Playing tourist in Toronto - Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Jump to the full
entry & travel map
Toronto, Ontario, Canada












Today we took advantage of touring Toronto as tourists.  Bonnie, Derek, Shelley and Diana and I went tothe CN Tower around 11AM. 
We took the elevator up to the observation deck for a 360 degree view of the city.















Later in the afternoon we met up with cousins Mathew and Samantha and we went to the Royal Ontario Museum.  It was a great museum with numerous exhibits.  We started by viewing their large display of dinosaurs.  They also had good displays of Greek and Egyptian artifacts.

















We took an hour siesta back at Bonnie's place in the late afternoon before heading out for an out-of-towners dinner at an Italian restaurant.

For dinner we went to an Italian restaurant with 22 family members.  The food was delicious and we all ate too much!















The big joke of the day was that when I woke up I discovered that I hadn't packed any boxer shorts for this trip.  My mistake was that I had been packing for this trip and next week's Peru trip at the same time and as a result I packed boxers for next week but not this one.  Of all the days to not have boxer shorts, today just happened to be Good Friday which meant that no shops were even open!  When we visited the CN Tower in the morning we joked that maybe we would find a pair with a large tower on the front.  At the end of the evening after dinner, Diana spotted an adult Love Shop.  Here I am entering the store with my wife, sister and cousin in hopes of finding boxer shorts.  I think we found everything except that!

Netware 4.1, VMware, and What to do?

Here's the deal, I have an old Novell Netware 4.1 server and it is dying a slow painful death.

I have a ghost image using Ghostcast in a .gho format and copies of all the data files I need. Also I have all the user info in an Access database I can spew out at will easily. So restoring the essential data is not an issue.

My current incarnation of this server works, the hardware is roughly 10 years old and we've been having drive issues lately. It's using 2x 9gb SCSI drives with a small DOS and larger Novell (I assume) partition. Unfortunately the program that it serves over the network is essential to our operation. The unlimited user version of the btrieve database included with 4.1 is essential to our software. It will be replaced, but not for a few months (ugh years?). You might think, upgrade to 4.2 since it's supported or a current version. No can do, this system is planned to go away thus little to no money is there to upgrade.

I have copies of VMware Server and ACE Workstation, plus other older versions.

My dilemma is how to make Novell 4.1 work in VMware. If I install from CD it comes up with issues saying there are no accessible disk drives. I can't seem to find any sort of walkthrough on how to install.

Re: ESX 3.5 new patches released

Keep in mind that if you are running DRS and are leveraging update manager, you may want to modify the default memory cap;

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003638

Excerpt-

Starting with ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5, VMware DRS applies a cap to the memory overhead of virtual machines to control the growth rate of this memory. This cap is reset to a virtual machine specific computed value after VMotion migrates the virtual machine. Afterwards, if the virtual machine monitor indicates that the virtual machine requires more overhead memory, VMware DRS raises this cap at a controlled rate (1MB per minute, by default) to grant the required memory until the virtual machine overhead memory reaches a steady-state and as long as there are sufficient resources available on the host.

For VirtualCenter 2.5, this cap is not increased to satisfy the virtual machine's steady-state demand as expected. Thus, the virtual machine operates with an overhead memory that is less than its desired size, which in turn may lead to higher observed virtual machine CPU usage and lower virtual machine performance in a VMware DRS-enabled cluster.

I hear that they are going to address this in VC 2.5 SP1

ESX3 Virtual Disk Modes - Performance, Snapshot and Backup

Hello,

I'm using ESX 3.5 and all our VM's were created with Independent -> Persistent disks because we believe that this was the best practice concerning performance.
Now we wish to backup the .vmdk's files online but in order to do so we need to create snapshots (with the memory option) so that the vmdk can be accessed by the backup software.
I believe that this can only be accomplished by changing the disk mode to snapshot (removing the check from "Independent" in the disk properties of the vm). So my questions are:

1. Is there any other way to backup the files without changing the disk mode?

2. And if we do have to change the disk mode, what effect could that have in the VM's performance? According to this: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi_performance_tuning.pdf in page 9 says: "Independent Persistent - Changes are immediately and permanently written to the disk, so they have high performance."

