 amazing to hear that! I'm sure you should be really happy to have your artwork bought by Jeff Corwin!
really nice find there!
nice finds there! I just can never find such huge specimens in sg
Very cool! :)
Thanks Calvin and Adrielle!
You got some interesting finds! I'd love to photograph critters like these!
Thanks Nature Rambles!The rod-shaped Myxococcus xanthus cells move with defined leading and lagging cell poles on surfaces. Occasionally, cells undergo reversals, which correspond to an inversion of the leading-lagging polarity axis. Reversals depend on relocalization between the poles of three polarly localized proteins that regulate polarity, i.e. the Ras-like GTPase MglA, its cognate GAP MglB, and the response regulator RomR. To understand how these three proteins localize dynamically to the cell poles, we performed a phylogenomic analysis and identified two uncharacterized proteins, RomX and RomY, that co-occur with RomR. Here, we report on the function of RomX and RomY in motility.This is a write-up on using vdbench. In this blog we will cover setting up vdbench on an Ubuntu server 14.04.5 LTS. Most of this information can be found in the vdbench guide on Oracle’s website.
First a few things you should know.
Note: Only needed if using a central server to collect all the data, single server testing ssh is not needed.
Read the vdbench guide to understand all of the switches and what they are used for. We will cover a few in this blog but for all of the needed switches and values please see the guide.
Now this is the easy part. Google vdbench download. This will pull a few links to Oracles website. Once on the site you’ll need a username and password to download the software. It is free just need an account to accept the licensing and to access the documentation and software that is stored in a zip file.
Once you’ve downloaded the zip file and documentation you’ll want to copy it to the server that you will be using, either a single server or a master server. To do this you’ll need an application like MobaXterm that combines the ssh session with TFTP and SCP capabilities to drag and drop files from your desktop to the server that we’ll be using. If using a MAC, there are several ways to go about copying files to a Linux server. I will not cover these in detail just know you will need to be able to perform these functions to move your downloads over to the server that we will be working with.
Note: If you load the desktop on the Ubuntu server you can use the browser to download this or if you are familiar with get/put commands you can do this from the CLI. Again go with what you are comfortable with as there are many way to go about doing this.
Now that you have the zip file downloaded you’ll want to extract it prior to moving it onto the Linux server unless you’re comfortable using gzip and gunzip commands then by all means use what you are comfortable with. Once copied over to the worker or master you may and I stress may need to run chmod to run the./vdbench app.
Once installed go to the directory you have the unzipped files in and run./vdbench -t this will run a test to make sure the tool is running as it should. This runs a single local worker.
Now that the test is finished let’s take a look at the output of the test.
For documentation, see ‘vdbench.pdf’.
12:19:52.479 All sequential workloads on all slaves are done.
12:19:52.479 This triggers end of run inspite of possibly some non-sequential workloads that are still running.
This information is important as it will tell you where the output files are stored and this is the meat of what we are looking for. When we extract the data and start analyzing the data this is where we will get said data from.
First thing we want to look for is output folder from vdbench just like the below example.
From here you can copy and past the data into Excel. Remove the top lines from the copy and past leaving only the header then highlight column a where you pasted the data. In the menu click data and select Text to Columns. See example below.
I keep the defaults and do not import the date column. This makes it easier to chart and provide customer graphs for people to view. Once you have done this you will see something that looks like.
No let’s setup a graph. First highlight the column that we want to see in the graph. In my example I will use MB/sec. Once highlighted click insert in the menu bar at the top of the Excel page. I typically click Recommended Charts that looks like the following.
From here select the chart that best works for you to review all the information graphically. When you are done you should have something that looks like the following.
This concludes my review of installing vdbench on Ubuntu 14.04 and extracting data. You can always get much more detailed information from the vdbench guide on Oracle’s website.
They might have been acceptable back in the anything-goes ’70s but Frank Turner reckons he can’t just “rock up” to fire callouts in his jandals and shorts any more. And certainly not since becoming deputy chief of the Raglan Volunteer Fire Brigade five or six years ago.
“You’ve got to be in full kit now, but in the old days there wasn’t much gear,” he laughs.
The stricter dress code’s just one change the born-and-bred local has seen since first volunteering for the Raglan fire service exactly 40 years and one week ago today.
Despite the decades however – and being the brigade’s longest-serving member – Frank insists it feels like yesterday he started out.
But there’ve been plenty of changes over the years all the same.
Volunteers these days have two sets of gear, unlike yesteryear, he adds – one for accidents and scrub fires, the other for all fire callouts except “the scrubbies”.
Firefighters of old, Frank reveals, wore pretty much only plastic leggings whereas they’re kitted out these days in everything from woollen bunker coats and overtrousers to heavy-duty boots and ‘flash hoods’ for neck protection.
He can remember way back looking down and feeling a bit of a hot leg through one of those plastic leggings which, ironically, had itself caught fire.
But apart from that Frank’s suffered nothing much more serious over the years, other than the pain of trying to get back to sleep after middle-of-the-night callouts. It’s the adrenalin rush that keeps you awake, he explains, “and it’s always been the same from day one”.
The biggest fire the Raglan brigade’s fought during Frank’s time, he recalls, was the spectacular early morning wharf blaze five years ago. Two years previously the brigade was called out to its biggest scrub fire at Wainui Reserve, with hot spots flaring up over an entire weekend.
Inevitably he’s also attended some pretty serious road accidents this side of the divvy, but against that there have been lighter moments too.
Frank reckons the funniest callout he’s experienced was to a Dalmatian – coincidentally a breed often adopted as firehouse or brigade mascots – which they had to dig out of the sand-dunes at Kopua campground. The dog had been looking for rabbits when the sand caved in, burying it about one-and-a-half metres underground.
Then there was the cockatiel – high in one of Bow Street’s iconic Phoenix palms – that had to be hosed down. “They don’t like water,” Frank explains.
Frank rates the camaraderie of fellow fire-fighters as one of the best parts of the job. There have always been 24 volunteers in the brigade, including women in recent times. The sense of “giving something back to the community” has also played a part.
Frank – who runs his car painting business these days from his Wainui Road home just south of the Ngarunui Beach turnoff – has also both refereed and coached local rugby for 30-odd years.
That’s no small community commitment all-up considering there are more than 100 brigade callouts annually now compared with 20-odd back in the mid ’70s.
With so many callouts the early brigade’s single-cab fire truck – which carried two people inside and up to half a dozen others hanging on the back – has made way now for two double cabs.
The aim is to get the first truck away within four minutes of the callout, says Frank – although he’s usually on the second one because he lives and works further from the fire station than other volunteers, who scurry from all directions of the town centre when that siren sounds.
Frank’s keen to stay on as a member of the brigade yet another decade – to get a second gold star to match his first marking 25 years’ service – and he’s looking forward to taking his 10-month-old grandson down to the station one day when he can appreciate it.
He will be officially acknowledged for his “huge commitment” at Raglan Brigade’s honours night in November, says local fire chief Kevin Holmes.
vehicle battery testing in Japan