05.11.08
Posted in Ramblings at 12:36 am by DeusExMachina
There’s a new high end restaurant open in the Clear Lake area, something we’ve been missing here for a long time. Cullen’s has been open for a little more than two moths and has already gained much attention, setting itself apart from the relatively pedestrian cuisine in the area. So is Cullen’s just a product of an effective hype machine or is it really worth your time and money? Read on the find out.
Before going, reservations are definitely recommended. On the night we were there, the wait for non-reservation holders was over an hour. i tried calling the number found on their web site, 281-481-3463 but after serveral tries, all I got was an answering machine. I happened to find another number in their advertisements, 281-991-2000 and immediately got a live person. So if you’re trying to make a reservation, try the latter number.
I have to say, our evening started out with a dubious beginning. I had made reservations for 8:00. When we arrived, parking was ample and valet parking is available if you really want the full service treatment. We got to the restaurant at about 7:40 and I was told that our table was still being prepared. I wasn’t really bothered by this since we were early, so we started the wait. And wait, and wait, and wait. Complicating this was the fact that the waiting area and the small lounge/bar off to the side didn’t seem to have any air conditioning (and on the hottest night of the year to date in Houston). We were finally seated at 8:45, about 50 minutes after we arrived. Admittedly though, we had decided to visit on probably the second busiest night of the year (the day before Mother’s Day, the busiest being Mother’s Day itself).
So far, I wasn’t really impressed. Once we sat down though, my view completely changed. Within seconds of our sitting down, the waiter was at our table (for some reason, this scores big points with me) and gave us a “wine list”. Now, this is where my inner geek gets to come out. The wine list was actually a touch screen tablet PC with a wireless connection so that you can see inventory in real time. You can search their wine collection by several different criteria: from winery to grape type. We settled on the cheapest bottle of Merlot which came out to $40 (disclaimer: I’m not a wine snob, even though I play one on TV).
Now, this is where Cullen’s reached a level of service that I’d never experienced before (disclaimer: this was the first time I’d ordered an entire bottle of wine from any restaurant). A person who was not our waiter (I assume he was the sommelier) brought out our wine. Upon popping the cork, he saw that there was sediment on the cork, told us that this bottle was no good, and went of fetch a fresh bottle. A few moments later, he appeared with a new bottle, and upon opening that, still wasn’t satisfied with the quality. So he went to fetch a decanter with a filter. As a side note, this is where I launched into Wine-Snob-Poser mode as taught to be by my tech lead at work and general Wine God. Sniff cork, tilt glass, look, swirl, smell, taste. Joe, you would have been proud: I had no idea what I was doing, but (in my mind anyway) I looked damn cool doing it (even though I may have looked like a complete tool).
“Ok”, you’re asking, “but what about the freaking food?” We started with the crab cake ($19) and unlike any crab cake I had before was composed of about 98% crab. Seriously guys, bravo. For the main course I ordered the Coffee something-or-another Roasted Duck ($26). In general, the portions are smaller than I was used to (by Texas standards) but the food is rich enough to still be filling. The duck itself (disclaimer: the entirety of my experience with duck is the the form of Peking Duck) tasted a little gamy than I thought it would and not quite done right. I would have preferred for it to be more seared on the outside and a little more rare on the inside. The real star of the dish was the side of mashed potatoes with artichoke and some kind of meat I wasn’t able to identify (I’m pretty sure it was some kind of pork). I’m pretty sure it was laced with crack because as soon as I was done, i wanted more.
For desert, we had the chocolate platter of death (ok, that’s not the real name, as you can tell I’m not too good with remembering dish names). Everything was outstanding but what really stood out on the uniqueness scale was the brownie topped with Habanero ice cream.
I’ve probably written more than I should have here already, so what’s the final verdict? The bill for the evening, for three people, came about to be around $150 and that’s including wine, desert and a pre-dinner “Oh god I’m bored to death” drink, which isn’t too bad for what you get. For most of us, that’s probably a bit steep to do every weekend. But for special events and entertaining gusts, I would definitely recommend it. And I for one, can’t wait to try out the rest of th menu.
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05.09.08
Posted in Computing, Linux at 11:28 pm by DeusExMachina
Checked the system logs yesterday and saw a bunch of write errors. Checking the RAID status showed this:
# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]
md1 : active raid5 hdg[2] hde[3](F) hdc[0]
398296960 blocks level 5, 32k chunk, algorithm 0 [3/2] [U_U]
unused devices:
Normally, the last part of line 3 shows [UUU]. The underscore means it’s a bad drive. Unfortunately, I don’t know exactly when the drive fails, which just illustrates the need to have some kind of log monitoring. Ok, so now I have to figure out how to get EVMS to replace a drive. I want to do it as quickly as possible because another drive loss means a total loss of data. Which brings up another good point: RAID isn’t a substitute for backups (which I’ve been delinquent in doing). So I went to to my local Fry’s to get a replacement drive, but they don’t seem to make 200 GB drives any more. I ended up getting a 250 GB but the array will only use 200 GB of it. The other caveat is that the failed drive is IDE and the replacement is SATA. Will it work? In theory it will, I guess I’ll find out soon. Oh yeah, and I hope I pull the right drive out (they all look the same in the case). This is why making backups is a good idea. Meanwhile, changing out drives means shutting down the system. There goes my 81 day, 13 hour up time.
