Stockholm, Seoul, Tokyo

Panasonic GF1 Himalayan Field Test, the ultimate travel camera

Posted Wed, 2009/12/16 - 7:09pm by alex

This is a different but great field test review of the m43 Panasonic GF1 by a photographer who spent 16 days in Nepal taking photos while climbing up the mountain range.
http://craigmod.com/journal/gf1-fieldtest

Create a EC2 Amazon Machine Image - AMI

Posted Tue, 2009/12/15 - 6:39pm by alex

Customize an existing AMI image

It's much easier to customize an existing AMI image to your own taste than to start from scratch so let's do that. First we need to find an image that is close to what we want. Read EC2 quickstart on how to setup the EC2 API tools.

$ ec2-describe-images -a 
…
IMAGE	ami-f0f61599	alestic-64/debian-5.0-lenny-base-64-20091011.manifest.xml	063491364108	available	public		x86_64	machine	aki-a3d737ca	ari-7cb95a15		instance-store
…

Amazon EC2 Quickstart

Posted Tue, 2009/12/15 - 6:36pm by alex

EC2 Preparation

First you need to sign up for Amazon's EC2 service and download your X.509 certificate and private key. The certificate and private key files are named as cert-<GUID>.pem and pk-<GUID>.pem. 

Create a directory to hold your EC2 access credentials.

$ mkdir ~/.ec2
$ mv ~/Downloads/*.pem ~/.ec2

Next download the EC2 API command line tools, add it to your PATH and create a few environment variables.

$ cd ~/bin
$ unzip ~/Downloads/ec2-api-tools.zip
$ ln -s /ec2-api-tools-1.3-46266 ec2
$ export $EC2_HOME=~/bin/ec2
$ export PATH=$EC2_HOME/bin:$PATH
$ export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=~/.ec2/pk-<guid>.pem 
$ export EC2_CERT=~/.ec2/cert-<guid>.pem
$ # JAVA_HOME is needed for ec2 tools to work
$ export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home

Let's list some publicly available Amazone Machine Images (AMI) to verify that the tools are working properly.

$ ec2-describe-images -o amazon
...
IMAGE	ami-a21affcb	ec2-public-images/fedora-core-6-x86_64-base-v1.06.manifest.xml	amazon	available	public		x86_64	machine	aki-a53adfcc	ari-a23adfcb		instance-store
IMAGE	ami-2d5fba44	ec2-public-images/fedora-core-6-x86_64-base-v1.07.manifest.xml	amazon	available	public		x86_64	machine	aki-a53adfcc	ari-a23adfcb		instance-store
IMAGE	ami-225fba4b	ec2-public-images/fedora-core4-apache-mysql-v1.07.manifest.xml	amazon	available	public		i386	machine				instance-store
IMAGE	ami-25b6534c	ec2-public-images/fedora-core4-apache-mysql.manifest.xml	amazon	available	public		i386	machine				instance-store
...

Launch an AMI instance

In order to access an AMI instance via SSH we need to create a EC2 key pair. This can easily be done using the web based AWS management console or following the steps below.

Fix PHP 5.3 timezone warnings for drupal

Posted Sat, 2009/12/12 - 7:01pm by alex

I recently installed drupal 6.14 on Snow Leopard and got these timezone warnings.

warning: strtotime() [function.strtotime]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. 
You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. 
In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. 
We selected 'Asia/Tokyo' for 'JST/9.0/no DST' instead in /Users/<user>/Sites/drupal/sites/all/modules/views/modules/node/views_handler_argument_dates_various.inc on line 67.

Enable clean URLs for Drupal 6.x on Snow Leopard

Posted Sat, 2009/12/12 - 6:31pm by alex

By default clean URLs cannot be enabled on Snow Leopard (Macbook pro) unless one of the following prerequisites is done:

Showa Kinen Park: Autumn pictures

Posted Fri, 2009/11/20 - 10:16am by alex

These are some autumn pictures taken at Showa Kinen Park with my GF1 20mm/1.7. I should have had a zoom with me but I did manage to get a few good shots anyway. A few photos have been tagged for family and friends so you need to logon (flickr) to see those.

