Since January I have been singing in two choirs and I love it. I do believe that two choirs is the limit, though – with the possible exception of more ad-hoc arrangements.

Lately we have been performing some really nice works:

Gladsaxe Kammerkor - February 19th 2009

• Johannes Brahms – Weltliche Lieder (Opus 62) — Rosmarin, Waldesnacht, Dein Herzlein mild, Es geht ein Wehen
• Edward Elgar – As Torrents in Summer / My love dwelt in a Northern land
• Camille Saint-Saëns – (Opus 68) — Calme des nuit / Les fleurs et les arbres
• Gabriel Fauré – (Opus 11) — Cantique de Jean Racine
• Den blå anemone
• Det er i dag et vejr
• I skovens dybe, stille ro

Koret Paradox - April 10th & 11th 2009

• Johann Sebastian Bach – St. John Passion (BWV 245) — Johannes Passionen

Many more exciting songs are coming up in both choirs in May/June and beyond. I will try to update the blog about it at a later time (hopefully before it happens )

So, I have slowly but surely been ramping up my Fitness commitment for the last few months, and it feels great! I started for real at the end of June and have kept at it since, although some weeks have been a bit spotty…. My goal is 4-5 times a week and most of the time I end up on 3-4 times a week, which is respectable. On occasion I dip to 1-2 a week, when things are just too busy to get everything done. I hope to keep that at a minimum.

Yesterday I took up spinning again after years of only biking to and from whereever I was going. It’s a beginner team for the moment (there’s novice, beginner, skilled and elite teams) and it sure was a workout! I am still having a spot of difficulty with standing up whilst biking, but I actually made it through the 45 minute session pretty well. I had to decrease my resistance on the bike a couple of times, but apart from that and needing extra water near the end, I hung tight all the way through. I’ll be going again tomorrow and hopefully do at least as well as yesterday.

It’s amazing how much perspiration you can loose it 45 minutes, really. I need to remember to bring 2 x 0.5 L bottles. With a bit of luck I may soon be able to do the skilled teams which are early in the morning. That would get me to work at a decent hour in stead of around 11:00 am, but would also require an even greater commitment to getting up in the morning… Oh well, it’ll be some weeks yet before I get there.

Let me just say this: If you are not doing fitness already, you really should be. Most centres have instructors that will help you figure out a good workout for you and you will feel a lot better, believe me!

Until next time!

I *do* plan on posting here again, and hopefully soon, but my days have not had enough free time lately to do a proper job of it.

I have loose plans to post about these topics in the future:

• Various internet radio apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Strong and less strong suits of each.
• Something about the various document transfer solutions for iPhone/iPod Touch. Mostly AirShare.
• My experiences with Bluetooth audio combined with the iPod Touch.
• A bit about the upcoming chrismas concert with Gladsaxe Kammerkor
• Possibly something about the ‘mk_assoc_array’ function I made for work. It needs some changes to be useful for generic use, though. Most likely an even better version already exists out there…
• Whatever else I feel sufficiently strongly about to want to write a story about.
• I do accept suggestions

/Martin.

Today I managed to convert a VMware image to a Xen image and get it up and running fully paravirtualized on a machine with a different OS and architechture. That was pretty cool. I will just list the basic steps of how I did it below:

• Made sure I had the domU kernel installed in the ‘guest-to-be’ VM.
• Shut down the VMware instance of the image
• Converted the vmware disk file to a ‘raw’ fil with qemu-img:

qemu-img convert -O raw gwce5.2.1.vmdk groundwork.img

• Copied the raw file to the Xen server (SLES 10 SP2 64-bit) [via tar and scp]
• Via virt-manager called vm-install and selected that I had an OS already installed.
• Selected Red Hat 4 (Should probably have been 5, but it made no difference in the end)
• Adjusted amount of memory, CPU and where the disk was.
• The vm-install frontend automatically detected the boot partition and gleamed the names of the xenified kernel and initrd.

Tried to boot it. Didn’t work. Turns out that CentOS 5.2 did not make a Xen-centric initrd when it ran mkinitrd, so it included SCSI-controllers and the like, but forgot all about the ‘xenblk’ and ‘xennet’ modules.

