Kas. Last.fm:n suosituskone tiesi äsken kertoa että raivomelankolisen örinäprogen mestaribändi Opeth saapuu Kaapelitehtaalle 15 joulukuuta.

Kuka tulee mukaan? Joulu tulee aikaisin

I added a few bits and pieces to pimp my web experience, and i thought i’d document them here. First stuff that i added to Firefox, then two plugins i added to Wordpress.

Delicious integration

I’m a great fan of server based services. I like to have my data in the cloud so that i can reach them regardless of which computer i’m on, or whichever browser i’m using on that computer — or indeed, whichever operating system. My mail is at GMail and i read my feeds with Google Reader. I also have most of my bookmarks at Google Bookmarks (judging from this, you could also argue that i’m a Google fanboy — oh dear).

The other day, i finally registered to del.icio.us. I’m a bit undecided whether it is a good idea or not for me to use delicious bookmarks, since as i said, my bookmarks-in-the-cloud are on Google. The reason for having them on Google is that there was good browser integration for them using the (kinda scary) Google toolbar if you just remove all other whistles and bells except for the Goog bookmark star. The Google bookmarks will also show up in my goog web search results. But then i realized that an old friend of mine, the Flock browser, had updated and i decided to install it. But alas, while Flock has a bunch of nifty service integrations, Google bookmarks ain’t tere. So i reg’d to Delicious.

Truth is, i’m a bit disappointed. The plugin has a bunch of ways to browse your bookmarks, but the integration doesn’t just feel native. There’s a button to add the page to your local bookmarks and there’s one (well, three) to send your stuff to Delicious. Flock gets by with one button. Firefox could too. And i might be in for a short relationship with Delicious. We’ll have to see.

Sxipper

I stumbled across Sxip a few years ago when i saw Dick Hardt’s (yup) mind-shattering presentation slides on identity. Sxip, which despite the spelling is pronounced “skip”, have a vision involving OpenID, which i too think is way nifty, but never got around implementing. Well, now the sxip guys have released their Sxipper identity manager (effectively, a password manager) as a Firefox plugin. I’m still having it installed just on one box since i’m a bit uneasy about the idea of having a bunch of my passwords syncable on the web. But i’m considering it.

Read it later

This one’s a gem, and does exactly as prescribed. It’s (yet) a kind of a bookmarking service, but with the explicit intent that you put a page on the Read it later list and retrieve it when you have proper time. Read it later also syncs between browsers and computers using the magic of the cloud.

ClaimID

ClaimID isn’t a Firefox plugin, but an Open ID service “for the rest of us”. Basically it’s a melting pot for your OpenID identity and the stuff you claim to be yours.

A big question for me was which provider would be the one to host my online identity. In the end it became ClaimID, but i’m using my domain name so that my “vanity OpenID” actually is based on my name. Of course, i also have a few other OpenIDs from web services that boil it in to their package; technorati and yahoo!. And possibly a few more that i haven’t thought of yet

Share This

I installed the Share This plugin for my blog. Should i write anything of interest, you’re now able to send those immortal words to delicious, email, or the moon.  OK, not the moon, but just about anywhere else. Just in case, you know.

WP Mobile Edition

I would have thought that Wordpress in all its word-impressive-ness would have a mobile version of itself built in, but no. Then again, i never noticed it since i’m usually browsing stuff with Opera Mini, which munges any page into a mobile one… and if i’m reading feeds on my cell phone, the page is munged both with Opera mini and the Google mobile proxy.

Mobile Edition is a Wordpress plugin and iIt Should Just Work™ when you browse Navelfluff with a mobile client (or just claim to be one). Please inform me if there are any problems with the Mobile view!

It’s a black day for the so called democracy in Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe (who used to be a nifty guy for a few years in the early 1980’s — power corrupts) has won using fear and violence as weapons against the opposition. It’s worked fine many times before. It worked again. Shame on you.

Yay! Now i finally have the Firefox 3 downloading. The site has been bogged down since last night when the Download Day world record attempt campaign thingy started. You still have time until tonight at 18:12 UTC to join.

How many times haven’t i come back to my computer and found that it has rebooted on me. At least KDE (and Firefox, and my pro-pimped IE) has session saving, but whatever was on the Windows desktop prior to the reboot … is no longer.

While Windows needs to reboot once in a while, the least it could do is do so on my terms. And my terms are “ask first”.

To prevent Windows from auto-rebooting after applying, apply this handy registry hack (but do remember to reboot your computer eventually, or your sysadmin will be very, very annoyed).

Tags: windows, hacks, reboot

Ugg. Mina barn och jag är rörande eniga om att Atrias Hiillos-korvar inte är bra. Åtminstone inte missbrukta på stekpanna.

