My Wushu Blog

We decided to get out of the house Saturday, and be a little spontaneous, to go out and just do something. After weighing some options and realizing out time constraint (it was already 11am) we chose The Exploratorium at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Well, *I* chose it, and Caralyne quickly called me out and said “Why do you ALWAYS get to pick?”

It’s simple: cause I’m the adult! Ha, top that little 6 year old!

Ahem, anyway…

I’ve been looking forward to taking the kids here for a while. I always liked coming here as a kid, being able to interact with everything made a huge impression on what I wanted to do. Giving kids the ability to explore and experiment is great,from playing in a mud pit in the backyard to changing the frequency and intensity of a sound wave.

So, we were on the road and thanks to 3 different maps (all telling us a different method to get there), and a Garmin GPS, we made it there stress-free and unscathed. We even accidentally got back on the freeway towards the Golden Gate Bridge, but no worries, the soothing mechanical voice of our GPS devices, devoid of all emotion, safely led us back to The Exploratorium. Of course, the reason why we accidentally got on the freeway was because there is very VERY little parking there, and we tried to find parking on the side streets.

As soon as we got in, we were already having fun, thats how cool the Exploratorium is. I was really happy that Owen was going out of his comfort zone and playing with new things. For a while, he would not touch anything that was new, and it was to the point of some concern. He seems to be doing much better and that makes me very happy.

The place is pretty large, with two levels. After spending almost two hours on the first level, we had lunch there, and then went upstairs for the other half.

We played with a bunch of auditory based exhibits, my favorites were the ’see a sound wave’, the Theremin, and some rig that let you visually see a guitar strings frequency and amplitude. Oh, and they had a cloud chamber, and that was REALLY cool to see. It’s too bad I couldn’t get a good picture of it, the flash reflecting off of the glass and then focusing on the wrong object made it difficult.

After all that, we left around 4:30 and headed to Fishermans Warf in hopes of getting dinner. I pumped $3 worth of change for 55 minutes at the parking meter, so we walked up and down the street a bit, and then ducked in the Rainforest Cafe. The wait itself was about 30 minutes, and we didn’t have that kind of time. Also, Owen was getting a little sleepy since he didn’t have a break at all the entire day. So, we sort of hung around there, bought a couple of snakes, and then headed back to the car. We timed it just right, three or so minutes remained on the meter!

I can’t wait to pick the next place, so I can continue to impose my interests upon my children. Maybe the Chabot Space Center, or the Lawrence Hall of Science…

mike General

Lately, my truck has been stalling when I make a stop. It happens more frequently in the mornings, and while I’m on an upward incline, though it doesn’t seem to matter if I let my truck warm up or take off cold. My Brother-in-Law, Charles, recommended that I replace the spark plugs and check the air filter. His simple statement of “Sure, you could do it…” was enough for me to decide I was going to do all 8 (and he did remind me there were 8, thanks for the vote of confidence Chuck ).

So, the next day I went to the local auto store. I grabbed an air filter, and then headed to the parts department where I met one of the nicest, if not THE nicest, person behind a counter. His name was Mike, he was older, and he addressed me as “Mr. Carlson” when I left. He quickly got 8 spark plugs for my truck, and he wrote down what size gap I needed for my truck (.04). He then showed me how to adjust the gap, and strongly recommended that I measure and adjust each one. That was very helpful, if I could have just grabbed those spark plugs myself I wouldnt have thought they needed to be adjusted. So, when I got home I waited an hour for my truck to cool off, then Owen and I headed outside to begin working.

It started to rain, hard, and I was outside. I spent almost 40 minutes alone adjusting each spark plug, and gathering the right tools to take everything out. I was able to get the #1 spark plug out, the new one in, and then I decided to start my truck up to check my work. It started just fine, and no check-engine light came on. Cool! However, it was getting late, dark, and very wet. So, I packed everything up and went inside.

The next day, Monday, I pulled Michele’s car out of the garage and pulled half of my truck in. From there I put on some music, let lil’ Bear-Bear run around (until he abused the privilege and ran into the public side walk too many times), and began my work.

I knew the first one I pulled out from the previous night was the easiest, and I had to work for the other 7. It started with me taking out the air filter and intake box, both were blocking the majority of the plugs. There was also what looked like the AC coolant exchange lines running across, obscuring #2 and #3. I couldn’t remove those, so I had to take them out of their harness and worked around then. What was interesting, is one of the clips for the tubes had broken off, and was zip-tied together I suppose that happened years ago when Big Mike, Pat and myself had to rebuild the engine. I’m guessing it was Pat, he likes to improvise like that. Anyway, once I got those two spark plugs replaced, re-zip-tied that clip back and it was just like I found it.

