A rant deferred: Bangalore airport

My colleague Mani Chandrasekaran just posted a piece about the new Bangalore airport which is due to be completed in 2008. He began by saying “Most airports, in India, dont really compare to the modern airports around the world”, which reminded me that I had promised you a little rant about my experiences at Bangalore airport. So here it is.

If you remember, I was flying from Bangalore to Mumbai to connect with a flight to London. My Jet Airways flight from Bangalore was repeatedly delayed, and I wound up missing my connection. In these circumstances, when you’re stuck in the departure lounge waiting for a flight, most people need two things: refreshment and information.

  1. Refreshments: none. Correction: one water fountain of dubious quality, and nothing else: no food, no beverages. No bottled water, no vending machines, no kiosk, no cafe. Zip.

  2. Information: Here’s where it really gets absurd. Scattered around the lounge were half a dozen televisions. These were used for three purposes: to show advertisements, to display flight information, and to carry a live TV feed. There was no other source of flight information. It quickly became apparent that there was no particular sequence or tempo as to what was shown when. Unless you watched intently you were likely to miss the occasional brief flight status displays.

    But it gets worse. It just so happened that India was playing Sri Lanka at cricket that evening, and the match was very exciting. India was winning: many of the ~250 waiting travellers jostled for the best seats to watch the TV, and when their heroes like Tendulkar and Sehwag were facing the bowling you could forget about anything else. Whoever was controlling the system wasn’t going to bother with trivia like flight information (or even advertising). At one point there were 20 uninterrupted minutes of cricket….

I would have taken a few pictures of this place for you, but of course photography is absolutely forbidden at all Indian airports. In any case, the lesson is clear: if you’re going to fly out of Bangalore, make sure you have bottled water and snacks with you, and be prepared to grab a seat in front of the TV. And if anyone from the airport reads this, I’m sure you can afford a few extra monitors to dedicate to flight information. Because we’re not there to watch cricket, we’re bloody well there to fly!

(Thanks. I feel much better now.)

P.S. The December’05 issue of Airliner World (excellent magazine, lousy website) includes a piece on p.68 about the critical state of the commercial aviation infrastructure in India. Airport parking places, terminal facilities, ground services, air traffic control – in every area, demand is outstripping supply, exposing a serious lack of investment. And this also applies to aircrew: a conservative estimate is that India needs an extra 1,200 pilots.

My PC emulates the Norwegian Blue…..

Although I’m primarily a Mac user, I’ve always had a WinTel PC at home, mostly for playing games. (I prefer turn-based games like Civilization and Alpha Centauri, as well as city-building simulations like Rome. However I occasionally fire up something in the Doom/Quake genre.) My current PC is an eMachines tower with an aftermarket video card and an extra hard disk so I can dual-boot WinXP and Solaris.

This morning I checked my Gmail on the PC and then hurriedly shut it down before going to work. I think that rather than choosing “Shutdown” I might have clicked on “Suspend”. In any case, when I arrive home I turn on the monitor and hit the power button. Nothing. The monitor status light is yellow, meaning no signal. Hold in power button for 5 seconds, then try powering up again. Nothing. Power supply and chip fans come on, maybe a flicker on the disk light, but no video. Repeat, holding down DEL to try to get into the BIOS. Replace USB keyboard with PS/2, repeat. Try booting off a Knoppix LiveCD, then off a floppy. Lug into the next room to plug into another monitor. Open case, remove graphics card, plug monitor into on-board video. Re-install graphics card. Re-seat everything. All totally, completely ineffectual. My PC is pining for the fjords. She’s dead, Jim. (Unless some blog reader can suggest something else to try.)

Now what? I’m tempted to declare victory, to forswear the works of Redmond and simply junk the PC. Of course there’s stuff on the disks that I want, which means I should probably get a FireWire enclosure to read them on my PowerBook. On the other hand, am I really ready to give up on PC games? I was just getting into Civ4. And there are one or two apps that I use that only run under Windows, like Family Tree Maker. How about Virtual PC? Well, if I were prepared to spend $240 on VPC, plus $60 each for a couple of disk enclosures, I’m starting to approach the price of a new PC. (Presumably I can re-use the graphics card, disks, and RAM.) And VPC may be OK for simple apps, but it’s hardly appropriate for a graphics-intensive game….

Sigh.

Bringing up ZFS on my Ferrari

As I mentioned, I wanted to check out ZFS now that it’s finally available in the latest Solaris build. My plan was simple: to upgrade my Ferrari to Nevada B27 and then “blow away the Ubuntu partition and create a couple of 10GB partitions” to test ZFS. Well, it wasn’t quite that simple.

