Well, this year, we’ve had 2 snow storms already, and something else I’ve never seen before. In the middle of the snowstorm, we had thunder and lightening. Yup, never in my 36 years have I ever seen that. In fact, most people I’ve spoken to today started off the conversation with ‘Did you see the lightening and hear the thunder?!?’. Surreal.

Here are photos taken from my front door about 20 minutes before the thunder and lightening:

There has easily been another foot of snow that has fallen since that time, and 14 hours later, it’s still falling.

Update: So, the next morning I was out to visit the osteopath (good thing too, since I had to shovel out the front door). I took these photos post storm:

Tux Pumpkin closeup
Front door 2003

This year, I decided that Potter (the ‘Yellow Dog’) would be the subject:

Potter Pumpkin with light


Potter Pumpkin a bit darker


Potter Pumpkin at the front door

Happy Halloween!

xzilla on #postgresql (irc.freenode.net) pointed me out to a recent blog posting of his that seemed to do what I wanted using Out parameters. This was really great, and I knew I had something I could work with there. Thanks xzilla!

So, I took it a bit further and modified his example slightly to see if I could also do it without the out parameters and just use the rowtype. Here’s the result:

CREATE TYPE footype AS (number int, oddoreven text);

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION odd_or_even(int) RETURNS SETOF footype
AS $$
my @Return;
my $Count = 1;
my $Input = $_[0];

while ($Count <= 10) {
  if ($Input%2 == 0) {
     push @Return, { number => $Input, oddoreven => 'even' }
  } else {
     push @Return, { number => $Input, oddoreven => 'odd' }
  }
 $Count++;
 $Input++;
}

 foreach my $Row (@Return) {
     return_next $Row;
 }
 return;

$$ LANGUAGE plperl;

test=# SELECT * FROM odd_or_even(23)
test=# ORDER BY odd_or_even.oddoreven;
 number | oddoreven
--------+-----------
     24 | even
     26 | even
     28 | even
     30 | even
     32 | even
     23 | odd
     25 | odd
     27 | odd
     29 | odd
     31 | odd
(10 rows)

A handy little one-line command to generate cert and keys in PEM format that Dovecot will like:

 openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 3650 
  -subj '/C=CA/ST=QC/L=Montreal/O=Company Name/CN=server.name.com' 
  -newkey rsa:1024 -keyout new_key.pem -out new_cert.pem

And there you have it.

Now, my place is insured, so if it were to burn down, it wouldn’t leave me in the situation as some of the 50 newly homeless people mentioned in the article above. No insurance company will give fire/home/theft insurance to apartments above bars and restaurants (been there, tried that). Those guys are very unfortunate indeed. So, I could replace most of my belongings, but this did make me seriously look at improving my backups. I do have some of my backups off site, but clearly not enough, and I will be remedying this very soon.

Before my connectivity loss, we could smell the smoke, so I grabbed my camera and went out to see what’s happening. Here’s a quick description of things as they happened:

As I got to the end of my block, I could clearly see smoke, fire trucks and lots of activity. I could hear the sirens of more trucks coming from behind me. The smell of smoke was very strong and irritating enough for me to change my breathing pattern to avoid inhaling deeply.

When I got around to the West side of St. Denis (a very popular street in Montreal, full of restaurants and night-life), there was a small crowd of people watching the firefighters. Lots of people taking pictures with their cell phones and cameras. There wasn’t any real sense of danger (although, I suspect the people who’s apartments were on fire felt diffently), if anything, there was an air of excitement.

The smoke really started to get thick fairly quickly - this was getting really exciting! The EMT folks (ambulance, police and fire) didn’t seem to be too concerned about the crowd right across the street, and were happy to let us watch the action as it unfolded.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many firemen all in one place before. It was kinda neat to see them all up on the roof. At this point, they had all sorts of saws, axes and prybars out, ripping open mouldings and flashings. Still no sense of real danger in the mob, but people were starting to realize that this was a big fire.

In the next photo, you can barely see a hit of orange behind the cherry bucket. Right before this, the smoke got noticeably darker. Once the flames were visible, the mood down in the crowd changed quite dramatically. People were clearly concerned for the safety of the firefighters, some of whom seemed to have been taken off guard as they scattered to the edges of the building. There were a number of gasps as the onlookers got more worried when the flames started shooting 10 - 15 feet up out of the building.

With flames clearly visible now coming out of the front window, the EMT guys realized that perhaps having a crowd across the street wasn’t a good idea. They started telling everyone to move along - most of us just stood there and watched anyway. Zooming in on the window, you can see that the room is largely consumed by flame.

