theducks.org

RIP Steve Jobs, a photo by theducks on Flickr. I could write a lot about Steve Job’s death, but a lot of it has been said by others, and said well. I’ll take the anonymous proverb, sometimes mis-attributed to Dr Seuss – “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” And what happened was [...]

.. and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. Actually, I didn’t get a t-shirt. Despite long layovers getting there, the TSA and lots of humidity, we had a great time. Day 0: Left Vancouver in the afternoon, flew to LAX. Yay pre-clearance of US customs and immigration in Canada. LAX is.. almost indescribable. You [...]

Over the last few months, I’ve really become a big fan of Perth boy Tim Minchin. Of all the ways I could have really looked into his music, I was reminded of my desire to look into it by a co-worker of mine here in Vancouver. Being relevant to my interests, I found out he [...]

Part the first – des vacances – We’re going to Seattle on the weekend, and seeing Panic at the disco and fun on friday night, and Tim Minchin on saturday night. Awes. May also see Ebbie, for the first time since 1999.   – In mid July, we’re going to Costa Rica, to meet up with Elizabeth’s sister, [...]

As I write this, I see many people on the twitters and facebooks posting a quote supposedly from Martin Luther King Jr, which posits: “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper [...]

Ok, so the last post went over the scenario of recovering entire VMs, what if you just want one file? As I mentioned, we used to recover the whole VM to another place, copy the file out, then delete our copy. But that was far from elegant, and again, a pain if the file they [...]

In my day job, I look after the day to day server operations of a university that makes extensive use of vmware and netapp storage. When I started there, and saw they were using NFS for their datastores, I reversed judgement on if they were crazy-smart or just crazy. Thankfully it was the former – [...]

.. make people unable to use authentication methods that don’t involve giving you a password, that’s what! Following on from the Gawker account hack, I have gone and changed a bunch of accounts, even though I may not have actually used a password I generated for Gawker, but it seemed prudent. Lifehacker have a page [...]

The big news in BC yesterday was that Gordon Campbell stepped down as Premier. Some were loudly proclaiming victory, or expressing happiness of his departure. As he put it in his statement: When public debate becomes focused on one person, instead of what is in the best interest of British Columbians, we have lost sight [...]

Eagle-watching at UBC Originally uploaded by theducks I spent about an hour before work yesterday stalking some of the bald eagles that hand around UBC. Unfortunately this is about as close as I could get, and even then it’s not that good of a photo. But eagles! Yay!