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ZFS on Debian/Wheezy

As storage capacities increase the probability of data corruption increases as does the amount of time required for a fsck on a traditional filesystem. Also the capacity of disks is increasing a lot faster than the contiguous IO speed which means that the RAID rebuild time is increasing, for example my first hard disk was […]

The Retina Display

Last night I played with an Apple Macbook Pro with the new Retina Display (Wikipedia link). Wikipedia cites some controversy about whether the display actually has higher resolution than the human eye can perceive. When wearing glasses my vision is considerably better than average (I have average vision without glasses) and while kneeling in front […]

Links July 2012

The New York Times has an interesting article about “hacker hostels” [1]. I had an idea for similar things after watching a Japanese movie about Tokiwa-sō – a shared apartment for Manga artists which among others inspired the creator of Astro Boy [2].

The TED blog has an interesting interview with William Noel about open […]

Some Proprietary Platform Issues

Android vs iPad

I’m currently in discussions with a client about a potential future project which involves a tablet computer talking to some electronic equipment. The options are an Android tablet and an iPad. One advantage of Android is that it runs on devices of all shapes and sizes, so we can choose a device […]

Breaking SATA Connectors

I’ve just broken my second SATA connector. This isn’t a lot considering the number of hard drives I’ve worked with, but it’s still really annoying as I generally don’t break things.

The problem is that unplugging a SATA cable requires pushing a little clip, this isn’t overly difficult but it unfortunately doesn’t fit well with […]

Postfwd and Local Only Email

Over a year ago when I was considering my first Android phone purchase I setup a test account on my mail server so that I could test email clients on phones and tablets. I used a short password because I didn’t want to type a lot on small screens and because typing a password into […]