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Blogroll – Bad Social Networking

A common feature in blog software is a Blogroll, this is a list of links to blogs which are associated in some way with the blog in question – most commonly it’s a list of blogs run by friends of the blogger in question.

Now in the case of friends with very similar interests (IE […]

Planet Debian Piracy

The site http://maxfeed.ath.cx/ is copying the entire Planet Debian feed for the purpose of splogging. I’ve sent one DMCA take-down notice for one of my pages (hopefully they will go through and remove all pages that were illegally copied from my feed). Other people who have non-commercial use licenses for their blog feeds may want […]

The Meaning of Godwin’s Law

A widely cited unofficial rule on the Internet is known as Godwin's Law [1]. In it’s original form this rule states that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one“. Mike Godwin noted that “overuse of Nazi and Hitler comparisons should be avoided, because it robs […]

New Bonnie++ Releases

Today I released new versions of my Bonnie++ [1] benchmark. The main new feature (in both the stable 1.03b version and the experimental 1.93d version) is the ability of zcav to write to devices. The feature in question was originally written at the request of some people who had strange performance results when testing SATA […]

Vista ReadyBoostReady – Good for Linux?

At the moment it seems that about half the USB flash devices on sale are listed as “Vista ReadyBoost Ready“. I recently bought an 8G USB device that I returned because it could only sustain 4MB/s writes (not much fun for backing up 4G+ of data). So I’ve been wondering whether I should get a […]

Apprentices

Shintaro wrote an interesting post about Rakugo (a form of story-telling) and Mottainai (a particular form of gratitude that is now becoming an English word in reference to environmentalism) [1]. My definitions of the two words are poor, I encourage interested readers to read Shintaro’s post for the links.

Recently I had been considering which […]

Creepy Social Networking

Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article about social networking [1]. One of his points is “Imagine how creepy it would be to wander into a co-worker’s cubicle and discover the wall covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by “friend” and “foe,” with the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine […]

Links November 2007

The web site www.CheatNeutral.com offers cheaters the possibility of paying single or monogamous people to offset their cheating. It’s an interesting spin on the carbon trading schemes that are on offer.

www.greenmaven.com – a Google search site for Green related information. www.greenerbuildings.com – information on designing buildings to be “Green”.

Binary adding machine using marbles […]

Pentium-3 vs Pentium-4

I recently was giving away some old P3 and P4 machines and was surprised by the level of interest in P4 machines. As you can see from my page on computer power use [1] the power use from a P4 system is significantly greater than that of a P3. The conventional wisdom is that the […]

Air Filtering for Servers

Serious server rooms have large (and expensive) air-conditioning and filtering systems. Most “server rooms” however are not like that, often it’s just some space in a store-room, sometimes near printers (which are a source of air pollution [1]).

The servers that are stored in serious server rooms have air filters as a standard feature. For […]