Almost two years after the Beta Test, the Compass Card is finally starting to become within reach of the general public. The Compass Card was first rolled out for BC Bus Pass, TransLink employees and CNIB passengers in January 2014. The U-Pass BC started transitioning to Compass early this year. This past week, the Compass Card was made available for West Coast Express customers. TransLink staff were handing out Compass Cards at the Waterfront West Coast Express station this week, so I went to get one on my lunch break. For the past week, I’ve been tapping in and out. For Continue Reading
Fun ways to get from Richmond to Downtown Vancouver on transit
I commute from Richmond to Downtown Vancouver every day for work. Normally I take the Canada Line, which is a quick and reliable way to and from work. As much as I like trains, some days it just seems boring; after all, the majority of the ride is underground. So I tasked myself to find five different ways to get to work (potentially one for each day of the week), if I wanted to take a break from the Canada Line. Let’s assume we’re commuting from Richmond Centre to Waterfront. Obviously we’re not optimizing for travel time. Option 1: 403, Continue Reading
Basic ‘ZFS on Linux’ setup on CentOS 7
Here is a quick guide to getting a plain ZFS partition working on a Linux machine using the “ZFS on Linux” project. I was playing around on a CentOS 7 virtual machine trying to set it up as a replication target for my home FreeNAS box as a backup. If you are unfamiliar with ZFS, it is a filesystem for a storage environment, having features such as data integrity protection and snapshots; I came across it as it is used in FreeNAS. Here is the procedure I used:
VMware ESXi Scratch Space
If you installed VMware ESXi on a USB stick like I did, the “scratch space” (used for storing logs and debug information) is stored on a RAM disk. This takes up 512MB of memory that could otherwise be provisioned to virtual machines. In addition, it does not persist across reboots, which explains why I was never able to find any logs after a crash. Also I was seeing random “No space left on device” errors when I was trying to run the munin monitoring script for ESXi. The solution to this is to simply create a folder on a disk, and Continue Reading
Seven years after Youth Leadership Millennium
Last Saturday I had the opportunity to attend the graduation ceremony of this year’s S.U.C.C.E.S.S. Youth Leadership Millennium (YLM) program. I participated in the same program seven years ago and since then have been volunteering there. Although I have attended many of the graduations as a volunteer over the past years, this was the first time I was invited to speak in front of the audience from my perspective as an alumnus. Writing the speech gave me a chance to reflect over the past seven years and how different aspects of YLM have been part of my life. Much of what Continue Reading