This is why I don’t design logos

March 6, 2010 by 5 Comments

I’ve been doing business under the “Panoptic” name for over 15 years now, and I’ve never properly done the brand identity work that I should have. This is definitely the all-too-often case of the shoemaker’s children going shoeless.

For 2010, I intend to finally do something about this. I’m going to finally invest the time and effort to build the identity that properly reflects the kind and quality of work that I do.

There lies the problem: I’m a software developer. I’m not the visual or creative person that I wish I were. I write excellent code; I solve difficult problems with simple and elegant solutions. I have a very broad understanding of a lot of technologies. I geniunely enjoy my work and do it with a passion that extends past “just getting it done.”

As an exercise in embarassing myself, I threw together the following two designs for fun:

2010 Panoptic Logo drafts

Like I said, this is why I don’t design logos. But, I know there’s a lot of really talented, creative people out there who may be interested in some work or know people who are. I’d love to hear from you! Can you envision an appropriate logo that reflects the brand I want to create? Have I written something that inspires a design that you think conveys a relevant message?

As you can see, I could use all the help I can get.

Filed Under: Panoptic 5 Comments

Confidentiality sucks

February 20, 2010 by 5 Comments

I hate this. Most of the things I want to blog about, especially the stuff that really eats at me and causes me stress, I can’t even talk about because it’s covered by non-disclosure agreements.

Every now and then, I think about blogging “anonymously” but that goes against my personal principles. There’s no such thing as anonymity. Eventually, somehow, the dots get connected and then what has been said is out there.

How does one crowdsource wisdom on matters like this? Sure, I talk to my therapist and my family … but sometimes it feels like it would be useful to cast a wider net.

I guess I’ll just sit here and wring my hands and just let you all know that there’s plenty I wish I could share, but can’t. Argh!

Filed Under: Dossy, Dossy and more Dossy! 5 Comments

On making fun of disabled people

February 19, 2010 by Leave a Comment

There’s been a lot of noise around the recent Family Guy episode involving a Down syndrome character making a reference to former Alaska governor Sarah Palin. For context, here’s the clip:

One of Sarah Palin’s responses includes an alleged quote from her daughter Bristol posted to Facebook. Besides totally mis-using the phrase “begs the question,” Sarah asks: “when is enough, enough?”

I’m not really concerned that a show mocked or satirized a public figure; that kind of treatment comes with the territory. What I find oddly strange is the reaction of Sarah’s, that it’s inappropriate to make fun of people with Down syndrome.

People spend a lot of effort and energy trying to suggest that people with disabilities can live “normal” lives. However, part of being normal is being made fun of for our shortcomings, whatever they happen to be. While disabled people obviously need certain adjustments made in order to accomodate them, suggesting that their disabilities are “out of bounds” or off-limits denies them that particular aspect of normalcy which they otherwise could have had.

As a person, I can sympathize that Sarah may be hurt that the Family Guy show chose to target her. As a parent, I can sympathize that her child was indirectly involved in the process and I would want to protect my child. But, the content of the episode itself does not actually make fun of her son Trig, nor of Down syndrome itself. The character in the episode with Down syndrome named Ellen, played by Andrea Fay Friedman who has Down syndrome herself, is actually cast as a very independent and assertive woman, who just happens to have Down syndrome. She’s about as “normal” as the rest of the zany, defective characters that are part of the Family Guy show.

See, she’s being treated just like everyone else, and as I wrote earlier, that’s the best thing you can do for a person with a disability: besides making the necessary accomodations required by their disability, treat them like the people they are instead of insisting on preferential treatment that perpetuates their outsider status.

Filed Under: Observations Leave a Comment

Installing Oracle 11g R2 on Solaris 10 with EMC PowerPath

February 1, 2010 by 3 Comments

For anyone who has the misfortune of having to install a multi-node RAC cluster of Oracle 11g R2 on Solaris 10 (in my case, SPARC 64-bit) with an EMC PowerPath, hopefully these notes I’ve collected will come in useful. I certainly suffered plenty trying to get this install to work and web searches didn’t turn up very many useful results at the time.

Make sure you set tunable limits correctly.

Previously, you would edit /etc/system to change tunable parameters then reboot the system, but starting in Solaris 10, there’s a new “projects” system where tunables can be configured. For my installation, the cluster nodes had 16GB of RAM each, so I used these settings (as root):

$ projmod -U oracle -sK "process.max-file-descriptor=(priv,4096,deny)" user.oracle
$ projmod -U oracle -sK "project.max-msg-ids=(priv,256,deny)" user.oracle
$ projmod -U oracle -sK "project.max-sem-ids=(priv,256,deny)" user.oracle
$ projmod -U oracle -sK "project.max-shm-ids=(priv,256,deny)" user.oracle
$ projmod -U oracle -sK "project.max-shm-memory=(priv,16GB,deny)" user.oracle

You can check these settings by inspecting /etc/project and looking for the user.oracle entry.

Also, when running in a RAC configuration, some Oracle processes like crsd run as root, so these will be necessary as well:

$ projmod -sK "project.max-shm-ids=(priv,256,deny)" system
$ projmod -sK "project.max-shm-memory=(priv,16GB,deny)" system

This appears to be a catch-all way of ensuring these settings are in use for all users:

$ projmod -sK "project.max-shm-ids=(priv,256,deny)" default
$ projmod -sK "project.max-shm-memory=(priv,16GB,deny)" default

Failing to set these settings for system and default seems to result in Oracle “ORA-01102: cannot mount database in EXCLUSIVE mode” errors when trying to start a database instance.

