Tracing back my childhood, via Google Maps – Part 1: Somerset, Ballantrae

Google Maps (and thus Google Earth as well) now have pretty good high-resolution imagery of the United Kingdom, good enough now that I can pretty much trace back my geographic history, so that's what I'm about to do.

I was born in Hampstead, a district of London, but I'm not sure which hospital. The Royal Free Hospital wasn't open in Hampstead at that point, so I'm not sure. Perhaps I was born elsewhere but my parents lived there, or perhaps it was in a location since closed.

Pretty early on – vague memory from my parents says at about six months of age – we moved to Montacute in Somerset, where my dad took a job at the National Trust's Montacute House. I'm not absolutely sure of the house we lived in, but this one appears closest to my memories.

At five years old, I think, we moved to Scotland, taking the night sleeper from Euston up the West Coast Main Line. Ever curious, I pulled the communications cord, fortunately when stationary. I remember the Guard coming to our compartment while I frantically hid beneath the blankets.

My father had taken a job as Head Gardener at Glenapp Castle, near Ballantrae, which was then the family seat of the Earl of Inchcape; it's now been sold and is a luxury hotel, but this was after my time there. We first lived at a house on the estate, Boartreehall House (I think I have the spelling of that correct, but we'll see) and later in a more modern bungalow, 1 Smyrton Hill, just outside the estate. I went to school at Ballantrae Primary School.

A bit of a refocus.

I started this blog originally with the idea that it would focus primarily on Wikipedia and issues surrounding it. I've found that harder than I expected – both in terms of motivation to do it, and in terms of finding what I wanted to say here incompatible with being a sitting member of the Arbitration Committee.

Come this January, I will no longer be a sitting member of Arbcom; I do not intend to run in this fall's elections. At that time I will feel much more free to discuss issues of Wikipedia without everything I write looking to some as if they are pronouncements of policy rather than personal ideas.

In the meantime, and thereafter, this blog will also contain much more of my personal writing, journalling and recollections. I am feeling the urge to write more, and more personally, rather than explicitly for an audience. If you read this blog (someone might!), you'll see a more eclectic grab-bag of stuff than hitherto.

I also intend, from now on, to publish my commentary on things I read online here, rather than commenting on blogs and the like. That was, after all, the original purpose of a weblog – an annotated stream of stuff one found on the web with personal opinion and commentary.

My camera is fixed…

…thanks to Camera Tech of Anaheim (1347 S Anaheim Blvd, Anaheim, CA 92805; just south of Ball). $95 out the door. As I'd suspected, a connection between the main circuit boards and the card reader had failed.

I'd recommend this place. Sole proprietor, and an Englishman to boot; he's a Londoner, been here 30 years. The tiny shop is full of ancient and modern cameras. Behind the counter are piles and piles of cameras and bits of cameras.

Despite being an old-school camera guy, he's also au fait with digital technology, and has a bunch of old digitals for sale, immaculately CLA'd and in nice shape indeed. When I was there the first time, he was espousing the quality of a Sony F717, and the second time, he was taking in a flash to repair from a wedding photographer. Seems to know his stuff, and there are a bunch of online reviews that like him as well.

Finding the umask of a running process in Solaris…

…is inordinately difficult. This seemingly basic piece of information is not available through /proc, nor through dtrace, nor any other supported way. It can only be retrieved by crawling through the kernel's data structures, either with mdb(1) or through using libkvm, an even uglier way to do it.

Chad Mynhier provides the way to do it on his blog, as well as pointing to a thread on comp.unix.solaris about the same topic, showing how to do it in C using libkvm.

My camera is broken

My Konica-Minolta Maxxum 7D "felt weird" yesterday when I inserted a CompactFlash card. It then didn't recognize the card, offering to format it, but the format failed. Same with other cards I inserted.

It's out of warranty, and I suspect a fix is going to be over $200. Is it worth it, when it's probably only worth $350 or so? I'm not sure. But a new camera is $500. Ugh.

Update: it's now at a local independent camera shop being looked at. Hopefully it'll prove to be something simple.

Update 2: Fixed at Camera Tech of Anaheim for $95. Recommended to anyone.

Today's boneheaded Solaris admin move

I converted the /var filesystem of a host I was installing to be a DiskSuite mirror, but forgot that I shouldn't attach the other side of the mirror until the filesystem was mounted through the metadevice.

Further compounding the problem, I didn't restart the system until after the mirror had resynced and I'd done a bunch of other work. After the reboot, a flood of errors from fsck; unsurprisingly, since everything I'd done to the system since I added the mirror had only been written to one half, but DiskSuite (Solaris Volume Manager, I guess, to give it its modern term) thought both mirrors were good, and was randomly reading from the good side or the bad side …

What makes it even more stupid is that I know better.

Given that I'd just installed the system, it was quicker to just re-jumpstart …

Changing the world via Wikipedia?

Too many people come to Wikipedia in order to change the world, to set things right, to tell The Truth about something. I think it's one of the root causes of dissatisfaction among new editors, and one of the things that sets some people on a course to consider themselves an enemy of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia's policy of Neutral Point Of View (NPOV) is an explicit statement that Wikipedia is not out to change the world's opinions. Some have even stated that it's Wikipedia's true innovation, differentiating it from other encyclopedias and reference works. Wikipedia does not attempt to judge the truth of anything; instead, Wikipedia reports accurately on what the state of current belief is.

If there is disagreement, Wikipedia gives space to all sides in proportion to the prevalence of each. (This latter is the prescription against "Undue weight", and is what differentiates Wikipedia's NPOV from journalistic even-handed neutrality. Wikipedia does not have to give equal time to members of the Flat Earth Society against scientific consensus of Earth's rough sphericity.)

Wikipedia doesn't care if you think you know the Truth or even if you can prove it—unless that proof comes in the form of solid citations to respectable sources. This, I find, bothers people who are sure they know the Truth about a subject—any subject.