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Letter Frequency in Account Names

It’s a common practice when hosting email or web space for large numbers of users to group the accounts by the first letter. This is due to performance problems on some filesystems with large directories and due to the fact that often a 16bit signed integer is used for the hard link count so that […]

The Cost of Owning a Car

There has been a lot of talk recently about the cost of petrol, Colin Charles is one of the few people to consider the issue of wages in this discussion [1]. Unfortunately almost no-one seems to consider the overall cost of running a vehicle.

While I can’t get the figures for Malaysia (I expect Colin […]

What is Appropriate Advertising?

Colin Charles writes about a woman who is selling advertising space on herself [1]. Like Colin I haven’t bought a t-shirt in about 9 years (apart from some Cafepress ones I designed myself). So it seems that the price for getting some significant advertising at a computer conference is to buy a few hundred t-shirts […]

I’m Skeptical about Robotic Nanotech

There has been a lot of fear-mongering about nanotech. The idea is that little robots will eat people (or maybe eat things that we depend on such as essential food crops). It’s unfortunate that fear-mongering has replaced thought and there seems to have been little serious discussion about the issues.

If (as some people believe) […]

Wyndham Resorts is a Persistent Spammer

Over the last week I have received five phone calls from Wyndham Resorts asking if I would like to be surveyed. Every time I tell them that I am not going to do their survey, on all but one call I had to repeatedly state that I would not do the survey for more than […]

ECC RAM is more useful than RAID

A common myth in the computer industry seems to be that ECC (Error Correcting Code – a Hamming Code [0]) RAM is only a server feature.

The difference between a server and a desktop machine (in terms of utility) is that a server performs tasks for many people while a desktop machine only performs tasks […]

Perpetual Motion

It seems that many blog posts related to fuel use (such as my post from yesterday about record oil prices [1]) are getting adverts about perpetual motion [2]. Note that the common usage of the term “Perpetual Motion” does not actually require something to move. A battery that gives out electricity forever would be regarded […]

Record Oil Prices

MarketWatch reports that oil prices had the biggest daily gain on record, going up $11 in one day.

They claim that this is due to an impending Israeli attack on Iran and a weak US economy. $150 per barrel is the price that they predict for the 4th of July. That’s an interesting choice of […]

SE Linux Support in GPG

In May 2002 I had an idea for securing access to GNUPG [1]. What I did was to write SE Linux policy to only permit the gpg program to access the secret key (and other files in ~/.gnupg). This meant that the most trivial ways of stealing the secret key would be prevented. However an […]

I Just Joined SAGE

I’ve just joined SAGE AU – the System Administrators Guild of Australia [1] .

I’ve known about SAGE for a long time, in 2006 I presented a paper at their conference [2] (here is the paper [3] – there are still some outstanding issues from that one, I’ll have to revisit it).

They have been […]