General
« Previous EntriesGoing with the flow
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010Several months ago I took a 2nd, part-time, after-hours job doing sysadmin work for a company that I have a close relationship with. A large part of their business infrastructure is a 10-blade Dell Bladecentre system. It’s a mean beast. 20 CPUs, over 40Gb of RAM, and is set up as a VMWare ESXi cluster, [...]
Gaming in the modern age
Friday, February 5th, 2010I’ve been thinking for a while about writing an article pertaining to computer/console games. Originally, I wanted to talk highly about the ‘shift’ in the developers goals of creating mindless, violent First-Person Shooters where you go around killing anything that moves – to that of more ‘thought-inducing’ strategy based learning teaching games. Back when I [...]
Apport integration
Friday, December 25th, 2009So for the last day or two I have been attempting to add support for bug reports from within the application. In the spirit of open-source, I have searched around and found that Apport seems to be heavily used in Ubuntu, and has clean integration with http://bugs.launchpad.net/, which is my chosen bug tracking system for [...]
Sharing sound between Pulseaudio instances in Ubuntu Karmic 9.10
Monday, November 9th, 2009The goal of this post is to respond to a query about how to synchronize soundcards across several Ubuntu-based computers together using pulseaudio. I will present two methods, demonstrating the GUI tools that are available, before showing how to come up with the manually-edited files. In theory, at the end of this post you will [...]
Windows 7 & Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” – Dual Boot Install
Sunday, November 1st, 2009Windows 7 is fresh out in the wild. Following close behind is Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. What better oppertunity to 1. Do a clean install of Windows 7 and 2. Test the dual-booting ‘ease of setup’ inbuilt into Ubuntu. I started with Windows 7. It installed in 15 minutes quite happily. One Criticism: It didn’t [...]
License to Compute
Saturday, August 29th, 2009An Australian criminologist, Russel Smith, thinks that ‘first time’ computer users should have to get a license: “There’s been some discussion in Europe about the use of what’s called a computer drivers licence – where you have a standard set of skills people should learn before they start using computers,” This has been something I’ve [...]
Virtual Machine’s are not the answer to everything
Friday, May 15th, 2009I love Virtual Machines. Consolidating servers, saving space, saving electricity, saving emissions, saving the world. There are dozens of virtualisation products at the server end of the market. SuSE and Novell have one, there’s the venerable VMWare ESX, Microsoft Virtual PC, HP and Dell even ship servers with VMWare ESXi HyperVisor installed on a flash [...]
The hip bone has millions of transistors in it
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009Health practitioners learn anatomy; IT practitioners learn computer architecture This was part of the opening line that my Computer Systems lecturer began with. Too many times people don’t understand the problems they’re having, or experiencing. They may see the symptoms, but can’t actually work out what is the cause of them. Back when I worked [...]
The world gone crazy
Monday, March 30th, 2009This is a re-post from my personal blog. I was reading Nadine’s blog this morning, and just after she says the word that most men dread *cough*tampon*cough*, she links to a brand named called Moxie. So, out of morbid curiosity (and I’m bored, and I’ve never heard of that brand before, which in itself is [...]
FilePhile: Transfer Files between friends
Friday, December 19th, 2008A slight deviation from the idea of “P2P”, this utility that runs on all platforms (Win/*nix/Mac), allows for users to share files with one another of any size and type. It also allows you to control the ammount of bandwidth being used, so that you don’t kill something (like your internet) in the process. FilePhil [...]
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