On Monday I borrowed a B27 DVD from a colleague and upgraded my Solaris partition. This went just fine, although I did run into a fiddly little xscreensaver bug that meant I had to snarf the B28a version of the Xorg bits. Never mind: I was now ready to repurpose that 20GB Ubuntu partition. But how? Solaris format/fdisk wouldn’t touch it. I booted up a Ubuntu LiveCD and used Linux fdisk: this let me change the type code to 0xbf, which is Solaris2, but Solaris still wouldn’t see it.

It turns out that Solaris only recognizes one primary Solaris partition on a drive; you can’t have more. So on Tuesday I rebooted the Ubuntu LiveCD and used fdisk to delete both the Solaris and Linux partitions (leaving WinXP untouched). I then created a new partition, and reinstalled Solaris from scratch; I sliced up the partition as 20GB root, 1GB swap, two 10GB slices for ZFS, and the rest in /export/home. Of course I now had to customize the system the way I like it, so I downloaded a ton of stuff, went home, and got things working during the commercial breaks while watching House.

Finally this morning I was ready to test ZFS:

zpool create -f test c1d0s5 [the -f flag because the Solaris installation had put a UFS filesystem on the slice]
zfs create test/tfs
cd /test/tfs

and start playing….

Verdict: if you want to experiment with ZFS, it’s a lot easier on a desktop machine where you can simply plug in another disk. You can use a laptop, but the chances that your disk layout will be appropriate are pretty slim; you should be prepared to repartition your disk and reinstall. Once you do, it all just works – kudos to Jeff and the team.

OK, next step is to try mirroring:

zpool create mtest mirror c1d0s5 c1d0s6
zfs create mtest/tfs
cd /mtest/tfs

Penn Jillette: this i believe

Here’s Penn Jillette’s contribution to the NPR series this i believe. Forget about the subtle distinctions between positve atheism, negative atheism, agnosticism, and so forth: Penn just cuts to the chase. “I believe there is no God.” He expresses my belief exactly, but more wittily and with a bigger audience 😉 Key quote:

Believing there’s no God stops me from being solipsistic. I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I’m wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate. I don’t travel in circles where people say, ‘I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith.’ That’s just a long-winded religious way to say, ‘shut up,’ or another two words that the FCC likes less. But all obscenity is less insulting than, ‘How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do.’ So, believing there is no God lets me be proven wrong and that’s always fun. It means I’m learning something.

(Via Susan.)

Photo gallery

I’ve just started populating my photo gallery on grommit.com. (Thanks, Steve!) I’m beginning with three albums: my Sunday tour of Hyderabad, gliding in Boulder, and stunning pieces from an exhibition at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

The permalink to my gallery can be found on the right, in The Basics section at the top of the sidebar.

[Steve: Any idea why a few of the thumbnails show up as “broken image” icons? I’ve used Gallery Remote, but I don’t have Image Magick installed.]

Talking and surfing

Before heading out on my last trip to Colorado, I (finally!) replaced our old LinkSys 802.11b router with a Belkin Wireless G Plus. Both laptops (my PB and Merry’s iBook) were G-capable, so I only had one desktop PC (USB) adapter to replace. I futzed around with WPA but couldn’t get it just the way I wanted it, so I stuck with WEP. The bottom line: things are much more stable, and we can now use the cordless phone or the microwave oven without disrupting the WiFi.

What the hell is "philosophical guidance"?

From CNN.com: “A former top State Department official said Sunday that Vice President Dick Cheney provided the ‘philosophical guidance’ and ‘flexibility’ that led to the torture of detainees in U.S. facilities.Retired U.S. Army Col. Larry Wilkerson, who served as former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff, told CNN that the practice of torture may be continuing in U.S.-run facilities.‘There’s no question in my mind that we did. There’s no question in my mind that we may be still doing it,’ Wilkerson said on CNN’s ‘Late Edition. ‘There’s no question in my mind where the philosophical guidance and the flexibility in order to do so originated — in the vice president of the United States’ office,’ he said. ‘His implementer in this case was [Defense Secretary] Donald Rumsfeld and the Defense Department.’“

So what exactly is the process for impeaching the Vice President?

Geeks ranking stuff

First we have Alec reporting on the Top 20 geek novels from blogs.guardian.co.uk. I hope the fact that Alec hasn’t read Consider Phlebas doesn’t mean that he’s ignorant of Iain M. Banks’ work.

Meanwhile, over at Slashdot the usual crowd is debating the merits of Space.com’s best space movies poll. Like many Slashdotters, I find the concentration on the various Star Trek and Star Wars films is (a) inevitable in today’s ADD world, and (b) really sad. If I could add one film to the list, it would be Silent Running, one of the most haunting movies ever made. (I also really enjoyed Serenity; it’s a shame that it flopped so badly.)

What we need now is a “top space TV shows with no Star Trek connection” poll. Just think of it: Blake’s 7, Space 1999, and more recently Firefly. Of course the top of the list will be Red Dwarf….