A simple matter of…

First of all I should make it clear - I loathe adverts and advertising. When I go and buy something I like to make an informed decision, advertising is rarely aimed at providing this. Just “we are cool”, “nothing is more effective” or just complete abuse of science and statistics (which IMO should [...]

I’ve been doing a bit of interviewing recently and generally I’ve been very unimpressed with the candidates. I’ve seen CVs so poorly written (or retyped by agencies) that I’d personally dismiss them there and then (this is _after_ someone else has already weeded out the worst culprits). The biggest problem by far though [...]

Whilst at work today I had a cunning plan, have a look at FuseFS and maybe implement a “diff” filesystem. I was originally thinking of rsync diffs (see rsync’s batch mode), but xdelta is probably an easier first fit (and would possibly work better).
There’s even Ruby bindings for FuseFS so I could [...]

Earlier today I was driving towards some traffic lights when they changed from red to green. This was very good, but made me have an idea - countdowns for traffic lights. It would be good to have some idea of how long you have to wait - giving you time to do something else [...]

I”m talking the 19″ wide variety that you put servers etc in. They seem to vary greatly in quality - unfortunately some customers seem to get really cheap and nasty ones.
First of all, some comments. There are two types of rack - comms rack and server racks. Comms rack are for network [...]

Well I’m sure you have all noticed spammers are getting more desperate. Anyone who buys stuff from people sending emails with such mangle text or random phrases is asking to be ripped off.
In fact, as reported by information week, 11% of people admitted to buying things from spam, with 9% ripped off. Shame [...]

This is another one for the todo list. A program which does bandwidth limiting of anything run after it.
Something like “limit -d 25K aptitude upgrade” would limit aptitude to a total download speed of 25KB/s.
How to implement this? Good question, dunno if it’s possible to use the QoS stuff in linux, but using LD_PRELOAD [...]

Well during the course of the day I needed to go as far as calculating the amount of power that a rack may draw. I wouldn’t be suprised if a rack of disks pulls more current than this, but hey, it’s a start. Take a pSeries 570 - 4U, 1400W max. So [...]

Ah, a lovely weekend visiting friends (and their children). Also went swimming for the first time in ages in Tina and Roy’s lovely swimming pool (indoor and heated). Lots of fun had by all and after Rob swam four lengths underwater (I could only manage two) I do believe I need to get [...]

Well today I finally order a digital camera. For the upcoming holiday I didn”t think the Canon EOS 600 SLR was really that suitable. The lovely Canon IXUS 700 should do nicely.
Thought for the day (an old thought this one). People get worried about computer viruses, but really, they cause _very_ little [...]