Catching the tail of summer in Mammoth – 2

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With the previous day’s hike and one night sleep, I felt I am well adjusted to the altitude. Today we planned to go a bigger hike.

We came to the same trail head again. Today we got up much earlier and got a closer parking spot, but still surprised to see so many early birds took the closest parking already.

[singlepic id=364 w=320 h=240 float=left]The trail forks not far from the trail head and keeps going up quickly. Then we stood way beyond the lakes and had a great view of them which we past by yesterday. Ah, the names are really after the shapes. Box lake has a square shape. Here you see the Heart lake. The shape is just like a heart!

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Our turn around spot was Mono pass which is at 12,000 feet elevation, the ground is rocky and sandy, almost no plants growing, the scenary is more like moon surface.

The cloud atlas –an interesting movie

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Finished movie “the cloud atlas” this weekend. It was almost 3 hours long, contains 6 sub stories crossing different area and time. i was completely lost in the first hour since scenes switch fast between the 6 stories. But it still remain interesting to me and i didn’t not want to stop.
Many famous actors are in this movie. Like Tom Hanks. He has multiple roles in there, some are greedy and evil, some are with great heart willing to help others. It must be a interesting movie for him to play.
There are still many unanswered questions in me even after finishing watching it. It’s a complicated story and the underlying thoughts is deep too. Does it want to say what ever we do, it will affect others and.people in the future or it is taking about afterlife, reborn. Or maybe both.

Anyway it is a very interesting and good movie.

Catching the tail of summer in mammoth – 1

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[singlepic id=357 w=320 h=240 float=left]We finally decided to book the lodge on Thursday since the Yosemite is having a massive wild fire. When we arrived last night, the air quality was not bad.

We decided to go the little lake for the first day hike. The trail head is at mosquito flat, at rock creek where we stayed at the ledge a few years ago.

Soon I noticed the little lake area is very popular for hikers, backpackers. Not only the parking next to the trail head was completely full, but also the road sides were parked with cars. Finally we found a parking spot 2 miles away from the tail head.

The trail head locates as 10000ft high, start from Moskito flat at Rock creek. But the trail itself is pretty easy, no much up-downs, which is good for families with little kids. Also good for adjusting to the altitude before a bigger hike in this area.

[singlepic id=367 w=320 h=240 float=left]This trail might be the most beautiful one I’ve ever hiked in California. The view is gorgeous. The trail is next to a lovely creek with many beautiful lakes around. The meadow has some golden color and reminds me the scenary of yellow stone.

 

 

[singlepic id=371 w=320 h=240 float=left]The last photo is one of the panorama pictures taken with my iphone. Pretty awesome technology!

 

 

 

[singlepic id=370 w=320 h=240 float=left] On the way back I found some leaves turning into golder color already.

Check Linux server status

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vmstat, iostat, top…etc are useful to check server load, I/O or memory usage.

iostat
r/s and w/s
the number of read and write requests sent to the device per second
await
the number of requests waiting in the device’s queue
svctm
the number of miliseconds spent servicing requests, from beginning to end
util
the percentage of the device utilization

vmstat
procs
r: processes are waiting for the CPU time
b: processes are in sleep (means they are waiting for I/O)
io
bi/bo: how many blocks reading in/out the device
system
in: number of interrupts per second
cs: context switches per second

Here are some good sites showing how to use them

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-disk-performance-monitoring-howto.html
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/how-do-i-find-out-linux-cpu-utilization.html
http://www.linuxforums.org/articles/using-top-more-efficiently_89.html
http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2011/02/09/using-linux-top-to-troubleshoot-multi-core-scalability-issues-at-dreamworks-animation/

Good article about I/O scheduler
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6931

Summer in Germany – 8 – Salzburg

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Salzburg means castle of salt. It was famous for its salt in the history.
It is such a popular place for tourists and we just needed to follow all the tourists groups to all the famous spots. We soon found out why it’s so attractive to the tourists.

[singlepic id=197 w=320 h=240 float=left] Mirabell garden palace. Baroque style garden. It was originally built by a archbishop for his mistress who gave birth to many of his children ( which is not allowed in Catholic). Eventually he was arrested and died in the prison.

Salzburg is also hometown of several world famous musicians. Such as Mozart. His birth house is this yellow building in the picture. It’s amazing to see such old building still standing there.
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To be continued….