Best Regards

Re: Any suggestions?

To update the story so far, we ended up getting Cisco involved since they monitor our WAN and they saw no problems with congestion or anything like that. I then opened a Support Request with VMware just to see what their recommendations would be. After it is all said and done, the problem seems to lie with our WAN in that it is a frame relay network. Apparently this network topology is not conducive to good RDP performance. We are scheduled to upgrade to MPLS and refresh the WAN routers but that is still a few months off. We looked into the solution from Expand Network but the prices involved were just too much for an unbudgeted expense. Come to find out...a company called Circadence had just opened an office here in Tupelo, MS and their specialty is WAN acceleration. We have met with them twice now and are preparing to test their technology to see if it will improve the RDP performance next week. I really hope this solution from Circadence works out, if not, we are going to be forced to bring Citrix back into the mix.

Grant

Regular Expression Pocket Reference

Michael J. Ross writes "When software developers need to manipulate text programmatically — such as finding all substrings within some text that match a particular pattern — the most concise and flexible solution is to use "regular expressions," which are strings of characters and symbols that can look anything but regular. Nonetheless, they can be invaluable for locating text that matches a pattern (the "expression"), and optionally replacing the matched text with new text. Regular expressions have proven so popular that they have been incorporated into most if not all major programming languages and editors, and even at least one Web server. But each one implements regular expressions in its own way — which is reason enough for programmers to appreciate the latest edition of Regular Expression Pocket Reference, by Tony Stubblebine." Read below for the rest of Michael's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Does It Suck To Be An Engineering Student?

Pickens writes "Aaron Rower has an interesting post on Wired with the "Top 5 Reasons it Sucks to be an Engineering Student" that includes awful textbooks, professors who are rarely encouraging, the dearth of quality counseling, and every assignment feels the same. Our favorite is that other disciplines have inflated grades. "Brilliant engineering students may earn surprisingly low grades while slackers in other departments score straight As for writing book reports and throwing together papers about their favorite zombie films," writes Rower. "Many of the brightest students may struggle while mediocre scholars can earn top scores." For many students, earning a degree in engineering is less than enjoyable and far from what they expected. If you want to complain about your education, this is your chance."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Why Microsoft Won't Have Blu-ray on the Xbox

Ian Lamont writes "Ever since Toshiba stopped production of HD DVD players, many Xbox 360 owners have been wondering when Microsoft will offer some sort of Blu-ray option for the Xbox 360. The answer: Probably never. Microsoft's product manager for the Xbox 360 has told Reuters that Microsoft is not in talks with Sony or the Blu-ray Association. Why not? The Industry Standard points to HDi, an obscure Microsoft technology that was part of the HD DVD interactivity layer. HDi may be dead on physical media, but it could potentially be applied to other Microsoft HD-compatible technologies such as Xbox Live Arcade and Windows Media Center, and be part of a long-term play to own a big share of the market for HD content delivered over the Internet."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Vampire Weekend live on SNL

For those of you who were away from a television set a couple of weekends ago {or for those of you attending the festival where Vampire Weekend was supposed to be playing} here are the two tracks that they played that night on SNL. I know that SNL is a rather limiting venue as far as live concerts are concerned and I wonder if the boys in Vampire Weekend have more fun with their songs when they’re not under the scrutiny of a million plus viewers.

mp3 : Vampire Weekend - A-Punk (Live on SNL)
mp3 : Vampire Weekend - M79 (Live on SNL)

Both tracks sound great live, but I seem to dig M79 a bit more. It just sounds great live. And for anyone still interested below is the entire touring list for Vampire Weekend in this current year. {Dates without a country listed are assumed to be in the USA}.

