Lecco: Between Lake Como and the Alps

Want to see (and, in winter, ski) the Alps? Get off the train in Lecco and walk across the station parking lot to the bus stand in via Montello, where the #5 bus departs, roughly every hour, for the Funivia (you can buy bus tickets at the newsstands inside or outside the railway station, or on the bus itself, though that will cost more).

Take the #5 all the way up the hill to the end of the line at the Funivia (cable car). Take the cable car to Piani d’Erna:

…where you will find ski facilities, restaurants, hotels, bars, and an unbeatable view of this end of Lake Como (above).

Pizzo d'Erna, Aug 22 2004

Tourist Information for Lecco

Why Do You Go Away?

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”

Terry Pratchett in A Hat Full of Sky: The Continuing Adventures of Tiffany Aching and the Wee Free Men

San Francisco Cable Car

I hadn’t been on the cable cars in more than 20 years, but the California Street line happened to be my most efficient route between two points yesterday. So I learned that you’re allowed to hang off the side, as long as you stand on the runner board and don’t block people getting on and off. Makes for a hair-raising view, but – whee!

New Videos: The Gregg Performance Series

Working for Joyent, I continue to create lots of technical video (~32 hours of edited material to date). Most recent examples, here, are the start of a series I’m doing with Brendan Gregg (author of the DTrace book). In the course of his research to make these videos, Brendan even made some surprising discoveries about tools that everyone thought they knew all about.

Above: Brendan Gregg discusses vmstat, a performance tool used in Solaris-based operating systems, including Solaris 10, SmartOS, IllumOS, that shows the health of the entire system. Part 2 covers all the fields in detail. Part 3 talks about how vmstat works in Joyent’s SmartOS.

^ Brendan talks about the 1, 5 and 15 minute load averages as reported by tools such as uptime and prstat, and then explains in details how they work on Solaris-based Operating Systems including SmartOS, and reveals why they aren’t really 1, 5 and 15 minute averages.

Below: Brendan discusses the key fields of mpstat, another performance tool used in Solaris-based operating systems, including Solaris 10, SmartOS, Illumos, to shows the health of the CPUs on multi-processor systems. Part 2 covers all the fields in detail. Part 3 is a deeper dive into the fields using other tools.

 

Deirdré Straughan on Italy, India, the Internet, the world, and now Australia