- ZBOXXXXXXX
Posted by Oliver on the 9th of October, 2010 in category Tech
If you've been following my excessively techy posts you will be aware
that my personal notebook computer has been on the verge of utter
failure for some time now. It has come to the point where I can no
longer tolerate holding a finger in the "magic" spot to keep the
screen alive long enough to update my Facebook status or other
meaningless activities, and standing up in front of the TV with the…
- oh the places you will go...
Posted by Angela on the 28th of September, 2010 in category Germany
Recently Oliver and I met up with some friends who had exciting news to
share. After years of corporate success in their various fields, (one
friend is a solicitor, and the other is a software developer) they have
decided to pack up their lives in Amsterdam where they are living -
quit their respective jobs, and go travelling around Europe, living in
their camper-van for the next 18 months! To me…
- Winter's on its way
Posted by Oliver on the 28th of September, 2010 in category Germany
This week has definitely been colder so far than last week, noticeably
so. We're getting down to ranges of something like 8 - 16 degrees
Celsius, with gusty winds and rain. Of course, I love this kind of
weather but it does necessitate certain precautions. Unfortunately I
caught a cold last week from some scoundrel at the office and had to
take three days off work, but fortunately I was more or…
- Of sparse files and men
Posted by Oliver on the 24th of September, 2010 in category Tech
One of my favourite interview questions is about sparse files. I'm
constantly surprised at how few people know about them, especially in
this day when thin-provisioning of storage is so pervasive you can run
into it just about anywhere. Most commonly though, candidates will
respond back with something to the effect of "a file with holes in it"
which is more or less correct. I think out of everyone…
- Running on borrowed time
Posted by Oliver on the 16th of September, 2010 in category Tech
No, I'm not dying, but perhaps my treasured notebook computer is. I've
been using my trusty Lenovo Z61t for longer than I can accurately
remember but I assume it must be about 5 years now. In that time the DVD
drive has stopped burning DVDs, the trackpad has completely stopped
working, the pointing stick flakes out regularly (prompting me to write
a script which restarts the driver when problems…
- Dangers of spanning tree interoperation
Posted by Oliver on the 12th of September, 2010 in category Tech
A couple of months ago we ran into a minor issue at work when running
Cisco and HP switches together. Naturally we have redundant links in
place for all networking equipment so spanning tree of some sort must be
used. In theory, any equipment can work together with spanning tree but
the reality is not exactly this utopian: Cisco supports natively their proprietary protocols PVST, PVST+,
PVRST and…
- I/O redirection "optimizations"
Posted by Oliver on the 12th of September, 2010 in category Tech
Quite a while back, I had to migrate a few terabytes of data from one
machine to another. Not that special a task, and certainly a few
terabytes is not that much but at the time it was a reasonable amount
and even over 1Gbps network it can take some time. Fortunately it was
not time critical and I could take the server in question down for a
while to facilitate the migration. The data in question…
- the women of Berlin....
Posted by Angela on the 12th of September, 2010 in category Thoughts
Daily I have German women of all a ages coming up to me or stopping me
on the street to comment about Kai. I carry Kai in a sling wherever I
go, so he can face out as we explore Berlin. some days I have woman
coming up to look at Kai, exclaiming he is "Sehr Suß" (very sweet),
oh, kleines Fuß! ( little foot), or asking questions - Wie alt? ( how
old?), Jungen oder Mädchen? ( girl or boy), is it…
- MySQL talk @ LCA08
Posted by Oliver on the 12th of September, 2010 in category Tech
Here are some of the files from my MySQL talk at Linux Conf AU 2008,
where I presented material on replicating, high-availability,
load-balanced MySQL. Slides - OpenOffice Presentation
format Slides - PDF
format Video - OGG
format Enjoy!
- Exact determination of Linux process memory usage
Posted by Oliver on the 12th of September, 2010 in category Tech
While I was still working for Anchor Systems, we had a client who was
launching a fairly large website and as part of the gradual ramp-up to
delivery we needed to perform some capacity tuning of the
web/application servers. The application stack was basically Perl via
mod_perl on Apache (not threaded) so we had to determine the memory
footprint of the application and make a determination of how…