Otorisama festival + Panasonic GF1C (20mm/1.7)

Posted Sat, 2009/11/14 - 1:31pm by alex

I'm recently a very pleased owner of a Panasonic GF1 micro 4/3 camera with a 20mm/1.7 lens. It's been a joy shooting with it and I've been taking it with me wherever I go now because of it's small size and DSLR capabilities. I wanted to get an Olympus Pen E-P1 at first primarily because of its looks, however because of the way Olympus handles AF (slower and hunts) I ended up with a GF1 and have no regrets. 

Below are some pictures I took at the Otorisama festival in Tokyo this week which is held at Temple of Tori (Juzaisan Chokoku-ji) in Asakusa. Here you buy lucky charm rakes from hundreds of stalls for good fortune and business. At the next year's Otorisama you'll throw away the old rake and buy a new larger one so that it brings you even better fortune than previous year. 

Webinar: MySQL Cluster Performance Tuning Best Practices (US/EMEA friendly time)

Posted Tue, 2009/11/03 - 1:20am by alex

On Tuesday, November 3rd there will be a webinar on MySQL Cluster Performance Tuning.
Presenting will be Johan A. our resident MySQL Cluster expert, so this will be an excellent time to get some practical tips on tuning MySQL Cluster. I'll be also assisting the panel answering any questions you might have.
 
Register here.

Are you experiencing current performance bottlenecks in your high availability applications ? Are you designing a new mission-critical application and want to know how best to structure your schema and index strategy for optimal performance? Interested in how to transform your SQL into faster, more efficient queries?
Then this free web presentation is for you! You will get expert insight and learn best practices to help you identify those areas of database and application design that will give you the greatest benefits for performance when using MySQL Cluster.
We will discuss guidelines and best practices covering the following areas:
 

  • General Design Concepts and Guidelines
  • Schema Optimization
        - BLOB/Text vs VARBINARY/VARCHAR
        - Partition by Key
  • Index Selection and Tuning
  • Basic Query Tuning
  • MySQL Cluster Parameter Tuning Guidelines
  • Tools to accelerate application development and testing

 

Webinar: What's new in MySQL Cluster 7.0 (APAC friendly time)

Posted Sun, 2009/08/09 - 4:26pm by alex

On Wednesday, August 12th there will be a webinar introducing new features in MySQL Cluster 7.0. Presenting are Andrew Morgan and Mat Keep (MySQL Cluster Product Management).
I'll be assisting the panel answering any questions you might have.  

Whether you're racing to introduce a new service, or trying to manage an avalanche of data in real time, your database has to be scalable, fast and highly available to meet ever-changing market conditions and stringent SLAs.

By attending this webinar, you will learn more about the next generation of MySQL Cluster, and how it enables you to deliver 99.999% database availability, with real time performance and linear scalability, while slashing TCO.

Boasting a range of breakthrough capabilities, MySQL Cluster 7.0 will enable you to stay ahead of your most demanding, mission-critical application requirements. Enhanced scalability delivers higher database performance with fewer nodes to simplify deployment and administration. Expanded platform support and interoperability delivers more choice in both the development and deployment of MySQL Cluster. Simplified cluster monitoring tools reduce DBA administration overhead and operational costs.

 Register for the webinar here.

Simple netstat bandwidth summary script

Posted Sun, 2009/08/09 - 3:05pm by alex

This is a simple script for showing the bandwidth usage on all your network interfaces using netstat. It displays the total usage per interface and an approximation of the usage per day and month.

Uptime 2 days 22:49, Sun Aug  9 15:46:25 CEST 2009 
Iface    Rx Total     Tx Total       Rx/day       Tx/day     Rx/month     Tx/month   Rx+Tx/month
             (GB)         (GB)         (MB)         (MB)         (GB)         (GB)         (GB)
lo0           .03          .03        10.86        10.86          .32          .32          .65
en1          2.48          .15       841.32        52.56        25.23         1.57        26.81