I brist på bättre körv i hotdoggarna körde vi med denna. Konsistensen smeting. Smaken… obefintlig. Saltigheten så hög att både ungar och jag drack vattenglas på vattenglas (och efter att ungarna slängts i säng, en öhl för far).

Som ökensand känns strupen ibland…

Ungar och far av denna familj håller sej till Vatajas 80-voltiga knackisar i framtida hotdoggar. Ugh.

I övriga nyheter från matfronten må noteras att familjen Laurén nu esboifierats ännu ett steg i och med anskaffningen av en gasgrill (av märket Weber — oj oj oj). Leverans any day now.

Tags: korv, mat, hot dog

There’s a radio show that i listen to every week and that’s the Rogues Gallery. It’s a prog show, it on Internet radio The Dividing Line, it’s got a great host (hello, Frans!), great music and an excellent bunch of regulars who hang out on the station’s IRC channel during the show. Yeah, it’s an actual interactive multimedia experience. So there!

This morning — the show goes live on Friday mornings Finnish time, Thursday nights US time — i had the great pleasure and privilege of being part of Rogues Gallery by arranging an interview for the show, an interview with Pide of the von Hertzen Brothers. And what a great interview it was! I urge you all who are even remotely interested in The Talented Von Hertzen Brothers to download the latest Gallery or even subscribe to the podcast (also searchable on the iTunes store if you prefer that platform).

The whole story started maybe a month ago, and i’m not sure from what. In any case, i mentioned in the chat that vhb:s new album will be out soon, and that Frans would have to play it. And then that he really should have an interview with them. Well, things turned back and things turned forth and soon i was chasing record label representatives to try and set up a date! This is almost like working for the radio again, and i’m loving it!

The unsung hero in this story, until this point, is Liisa from Dynasty Recordings. Liisa provided both Frans and me with a promo ex of the new album, and me with quite some handling and organizing to set a date for the interview. Turns out that a live interview on Friday morning won’t be as easy as pie. Or peanuts. But we try. Maybe it will be live, maybe it will be recorded. I would love to do the interview myself, face to face, but i know i just don’t have the time to edit it. So the work goes to Frans. He’s the man. I’m helping out from the shadows, and to be fair, i’, quite liking it that way. I’m not sure if i’m ready for prime time after all this time off air. We also decide with Frans that i would help him out thinking of questions to ask whoever brother we get on the line.

And then, for quite some time, nothing.

Of course, not everything always goes like it should. When it finally is clear that Pide (Mikko) von H would be able to talk, there was no answer from Frans. I tried IRC, i tried mail, i tried telepathy, i tried Skype. If i’d had Frans’ phone number, i would have called him in the middle of his night. This was on Wednesday.

Come Thursday, and i still have zero signs of life from the Frans. And then, on (our) Thursday night, Frans flashes up on Skype for a while and tells me he’s mail’s been down. So i mail him again. No response.

In the meantime, i’ve been SMS-ing back and forth with Liisa, telling her that everything will be fine (probably) even though i still haven’t got a greenlight from Frans. Pide is alerted and ready for an interview, but evidently he is still awaiting confirmation from her. At around midnight i get the last message from Liisa: if we aren’t hearing from Frans, we’ll just have to postpone the interview.

Damn.  So close.  Damn technology.

But lo! Behold! At around three in the/our morning, i get a message! It’s Frans, and he’s going “Crikey! There is no way i can do this!”.  Frans feels he is not prepared, and asks if i can chip in somehow. This i read at around five or six in the morning when our bed was invaded by my daughter and her furry dolphin. I was not able to sleep after that.

Liisa has basically told us that the interview is no-go. IF we get no word from Frans. Except… of course, that we did — not just in that order.

Plans go through my mind. I can’t do the interview from work. I’m sitting next to a server (temporarily placed next to my desk nearly a year ago) and it’s making enough noise to mask out any phone conversation. I could sit in the meeting room… except if it’s occupied. And while my employer knows that i’m mentally off-line with regards to work on Friday mornings until ten, it still doesn’t seem like the kosher thing to do. At least not without previous arrangement. And on the company’s phone bill… (which technically i am allowed to misuse — to a certain degree at least — since i pay 20 € of my wages for that privilege each month). But still, i’ve done my questions and Frans have them too as a shared Google document.  Everything else failing, i could do it. The show must go on. This is rock and roll and it cannot be stopped.

At about 6:30, i drag myself up and get on the IRC.  The Rogues Gallery has already been on for half an hour, so i know i’ll be catching Frans now. And what a relief. Frans has checked through my questions and likes them. He is ready, willing and able to do the interview. I can just sit back and listen.

Which of course i can’t, because Pide hasn’t been checked with.