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01.28.07
Posted in Computing at 12:19 pm by DeusExMachina
Seems like it was around this time last year that I was talking about upgrading the Linux server to a dual Athlon XP machine. Well, things didn’t work out exactly as planned. Unfortunately, it seems making hardware do what it’s not supposed to do isn’t the best strategy if you need a totally stable system. Almost as soon as I got the system up and running, there would be random crashes, freezes, and strange error messages. Sometimes a simple reboot would fix things but at other times, the system would just freeze again immediately and repeatedly. Worst of all, the crashes would often result in a rebuild of the RAID array. Any drive failure during a rebuild and it’s (to quote Burke from the movie Aliens) Adios Muchachos.
So, it’s out with the old and in with the new. Well, not quite. The old is still in while the new is still being built and configured. The new system is set up as a bench build and if you’re wondering what a bench build is, allow me to direct you to the image below.
It’s literally a computer built on top of a bench, or in this case, a desk. For the most part, just put the motherboard on a static bag (to make sure it’s not grounded) and hook up all your components. Of course, this is a temporary setup and you really should put everything in a computer case. Like a human, it is possible to walk around with your internal organs hanging out, but you don’t see anyone doing that (for very long).
Let’s take a quick look at the what and why, as in what are the parts you’re looking at and why did I pick those.
- Processor - AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ - This is the low end of the AMD dual-core (meaning there are 2 CPUs on one “chip”) line. At this price point, AMD is still price/performance king. As an extra bonus, the X2 lineup comes with virtualization support, more on that later.
- Motherboard - Abit NF-M2 - This motherboard uses the Nvidia nForce 6150 chipset. A non-gaming system doesn’t have a need for a high end video card and even a discrete video card adds extra cost to the system, so the integrated video in perfect. It’s also got all the modern amenities you’d expect including a DVI connector, SATA connectors, and PCI-E slots. My only complaint is the motherboard only comes in mATX form factor. I would have preferred the extra flexibility of having a full ATX motherboard.
- RAM - 2×512 MB Corsair DDR2-800 - It’s important to match the speed of your RAM to the speed of the rest of your system. In this case, it’s 800MHz or DDR2-800. The next question is how much to get? 512 MB is usually enough in this case, but I went with 1 GB for hopefully a bit of future-proofing. The next question is one stick or two? Cost wise, the 2 options are about the same. If you use 2 sticks, you get to enable dual-channel access (for slightly increased performance) at the cost of using an extra RAM slot.
- Hard Drive - Seagate 7200.10 250GB - Initially I was thinking to just get the cheapest SATA hard drive, but looking at the prices, $80 for 250 GB (vs. $50 for an 80 GB) is pretty much a no brainer. Seagate offers a 5-year warranty on all of its hard drives, most other manufacturers only offer 3, nice to have a little extra piece of mind.
- Power Supply - Seasonic S12-430 - It’s a sad reality that you pretty much have to upgrade your power supply every time you upgrade your system. Manufacturers these days are releasing ever more power hungry devices that also require new and exotic connectors. It’s getting bad enough that you’re starting to see power supplies output power measured in the kilowatts. Ok, enough ranting. Seasonic has a reputation of make very quiet, reliable, and efficient power supplies (these are all very good things). The 430 W unit seems like a bit of overkill for the system specs, but a little extra room in case of future upgrades never hurt.
The rest of the parts will be carried over from the old system. Now I’m looking for a case to house this new computer. Although the current Inwin Q2000 case is nice, I have to take the whole damn thing apart every time I want to change something. Well, that’s all for the hardware. Next is the delicate process of moving data from one system to another. This includes physically moving the RAID array, and while I have any idea how it’ll work in theory, theory has a funny way of being very different from real life. In addition, I need to make sure that all of the old services get reinstalled on the new machine. But that’s going to have to wait for another day.
