The Weatherman

Zach visited Santa Clause tonight.

Waiting in line…

Sittin with Santa…I think he’s asking for a 20″ LCD TV for the bedroom.

Today we visited Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park (wikipedia) with Zachary. What a beautiful park. We started from the visitor center and strolled through the old growth redwood grove. They have a beautiful stand of old growth redwoods and the trail through the grove is very well maintained. We then followed Overlook Road up to the observation bench which provides a sweeping view of a canyon that leads to the sea. I was carrying Zach in the child carrier - he fell asleep about halfway to the bench. Nothing like your baby snoring in the redwoods.

And of course I took some pictures…here are a few.

Some redwoods in the old growth grove.

Wow, they sure are tall.

There’s more than just redwoods - you also have pine, bay, and madrone.

ZZZzzzzZZZZ!

Joe Brockmeier has two articles on Linux.com called the Sysadmin Toolbox.

My sysadmin toolbox and My sysadmin toolbox: second helping

He lists out many good tools that sysadmins should be aware of and be familiar with. My top 10 is basically similar to his with a few changes.

vim
This is where it all begins…with a good editor that you can use on every unix box. I haven’t spent nearly enough time experimenting with vi. Unfortunately I tend to learn things until they become usable but do not take the time to become an advanced user. Nevertheless, I’m able to get things done quickly with vi and I couldn’t imagine editing a file with anything else.

curl
While I like wget, I’m a bigger fan of curl. I enjoy it’s trace option and the libcurl support for multiple languages.

screen
I’m pretty new to screen (been using it for about a year) but I find it invaluable. By far the best feature is the ability to detach/attach remote sessions. It makes it easy to take work home or vice versa. In addition, the key bindings are nice. It does take a little ramp up time to get the ideal setup.

cygwin
Isn’t cygwin for windows? Yes, I know, it’s for windows. But, as much as I can’t stand windows, I still use it at work for stuff like Yahoo Messenger, Word/Excel, or Visio. Cygwin allows me to setup an XDM session with my FreeBSD box and from there I can easily copy/paste between unix and windows. I basically leave the XDM session maximized and just pull up the few windows pieces (eg, Word) that I need.

perl
I learned Perl and decided I didn’t need Awk and Sed. With Perl I can write a program to do anything or run some quick commands right at the command line.

bash
Just an all round solid shell environment.

ssh
Nothing unusual here. But I think ssh needs to be mentioned since every sysadmin uses (or should be using) it. Plus you can run commands remotely with it.

tcpdump/ethereal
Great tool for analyzing network traffic, but I would never user tcpdump without ethereal. The benefits of ethereal are too great (like following a tcp stream) to not warrant its use.

gdb
It’s nice to get backtraces from cores or stuck processes.

lsof
I don’t use this much, but when I need it, it’s invaluable at helping me find large open files that appear deleted.

That would be my top ten list…at least that’s what I thought of tonight.

You make the call!

I must remember to hide the beer.

Yesterday, I took my third trip to Purisima Creek Redwoods Open Space in Half Moon Bay. For this trip I did the out-and-back on Purisima Creek Trail to the Redwood parking lot on Skyline Blvd. It was 4.1 miles one way through a cool, lush Redwood forest. The area had picked up some decent rain the day before so the area was very fresh and clean. The ferns were sparkling from the recent rains and Purisima Creek was flowing well.

During the full 8.2 miles I saw one person on a bike, otherwise the trail was all my own. While you climb 1400 feet in the 4.1 miles, it isn’t very strenuous - in fact it’s probably one of the easiest 1400′ climbs around. Most of the trail is covered by trees (redwoods, firs, bay, and others) so there isn’t much sun. This is of particular intersest on cool mornings so dress appropriately. Following are some photos I took.

Be sure to check out Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District for more information on local preserves.

It’s not often that my wife introduces me to something very new and cool on the Internet. Tonight she emailed me about a relatively new music service called Pandora. So what is it…well from the FAQ,

Pandora is a music discovery service designed to help you find and enjoy music that you’ll love. It’s powered by the Music Genome Project, the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken. Just tell us one of your favorite songs or artists and we’ll launch a streaming station to explore that part of the music universe.

They have analyzed 300,000 songs from 10,000 artists for a multitude of characteristics (up to 400). This information allows Pandora to create a radio station based solely on the user entering a song or artist. From there, the software will play songs that meet similar characteristics. The user can give the suggestions a thumbs up or thumbs down. So how is this different from other radio station like services? This one works. The due diligence Pandora has performed in song analysis shows.

In addition, they provide a very simple, sharp flash player that works on common browsers that have flash support. Right now I’m listening from my Gentoo Linux desktop box on Firefox. I couldn’t do that with Yahoo Music Engine or ITunes.

In addition, Pandora has provided links to ITunes to purchase individual songs or Amazon.com to purchase albums.

So how much does this service cost? They provide a free version that is entirely supported by advertising or you can pay $36 for the year. This is one of those services I believe people will easily pay for even though it’s free.

Kudos to an excellent product.