Gas in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area has already shot up to over $4 a gallon and is expected to top $5 by the summer or maybe even earlier. As gas here in the US creeps closer to what Europe has already been paying for years, will we see a bigger shift toward diesel and smaller cars? Will a summer hurricane put pressure on the oil mkt, causing 6 dollar gas to be the norm?
What options do you have to avoid the “commuter tax”?
Here’s a couple, but they both come with their own steep price tags.
50 years ago today, John Glenn, one of the original 7 Mercury Astronauts, became the first American to orbit the planet Earth. Today NASA no longer has the capability to send humans into space.
With NASA stepping away from costly human space exploration, it is now time for the innovators and entrepreneurs to step up their game to bring safe, repeatable manned space flight back. Those at Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic seem poised to be the leaders of the new privatized future of space travel.
Smart phone designers know that new power hungry phones are killing batteries much faster than the older models. They are beginning to address the problem with new phones like the Droid Razr Maxx and adding extended batteries. Dual-core smart phones are much more powerful than the laptops of just a few years ago but have tiny batteries compared to those of laptops. Otherwise your speedy new 4G phone would look like something like this:
Soon battery technology will catch up with the fast phones of today. Then something faster will come out and we’ll have to use fuel cells to power them. Or Mr. Fusion.
Here’s a few Solaris commands that are useful for determining what type of Fibre Channel adapters you have installed in your system.
The ifconfig command won’t show fibre interfaces unless they are configured for IP over FC.
There is a Solaris 10 command called ‘fcinfo’ that will give you more information on your fibre devices.
Command usage for fcinfo (must be root to get results from this command, it won’t return an error, just the message; “No Adapters Found.”, when the command is not run as root. This can be confusing and frustrating if you know that FC adapters are installed on your system. Trust me. I’ve been there in my early days of plodding through fibre channel connectivity.
Fcinfo as a standard user:
Sunbox% fcinfo hba-port
No Adapters Found.
As root:
sunbox# fcinfo hba-port
HBA Port WWN: 2100001b………
“Fibre” vs. “fiber”
References to Fibre Channel can be confusing partly due to the use of the words “fibre” and “fiber” interchangeably.
Both spellings mean essentially the same thing, but have evolved with the technology to be used for more specific aspects of the architecture or hardware.
“Fibre” is used in non-US international English, and the spelling “fiber” is primarily used in US English. The official spelling of the FC technology is “Fibre Channel” The word “fiber” is generally used more often when referring to the actual optical glass fiber cables used to facilitate high speed communication over long distances.
More Solaris fibre channel commands coming soon!
FTP ASCII vs. Binary transfer modes
In this demonstration we will be using ftp to transfer files from a Solaris 10 workstation to a Windows workstation using the dos command prompt ftp program to connect to the ftp port of the Solaris machine.
The two primary modes of transferring files via FTP are ASCII and binary. ASCII is an acronym for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, an early standard of character encoding. ASCII mode in FTP is meant to transfer text files. Examples of ASCII files are .asp, .html, .php, .pl and .txt files. Binary mode in FTP is meant to transfer raw data files. Examples of binary files are .gif, .jpg, music and video files, as well as zipped (compressed) tar files. Be sure you understand the ftp ASCII vs binary differences so you know which file transfer mode to use.
Transferring a jpg file in ASCII mode, will get you something that looks like a screenshot of the game Pitfall! on the Atari 2600, circa 1982. It won’t look anything like the original file.
So to transfer a non-text file with all the bits intact, use the binary mode by typing ‘binary’ at the ftp command prompt. In the dos version, you’ll see the “Type set to I” message rather than the “Type set to A” message for ASCII mode.
Use binary transfer mode for your non-text files and they should arrive fully intact and legible:
Installing Firefox on Solaris Unix
Mozilla releases Firefox for Windows, Mac OS X, Android, iOS for iPhone and Linux operating systems but the popular browser is also ported to Solaris by Sun/Oracle internal developers.