4, 5 and 6 were easier, and I we getting the hang of things. I even had the air compressor handy to blow away any debris around the plugs. The last one was tough, since it was all the way in the back, but that was all the trouble I had.

Once they were back in place, I put the air filter and intake back on, started the truck up, and was happy it ran without any issues All in all, I was sort of surprised that I did it. What really helped me out is I made a very conscious effort to take my time, and remain organized. It was a fun task, so besides being able to change oil, I’ll have to add changing spark plugs to my short list of “Vehicle Maintenance Tasks I can Do”.

mike General

Michele recorded these two playing, and then the aftermath of it all.

mike Family Coal, Zoey

Not an instrument,  but albums.

I enjoy listening to music a lot, it makes my commute better, it makes jogging a lot of fun, and sometimes I don’t mind running errands because it gives me a good reason to listen to a new album.

So, here are a few albums that I’ve recently picked up and really enjoyed.

Fist off, check out that cover, that looks like a movie poster of something I’d watch. If I saw that in a video store (or on twitchfilm.net), I’d be too excited to click on it, I’d be paralyzed in the anticipation of a subtitled movie. There was a short story of a similar title which inspired this album. Or, so Wikipedia says.

I could lament over the fact that its just a Roger Waters album, and without David Gilmour playing guitar, it is only a shadow of what it could have been… I’d be lying if I said that though. This is a pretty awesome album, and while there is no Sir David Gilmour, there is Jeff freakin’ Beck. That guy creates some really unique sounds out of his guitar, where I cannot even tell what he is doing. I’m not a guitar virtuoso by any means, I know about enough techniques that while I can’t do it smoothly, I at least know the fundamentals of what a musician is doing. Not with this album. I can’t tell if he’s using a slide, his magical fingers, a whammy bar… its all mixed together.

Besides the music, which I do like, it is a Roger Waters album, and that means it is very satirical and the entire album is really one LOOONG song. The biggest downside to that is you cannot really appreciate one song at a time, you have to listen to the entire album. In the era of digital music with random track selection, or buying songs at a time, it can really kill a high concept album like this. Like the other Pink Floyd albums, such as The Wall, Dark Side of The Moon, Animals, etc… the entire album flowed together. They were also produced in the days of records (which now a days means a piece of information in a database ), where you pretty much had to listen to the entire album (I was always really bad at finding a track without hitting another song). It almost seems like albums like this wouldn’t be very successful in todays market, where you have to have a few radio-friendly hits and your album has to be modular enough to accommodate one-off iTunes downloads.

So, albums like this make me appreciate my commute to work. It gives me a large chunk of time to give the entire album its due respect, because after all, driving is for paying close attention to music and podcasts, not the road…

I heard a song off of it called ‘No Rest for The Wicked’, and it’s pretty rockin’, so I got the entire album.

It’s not bad at all, it has a few tracks that I really like, and others are a little too fast paced for my liking, but all around it has a nice classic rock/blues feel to it. I have one of the songs on my jogging play list, and it has the perfect tempo to run too. Its just right where if I follow it with my gate, I run a bit faster than normal.

This group makes their music with a hacked Nintendo Classic. It seems like they use real instruments, then let the 8-bit MIDI sound processor re-encode it. So, it sounds like the music to a 80’s video game. Being that is when I started playing games, it really hits the nostalgia spot. I like the bleeps and boops of old games, so naturally this album is good.

This album cover reminds me of something my Grandma would listen too. Or, when I used to go to the Salvation Army to look for records (Look, I didn’t have any disposable income as a teenager, and I was big on 70’s music. I could only afford used records, and even then I couldn’t even afford that), and every album had a cover like this… Maybe thats the joke of it, its pretty deceptive. That, and I think the dude likes animals a lot.

Over a year ago, I watched a very good movie called “Dead Mans Shoes“, which featured a Bill Callahan track (its under his previous band name, Smog) called “Vessel in Vain”. I’m not a country or folk fan. I might find a Johnny Cash song appealing, ormaybe one Bob Dillon song, but that is more of an artifact than me liking the two genres. Even though I don’t really like the majority of that type of music, there is something about Smog/Bill Callahan’s music that hooks me.