I arrive early at work. Those lovable kids were really, really quick today. In fact, i’m at work shortly after eight in the morning. I don’t know if that’s happened ever before. At 08:30, i call Pide von Hertzen and politely ask him if he’s okay with an interview. I fill in the man on what the Rogues Gallery is all about, about the international audience, the hang gang on chat, the fact that Frans is only half way up to par about the situation… so that Pide has some context to grab on to. I inform Frans that we are go in each direction. And now i sit back. And enjoy.

What an interview it was. If the von Hertzen brothers play music with a Big Heart, so does Pide in this interview. I am happy as a clam for the forty minute interview + the two follow-up songs. Frans tells me on air how he’s thankful about my part and both he and Pide nearly sing to my glory… and i’m actually blushing behind my keyboard

After the interview, i call Pide and thank him for his excellent appearance. It truly felt like he enjoyed it. And i call Liisa; “Hi, Robin Laurén here. About the interview… we just did it… and it was great”.

Tags: vonhertzen brothers, vhb, rogues gallery, dividing line, radio, interview

Nice photo set on Flickr.

Thanks: Frans

[via]

Today, we employed some wizard power tools to manage our machine park. Most notably, we learned how to connect two VMware ESX servers underneath one management umbrella and then how to throw virtual machines — even running ones! — from one server to another.

For a live migration to be possible, some rather obvious (and, while you’re doing it, rather irritating) things that need to be satisfied. In short, a VM needs to be able to access the same resources at the source and target server. Thus, file shares that aren’t accessible on the other side, including server-specific ones. No connected CD drives. And most irritatingly, the target server needs to have a virtual switch port group with the exact same name on both sides. The name is Case Significant. But once you have all these things sorted out, you can really move a live VM and you’re not going get practically any downtime. We pinged a host once a second while it was being moved, and after a couple of attempts, we actually managed to get one lost package. From moving a four gig image. Not bad.

But this is skipping ahead of stuff. We actually started the day by creating a template from a configured VM and firing up new VM instances based on the template. You can, and usually should, set some customization to a box you’re “cloning” so that you don’t end up with several Windows boxen with the same SID. But this can all be provisioned for so that you run a sysprep on the new box when it gets deployed. Not bad.

On the topic of cloning installations into templates: You can clone virtual machines into other virtual machines, and you can convert a physical machine into a virtual one. The target image becomes a close approximation of the source box. You’re not really cloning the hardware platform you’re running on, but transferring your physical machine onto a VMware software platform. Still, it’s a pretty impressive feat, and usually what you want to do. It just isn’t cloning in the forensic sense of the word. And it doesn’t get less impressive by the fact that you can clone a running machine and the only thing that is affected on the source installation is that the CPU meter goes up a notch and your network connection is saturated. It’s like stealing your soul. Pretty nice

A remarkable feature or by-product of the converting, as well as creating a new server from a template, is that your network interface’s MAC address changes. Stamping out new servers from a common template will not make your network cry. Again, nice.

Cloning and converting works well on Windows boxen that you install the VMware tools on, and reasonably well on Linux boxen with those same tools. You will need to install SCSI drivers on the source box yourself (as i lamented yesterday about the otherwise nifty Ubuntu JeOS distribution).

Not all VMs need to be created equal. There are two ways you can manage your VM (and host) resources: per server and per resource pool. The easiest way is just to edit the resource properties of a VM and say that it’s not going to get more than this or that amount of memory, disk i/o or CPU cycles. The more realistic way is that you create a resource pool to which you allocate so and so much resources and throw your production servers in a more-privileged production pool while keeping the testing (or accounting servers in a pool which gets whatever is left after the machines in the hungrier pool(s) get their shares. Which incidentially is the term for how much resources a VM is going to get within a pool — shares, that is. The more shares (karma), the higher part of the cake can be allocated a VM if the resources are scarce.

Misc bits:

• We got to install a small Linux-based router running on Freesco. Freesco must have been graph-designed by somebody on acid, but otherwise it’s a rather nifty thing.
• We poked around with rights management for the VM environment, which happily is based on Role Based Access Control (RBAC) and allows a single user to have many roles (yay!). 
• A VM can access a raw LUN over the net. This can be a good thing if you want to cluster VMs… they say.
• You can increase the size of a disc a VM sees. This will not increase the size of the underlying file system (which makes sense if you think about it). To remedy, boot up the VM with a GParted LiveCD mounted and resize. Works wonders.
• We accessed the ESX using http, which can be nice because you can send a link to a colleague or consultant who also can access a given interface machine over http.
• We touched importing and exporting VMs using the Open Virtual machine Format (OVF) which may or may not be natively supported by any other manufacturer, but at least they’re free to support it at will.

And that’s about the size of it for today.