Edward’s Notes

Technical topics and photos.

Home Produce

We spend today visiting the Grandparents and consuming lots of fresh home grown vegetables. I took these photos of some of the vegetables.

TLUG June 12 Nomikai

We had the Tokyo Linux User Group (TLUG) June Nomikai last Friday. We started at the Za Watami at 20:00 and then move on to the town Crayer. Our regular photographer Jim Grisanzio couldn’t make it so I took a few shots. I only had a AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G ED II (3.0x) so the pictures are pretty dark. They are mostly at ISO1600 so are pretty grainy.

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Tokyo BarCamp 2009

I attended the Tokyo Barcamp on Saturday and the Sun Yoga Building.

View looking out the main window at Sun Yoga by Edward Middleton View looking out the main window at Sun Yoga by Edward Middleton

It was a great chance to see the wider 外人 community ;) The event was the conceived by Matthew (Karamon)

– Updated 2009/05/20 added some photos

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Hanami in the Park

Some photos I took while at the park with my wife and daughter.

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Monitoring Traffic With Munin and Shorewall

I have been using munin to monitor servers for some time. Recently I noticed a message in pages generated by network traffic plugin if_ which stated the plugin doesn’t work reliably on 32 bit systems were bursts may exceed 50Mbps. As I was monitoring a 100Mbit and 1Gbit interface this problem could effect my system. This article describes how I resolved the problem.

Making Wholemeal Bread

Since I moved to Japan I have been unable to find any shops selling wholemeal bread so I have been making my own. It doesn’t cost much and is pretty easy to do.

I use a National SD-BH101 which cost about 1.4万円 at Yodobashi Kamera Akihabera. I buy 25kg bags of Graham wholemeal flour from the TOMIZAWA online shop. I buy 4 packs 125g saf-Instant red dry yeast. Yeast has a limited shelf lift after being opened so I find it is worth buying smaller packs. TOMIZAWA offers free delivery to most places for orders over 1万円. If you plan on using the free delivery you need to be careful because there is a weight limit and various other conditions. All other ingredients I buy from local supermarkets.

Cross Cultural Career Panel

Yesterday I was a panellist in a round table discussion about the challenges of cross cultural career development chaired by Tomoyuki Sakurai. Sakurai-san previously ran the cross cultural engineering party which I was unfortunately unable to attend. About 100 predominantly Japanese people attended, and a large number said they were considering working for a foreign companies or 外資系. This is the first time I have been in a panel, or presented in any capacity, in-front of a large group and I was pretty nervous. The other panellist included Jim Grisanzio, Toshiharu Harada, Gosuke Miyashita, Iwasa Takuma and Hiroumi Mitani who did live translation from English to Japanese. The main message I wanted to get across was that it is possible for most Japanese to work in foreign companies.

Replacing Page Cache With Varnish

I am finally getting somewhere with configuring varnish to run in front of typo. I just need to add code to purge the varnish cache when pages are expired and add ESI support so page can be semi cached in varnish and composed on demand. The following is the code so fare. First adding PURGE to net/http