After the Arc, we caught the subway again and headed for the Eiffel Tower. The trip was easy enough, but once you got off the subway you were bombarded with street peddlers offering you rare, once-in-lifetime key chains of the Tower. In case you missed the rare deal, look no further than two feet away and you find the same item for a different price. The Tower was just as large and magnificent as I thought it would be.  The lines to enter the tower, on the other hand, were larger and much more impressive than I thought. The lines were crazy, maybe three hours later you had a chance to enter (and that was for the stairs line). Needless to say, we opted to walk around the garden and take a few pictures enjoying the wonderful weather we had.

After some lunch at a tourist restaurant, which was way over priced and not the greatest food, we headed back along the Champs-Elysees to the Place de la Concorde. This is the famous location for the guillotine during the French Revolution. The same guillotine that took the heads of much of the French aristocracy including Louis XVI in 1793. We arrived at the place just before sunset, so naturally we were treated to the best possible light and skyline conditions for pictures.

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To finish out the afternoon, we headed up to Sacre Coeur Cathedral just before sunset. Unfortunately, we were unable to photograph the interior of the cathedral, which was amazing! But the outdoor and neighborhood shots were nearly perfect with the sunset that we were given. You can see more of the photos here (please login first). After the cathedral, we headed into the nearby town of Montmartre, which is kind of the “west hills” of Paris. Within the square, are dozens of artists, all eager to draw your portrait in about every style available.

To help warm back up and being fairly tired of just sitting, we opted to walk over half the way back to the flat. This again was enjoyable as we got to see more of Paris that is not frequented by tourists. Once the walk got the best of our feet we hopped on the nearest subway and headed back to relax the rest of the night.

After a great breakfast, we set out with Jean-Pierre to head to the Christmas Market near La Grande Arche de la Défense. The Christmas markets were nothing special, except for the food that was being offered, but it was a our first chance to see the Grande Arche and try some hot spiced wine. Which was much needed since it was so warm out.

After enjoying and photographing the market, we headed back on the subway to Notre Dame Cathedral. The cathedral was absolutely incredible, and provided a nice break from the cold wind. The inside was immaculate, but very dark and difficult to photograph. We spent at least an hour inside the church photographing the interior. After feeling warm enough, we headed back outside to photograph the main entrance, including a picture of St. Denis. Finally we decided to walk around the church admiring it’s elaborate structure. But, the wind continued to get the best of us, so we called it a day and headed to find the nearest restaurant to warm back up. Nothing like a Quiche Lorriane and hot chocolate to do the trick.

After landing in FRA around 6:00am the next day, we tried to figure out where our Paris flight was. The problem with FRA is that unless you are flying on Lufthansa, FRA will not assign a gate number until about 30 minutes before your flight. Normally not a problem, however many of the concourses have split levels with different gates above and below, security control is at the start of the level. So if you gate is on a different level than you are on, you must exit security and go back through on the next level. Natalie and I were getting quite tired by this point, so we decided to guess where the flight was going to be and camped out near the monitors until the gate was posted.  After enduring security, we headed for the gate, and Paris.

Once we got on the flight, I was beat and decided to nap a bit. Natalie called Jean-Pierre (Natalie’s uncle) to inform him that we were on-time and all was good. I awoke about an hour later expecting to be preparing to land, only to find that we have not left yet. Apparently there was a different excuse for why we did not leave every time they provided an update on the PA. Again, over an hour later we finally left for Paris. This is the beginning of my stance that Air France sucks.

Jean-Pierre met us at the airport and drove us to his flat near the Bastille in downtown Paris. We took a much needed nap for a few hours and woke up in time for an aperitif and dinner. Finally, the end of a very long trip to Paris, can’t wait to see some sights tomorrow.

Obviously no. So the solution was clear, construct a home SAN (storage area networking) or technically a NAS (network-attached storage).

I wanted a system that could hold a large amount of data, plus be scalable enough to support growth without the need to constantly migrate data from one array to another. The solution was using the open-source SAN solution OpenFiler. This offered us a very simple way to scale-up the capacity by growing the RAID array with new drives and resizing the necessary volumes. No more transferring data around and buying all new sets of drives.