Apr 03 - The Triple Rock Social Club - Minneapolis
Apr 04 - The High Noon - Madison
Apr 05 - Turner Hall - Milwaukee
Apr 06 - Metro - Chicago
Apr 11 - Brown University Campus Green - Providence
Apr 25 - Coachella - Indio
May 01 - Anson Rooms - Bristol, UK
May 02 - Birmingham Academy - Birmingham, UK
May 03 - The Liquid Rooms - Edinburgh, UK
May 04 - ABC - Glasgow, UK
May 06 - Northumbria University - Newcastle, UK
May 07 - The Cockpit - Leeds, UK
May 08 - Manchester Academy - Manchester, UK
May 09 - Camber Sands - Minehead, UK
May 12 - Wedgewood Rooms - Portsmouth, UK
May 13 - Electric Ballroom - London, UK
May 15 - Great Escape Festival @ Concorde - Brighton, UK
May 17 - Orangerie - Brussels, Belgium
May 18 - Luxor - Koln, Germany
May 19 - Le Trabendo - Paris, France
May 20 - Melkweg - Amsterdam, Holland
May 21 - Motolow - Hamburg, Germany
May 22 - Magnet - Berlin, Germany
May 23 - Atomic Cafe - Munich, Germany
May 26 - Circolo degli Artisti - Rome, Italy
May 27 - Bologna Rocker Festival - Bologna, Italy
May 28 - Mascotte - Zurich, Switzerland
Jun 07 - Park Ave CDs - Orlando
Jun 07 - The Social - Orlando
Jun 08 - Cafe Eleven - St. Augustine
Jun 12 - Bonnaroo - Manchester
Aug 09 - Summer Sonic - Tokyo, Japan
Aug 10 - Summer Sonic - Osaka, Japan

+ twf hype elbows site myspace amazonmp3 itunes
add this post to del.icio.us / digg / facebook

The Joy Formidable

I’ll admit it, usually I stray away from the most hyped path. I don’t really associate with the most popular of all popular artists {I need to reserve some indie credibility} and many times I don’t even like what everyone else is calling the most influential band since The Beatles {you know, that one band your roommate just won’t let go of until you’ve heard every terrible minute of their twenty seven minute debut self-recorded opus to pet names}. But on rare occaisions there exists a band who has massive hype and yet retains a lot of their musical integrity {these guys don’t even have a website, only a myspace. What more could you want?!}.

I’m not entirely certain who these three kids from London remind me of. There’s a trace of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs {if they were happy all the time} and a dash of The Dodos due to their penchant for sounds built from the ground up on bombastic drums and walls of guitar. One thing can easily be said though, their name accurately depicts their sound. This trio creates an infectious blend of sounds that, and I write this with a straight face, could be described as inducing formidable joy {akin to the joy found on the latest Of Montreal album for those of you still musing}. But that’s enough, just listen to these tracks.

mp3 : The Joy Formidable - Austere
mp3 : The Joy Formidable - While the Flies
mp3 : The Joy Formidable - The Butterfly’s Last Spell (Stegosaurus Remix)

I really can’t pin down the familiarities I hear in these tracks {the first two are from what will most likely be their debut album and the third is a remix by Stegosaurus from Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, or TEED}. There seem to be glimmers of everything from Shout Out Louds to U2 to Pete Yorn. It’s as if they took the best part of dance, pop, rock, and a truly live sound, put it in a blender, pushed the button marked fun, and ended up catching it all on tape. It’s just brilliant, and oh so much joy.

+ twf hype elbows myspace {you really can’t buy this anywhere}
add this post to del.icio.us / digg / facebook

kde dies right after login

I am running kubuntu 7.10 on a new dell (this has been a battle to get this distor working), I rebooted because kde had repeatedly crashed, and now after the login screen kde is dying, during the "loading the window manager step".

Any one offer help?