Tech

Hello, I’m a sysadmin. I manage servers for a living. About a hundred of them, at last count. One of the biggest challenges in my job is keeping tabs on what’s going on inside my infrastructure. Was the last email sent to dave.mcUserface@example.org delivered? What’s the busiest nginx host in the network? Which vhost gets the most traffic? What was the average load across the entire infrastructure at 04:53, three days ago? ...

Citymapper is a relatively new app that’s been brought to my attention recently and it’s what Android has been craving for a long time. Compared to most other ‘travel planners’ that are out there on the Play Store, this outshines them all by miles. It’s been argued for a long time that app developers really ought to be paying more attention to the UX design of their products, instead of being function-driven. ...

The Nexus 7 is a great piece of kit, but some units suffer from a crippling bug that is very simple to fix but can lead you to bash your face against a hard thing in frustration. If you let the device’s battery run down to absolute zero, it’ll power off like a good little piece of electronics to prevent the lithium polymer battery from exploding. Unfortunately, in some units, this leads to the battery dipping below baseline voltage and results in the device trying to power on when connected to mains power, running “out of battery” and hard shutting down with a terrifying sound of white noise from the speaker and static on the screen. ...

A shipment of these bad boys has just shown up. Enterprise-grade MLC SSDs. Yes, it sounds like a bit of a misnomer, but if Smart Storage are to be believed, their take on ensuring SSD durability means a whole new era in enterprise SSD storage. Up until now, you had essentially two choices when purchasing SSD storage for your storage solution: Buy SLC disks at a considerable premium from the likes of Toshiba or STEC or, god forbid, OCZ. ...

A while ago, I joined this awesome collaborative production company called HitRecord. It’s a little bit different. It’s a collaborative production company. Think open source, Creative Commons and a whole bunch of delightful humans rolled into one package. Anyone can join. Anyone can contribute. As long as it’s your own work. It leads to some incredible collaborations like this: …that arise from someone writing a short story, then someone else drawing a couple of character illustrations, then someone else recording a reading of the story, then someone else recording a live green-screened rendition ...

An utterly fascinating essay by Jean-Baptiste Quéru just caught my attention and as a technology nerd, I find it incredibly awesome. It’s called Dizzying but invisible depth. It appeals to me on a number of different levels, encapsulating a concentric series of black boxes, each more fascinating in its complexity than the last. Dizzying but invisible depth You just went to the Google home page. Simple, isn’t it? What just actually happened? ...

Vihart’s videos on Youtube are an endearing mix of maths, silliness, drawing and, in this case, snakes. I’m especially fond of how unabashedly excited she is about geometry, pi, snakes, numbers and mathematical quirkery. Anyway, SNAKESNAKESNAKESNAKESNAKESNAKE

I have one of these Galaxy S3 things now. The phone is a technological marvel and is honestly one of the greatest pieces of Android kit I’ve used and I’ve gone through: Google G1 HTC Hero HTC Desire Motorola Atrix …so I’ve run the gamut of Android handsets, and have sampled one from pretty much each generation and watched Android develop.There are plenty of reviews on the internet that will go into technical details more than me but here are some important facts. ...

A couple of weeks ago, I installed the Varnish Cache daemon on the server this blog runs on to see if it’d speed it up any. The answer is, emphatically, yes. Images and pages load in seconds, as they’re being served from the static cache. The number of hits to Apache has decreased dramatically, which is fantastic! The tradeoff was that Piwik, my analytics package that produces pretty graphs and charts like these… ...

This was posted on Books of Adam, hitherto-unknown (to me) blog and follows the conversation between Adam, who went to Vegas and his friend Kristin in NY. Sex with sharks gives you Shark AIDS.

I got tired of trawling through forums to find these answers so I collated them for you! My work laptop is a Lenovo ThinkPad x121e. It’s stupidly energy-efficient, quiet and most importantly built like a brick. When I took the bottom cover off to upgrade the RAM to 8GB, I was struck by the build quality and was gratified to see the area around the hard disk and other crucial sections of the mainboard was reinforced with extra structural metalwork. ...

Really, the title should have some sort of clever warning about not upgrading 11.10 to 12.04 when running a Rackspace Cloud Server. I tried this on Saturday (4 days ago) and it’s taken me this long to recover my server. And by recover I mean ‘snatch the files and data off it, then recreate it from scratch running 11.10’. You see, among other things, Ubuntu seems to require a custom kernel to run on Rackspace’s infrastructure. ...

I recently procured one of these beauties after staring enviously at the one we have on our desk for testing at work. It’s a HP ProLiant MicroServer – a bit of a mouthful, but a good piece of kit! It comes with 2GB RAM 250GB HDD Dual-core AMD Turion II N40L processor Gig Ethernet More USB ports than I know what to do with Three more 3.5″ disk bays, which I filled with 2TB Western Digital disks Some flashy lights I bought it after umm-ing and aah-ing about building a replacement for my ageing Windows Home Server file server. ...

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m running a series on ZFS storage systems mostly for the purposes of remembering this stuff and tangentially on the off chance that it’ll help someone too! Today’s documentation entry is concerned with using ZFS’ *send* and *receive* commands to backup datasets over a network. Since installing a new storage server at work, we’ve had an old DL385 G6 chassis with 6 1TB disks kicking about for a good 6 months with a view to converting it to a backup storage device for snapshots and the like. ...

This infographic makes a great argument in favour of using a blogging platform – ideally self-hosted – as a means of sharing content. Having a blog, I’m fully in control of my content – I own the copyright, I can modify, show, hide, publish and delete at will. The “danger” that prospective employers and so on can look you up on Facebook and other social media sites and may refuse to employ you based on what they find there is easily mitigated by the control that you have over your content. ...

These days, the hypocrisy in Hollywood has reached astounding levels as the MPAA, RIAA and other media associations have been beating their breast and shouting to anyone who will listen that illegal filesharing and torrents are killing their profits. However, the truth is that firms like NetFlix are losing more money in paying the MPAA’s extortionate licensing fees than they lose to those pesky Swedish Internet Pirates. Peter Kim of paralegal. ...

I’ve been using ZFS at work for a while, but haven’t really had time to tinker with it to see what makes it tick and use it actively. One of the great benefits that I’ve found to using it is that it sits there and requires no human input 99.9% of the time. It *just works. *Which makes me happy. Today, though, I had to Do Stuff. I’m posting this mostly as a reminder to myself on how to do stuff and on the off chance that Google indexes this page and others of its ilk under ‘ZFS Tutorials’ or ‘ZFS How-To’ or something. ...

SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) has gone dormant for now, thanks to a massive outcry by millions of end-users who are, ironically, far better clued up about how the Interpipes work than the legislators debating the bills and a host of big-name companies, like Facebook, Yahoo, Google and so on. It’s really awesome to see the industry rally together to fight a piece of legislation that is so badly conceived that it would wreck many more lives and sources of revenue than it would save. ...