So, I’ve gone though every Smog/Bill album, and each album varies enough from indie to country that I tend to like one or two songs, and the rest are kind of ‘meh’. This one was no exception, there are about three songs I REALLY like, and the rest just don’t do anything for me.

I got this album specifically to try and learn some classic B.B. King songs. I’ve been working on “The Thrill is Gone”, and its pretty amazing how he can work just a few positions on the strings, yet create a whole sound scape. He also has a different playing style than I’m used to, so I had to build up my index finger’s strength just to try and hit the same quarter and full bends that he does.

Blues is still iffy for me. It seems if I like it, I REALLY like it, but not all of it catches my attention. Like this album, some of it is really REALLY good, and the rest feels like its just filler music. Maybe because to me, some of it starts to sounds too much alike, and I can’t remember it.

This cover is on the right on the precipice of giving me nightmares, freaky right? That and the weird almost anagram like mix of the Band name, and the Title name (which is almost backwards) breaks my brain like a divide by zero error. I can’t remember if the band is King Crimson or Crimson King now…

I’ve never heard of King Crimson, and the only reason why I got it was because it was categorized with Pink Floyd (as “Progressive Rock”) on the hilarious show “The Venture Brothers”. With that in mind, I decided to give it a shot.

It’s not bad considering the era (Ha, does that make you feel old Dad?? I referenced your generations music like a historian would ), it talks about flower power, moon children, it has flutes in the mix, and the entire album is 4 tracks, each track is 12 minutes long. I don’t like flutes in my rock, so there are bits and pieces that I like about it. It seems it would have been a good soundtrack to a movie, as it doesn’t have the typical structure as most music.

mike Music

We have been talking about getting a new dog, off and on, for a year or so. There was very little doubt that it would have been anything other than an Australian Shepherd, since I’ve been pretty vocal about that. That, and I try to abduct everyone else aussie. So, now I have my own, and he’s pretty freakin’ awesome.

Let’s talk about names. I’ve had a rough time picking one, nothing has really lived up to how awesome this dog is. Here were some runner-ups:

• Fender
• Fret
• Tex
• Abe
• Mr. Wiggles

So, I chose Coal, like Charcoal. Oddly, I haven’t even used that name, I really needed something to tell the Vet when we took him in Saturday. I pretty much call him things like “Buddy”, “Bear-Bear”, “Bear”, and the most popular nick-name is “NO!”.

The vet, Dr. Malone, gave him a good bill of health and we are happy about that.

mike Family

I need to share this. When I google for “Samba performance”, I never see real numbers, real configuration files, or real hardware environments. All I read are anecdotal recollections, and that is not good enough. I like numbers, and I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves:

    > netstat -I em0 -w 1
                input          (em0)           output
       packets  errs      bytes    packets  errs      bytes colls
         90166     0   98762637      95363     0    5332847     0
         18131     0   24713156      20042     0    1123684     0
             4     0        310          1     0        178     0
             8     0        518          1     0        178     0
         10153     0   10952920      10696     0     598129     0
         92990     0  102837002      98476     0    5514994     0
         92025     0  102680574      97277     0    5439496     0
         92080     0  101799874      97403     0    5448637     0
         75348     0   90861608      80972     0    4537737     0
         90895     0  100323946      95781     0    5360948     0
         89313     0   97371154      94364     0    5278618     0
         81363     0   89229738      85861     0    4803589     0
             2     0        126          3     0        286     0

I was so shocked that I had to use gstat and zpool iostat to verify the information:

    dT: 1.002s  w: 1.000s  filter: da0
     L(q)  ops/s    r/s   kBps   ms/r    w/s   kBps   ms/w   %busy Name
       35   1476      0      0    0.0   1476 188421   23.7  100.0| da0

    > zpool iostat  1
                   capacity     operations    bandwidth
    pool         used  avail   read  write   read  write
    ----------  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----
    tank        5.68T  4.32T      1     81   250K  10.1M
    tank        5.68T  4.32T      0  1.37K      0   175M
    tank        5.68T  4.32T      0  1.44K      0   184M
    tank        5.68T  4.32T      0  1.44K      0   184M
    tank        5.68T  4.32T      0  1.44K      0   184M
    tank        5.68T  4.32T      0  1.44K      0   184M
    tank        5.68T  4.32T      0  1.44K      0   184M
    tank        5.68T  4.32T      0  1.44K      0   184M

This is all through Samba (3.3.9), There was no local work being done. I unfortunately didn’t configure MRTG correctly, so it had built a malformed graph while all this happened. Having a picture from all of this would have been nice.

