So recently my router decided it didn’t want to whir its fans anymore and consequently gave up on life. It’s a dual CPU machine and both CPU fans had managed to wedge. After fixing them and getting things running again I heard klunking noises coming from the front of the case; one of the disks in the mirror had failed. …
I’ve always been fascinated by computer generated art, in particular the landscape work. Over the past few years they seem to be getting so good that it’s often hard to tell the difference between them and real scenery photographs. The main site I visit is digitalblasphemy.com, and I pay the small subscription fee to get access to the latest images. …
I recently found a neat little tool whilst looking for applications that link against libstatgrab. It’s called bwm-ng and is written by a guy called Volker Gropp. The tool itself isn’t anything revolutionary (it’s influenced by the original bwm tool), it’s just a handy way of displaying current bandwidth usage across multiple interfaces. This screenshot shows bwm-ng in action on my FreeBSD router. It has …
Over the past year or so the space usage on our research and web filesystems has pretty much doubled to the point where we’re dangerously close to running out of space. There’s currently about 1TiB of filestore available of which less than 10% remains unused. Teaching filestore, however, has barely grown at all during the last year. I attribute this …
At some point towards the end of last week I had the idea of writing a blog. I spent a while looking around for a decent online blogging tool, and, as I suspect most people do, I landed on blogger.com. It looked fairly swish, and had plenty of useful features. Except one. Where is the support for categories? So, moving …
I’ve been putting off upgrading my remotely hosted server from FreeBSD 5.2.1 for a while now, but after I started getting random problems I decided I had to move forward. To start with there were a few reasons putting me off doing the upgrade: From version 5.3 of FreeBSD vinum was pretty much broken, so I’d need to switch to …
So, yet another blog. Given that there are more bloggers than blog readers one might have thought another blog would be largely pointless. They’re probably right. However, my intention is not to write an uninteresting blog about what I saw on television last night, what colour the sky is on my planet, or whether I prefer my toast with or …