Here, I’ll describe steps for a quick test install on a Solaris 10 machine. You can copy the Firefox file to whatever directory you specify. I used /usr/lib for testing this version without overwriting my current version of Firefox.
Install as root.
sunbox# pwd
/usr/lib
sunbox# cp /home/testuser/firefox-10.0.1.en-US.solaris-10-fcs-sparc-tar.bz2 .
sunbox# bzip2 –cd firefox-10.0.1.en-US.solaris-10-fcs-sparc-tar.bz2 | tar xf – (use tar xvf if you want to see the verbose output)
sunbox# cd firefox
sunbox# ls –l | more
firefox
sunbox# ./firefox & (to start this install of firefox)
[1] 342
sunbox#
Firefox for Solaris can be found here (pkgadd versions):
Firefox 19.0.2 is now available for Solaris at unixpackages.com.
Firefox 18 is also now available for Solaris at unixpackages.com.
Firefox 17.0.1 is now available for Solaris at unixpackages.com.
Update 12 September 2012
Firefox 15 is now available for Solaris Unix
Update 19 July 2012
Firefox 14.0.1 is now available for Solaris 10 at the new Sunfreeware link: http://unixpackages.com/packages/mozilla
Both pkg and tar files are at the new link.
or Firefox for Solaris (tar versions):
ftp://ftp.sunfreeware.com/pub/freeware/mozilla/
Be sure to choose the correct file for your Solaris OS and platform. (OpenSolaris, Sparc, i386, etc.)
The latest version of Firefox ported to Solaris is 10.0.1 which is the latest version of Firefox for other platforms as of this writing (20120214)
In the world of Unix, as in life, there are many paths that lead to the same place. There are numerous ways to perform the same task in Unix, Linux, OS X and sometimes Windows. This is just one.
Happy Valentine’s Day and Happy Browsing!
There is snow on Mount Hamilton in San Jose from last night’s storm. The first snow we’ve seen up there in some time. It’s nice to look up from the warm valley on a clear day like today and see snow draped on the peaks above. The telescopes of the Lick Observatory always look great with a fresh dusting of snow.
Richard Branson’s Virgin America has many advantages over the budget airline competition. One of them is the ability to order drinks and food using the touchscreen on the back of the headrest on every seat. Here you can order basic drinks (still free) or the “Good Stuff” as Virgin America calls them. Just swipe your credit card on the screen and your order is brought right to you. And Virgin America has real beer. In a can. Before you scoff, ponder a little beer can tech below the image.
Beer ‘bottled’ in cans seals out light and oxygen, two mortal enemies of fresh hoppy beer. Another mortal enemy of fresh beer flavor is heat. While the can isn’t that different from the bottle in staying cool, the can is lighter than the bottle, easier to transport and stack in your cooler, easier to recycle, and much more forgiving when you toss a brew to your buddy who isn’t paying attention. And when the cans are recycled, the precious aluminum (aluminium for those non US readers) may just be made into a Virgin Galactic spaceship. I’m pretty sure Richard Branson will serve beer in space as well. Just have to figure out that whole weightless beer pouring thing…
So the next time you see a craft brew in a can, give it a try. You’re in for a pleasant surprise. Other beers besides Black Star appearing on Virgin America flights are Blue Moon, Heineken, and if you like, Bud Light.
Taking a quick weekend break in Vegas. Back to more Unix/Linux/Windows system admin work on Monday.
On Jan. 29, 2012, using the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the space agency spotted the lander from the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit mission. The rover drove off after landing and explored its corner of the red planet for 6 years! The little rover is quietly resting now on the surface having done it’s duty. The Phoenix Lander was also found by NASA. Check out NASA’s site for some amazing color Mars images. (link below)
Where is the planet Mars now you ask? Look up tonight to the left and above the bright Moon and you’ll see the red planet shining a bright, ruddy red in the night sky. Mars will be getting closer to Earth these next few weeks and will be at it’s closest in early March. Be sure to check it out!
Full image from NASA at the link. Full story from NASA here.
