I’ve known about Google Bookmarks for a while, but until recently couldn’t really see how they’d be useful to me. A single set of bookmarks on the web is great, but if you have to go to a webpage to find them it rapidly becomes too much effort. Compare this to a single click within your browser’s menu. My Internet …
I’ve been playing a game called Entropia Universe (previously Project Entropia) recently, and I’m finding it quite addictive. It’s much like other MMORPGs at a first glance, but it boasts a “Real Cash Economy”. This means that there’s a direct exchange rate (fixed to the US dollar) and you can exchange money to and from the game currency just like you …
We’ve recently moved to having our filestore NFS exported from a cluster. This provides almost complete resilience from hardware failures, and moves us away from depending on individual end-user systems with locally attached filestore. Given the inherent insecurities with NFS we opted to use IPsec authentication (but not encryption) between the hosts involved. The NFS server only accepts connections from …
I’d finally finished migrating everything off the old myrtle disk arrays, so I was feeling quite pleased. I’d just unplugged the last array from myrtle and plugged it in to the test machine for wiping. Then I tried to log in to the machine room SunRay, but strangely it didn’t work. I checked the console logs for myrtle and was surprised …
The Computer Science department got it’s new website (more of a re-skin, actually) yesterday, so I decided it was about time to update my staff page. I’ve brought it in-line with the new look of the main website, although it doesn’t completely follow the standard templates. It’s also XHTML 1.1 valid, which makes the pedantic side of me feel much better. There’s …
A few days ago one of our users reported that they couldn’t change their password. The error coming out of the passwd command was confusing in itself – it said ‘bad old password’, or similar, which turns out to be a bug in our wrapper script. After some investigation we discovered that neither kadmin or kpasswd worked: tdb [~] % …
I’ve been using the Flash Car Wash to wash my car for the past year. It’s a fantastic device, and has really good results. Not only does it leave my car shining without blotchy water marks, but it removes the need to use a bucket at all. There’s only one flaw with it though – it requires a hosepipe. Here …
I’ve done a bit of driving back and forth across the country recently, and I’ve seen quite a few places go over the £1 per litre mark. Admittedly they were the more expensive places anyway such as motorway service areas. Fortunately I’m not a heavy user of petrol, but it still frustrates me that something like 70% of the cost …
So after copying everyone off the limping T3 arrays I arranged for a Sun engineer to return to site to fix it properly. Sun Dispatch had a bit of a moan because I’d had the parts for too long, but they realised it’d make most sense to keep the parts on site rather than collect them and then send them …