I managed this with with loopback mounting:

sunxen64:/home/xen-images/groundwork # LANG=C fdisk -lu groundwork.img
You must set cylinders.
You can do this from the extra functions menu.

Disk groundwork.img: 0 MB, 0 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 0 cylinders, total 0 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

         Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
groundwork.img1   *          63      208844      104391   83  Linux
groundwork.img2        12787740    20964824     4088542+  83  Linux
Partition 2 has different physical/logical endings:
     phys=(1023, 254, 63) logical=(1304, 254, 63)
groundwork.img3          208845     8594774     4192965   83  Linux
groundwork.img4         8594775    12787739     2096482+   5  Extended
groundwork.img5         8594838    10699289     1052226   83  Linux
groundwork.img6        10699353    12787739     1044193+  82  Linux swap / Solaris

Partition table entries are not in disk order

# Multiply the start sector with 512 and you get the offset

mount -o loop,offset=106928640 groundwork.img /mnt/
mount -o loop,offset=32256 groundwork.img /mnt/boot/
mount -o bind /sys /mnt/sys
mount -o bind /proc /mnt/proc
linux32 chroot /mnt
mv /boot/initrd-2.6.18-92.1.10.el5xen.img
/boot/initrd-2.6.18-92.1.10.el5xen.img.old

mkinitrd --preload xenblk --preload xennet \
--omit-scsi-modules --omit-raid-modules \
/boot/initrd-2.6.18-92.1.10.el5xen.img 2.6.18-92.1.10.el5xen
exit
umount /mnt/sys /mnt/proc /mnt/boot /mnt

Then it was basically unmounting and recreating the xen domain.

xm destroy groundwork
<edit groundwork config a bit>
xm create groundwork

Below is the xen config I ended up using. Note that most people will not need the ‘bridge=eth1′ part, but in this case I have to different physical nets and this box must be on the second one.

Config follows:

name="groundwork"
uuid="bcae1ef7-a709-06b7-5755-b164934aeab3"
memory=1024
vcpus=1
on_poweroff="destroy"
on_reboot="restart"
on_crash="destroy"
localtime=0
builder="linux"
bootloader="/usr/lib/xen/boot/domUloader.py"
bootargs="--entry=xvda1:/vmlinuz-xen,/initrd-xen"
extra="TERM=xterm "
disk=[ 'file:/var/lib/xen/images/groundwork/groundwork.img,xvda,w', ]
vif=[ 'mac=00:16:3e:XX:YY:ZZ,bridge=eth1', ]
vfb=['type=vnc,vncunused=1']

Obviously you need other values for XX, YY and ZZ, but a working example is always nice, no?

Because the CentOS image used labels to mount everything I did not need to change xvda til sda (but I could have). I hope this will be of use to someone out there

Xen is supposed to be able to run VMware images directly via the ‘tap’ interface, but I much prefer a raw image if I can get one.

The last 4 weeks, choir practice has been back on, which is, as such things usually are, great! I really enjoy singing and the company is great, too! We are working on some great stuff at the moment: Felix Mendelsohn, Brahms and Lange-Müller. We have performed the Lange-Müller songs previously but it’s a while back so we need a bit of repetition. They are really well made, though, so that is only cause for joy.

It is looking likely that we will have a concert in Germany later this year around christmas time, which supposedly should be quite a sight to behold (Germany in/near December, that is).

Well, that’s it for today. Need to get to sleep soon. C Ya! Maybe even C#.

Whoo-hoo! It seems that TDC actually can move pretty quickly when they get going! My Internet connection is back, baby! And apparently the problem I had where Telia and TDC had to tweak something somewhere before I could get my 8 megabit download speed has also been fixed now! ‘Tis a joyous day indeed!

I hope to be able to write more on these pages from now on…

Well. This week we finally got some information about the fire in the cellar on 30th august.