It didn’t take long for the heat to break the closed windows. Along with the very dark smoke that was released, the sound of the windows shattering and glass falling to the sidewalk was clearly audible despite the fact that there were dozens of alarms and sirens going off. Many of the alarms were from the warning mechanisms on the firefighter’s air supplies as they came down the ladder to cool off in a makeshift shower and get new tanks.

Once the windows were broken, the fire really managed to burn hot! The plus side was that a hot fire burns more and makes less smoke. Now the EMT folks were starting to get a little more serious about getting us out of there as we could clearly feel the heat across the street even though we were upwind. Watching this made me think of the classic line from an old Eddie Murphy standup skit, where his pyro uncle says “Now, that’s a fire!” after nearly burning down the back yard lighting the BBQ.

The flower pots in front of the windows were now melting, and the dripping plastic burns as it falls. From our view, it looked like dripping flames and was quite interesting to watch as it burned whatever it lands on. Our side of the street was now getting really hot, and the police were now actively putting up barricades and telling people to get further back. I could hear them coming, and they were starting to get annoyed that people weren’t listening, but I wanted a couple more shots.

  
Despite the fact that there’s a huge fire right next to them, these firefighters stick to the task at hand and do what they can to save the structure next to it. I can’t imagine how hot that was for them, considering what we could feel across the street. According to the reports the next day, 4 firefighters suffered heat exhaustion and one had minor burns. The crowd was really worried about them and we were all hoping the hoses would start as there were still no signs of any hosing at the front yet.

Eventually, we were all forced to leave the area and the police barricaded the entire block. I went back home to unload my camera, and came back to take more photos and watch as they got out the hoses. By this point, my ‘net, cable and phone were no longer working.

    
The next day, it was clear that the building that had L’Barouf and The Continental was completely destroyed. The owner of The Continental vowed to rebuild in a bunch of newspaper and TV interviews. The ironic thing is that the fire started in the grey building to the right, which seems to have suffered way less damage. Apparently, the cause was electrical, not a surprise seeing how some of these places are wired.

Geekroom v1

I don’t remember when that photo was shot, but it used to be on here.

Here’s a description of the machines in that photo:

Commodore SuperPET

This is the first machine I learned to program on. It had 5 languages, but I mostly used Waterloo and Commodore basic. It can actually make (pitched) noises by POKEing the right values into the memory address that controls the oscillator. I managed to surprise my programming teacher by handing in an assignment that played a little melody while it scrolled text in tiny window above an image of a face… not impressive by today’s standards, but it was nifty at the time.

A friend of mine spent $6000 CND on this machine when it was new, and couldn’t find anyone to give it to several years later. Unfortunately, the dual floppy drive has died first and was tossed. Then, sadly, after it stopped turning on and my kids couldn’t use it as a typing toy, I finally got rid of it. It looks so sad in that photo, and reminds me of the IKEA lamp commercial.

Palm IIIxe

My first Palm was a Palm IIIe, but it died a mysterious death. Fortunately, I bought an extended warranty on it, and the IIIxe was what I got when I brought the corpse in. I love my Palm, and I would be lost without it. I use it to keep track of my appointments and contact list mostly, but also for stuff like this. As you can see in the header above and on that showcase page, I also used to use this Palm as a serial terminal for my Yellowdog briQs. It raised a lot of eyebrows in the machine room and certainly got me geek cred.

RIM BlackBerry

My RIM Blackberry was basically an expensive pager. I didn’t really like it other than I could read my email from anywhere (and that really wasn’t a good thing. The desktop software was windoze only, and trying to find the right version to use is a PITA. There are nowhere near as many apps for this thing as there are for my Palm. I used to carry this and my Palm, which was a major pain. Eventually, I convinced my boss to let me upgrade my Palm to a Tungsten W (which I still have, but haven’t turned on in ages). As soon as I had a Palm with phone and SMS capabilities, I turned the Crackberry off and it sat on the shelf during the rest of it’s data plan. Since then, I’ve also had a Treo 600 and now a Treo 650.

NeXTStation Turbo

My first *nix like OS that I used regularly (other than the shell account at my ISP and for CS courses), was NeXTSTEP. For it’s time, it really kicked ass! The thing I like most about it is that it is a really nice looking machine. The dumb thing about it is you can’t turn off the display, so if you find one today, chances are it is faded and hard to read. Fortunately, this one is in pretty good condition. I haven’t turned it on in a while, mostly because I haven’t found the Y2K patches for it. So when I set the date on it, it thinks it’s 1972 or something. Like my SuperPET, I don’t think I’ll be getting rid of this thing any time soon.

iBook

Of all of my Macs that I’ve ever had this one was my favorite, and so far, I’ve owned the following: IIfx, LC475, Quadra605, LC575, Quadra840AV, PPC6100, PPC7200, Beige G3/233, Powerbook G3/233 (Wallstreet), PowerMac G4 (many single and dual CPU models), many different iMacs, a Mac Mini (G4), PowerMac G5, Powerbook G4 (12″ and 15″), and used many others. I would recommend this machine to anyone despite the fact that upgrading the hard drive is a major pain:

.