The underlying storage is a SATABoy2 RAID6 array, with a simple “flat” ZFS filesystem (version 13). As cheap as the SATABoy’s are (and come on, they have a terrible IIS web interface), they can at least keep up with the current load.

I have felt that if you are going to use ZFS, you should let it manage the RAID, and not bother with a hardware RAID controller. While the hardware RAID may be faster, ZFS’s ability to self-correct bad blocks is a great feature despite the performance set back. However, RAID6 is pretty good in itself, and having dual parity would ideally reduce the risk of a bad block being detrimental.

One thing I noticed with Samba is it doesn’t seem to be a threaded daemon. When I do a top(1) -H, there are only 2-3 smbd processes, and one of them is running around 30%. Though I don’t really know how well Samba can scale out, this environment only has about 10 users. I would like to see how samba reacts if there are a couple hundred active users. Furthermore, how does a native Windows server handle a couple hundred users? It may handle it a little better, however, I don’t think I would enjoy watching NTFS handling a multi-terabyte volume… it would be like watching a stroke victim eat a bowl of soup. I do admit I am biased and I have no working experience with Windows as a large file server, most of them that I have worked on are horribly limited and underpowered, and no one seems to care if they perform well or not.

Hardware

CPU information

    Machine class:    amd64
    CPU Model:    Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 285
    No. of Cores:    4
    Cores per CPU:

RAM information

    Memory information from dmidecode(8)
    Maximum Capacity: 8 GB
    Number Of Devices: 4
    Maximum Capacity: 8 GB
    Number Of Devices: 4

    INFO: Run `dmidecode -t memory` to see further information.

    System memory summary
    Total real memory available:    8048 MB
    Logically used memory:        2876 MB
    Logically available memory:    5172 MB

    Swap information
    Device          1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity
    /dev/da1s1b       8373844      28K     8.0G     0%

Storage information

    Available hard drives:
    cd0:  Removable CD-ROM SCSI-0 device
    cd0: 1.000MB/s transfers
    da2:  Fixed Direct Access SCSI-5 device
    da2: 300.000MB/s transfers
    da2: Command Queueing enabled
    da2: 140009MB (286739329 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 17848C)
    da1:  Fixed Direct Access SCSI-2 device
    da1: 300.000MB/s transfers
    da1: Command Queueing enabled
    da1: 69618MB (142577664 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 8875C)
    da0:  Fixed Direct Access SCSI-5 device
    da0: 200.000MB/s transfers
    da0: Command Queueing enabled
    da0: 10491861MB (21487333120 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 1337524C)

    Raid controllers:
    umass-sim0:
    mpt0:
    vendor='LSI Logic (Was: Symbios Logic, NCR)'
    device='SAS 3000 series, 4-port with 1064 -StorPort'
    isp0:
    vendor='QLogic Corporation'
    device='QLA6322 Fibre Channel Adapter'

    Currently mounted filesystems:
    /dev/da1s1a on /
    devfs on /dev
    tank on /tank
    /dev/ufs/EXPORT on /export

    I/O statistics:
           tty             da0              da1              da2             cpu
     tin  tout  KB/t tps  MB/s   KB/t tps  MB/s   KB/t tps  MB/s  us ni sy in id
       0    40 63.61 167 10.36  16.53   2  0.03  61.65   0  0.00   1  0  4  0 94
    INFO: Run iostat(8) or gstat(8) to see live statistics.

    Disk usage:
    Filesystem         Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
    /dev/da1s1a         58G    3.4G     50G     6%    /
    devfs              1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
    tank               9.8T    5.7T    4.1T    58%    /tank
    /dev/ufs/EXPORT    126G    148K    116G     0%    /export

Software

• FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-p1 FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-p1 amd64
• samba-3.3.9 A free SMB and CIFS client and server for UNIX

