http://www.smop.co.uk/blog Programming? Wed, 20 Aug 2008 21:32:58 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en So, how was Linuxworld? Great! I went as part of the Opsview team and met lots of potential new customers ranging from very small to very large. Opsview is a monitoring system for networks, servers and applications. Based on Nagios, it's substantially better. The conference went very well, we had ... http://www.smop.co.uk/blog/index.php/2008/08/20/linuxworld-san-francisco-2008/ On Friday I _finally_ picked up my new toy and I'm loving riding it. If only the weather in this country was a little better than it's been recently. Leaning into corners rather than just going around them is much more fun, you also feel much more connected with the ... http://www.smop.co.uk/blog/index.php/2008/08/20/new-toy/ Well I've had enough of Xen - I've recently moved a disk from hdd to hdc and since I referred to it in a xen domain, when I tried to start that domain, it hung for several minutes (other domains also seemed to stop responding for a while) and then ... http://www.smop.co.uk/blog/index.php/2008/08/16/dropping-xen/ At the end of this week I'm off to [http://www.linuxworldexpo.com/live/12/ LinuxWorld Expo] in San Francisco. I'll be there as we are now partners of [http://altinity.com Altinity]. Altinity make [http://opsview.org Opsview] - which is a customised Nagios. In particular it is much easier to setup and administer - there are ... http://www.smop.co.uk/blog/index.php/2008/07/27/linuxworld-expo-san-francisco/ I was sad to see that [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Pausch Randy Pausch] has [http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Story?id=4614281&page=1 died]. If you've not seen it, you really should watch [http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/innovation/2007/fall/words-to-live-by.shtml the last lecture]. Even if you are (like me) someone who hates "go get them" videos, just bear with this one, even if you think it's ... http://www.smop.co.uk/blog/index.php/2008/07/25/the-last-lecture/ Occasionally we've had this during a tomcat restart at a customer site. After a little while we rebooted. Next time it occurred on a test platform and I could check shared memory (using ipcs and ipcrm commands), all files (temporary files etc). Then I restorted to "strace" which allowed ... http://www.smop.co.uk/blog/index.php/2008/07/16/java-out-of-swap-space-rubbish/ [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7492573.stm pot] - "The PM said "unnecessary" purchases were contributing to price rises". [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7493482.stm kettle] - "The UK is to slow its adoption of biofuels amid fears they raise food prices and harm the environment". As has been known for quite some time that biofuels in their present form are bad: * ... http://www.smop.co.uk/blog/index.php/2008/07/07/pot-kettle/ That's "passed" with an "a", not an "i". On Thursday I passed by DAS Motorbike test. I'm now able to ride any motorbike I like (after my CBT test last year I could ride anything up to 125cc). Many, many thanks to Steve and Tim at [http://www.bike2bike.net Bike2Bike] for ... http://www.smop.co.uk/blog/index.php/2008/07/06/passed/ I've blogged about [http://www.last.fm last.fm] before, but it's so good it's worth mentioning again. It's changed a fair bit since I last used it, the client has got better (it's also as simple as "apt-get install lastfm" in Ubuntu and Debian for us Linux users). A recap - you ... http://www.smop.co.uk/blog/index.php/2008/07/01/lastfm-3/ Well it looks like it's time to plan a replacement server. My trusty Ideq Biostar which I've had since 2004/2005 is still fine, however there are some bugs for which I need to upgrade the kernel and it's stuck at 2.6.18 since Xen hasn't been ported to a newer ... http://www.smop.co.uk/blog/index.php/2008/06/24/bye-bye-xen/