I had 3 OSes installed on it: YellowDog Linux (default), MacOS 9.2 and MacOS X. I’ve used MacOS X for a grand total of about 1 hour, and I sometimes used MacOS 9 when I was doing location recordings with a MOTU828 and Digital Performer. Other than that, I pretty much used Linux 95% of the time and YDL ran on it beautifully.

Hyperion 256k ‘Luggable’

In its day, this machine was very cool. It has an 8086 CPU with 256k of RAM, an orange/black screen and two 5-1/4″ floppy drives. I used to have the MS-DOS 3.x floppies and WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. This was my first introduction to the Intel world (after my C-64, and just before my Amiga2000). For the time, it was a great machine, but it has since paved the way for the SuperPet and warmed up a space in the landfill for it.

Apple Powermac G4

This was main machine at home, and it had one operating system installed on it - YellowDog Linux. At the time I also had another one just like it in my studio which runs only MacOS 9 (and Digital Performer). The studio machine is now a dual G4/800 MHz and my other main audio box is a Dual 2GHz G5. Believe it or not, this very box was once www.mcgill.ca.

In the photo, the machine is running WindowMaker - an X windows window manager that emulates NeXTSTEP - which is pretty ironic considering what is right NeXT to it (sorry for the bad pun). I had forgotten how nice NeXTSTEP really was. I ran WindowMaker for a while as my default window manager, but now I’m a total KDE addict.

Roland W-30 (keyboard)

This was my first synth and was a birthday present from my Dad. It has a built in sampler and sequencer, and 8 outputs. Pretty spiffy for its day, and I toured all over the place with it back in my rock/funk/pop days. My other synths are in the studio, but this one is at home to use to teach my sons music (and for them to play with). Now it sits on top of my digital piano which wass temporarily in the studio as well.

Commodore 64 (monitor)

My first home computer…. ahh those were the days. I still have my C64 in a closet somewhere, but I was using the monitor up until very recently as a TV. It has a composite video input, so I simply hooked the video out of my VCR into it, and used the VCR as the receiver. The thing is almost 20 years old and it still works beautifuly. Like my NeXT I can’t seem to part with it, despite the fact that there is a C64 emulator for OS X that I would be far more likely to use than the real thing.

Geekroom V2

This next photo:

Geekroom v2

was taken some time afterward, probably shortly after I upgraded to the Powerbook G4 12″ 867 MHz, which you can see there as well as my Tungsten W. The Tungsten was a nice Palm, but a crappy phone. The Powerbook was a total lemon, and the worst Mac I ever had. In that photo, you can see I was installing Red Hat on the 1U machine sitting on top of the C-64 monitor (see, the monitor was still useful after all!).

Geekroom V3

The next version:

Geekroom v3

Here you can see that my main G4 tower was joined by a Dell, and a Rev. B iMac (which I named ‘Douglas’ after my favorite author Douglas Adams). The Dell was a PIII 550, and it was my home desktop machine until the summer of 2006. Both the G4 and the Dell were running Linux (YDL and Fedora Core respectively). In the photo, you can just barely see the KVM that I used to switch between them. Douglas ran MacOS 8 which was the last version of MacOS that could play Starship Titanic properly. I still use the iMac for YDL testing.

Geekroom V4

These next two shots are a little closer to how things are now:

Geekroom v4

Geekroom v4b

The workstation on the right is a G5 Dual 2GHz with a P4 1.6 GHz file server sitting next to it which is running headless and is my home file server. The G5 runs MacOS X and is primarily my wife’s machine. Other than the regular email/web stuff, she uses it for doing audio editing, composing, music notation and pre-mixes. She now has far better speakers (Yamaha MSP-5s) than the ones in that photo. The workstation on the left is my current desktop machine, a Pentium D 2.8GHz.

The drawers under my desk and between both desks were taken from the old desk in versions 1-3, and it’s funny how it just fit there perfectly. The NeXT Machine is still there, and a tiny corner of it is visible in the top right corner of the first photo.

An old photo of my desktop. I’ve since gotten a new powerbook, monitor is now an LCD, and iMac is a testing machine for YDL.

Ok, so this posting was just an excuse to upload an image so that I could test that Wordpress-mu was installed correctly. I’ll put up more interesting things soon.