Samba 3.3.9 Compile-Time Config

> make showconfig
===> The following configuration options are available for samba-3.3.9:
     LDAP=on "With LDAP support"
     ADS=on "With Active Directory support"
     CUPS=off "With CUPS printing support"
     WINBIND=on "With WinBIND support"
     SWAT=off "With SWAT WebGUI"
     ACL_SUPPORT=on "With ACL support"
     AIO_SUPPORT=on "With Asyncronous IO support"
     FAM_SUPPORT=on "With File Alteration Monitor"
     SYSLOG=on "With Syslog support"
     QUOTAS=on "With Disk quota support"
     UTMP=off "With UTMP accounting support"
     PAM_SMBPASS=on "With PAM authentication vs passdb backends"
     DNSUPDATE=off "With dynamic DNS update(require ADS)"
     DNSSD=off "With DNS service discovery support"
     EXP_MODULES=on "With experimental modules"
     POPT=on "With system-wide POPT library"
     MAX_DEBUG=off "With maximum debugging"
     SMBTORTURE=off "With smbtorture"
===> Use 'make config' to modify these settings

System Tuning

The Kernel

I enabled device polling, and took out debugging in the kernel (Sanders, get it! Mmm, I’m hungry…)

diff /usr/src/sys/amd64/conf/GENERIC /usr/src/sys/amd64/conf/SANDERS
    33d32
    < makeoptions    DEBUG=-g        # Build kernel with gdb(1) debug symbols
    78c77
    <
    ---
    > options        DEVICE_POLLING

/boot/loader.conf

    ispfw_load="YES"
    kern.hz="2000"
    aio_load="YES"

/etc/sysctl.conf

    kern.coredump=0
    security.bsd.see_other_uids=0
    security.bsd.see_other_gids=0
    kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=16777216
    kern.ipc.nmbclusters=32768
    kern.ipc.somaxconn=32768
    kern.maxfiles=65536
    kern.maxfilesperproc=32768
    kern.maxvnodes=800000
    net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0
    net.inet.tcp.inflight.enable=0
    net.inet.tcp.path_mtu_discovery=0
    net.inet.tcp.recvbuf_auto=1
    net.inet.tcp.recvbuf_inc=524288
    net.inet.tcp.recvbuf_max=16777216
    net.inet.tcp.recvspace=65536
    net.inet.tcp.rfc1323=1
    net.inet.tcp.sendbuf_auto=1
    net.inet.tcp.sendbuf_inc=524288
    net.inet.tcp.sendspace=65536
    net.inet.udp.maxdgram=57344
    net.inet.udp.recvspace=65536
    net.local.stream.recvspace=65536
    net.inet.tcp.sendbuf_max=16777216
    net.inet.tcp.mssdflt=1460

rc.conf (em0 flags)

    ifconfig_em0="inet xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx  netmask 255.255.255.0 polling tso mtu 9194"

smb.conf

        min receivefile size = 131072
        aio read size = 1
        aio write size = 1
        use sendfile = yes
        lock directory = /var/run/samba/
        keepalive = 300

I’m also using LDAP users and group. I wasn’t sure if there would be a noticible performance hit for local users or LDAP users. There doesn’t seem to be one.

We use Active Directory, and since Quest/Vintela still won’t make a FreeBSD client for the Quest Authentication Servers ( a sales rep once told me “There are just too many versions of BSD…”) , I have to use all the open source utilities like OpenSSL, OpenLDAP Client and Kerberos. I don’t mind having to do it, but it is always nice if you can maintain one standard process across ALL systems, and we have a lot more Linux and Solaris systems than FreeBSD. I’m the odd one.

That aside, I use the latest OpenSSL in FreeBSD 8.0, OpenLDAP 2.4.20, and the built-in version of Heimdal Kerberos.

I get similar performance form NFS, however, most desktop users have are either on a Windows or OS X, and CIFS seems to be the unifying network storage protocol.

One thing I have yet to really figure out is configuring Samba to use proper NT ACL’s. However, if you can live with UNIX style permissions, a setup like this is pretty good at serving out lots and lots of data. Maybe that will be next.

mike Geekyness FreeBSD, kickassery, Samba, ZFS

Patti called me on Friday, and invited me to come Sunday for a workout and food. This has always been a nice little tradition at Wushu West, Patti likes to do this around the holidays.

I was pretty excited, I haven’t been to wushu since June/July, when they all went to China for the summer. I have sort of enjoyed my free Tuesday and Thursday nights, and so has Caralyne. A month or so ago she told me she was really glad that I didn’t go to wushu anymore. That bummed me out a little. Wushu is something I have enjoyed for the last 8+ years, and all of Caralyne’s life I’ve been there two nights out of the week. So, she has the right to want me around, and I should at the same time be allowed to continue one of my big passions in life.