NB: There may be circumstances when you still need to configure these tunables in /etc/system. For more information, see Oracle Metalink 435464.1 ENABLING SOLARIS PROJECT SETTINGS FOR CRS.

Failure to create the DATA diskgroup using ASM

I wasted a good 6 hours trying to understand why I kept getting the following error during the 11g R2 grid package install:

ORA-15020: discovered duplicate ASM disk "DATA_0000"

Turns out, I had only set the permissions on /dev/rdsk/emcpower* correctly on one of the nodes in the cluster. The permissions need to be correct on all nodes in the cluster, as the installer operates on all cluster nodes as part of the install – duh! Beware of this gotcha, it can be very frustrating.

WARNING: oradism did not start up correctly.

In diag/rdbms/*/$ORACLE_SID/trace, in the alert_${ORACLE_SID}.log, you may find this message:

WARNING: oradism did not start up correctly.
  Dynamic ISM can not be locked.
----------------------------------------
oradism creation failed for unknown reasons 0 8 105

This is apparently a bug described in Oracle Metalink 374367.1. By default, the Oracle installer installs the file with ownership oracle:oinstall and mode 0750. It needs to be suid root, sgid dba. The solution is to perform the following steps (as root):

$ cd $ORACLE_HOME/bin
$ chown root:dba oradism
$ chmod 6550 oradism

Then, restart the database.

Back up the Enterprise Manager encryption key!

The Enterprise Manager runs on port 1158, using HTTPS. The encryption key is located here:

$ORACLE_HOME/*/sysman/config/emkey.ora

Back this key up, because without it, the Enterprise Manager data can’t be accessed.

ERROR: NMO not setuid-root (Unix-only)

When using Enterprise Manager, you might get the following error message:

ERROR: NMO not setuid-root (Unix-only)

This occurs because the NMO binaries need to be setuid-root, as the error explains. Use these steps to correct the problem:

$ cd $ORACLE_HOME/bin
$ chown root nmb nmhs nmo
$ chmod 6750 nmb nmhs nmo

Have you installed a multi-node RAC cluster using Oracle 11g R2 on Solaris 10? Did you discover any gotchas that prevented a successful installation “out of the box”? Please, share them in the comments below so that others can benefit from our pain!

Filed Under: Geeking out, Oracle, Solaris 3 Comments

Making slow progress

February 1, 2010 by Leave a Comment

After several rounds of comments, leading to what I hope are improvements, resulted in this latest iteration of my blog theme:

dossy.org screenshot

Sure, it looks like someone beat up a clown and then vomited on the body, but it’s progress. As before, any comments would be greatly appreciated.

Filed Under: Blogging Leave a Comment

It’s time to tweak the blog theme

January 31, 2010 by 6 Comments

As part of 2010, I’d like to finally move away from my mostly monochromatic color scheme for my blog. However, the problem is … I can’t choose colors to save my life! After some fiddling around last night, these are the colors I ended up with:

Sample screenshot of new theme in progress

It might not be the worst possible colors to pick, but … ugh, even I know they’re ugly. But, I just can’t choose good colors!

Help me! What colors should I use as the palette for my new theme? I really do like the background color and body text colors I chose … but what about a highlight color? And link colors? Let me know what you think I should try, please!

Filed Under: Blogging 6 Comments

My shiny new battery (thanks, AppleCare)!

January 25, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Today, I was able to get my optical disk drive and battery replaced on my 15″ MacBook Pro. The ODD would intermittently fail to write disks. My battery wouldn’t hold more than 1400 mAh at full charge and only had 172 cycles on it.

Here’s what System Profiler says about my new battery:

Screenshot of System Profile battery info.

Oh happy day!

Filed Under: Apple Leave a Comment

Those three words you long to hear …

January 21, 2010 by Leave a Comment

… “PAID IN FULL”.

Direct Loans - Paid In Full
Filed Under: Education Leave a Comment

Making MacOS X usable without a mouse

January 8, 2010 by 3 Comments

I whined about not being able to manipulate modal dialogs without my mouse and one of my friends, Tom R., pointed out how to get OSX to behave as I had hoped. The trick? A System Preferences change:

  • System Preferences
    • Keyboard
      • Keyboard Shortcuts
        • Keyboard & Text Input
          • Full Keyboard Access: All controls.

Filed Under: Apple 3 Comments

Make sure all your friends show up in your News Feed

December 22, 2009 by 1 Comment

I keep forgetting where this setting is, so I’m going to blog it here so I can find it when I search for it.

If you want to make sure all your friends status updates show up in your Facebook News Feed, you need to make sure you’ve set your threshold high enough. You get to this setting by going to the bottom of your News Feed page and clicking on the Edit Options link:

Facebook News Feed Edit Options link

In the dialog that pops up, there’s a Number of Friends section that controls how many friends’ updates will be included on your News Feed. Set this number to something larger than the number of friends you have, to ensure that all of their updates will be included.

Number of Friends configuration

There you go. If you have more friends than the number that is currently showing, you won’t see all your friends’ updates.

Filed Under: Geeking out 1 Comment
« Previous Page
Next Page »