I chose to have my guests that needed the increased space to connect via iSCSI to the SAN which offered me the most flexibility and network fault tolerance. OpenFiler supports many other sharing methods including NFS and SMB, which were appealing, but I wanted to have gating control over access on my file server and not the SAN.

This solution has been working great for well over a year now, and I would strongly recommend this form of solution. With the ease of media development, and the ever-increasing ease of media presentation within the home, building a centralized file-server makes more sense now than ever. Rather than putting a large drive or two in your system, you can consider using a SAN to offer better scalability.

Almost immediately up on arrival we attended a short panel on freelance artists for comics, graphic novels, and games held by Wizards of the Coast. From my vantage point the panel offered some good advice, but I was confident that Natalie absorbed far more. After the panel, we headed down to the exhibit halls to see what games were being presented. Upon entered you were first introduced to the independent games being offered for a greatly reduced price.

Now like many of you I am growing increasingly tired of the same search/replace names on screenplays for movies, and studios milking sequels and “reboots” to death. Unfortunately, PAX was no exception. There were very few new games being offered, most of the games that are due around Christmas time are. . .yes. . .sequels. Definitely not bad sequels, in fact I very much looking forward to Halo 3 ODST, Left 4 Dead 2, and especially Bioshock 2. Getting to play and watch a few of them was very exciting, and is making the wait that much harder to bear.

But really, are studios and designers really out of ideas? Seriously, grab a book or two, and I think you may find some new inspiration. Many of the indie games are not focusing on cutting-edge graphics or Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound, instead they are offering the user an opportunity to try something new. Most of the games focus on different forms of puzzle-solving, that at first glance you offer a “that’s nice” and then walk away. It’s not until you start playing that you find the game-play intoxicating and yourself writing down the URL for the game.

The highlight of PAX was no doubt the Saturday night concert. The concert started with a lame Rock Band live duel, but eventually gave way to folks who know how to create their own music. The word during the convention was that first band FreezePop had great music, but was poor on-stage. I found this to be quite the opposite: I thought their performance was amazing, but their CD music a bit flat. After being entertained by FreezePop for close to 90 minutes, the next “opening” band of Paul and Storm kept the energy going for another hour. We have heard them a couple of times, so their performance was nothing new, but entertaining nonetheless. Finally Paul and Storm were relieved Jonathan Coulton who delivered a stellar performance. The climax of the show was no doubt with Jonathan changed the lyrics of his song My Monkey to “Wil Wheaton”. Wil who happen to be in the crowd, found it so amusing that if he had not been laying down already probably would have collapsed. After the song, Wil came up on a stage for a big group hug. Awwww. . .

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We graduated in 2003, and have made less than a handful of trips back since. In the six short years since our departure, the school had underwent a fairly significant transformation on both the inside and outside. Most noticeably are the new dormitory and complete overhaul of the engineering buildings. The new dorm sits across from Tyson Hall (formally University Court where we spent a year). This new dorm is built using a similar design as Corrado, but appears to be twice as large as it uses a horseshoe layout.

The new engineering building was the most impressive by far. Here was a building that was barely standing, had some seriously frightening environmental items in the basement, and really had some seriously out-dated lab equipment. Started last year, the engineering building was nearly gutted (except for the exterior of the front of the building). Everything inside was completely different, elevator shafts were moved, the CS department was able to return to the building with the new space, the labs were upgraded, and the lecture halls were finally modern. While it was not quite finished, it was pretty close and I was completely blown away with the beauty of the project. This was something that really needed to be done about 10 years ago, but it appears to have been well worth the wait. The part that was disappointing was that it appeared that majority of the lab equipment was still the same old equipment that we spend countless hours troubleshooting (come on HP and Tek, give these guys something representative of the new building).

Aside from the new engineering building, there are other small changes to various campus buildings such as what appears to be a new congregation area in the commons to replace St. Mary’s. Also near the chapel is a new Notre Dame-like outdoor temple. Some other buildings that need some serious improvements like Buckley Center and Old Science still look the same way they did about 10 years ago (and probably well before that).