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10.07.06
Posted in Ramblings at 12:51 am by DeusExMachina
Well, my connection internet is acting like ass tonight, and since I’m avoiding any and all work, I thought I would make a post. From time to time I like to take a screen capture of my computer just to show the world how much pimped out bling I have on it. For your reference, here it is:
click for full PNG version (6.5 MB)That’s a desktop resolution of 3200×1200 for anyone keeping score (it’s 2, 19″ monitors, each running 1600×1200). Although it doesn’t look like it, I am running standard Windows 2000 Professional. The reason it doesn’t look like Windows is because I’m running an explorer replacement called bbLean. It’s a pretty minimalist shell, but after I got used to the interface, there’s no going back to regular Windows. And if you’re an X Windows user, it does provide virtual desktops. But why switch? For some reason, Windows Explorer would repeatedly freeze, hosing the CPU. It’s really annoying when you’re trying to get work done and your computer just stops, so my solution was to get rid of explorer. On the top right is my music player, Quintessential. Along the right is a nifty little program called RainMeter, You can plug in different widgets to keep track of your computer’s telemetry, weather conditions, RSS feeds, and other useful things. Here’s a clean version of the background wallpaper (1.1 MB JPEG), it’s from the anime series Stellvia of the Universe (Ucchuu no Stellvia in Japanese).
And finally, you can take a look at what I’m working on now. This is going to be the header image for the new page that I’m designing for the SSL side of this site. I’ve been needing to make a real theme for it as the current page is just embarrassingly ugly. I can’t remember where the inspiration for this theme came from, I think it was one of the early installation screens from Longhorn (codename for Windows Vista). You can see I borrowed the “plastic pods” from the front page, I think I’m in a pod design phase right now. Anyway, the full site should be up soon, stay tuned.
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09.18.06
Posted in Ramblings at 10:53 pm by DeusExMachina
I don’t know how big of a milestone this is, but I realized today that right now, there are 13 people in orbit around this planet. The Shuttle Atlantis is on its way back after an 11 day construction mission (more on this later) to the International Space Station. The Atlantis is scheduled to land tomorrow at around 5:30 in the morning at Kennedy. The second space ship in orbit right now is Soyuz TMA9. The ship took off yesterday morning from Kazakhstan and is currently on its way to the ISS, scheduled docking is around 1:30 tomorrow morning. Finally, currently aboard the space station are the 3 crew members of the Expedition 13 crew (representing NASA, RSA, and ESA).
Aboard the Soyuz is the one Astronaut and one Cosmonaut of the Expedition 14 crew, who will replace 2 of the 3 members of the current Expedition 13 crew. The third seat on the Soyuz is being occupied by (to steal a term from NASA) spaceflight participant, Anousheh Ansari. Ansari had the privilege to pay an estimated $20 million to train in Russia, get strapped into a Soyuz capsule to get blasted into space, spend 10 days aboard the ISS, and become (if I remember correctly) the second tourist to go up into orbit (and the first aboard the ISS). What makes a person want to spend millions of dollars to take a “vacation” in space? In case you haven’t heard the name Ansari before, she’s best known for funding the majority of the (appropriately named) Ansari X-Prize, the $10 million prize that went to the first team to build a sub-orbital rocket ship. Ansari is a self-professed space fanatic, her vision is to bring affordable space travel to everyone. For now at least, she gets to realize her own dreams of going into space. All I have to say to that is, you go girl.
Back to Atlantis, they just spent the last few days installing the P3 and P4 truss segments (P stands for port, or left for the non-naval inclined people out there; 3 and 4 mean the 3rd and 4th segments on the left side). NASA released some pictures today of the new configuration of the Space Station. They were taken from Atlantis after undocking on Monday morning. These pictures haven’t been released on the public site yet, so here’s an exclusive:
On the right side of this picture, you can see the newly installed P3 and P4 truss along with the solar arrays. The thing sticking out of the bottom on the arrays is one of the radiators, used to maintain temperature. The solar arrays that are currently sitting on top of the station are actually part of the P6 segment, and will be moved during a future mission, after the S3 and S4 segments are installed (S stands for starboard, imagine the same thing only on the other side of the station). You can also see 2 Soyuz modules attached to the bottom of the station, and another in the back. Two of these are actually Progress automated resupply vehicles. As of this writing, one of the Progress spacecraft has been undocked and is on it’s way to a fiery return to Earth, making room for the new Soyuz craft about to dock later this morning. The other Soyuz craft is used as an emergency escape vehicle for the ISS crew, in case something goes wrong.
Notice in this picture how the solar arrays on the P4 segment are tilted in relation to the rest of the station. The new truss segment gives the ability for the solar arrays to move in 2 degrees of motion, something the station didn’t have before. With this, the arrays can track the sun more easily, maximizing their light gathering abilities and thus maximizing power generation. NASA plans to fly up 2 more sets of solar arrays, giving the station 4 in total.
I really like this picture because it gives you a sense of just how big the station is. This picture is taken from about the center-line of the station, looking out at the newly installed P3 and P4 truss. If you look closely, you should be able to see two astronauts at the end. The T-shaped thing on the right hand side of the image are the actual solar arrays, still in their storage containers.
Well, I hope this post was somewhat educational if not enjoyable. If not, at least you got some cool space pictures out of it. Until next time…
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