So, I got her ready Sunday morning and took her with me, we both went as students

She was pretty excited, and I was very proud that she not only jogged with all of us in the beginning, but she fully participated in the whole class with the other kids. Sunday classes are great for this, since its one class for all levels. The also let me get a great workout, and after class we ate some delicious Chineses food (and Kringle, but it wasn’t that popular…), then she ran around and played tag for an hour while I talked with Pierre, James, Miles and all the other people there.

I’ve missed that place, and I’ve missed the killer workout only Wushu West can give you. I feel I’m in pretty good shape, yet its no where near the kind of “Wushu Shape” that you need to be in to survive a whole class. Today was pretty light, but I did manage to push myself hard enough to destroy my right leg. All the kicking and jumping really seized it up.

We had a good time, Patti said we could come together on Sundays. I’m going to think about it, paying for the two of us to go might be hard, but at least we get to do something together in the process.

James was very excited to see me, so he told me a bunch of different ways I could work wushu back in my schedule. Pierre offered his own special “Pierre brand” of advice on the subject of payments. We’ll see, today was a great class, I had a great attitude while training and I was very happy that I could do frog leaps, and look over to see Caralyne kicking some target pads. James had said that he’s been leading the classes with a heavy focus on basics and leg strengthening, so he tried to woo me even more with promises of brutal leg conditioning. I can believe it, we did a awesome ab workout at the end (synchronized situps, then synchronized double trunk twisters).

We’ll see.

mike Wushu Christmas, conditioning, Wushu

Tools

• 2 cookie sheets
• 1 large mixing bowl
• 1 medium mixing bowl
• parchment paper

The Ingredients

The Dry Stuff

• 4 cups of AP flour
• 1 cup of Vegetable Shortening (original recipe called for lard, Michele winced at the mention of that though )
• 3 tablespoons of sugar
• 1 teaspoon of kosher salt

The Wet Stuff

• 1 package of dry yeast
• 1/2 cup of lukewarm water
• 3 egg yolks
• 1 cup of lukewarm milk

The Icing

• 1 tablespoon of water
• 1 cup of powdered sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract

Fillings

Fruits can be used, like { raisins, dates, prunes, apricots, cherries}, I use a brown sugar and chopped walnuts filling, with some small butter chunks. This was how my Grandma Mary made it, and that is how I like it.

Directions:

Dissolve the dry yeast in 1 cup of lukewarm water. It will take a few minutes for the yeast to “wake up”, so set it off to the side.

In a large bowl, mix the Dry Stuff (flour, shortening, sugar and salt). Mix it well enough so it will clump together, and break apart. Like a pie crust.

Now for the Wet Stuff. In another bowl, separate the 3 egg yolks. Beat them together, and add in 1 cup of lukewarm milk and the yeast.

Combine the Wet Stuff into the Dry Stuff, mix well.

Cover the bowl with saran wrap, and place in the refrigerator over night.

Sleep…

Day Two

Prepare a surface area to roll the dough out on. Sprinkle with flour.

Prepare the cookie sheets by covering them with the parchment paper.

Split the dough into 4 equal parts.

Roll each one out, make them as long as your cookie sheet and 9 inches wide.

When you roll one out, transfer it to a cookie sheet. Sprinkle your filling, in this case, brown sugar+chopped walnuts+a little bit of butter down the middle.

Fold both sides, one over the other. Repeat for the next three. You should be able to fit two on one cookie sheet.

Let them rise for 2-3 hours. This may vary, I let mine rise for 4 hours in a colder environment. My Dad told me that they were originally left out for 2 – 3 hours next to their stove.

Two Hours later…

Bake in the oven for 20 – 30 minutes at 350F

Mix your icing ingredients together, and while the Kringle is still warm, coat generously

You may also sprinkle some crushed walnuts on top as well.

EAT!

I totally ripped off Alton Brown for this format While I was making the dough, Caralyne said I looked like “the Good Eats guy…”. She said it in a tone that meant she wasn’t complimenting me, but I’m going to take it as one anyway.

This recipe was from my Grandma Mary, and she made a bunch of them every year around Christmas. She taught my sister and Michele how to make it, and last year I helped Michele, but this year I want to do as much of it as I could myself. I feel very proud that I can continue this tradition.

