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More About the Thinkpad X301

Last month I blogged about the Thinkpad X301 I got from a rubbish pile [1]. One thing I didn’t realise when writing that post is that the X301 doesn’t have the keyboard light that the T420 has. With the T420 I could press the bottom left (FN) and top right (PgUp from memory) keys on […]

Designing Shared Cars

Almost 10 years ago I blogged about car sharing companies in Melbourne [1]. Since that time the use of such services appears to have slowly grown (judging by the slow growth in the reserved parking spots for such cars). This isn’t the sudden growth that public transport advocates and the operators of those companies hoped […]

Huawei Mate9

Warranty Etc

I recently got a Huawei Mate 9 phone. My previous phone was a Nexus 6P that died shortly before it’s one year warranty ran out. As there have apparently been many Nexus 6P phones dying there are no stocks of replacements so Kogan (the company I bought the phone from) offered me a […]

Thinkpad X301

Another Broken Thinkpad

A few months ago I wrote a post about “Observing Reliability” [1] regarding my Thinkpad T420. I noted that the T420 had been running for almost 4 years which was a good run, and therefore the failed DVD drive didn’t convince me that Thinkpads have quality problems.

Since that time the plastic […]

Work Stuff

Does anyone know of a Linux support company that provides 24*7 support to Ruby and PHP applications? I have a client that is looking for such a company.

Also I’m looking for more consulting work. If anyone knows of an organisation that needs some SE Linux consulting, or support for any of the FOSS software […]

Logic of Zombies

Most zombie movies feature shuffling hordes which prefer to eat brains but also generally eat any human flesh available. Because in most movies (pretty much everything but the 28 Days Later series [1]) zombies move slowly they rely on flocking to be dangerous.

Generally the main way of killing zombies is severe head injury, so […]

Anarchy in the Office

Some of the best examples I’ve seen of anarchy working have been in corporate environments. This doesn’t mean that they were perfect or even as good as a theoretical system in which a competent manager controlled everything, but they often worked reasonably well.

In a well functioning team members will encourage others to do their […]

Process Monitoring

Since forking the Mon project to etbemon [1] I’ve been spending a lot of time working on the monitor scripts. Actually monitoring something is usually quite easy, deciding what to monitor tends to be the hard part. The process monitoring script ps.monitor is the one I’m about to redesign.

Here are some of my ideas […]

Converting Mbox to Maildir

MBox is the original and ancient format for storing mail on Unix systems, it consists of a single file per user under /var/spool/mail that has messages concatenated. Obviously performance is very poor when deleting messages from a large mail store as the entire file has to be rewritten. Maildir was invented for Qmail by Dan […]

Observing Reliability

Last year I wrote about how great my latest Thinkpad is [1] in response to a discussion about whether a Thinkpad is still the “Rolls Royce” of laptops.

It was a few months after writing that post that I realised that I omitted an important point. After I had that laptop for about a year […]