was amazing given the ice storm that had caused Montreal to come to a grinding halt. Thursday the weather was much better and Upstairs was packed. Excellent!
It's been really hard to juggle work, organ logistics and hanging out with Rhoda this week but it's been well worth it. Good times! We have to bring her back sometime when the weather is less sucky...
Tue, 17 Jan 2006Ok, I'm just about to explode. There's a Mac mini on my desk which I use for Pro Tools editing. So far I've been running it through the analog VGA connector on my LCD. Today I bought a Belkin USB/DVI/Audio 2-port SOHO KVM to make switching easier. Hahahaha!
My existing StarTech KVM was driving me nuts because they - in their infinite wisdom - had chosen Control-Control as hot key for switching. Brilliant! Good thing I never use the Control key for anything. Ever! I had looked in the manual for the Belkin and seen that they used Scroll Lock. That I could live with. Plus it was the only game in town for DVI.
I unpack and install the bloody thing:
Issue #1: The console DVI connector is too close to the edge and consequently you can't plug a cable in. I muck around trying to find cables with smaller connectors and eventually get that working with a Dell DVI cable.
Issue #2: The power supply has an angled plug that blocks one of the available USB ports. What an awesome design!
Issue #3: The switch can supposedly handle 1600x1200 @ 60Hz which is what my display is. Flicker mania! Both the Mac and the Linux box flicker when there are dotted lines on the screen. Smashing!
Issue #4: This pizzashit is mangling the keyboard events. Instead of just being a USB switch the KVM snoops data (for hot key switching) and has a crapolariffic algorithm that decides what gets through. This means that not only do the multimedia keys stop working but other combinations of keys get completely messed up. My favorite is right control c which ends up sending c. Good thing nobody ever needs to press control c.
Issue #5: I decide that the keyboard mangling is too broken and on top of that I don't care about the hotkey switching. I can reach the buttons on the Belkin and switch manually. So I move the keyboard to the only usable (see issue #2) generic USB port. Great! The KVM immediately goes into infinite beep mode. Turns out it needs a keyboard plugged into the console port at all times.
Issue #6: Belkin's support site has a no-beep, no-keyboard version of the firmware available for download. Woohoo! Except it requires Windows 98 or 2000 to upgrade the KVM. No Windows boxes here. Dead end.
Issue #7: Fine! I plug a random USB keyboard into that port and hide it under the desk. And this solved my problems, right? Nope. Because the generic port might not snoop and mangle data but it's still flakey. I type fast and it loses keypresses all the time. Unusable.
Issue #8: But wait! There's more! Sometimes the keyboard goes into repeat-the-last-keypress-20-odd-times mode. That in combination with the delete key took care of a lot of the unanswered email I had in my inbox. Lovely!
RANT: Why on earth can't you shit-flinging monkeys design a KVM switch that's just that - a switch. Which passes the electrical signals from one port on to the other. No mangling, no hotkeys, no flicker, no bullshit. I have yet to own a KVM that passes that simple criteria.
Mon, 16 Jan 2006Went to Andre's today to mix the tracks from my August/December recording sessions with the Certified Organic Jazz Quartet.
Ok, but I still sound way better live than I do in the studio...
Sun, 15 Jan 2006Played two shows with Free Oxygen this weekend. Friday night at The Dome was a lot of work for nothing. We were the last act in a 4-band marathon and didn't go on until about 1:30am. With the lengthy set breaks due to changing bands and gear on stage the crowd didn't have much incentive to stick around. Played a short set and spent forever moving gear. Got home at 4:30am. *sigh*
Last night was much better. Lots of fun at a packed Sala Rossa. Now we're talking! Organ schleppage was a lot of work as usual and after the show I had to hurry to the Upstairs to pack and move my tonewheel organ which is going to live there until Rhoda shows up this week.
Sun, 08 Jan 2006
Vanessa & I won the annual Swankola Name That Tune Award. At the ceremony in Edmonton, AB we received our priceless (albeit not jewel-encrusted) Mr. Potato Heads.
Last night we had a party at Vanessa's mom's place. Good times. James Andrews invented what's about to become a best seller at Timmy's: The smoked oyster/jelly donut.
Now back to eating Ukrainian Christmas food and trying to recover from this @!#$ cold. Two weeks...
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