My Grandparents were originally from Wisconsin, where there is more of a Dutch and Swedish community. It is also, as was explained to me by my Grandma, extremely cold. When my Grandpa Hap was stationed at Camp Stoneman, Pittsburg CA, my Grandma moved out here with him. My Grandma liked the warm California weather, and when it came time to go back home she demanded they stay. My Grandpa was a little resistant, so my Grandma asked,

What does Wisconsin have that California doesn’t?!

to which my Grandpa simply said,

Danish Kringle.

So, the deal was made, my Grandma would make Kringle, and they would stay in Sunny California.

That is the Carlson legend anyway.

My Dad also said that he only knows of one other place in California that makes Kringle, and that is in Solvang, CA.

mike Cooking Cooking, Good Eats, Kringle

!!!
I came home with Owen last night, it was dark in the house. I was going to Owen’s room to get him ready for bed, and I went to the corner of the room to turn the light on. What I forgot, and didn’t see, was my guitar that I left of the floor. I normally lean it up against my computer, or the wall, but sometimes I’ll leave it on the floor to encourage Owen to play with it. I guess that wasn’t such a good habit to get into.

Repairing a neck like that would cost about as much as I bought that guitar for, so I’ll pull down Michele’s old acoustic guitar.

mike Music guitar

I recently had a little problem with a new FreeBSD install, and it is one of those times were I sort of appreciate how FreeBSD assigns device handles, yet at the same time hate it

The setup is this:
The OS was installed on a mirrored hardware raid device (using the mpt(4) driver), and then I had a large RAID6 array attached via a FC controller (using the isp(4) driver). When I installed the OS, the mpt device was showing up as da0. So I went ahead with the install and rebooted the system, so far so good.

What I didn’t realize was the FC device was not seen yet, so after some fiddling, Jenny and I got the large RAID6 array to show up… unfortunately, the isp card was before the mpt card on the PCI bus:

isp0@pci0:2:1:0: class=0x0c0400 card=0x01321077 chip=0x63221077 rev=0x03 hdr=0x00
vendor = 'QLogic Corporation'
device = 'QLA6322 Fibre Channel Adapter'
class = serial bus
subclass = Fibre Channel
mpt0@pci0:2:3:0: class=0x010000 card=0x30601000 chip=0x00501000 rev=0x02 hdr=0x00
vendor = 'LSI Logic (Was: Symbios Logic, NCR)'
device = 'SAS 3000 series, 4-port with 1064 -StorPort'
class = mass storage
subclass = SCSI

and the RAID6 now became da0, and the OS device now became da1.

Doh!

The system prompted for the / drive, so I had to call out the correct device at the mount> prompt:

mount> ufs:/dev/da1s1a

After that, the system continue to boot into mult-user mode, which cause some very strange console behavior (it acted like the return key was being held down), and my only option was to SSH in as local user, su to root, and then fix /etc/fstab.

This was not devastating, however, it show the importance of using disk labels instead of device handles in certain use cases. I haven’t fixed the / mount, but to get a comfort level with using GEOM labels I added another drive to the system and called it EXPORT.

You can assign a permanent label in two ways (that I know of). When you newfs the device, you can specify the L flag (BTW, -O2 means to use UFS2, and -U will use Soft-Updates):
[root@paper ~]> newfs -O2 -U -L EXPORT /dev/da2s1a
OR using glabel (which is what you would have to do for a non UFS filesystem.
[root@paper ~]> glabel create EXPORT da2s1a
Now we can see our newly labeled device in action:
[root@paper ~]> ls /dev/label
. .. EXPORT
[root@paper ~]> glabel status
Name Status Components
label/EXPORT N/A da2s1a

To add it to /etc/fstab, you can either edit the file, or append the correctly tab-delimited line like so:

[root@paper ~]> echo "/dev/label/EXPORT\t/export\tufs\trw\t2\t2" >> /etc/fstab
[root@paper ~]> mkdir /export
[root@paper ~]> mount export

Hurray!

[root@paper ~]> df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/da1s1a 60931274 4754540 51302234 8% /
devfs 1 1 0 100% /dev
tank 10569645824 107237376 10462408448 1% /tank
/dev/label/EXPORT 132022788 4 121460962 0% /export

[root@paper ~]> mount
/dev/da1s1a on / (ufs, local, soft-updates)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local, multilabel)
tank on /tank (zfs, NFS exported, local)
/dev/label/EXPORT on /export (ufs, local)


This is now a persistent label. To be safe, I’ll have to boot off of a CD/USB drive and modify the root device.

mike Geekyness FreeBSD, GEOM, Jenny, Labels