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Hetzner now Offers SSD

Hetzner is offering new servers with SSD, good news for people who want to run ZFS (for ZIL and/or L2ARC). See the EX server configuration list for more information [1]. Unfortunately they don’t specify what brand of SSD, this is a concern for me as some of the reports about SSD haven’t been that positive, […]

Cheap SATA Disks in a Dell PowerEdge T410

A non-profit organisation I support has just bought a Dell PowerEdge T410 server to be mainly used as a file server. We need a reasonable amount of space and really good reliability features because the system may have periods without being actively monitored, it also has to be relatively cheap.

Dell servers are quite cheap, […]

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 […]

Links June 2012

This Youtube video is an amusing satire of EULAs and copyright law as applied to uploading consciousness [1].

Washington’s Blog has an insightful article about the way that the lack of trust in the US is killing their economy [2]. It seems that as long as the 1% are allowed to get away with breaking […]

Targeted Advertising

Don Marti has written another blog post about targeted advertising [1]. His main point is that when a company uses the most targeted adverts (such as Google advertising) everyone knows that they are paying a small number of cents per click and nothing for the people who don’t click. This compares to TV adverts which […]