TDC, the telco company that handles the copper connection here in Denmark, is finally rewiring the building. Apparently the damage to the cables were larger than I would have thought. Only the first 7 floors have been restored at this time, but I am hopeful that the last 7 will get restored next week and hopefully before the weekend this time…

The fire was apparently started by someone who tossed linseed oil rags and sawdust down the garbage shaft without thinking that these things are flammable. Grrr… Hopefully no-one will ever make that mistake again!

Hoping to be properly connected again very soon…

The building I live in had a nasty fire in the basement this past Saturday that among other things killed my phone line and with it, my broadband connection. I am still working on getting someone out to fix it, but I at least have an appointment now for next week, so there is hope it will soon be resolved…

The fire broke out in the garbage container at the end of the garbage shaft in the part of the building where I live and the smoke traveled all the way up to the roof of the building and left a very nasty odor along the way.

The alarms on the 13th and 14th floor went off, so I expected a fire had broken out in the attic as that is what they are supposed to detect. Luckily I had a carbon filter particle mask so I could go up and check. There was a bit of smoke, but no fire up there. The fire department seemed to focus on the ground as well.
As the air was pretty bad in the hall, I decided to leave the appartment for a while and see what was going on at ground level. Several of the other people from the building had gathered in the parking lot and surmised that the fire was in the basement. The general consensus was that is was burning garbage that was the cause.

Black smoldering bags of garbage from the cellar.

I tried to think of something else and get away from the smell so I went shopping for a while for some necessities I needed anyway. When I came back the fire department had extracted a lot of black garbage bags with charred contents that was lying around in the parking lot still smoldering slightly. The fire department was still at it in the cellar at this point and I resolved to return to my appartment and get some air in from the side doors in stead. This worked quite well.

As I had no internet connection at this point I caught up on some of the TV series my MythTV box had recorded over the last several weeks that I had yet to watch. Time passed quite easily in this manner. I was very glad to have Opera Mini on my cellphone to check my normal haunts during this ordeal. It’s amazing how good of a browser Opera Mini is in a pinch.
I had hoped that the phone lines would be restored before the fire department left, but unfortunately that was not the case. As of today, they are still down (at least mine is, and I have a hunch the rest of the building have the same issue). I have talked to the supers about it and they seem to have tried to get TDC to move out and do something about it but as yet to no avail.

The garbage shaft with the fire looked a mess in the aftermath.

The day after the fire I needed to do some laundry and I went to check out the damage. It was not pretty, but I guess it could easily have been a lot worse. There was pretty much nothing left of the yellow coating that used to adorn the area above the shaft and there were still some ash on the floor. The smell has pretty bad, so I hurried away as soon as the pictures were done. It smelled very toxic. For the same reason I used the elevator in the other  side of the building all sunday on my trips to and from the washing chamber.

At this time I do not know if the fire was started deliberately by someone or if it was accidental, but hopefully that will be cleared up and hopefully the ones responsible can be found. I sincerely hope that something like this never happen again.

Not exactly what I had thought I would be writing about when I created the Daily Life category on the site… Have any of you had similar experiences?

A few days ago Shanhai Mahjong Free was released and it looked good from the shots in the AppStore so I decided to test it out against my already downloaded Moonlight Mahjong Lite and see if I preferred one or the other.

Each have plusses and minuses but both are in general worthwhile apps.
Moonlight Mahjong Lite has 4 layouts available (the pay version has 12) and it guarantees that each board is solvable, which is nice. If only there was a Solitaire card app like that!
Moonlight mahjong is also in full 3D, so you can view the bricks from almost any angle. I like that feature a lot.

Shanghai mahjong has only one layout in the light version, but the pay version has more than 160 to make up for it!
The layout presented is usually pretty easy to solve, but I don’t see any guarantee that the board will solve in the game. This version has some nice sound effects and very good looks and the included board is easy enough to see fully without needing the twist and turn you only get with Moonlight.

After a long hiatus, I will again try my hand at blogging. This time in English. It just feels more natural for some reason..

I plan on posting maybe 4-6 times a month. Maybe I’ll get lucky and do more than that, but don’t count on it! Much of what I post will likely be about iPod Touch apps from the AppStore as that is what interests me most right now. Look for some actual content within the next week or two.

Have a nice day and take care, y’all!