I have also heard that the CTS department that I had invested 4 years into is no more. Rumor has it that the formerly great IT department has been renamed to Technical Services and is charged with technical support of the student and lab issues only. All infrastructure-related initiatives have been apparently subcontracted out to Verizon Business. I don’t know what the administration structure is anymore, but I can imagine it is pretty simplistic. Most of the people that I had the pleasure of working for were laid-off in the process.  Shortly after we graduated, most of the CTS student help was disbanded as concerns were raised over students having too much access and responsibility. While I have mixed feelings on this, I do believe that this was serious mistake. It is true that we had more access than I think should have (I was the pinnacle of this as at one-time I held keys to the entire campus), and we very lucky that we did not encounter any liability issues. I mean with students have root access to the some of the most critical university systems, this is just inviting trouble, because despite your best efforts you will one day encounter students that are not as trustworthy. On the flip-side, we were good. Not just good, but damn good. The student staff was some of the most effective staff members ever in the CTS department, and in some cases educating their full-time staff counterparts. Aside from their effectiveness, the experience we gained from these positions was invaluable. To this day, I have benefited and applied from the lessons I learned from Telecomm (both the good and the bad) far more than any knowledge acquired from the classroom. It is very concerning to me that the next generation of students will not benefit as did, and be able to offer the same experience back in the future endeavors. With that, a huge thanks to Jason, Mike, and Kerry for their knowledge and wisdom that they passed on and the patience that they showed us.

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Colossus was built soon after I joined the CTS Telecomm department at the University of Portland during my freshman year, in an effort to better understand Linux. Simply put, I am a kinetic learner, therefore the only why I will understand many IT technologies is to install them and use them on a regular basis. The senior members of the CTS team used another personal server called Snafu which was their project box and home dial-in server. Not wanted to be outdone, I built up Colossus which was named after the supercomputer in the 70s movie “Colossus: The Forbin Project“. Colossus originally ran RH Linux v5.2, and was slowly upgraded on the RH line through the years. Colossus started its life using my old workstation hardware, and it would receive the latest hand-me-down hardware all through school. Originally, a Pentium 133MHz with 64MB of RAM and a 3.5GB HD, it served as fairly reliable hobby server.

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As years went on, Colossus became a great refuge for folks wanting to host their website and have a separate email system separated from the University. At its peak it had 23 users on the system. Colossus underwent a lot of scrutiny and trouble during the college years including one Windows administrator concerned that since it was DNS server it could bring down the whole University if it allowed zone transfers. It was relocated more times than I can count including hiding out in dorm data room, enduring a 80-90 degree storage closet, and sitting in a proper rack in the switch room.

A Dogs Breakfast divx After school, the need for private web space dropped off as did many of the users. Even though Colossus continued to host a number sites including our photo gallery and personal blogs, I began to become increasingly concerned about my data. So Colossus was slowly retired from the web hosting service and began to serve our household data. With my post-college paychecks I was finally able to afford a bit better hardware for the server so that it could adequately perform and had sufficient redundancy to safeguard our information.  Despite my best efforts, Colossus has crashed more times than I can count due to hardware failure. At its lowest point, I was in Cincinnati advising Natalie how to completely rebuild the hardware from spare parts after it tanked. That was during the phase where it was blowing up a RAID member every 6 months for no reason.

Finally, midway through 2008 thanks to VMware releasing ESXi for free, I was able to virtualize my whole environment. It was kind of  the end of era for Colossus as it went from being a physical system to a virtual server for the first time. From a management-, redundancy-, and HA-standpoint it is in a far superior configuration now. At the same time, I dumped the less-than-stable Fedora Core distros for CentOS 5. Colossus continues to host our data with over 1.2TB of NAS space available, serving as our DNS and DHCP servers, as well as still remains a place for hobby-development.

For pure amusement, I dug up the original website for Colossus from when it was serving as file-hosting webserver:

old_colossus_site1

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The meeting today was held at the Conway building near NW 23rd St. While I was forced to miss the first presentation due to a prior engagement, I did get the opportunity to see Vizioncore’s new flagship VM monitoring solution, vFoglight, and Tripwire’s latest product, vWire. Naturally, I am partial to vWire

If you have even the slightest interest in visualization, it is well worth the time to visit. Oh yes, and the lunches were amazing!