Writings on various topics (mostly technical) from Oliver Hookins and Angela Collins. We currently reside in Sydney after almost a decade in Berlin, have three kids, and have far too little time to really justify having a blog.
Disclaimer: Most of this post was written in 2014, but it's been languishing in my drafts folder for a long time and I thought I'd push the publish button rather than waiting to perfect it. The original context was that I was attempting to perform integration testing on a client application that needed to handle a variety of different network behaviours - including TCP resets. I mulled over how…
I've been doing a lot more programming in Go recently, mostly because it has awesome concurrency primitives but also because it is generally a pretty amazing language. Unlike other languages which have threads, fibres or event-driven frameworks to achieve good concurrency, Go manages to avoid all of these but still remain readable. You can also reason about its behaviour very effectively due to…
I imagine that there are two groups of people who might read this post:
ps -ef or similar
and pipe into grep processname.ps -C processnameIf you fall into the first category, you fail my interview tests. Perhaps you smugly fall into the second category, but surely you have seen this occur:
…I have a Zotac ZBox which I use an my HTPC, and generally it works pretty well. One thing that is slightly troublesome is the HDMI audio, which seems to rely on having the ALSA backports modules package installed in order for it to work. Remembering this is key, though, since when the package is installed it does not automatically get updated when you upgrade the kernel package.
Most packaging…
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…
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…
I'm a big proponent of getting IPv6 out there, but not everyone shares this opinion. A lot of people are happy to stick with IPv4 and all of the horrid NATing nightmares this introduces despite there being such big wins when using IPv6. Some issues it does introduce though need to be dealt with: