Love the Drake

Brandi Carlile @ Schubas

The wife and I made it to Schuba's in Chicago on Saturday night to see Brandi Carlile. I have been really looking forward to this concert. It's one thing to listen to good music on a CD, but hearing a talented singer live nothing compares.

We go to Schuba's early enough (and were extremely lucky to grab a free parking spot next door), that we had to wait to get in. Cary Brothers (one guy, last name Brothers) opened up and put on a good performance. We were standing basically in the third row off to the right side of the stage.

Carlile played a good mix of songs from her new CD, The Story, and from her first self-titled CD. She included covers of CCR, 'Fortunate Son', Johhny Cash's 'Folsom Prison Blues'. Gib Droll sat in for a few songs and can really play the guitar, it was a sight to see and hear.

After a brief encore, Brandi closed out her set with her cover Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' which she sang alone with her guitar. In fact, before she sang the last verse, she turned off her microphone, and stood at the edge of the stage and sang to the crowd. It was an awesome ending to a great show.

Can't wait to see her again, maybe this summer at Ravinia.

2007 DST Time Change - Mini Y2K

Sunday, March 11, 2007 marks the new change for clocks for Daylight Savings Time in the US.

A lot of computers, cell phones, etc. are not ready for this change.

I have a few Linux servers running older versions of Linux that are being used for development and other purposes. These servers have a high uptime, work great and don't really need to be upgraded to the latest and greatest Red Hat or CentOS release.

Until now.

Here's a workaround I used to get these systems ready for March 11th. Your mileage may vary.

You can verify your Timezone readiness with the following command run as root:

# zdump -v /etc/localtime |grep 2007
/etc/localtime.orig  Sun Apr  1 07:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Apr  1 01:59:59 2007 CST isdst=0 gmtoff=-21600
/etc/localtime.orig  Sun Apr  1 08:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Apr  1 03:00:00 2007 CDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-18000
/etc/localtime.orig  Sun Oct 28 06:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Oct 28 01:59:59 2007 CDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-18000
/etc/localtime.orig  Sun Oct 28 07:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Oct 28 01:00:00 2007 CST isdst=0 gmtoff=-21600

If you see Apr 1, then you're in trouble. If it says March 11, then you're all ready to go.

One requirement is that your glibc is at least version 2.3.2-64 (from 2003). This version split out the timezone data into its own directory structure.

On a few of my servers, I was able to get the new tzdata rpm that has the files with the updated timezone information. Since the RPM is labeled as noarch, these files should work across different architectures.

You can download the CentOS RPM here. if you don't have access to it.

Install the rpm, then run 'system-config-date' if it's on your system.

If 'system-config-date' is not available, then manually copy from /usr/share/zoneinfo/TIMEZONE where TIMEZONE is your timezone file (e.g. mine is CST6CDT) to /etc/localtime.

# cp /etc/localtime /etc/localtime.orig
# cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/CST6CDT /etc/localtime

Then run zdump again to verify the changes were applied:

# zdump -v /etc/localtime |grep 2007     
/etc/localtime  Sun Mar 11 07:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 01:59:59 2007 CST isdst=0 gmtoff=-21600
/etc/localtime  Sun Mar 11 08:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 03:00:00 2007 CDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-18000
/etc/localtime  Sun Nov  4 06:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Nov  4 01:59:59 2007 CDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-18000
/etc/localtime  Sun Nov  4 07:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Nov  4 01:00:00 2007 CST isdst=0 gmtoff=-21600

If you see March 11, then you're all ready for the time change.

Good Luck.

Patent - Approved!

I'm officially an 'inventor' according to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for Patent 7,174,152. The patent that was filed while a was working at Sprint in 2003 was recently approved.

System for event correlation in cellular networks was a fun project to work on, but we'll have to wait and see if Sprint really uses it for anything.

The process to get a patent filed, documented, etc. was certainly interesting. There is a dialect specifically created by lawyers when writing patents, it's pretty amazing how complicated it gets to understand the actual description of a patent.

SuperBowl XLI - Bears

Well, the Bears are in the Superbowl.

As a Chicago Bears season ticket holder, this is the reason for the season. Even though their was a playoff ticket disaster for me, I still made it to both games. They were some of the best games I've ever been to.

Now, the Bears take on the Colts, who decided to not implode in the playoffs this year like they usually do. Maybe, they're waiting for the big game to meltdown.

I really think the Bears will win. They are underdogs, which is right were they want to be. Very few (if any) major media sportscasters picked them to beat the Saints in the NFC Championship and they proved everyone wrong.

A few pics from the NFC Championship game are below taken on by Blackberry Pearl. Click on them for a larger image.

Not a bad view, the camera doesn't do it justice.

Yes, it snowed, but it wasn't that cold.

The scoreboard after the game said it all.