Visualising pSeries temperature data

I've yet another frantically busy week, with my time split between my own work and acting as consulting unix guru to others. Of my own projects, the most interesting has involved an attempt to monitor the temperatures of the p575s in real time. The actual data capture isn't too complicated and simply involves logging into each HMC in turn and:

1. running lssycfg to obtain a list of the managed frames;
2. running lshwinfo against each frame to obtain the temperatures of each node in the frame.

The data from lshwinfo can then be massaged into an appropriate form and dumped out to a file for further analysis.

I decided to use the excellent LiveGraph utility to visualise the data in real time. LiveGraph accepts data in a pseudo-CSV form — something that makes it trivial to import the data into Excel for post-processing and analysis — and displays the results in a constantly updating chart window that can be configured to show either the entire data file or just the tail data.

My only minor quibble with it as a tool is that it doesn't seem to be possible to open a particular data source from the command line — something that matters to me because I want to package the whole thing up so that it can be launched with a single command that frees the end user from having to know anything about the underlying data source. Perhaps, if I have time next week, I'll investigate the API in more detail to see if I can't use that to solve the problem.

The Murder Room

Another day and another novel. This time it's P.D. James' The Murder Room, which has the distinction of being set in Hampstead, one of my old stamping grounds.

After a chance meeting with Conrad Ackroyd, Adam Dalgliesh finds himself touring the small, family run Dupayne museum and, at Ackroyd's insistence, visiting the murder room with its relics of grisly cases from the interwar years. Thus, when the burnt body of Dr Neville Dupayne is found in his car in a garage at the museum and the chance words of stranger leaving the scene mirror those of the murderer Alfred Arthur Rouse, Dalgliesh finds himself handily familiar with some of the background details.

Investigating the murder, Dalgliesh and his team — Kate Miskin, Piers Tarrant and new boy Francis Benton-Smith — quickly home in on the tensions behind the scenes at the museum. The three Dupayne siblings, Caroline, Neville and Marcus, seem to have been at odds over the future of the collection and the renewal of the rental contract for the buildings. Tally Clutton, the housekeeper, is concerned about the loss of her home; the ferociously efficient Muriel Godby fears the loss of the only job that has given her any sense of happiness; while the terminally ill curator, James Calder-Hale, worries that closure will divert his waning strength away from his thesis on the history of the inter-war years. Throw in a sullen garden boy, a difficult daughter, a mysterious motorist and someone with a rather too keen interest in some of the paintings, and the police find themselves with a substantial set of suspects.

The case is muddied still further when a second body is found in a position which mirrors yet another of the murders exhibited in the murder room. Could it be that the killer is a crazed outsider and not a member of the museum staff after all?

I rather enjoyed The Murder Room, but I think that I ultimately prefer some of the other mysteries in the series. I didn't buy into some of the characters — to disconnected from reality to believe that they really lived in modern London — I thought that the character of the museum was evoked rather well. I liked the contradiction of a museum that doesn't really want to welcome visitors — least of all hoi polloi — and doesn't see much reason to change. I also thought it provided an excellent setting for moments of real gothic horror, particularly towards the end, after the second murder has been discovered.