Kenplaysviola

Check out Soluna’s in San Francisco. Located right next to city hall and BART‘able with a little walking. Nice place to take a date for dinner and then off to catch the San Francisco Opera or San Francisco Symphony about a block or two away!

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Grilled Ahi from Soluna's in San Francisco

Chicken at Soluna's in San Francisco

Another day of Berkeley protestors marching down Shattuck Ave in Berkeley, CA, protesting the wars and/or occupation in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Israel.

Berkeley protestors protesting the wars. Note the girl with the megaphone in the lower left corner

I highly recommend Fish Castle located in Berkeley, CA. It’s one of the few places you can actually get fish & chips! DELICIOUS!

Fish Castle Chicken Strips and Fries with ranch dressing

Update! Turns out the line are for new jobs at the Hotel Shattuck across the street.

Hotel Shattuck in construction

I took this picture of these line of people in downtown Shattuck in Berkeley of people waiting for job openings? I’m assuming they want jobs for this new unannounced store. I wonder what this store is going to be.

Downtown Shattuck - People looking for jobs?

After hearing about my favorite Linux distro, CentOS, being behind on all its security and updates because 1 out of the 2 maintainers got married, I decided that it was time to try a new Linux distro.  There’s just something wrong when a project solely depends on 2 people to maintain it when over 100,000 people use CentOS.  I am thoroughly disappointed in CentOS and they have lost my confidence in them.  Now, since Fedora is made by the same group that makes Red Hat, I figured that it would be similar enough to crossover and adapt.  WRONG!

Here is my experience with the Fedora 10 i686 LiveCD:

1) Graphical LiveCD literally takes about 10-15 minutes to boot into the desktop.  Too long and slow.
2) Where’s the Fedora 10 LiveCD text install?  According to the official documentation, you just type at the boot: linux text after pressing ESC at the GRUB-like menu.  Guess what?  I get an error about the kernel not finding “linux text” on the LiveCD.   Now according to this release notes, you could also type in liveinst at the console.  I have not tried this on the LiveCD.  The Fedora 10 DVD has the boot linux text option.
3) I was able to install the Fedora 10 LiveCD first time through the graphical installer.  After running yum to do some updates, the updates stopped on the kernel update package.  Not a good place to stall.  From then on, it was yum hell.  yum kept reporting that the new kernel was installed, but this was nowhere to be seen in /boot.  I had to run rpm -e –justdb –nodeps kernel to “remove” it.  Then I tried yum reinstall kernel, and I got some weird errors about multiple instances being allowed (?).  At this point, I decided to reinstall Fedora 10 again.
4) I sat there again for about 10-15 minutes waiting to boot into the LiveCD desktop.  This time I do exactly the same partitioning and install of Fedora 10.  The moment the installer goes to format my partition, I get a “major” crash with some un-human readable error log.  The log is about 5-pages long.  I reboot and try the installer again.  FAIL again!  What is going on?!??
5) Does not notice or detect the kernel-PAE, so Fedora 10 LiveCD does not recognize that I have more than 4GB of memory on my machine.

Currently I am having a pain in the ass problem with yum and trying to update my kernel in the complete Fedora 10 i686 DVD installation.  I get this error: error: %post(kernel-PAE-2.6.27.12-170.2.5.fc10.i686) scriptlet failed, signal 2.  What the heck does that mean?

In conclusion, I suggest and recommend that users get the full blown Fedora 10 DVD.  The LiveCD is broken and missing features.

Spent the 3-day Valentine’s weekend in rainy Monterey, California.

My girlfriend, Meagan, and I stayed at the Old Monterey Inn, which is a lovely bed and breakfast hidden in a little residential street located at 500 Martin St, Monterey, CA, which is not too far from downtown Monterey.  The inn provides a lobby with a grand piano that you can play, daily morning SF Chronicle newspaper delivered to your room, breakfast to your room or out in the dining area, public internet computer in the lobby, a nice garden in the back, cookies, coffee and a refrigerator with unlimited drinks of bottled water, Juice Squeeze, yogurt and Ocean Spray canned drinks.  I chose to stay in the Tattershall room pictured above for $275/night.  The room is just right for two people and has a nice little couch, which unfortunately is cut out from the picture.  The bathroom in the room contains a nice shower stall with amenities such as toothbrush, toothpaste, hair dryer, mouthwash, towels, toilet paper, shampoo, conditioner, body lotion, as well as a nice make-up mirror.  The bed is very comfortable for two people and does not make any squeaks or noises.  The place is quiet and the walls can be a little thin, particularly when people are in the hallway walking and talking.  When it’s too quiet, you can hear your neighbors coughing next door. Other than that, the Old Monterey Inn was a delightful bed and breakfast place that I would highly recommend to people.  We definitely would love to stay again and check out another room.

Below are some of the great foods and places that we ate around in Monterey, CA:

Valentine cupcakes from Meagan's grandmother

Country Fried Steak at the Black Bear Diner in Monterey, CA

GParted 0.4.1-2 would not recognize my SCSI disks on our VMware ESX server. Instead I tried an older version of GParted 0.3.4-7 and voila, it noticed the VMware SCSI virtual disks. Not sure why the more recent versions of GParted doesn’t recognize VMware SCSI virtual disks.

Tandberg 880 mxp system: Cannot get rid of the ANNOYING “STREAMING” Banner on top. Give me an option to turn that off! People viewing the screen DO NOT want to see that.

REAL Player for Linux: What? No H.261 codec? LAME! Do you not want people to multicast streaming video??? No wonder REAL sucks. Even Apple Quicktime can do this, but there is no Apple Quicktime for Linux.

So I was working on increasing one of our VMware’s image disk for VMware ESX. You can do this by running the vmkfstools command.

Steps:
1) make sure to delete ALL SNAPSHOTS! If you have any leftover snapshots, then you will get an error, or your virtual disk will not boot since it is looking for previous snapshots that aren’t there anymore.
2) run the vmkfstools command. For example, if I want to increase my 16GB virtual disk to 40GB, I just run vmkfstools -X 40G disk-name.vmdk
3) Download an older version of GParted-0.3.4-7 (live CD), boot that at startup on your virtual machine and run that to expand your virtual disk to it’s new size.
4) boot into your virtual machine as usual and all is fine.

I have tested this method on Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP.

My situation did not work since the VM Infrastructure client did not properly delete my snapshots. Fortunately I had backups. The other system admin person at my work does the backup by using the vcbmount command. I used the vcbRestore command to get the image back. Note that by running the vcbRestore command, your snapshots are gone, but your virtual disk is right where it left off in terms of the most recent snapshots.