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Servers vs Phones

Hetzner have recently updated their offerings to include servers with 16G and 24G of RAM [1]. You can get a dedicated server with two 3TB SATA disks, an i7-2600 quad-core CPU, and 16G of RAM for E49 per month plus an E149 setup fee. That is a good deal and I’ll probably soon be running […]

Akonadi on a MySQL Server

Wouter described how to get Akonadi (the back-end for KDE PIM) to use PostgreSQL [1].

I don’t agree with his “MySQL is a toy” sentiment. But inspired by his post I decided to convert some of my systems to use a MySQL instance running on a server instead of one instance for each user. In […]

Modern Laptops Suck

One of the reasons why I’m moving from a laptop to a cloud lifestyle [1] is that laptops suck nowadays.

Engineering Trade-offs

Laptops have always had disadvantages when compared to desktop systems. The screen has to be smaller, the keyboard is inconveniently small on the smaller laptops and netbooks, you don’t get PCI slots (CardBus […]

Moving from a Laptop to a Cloud Lifestyle

My Laptop History

In 1998 I bought my first laptop, it was a Thinkpad 385XD, it had a PentiumMMX 233MHz CPU, 96M of RAM, and an 800*600 display. This was less RAM than I could have afforded in a desktop system and the 800*600 display didn’t compare well to the 1280*1024 resolution 17 inch Trinitron […]

Links August 2011

Alex Steffen gave an interesting TED talk summarising the ways that greater urban density can reduce energy use while increasing our quality of life [1].

Geoffrey West gave an interesting TED talk about the way animals, corporations, and cities scale [2]. The main factor is the way that various variables scale in proportion to size. […]

Digital Cameras

In May I gave a talk for LUV about the basics of creating video on Linux. As part of the research for that I investigated which cameras were good for such use. I determined that 720p was a good enough resolution, as nothing that does 1080p was affordable and 1080i is lower quality. One thing […]

Name Server IP and a Dead Server

About 24 hours ago I rebooted the system that runs the secondary DNS for my zone and a few other zones. I’d upgraded a few things and the system had been running for almost 200 days without a reboot so it was time for it. Unfortunately it didn’t come back up.

Even more unfortunately the […]

Links July 2011

The Reid Report has an article about the marriage pledge that Michelle Bachmann signed which implies that slavery wasn’t so bad [1]. Greg Carey has written an interesting article for the Huffington Post about marriage and the bible [2], I always knew that the so-called “conservatives” weren’t basing their stuff on the Bible, but the […]

SE Linux File Context Precedence

In my previous post I expressed a desire to use regular expressions for files that may appear in multiple places in the tree due to bind mounts for /run and /var/run etc [1]. However there is a problem with this idea.

The SE Linux file labeling program restorecon reads the file /etc/selinux/$SELINUXTYPE/contexts/files/file_contexts which contains a […]

/run and SE Linux Policy

Currently Debian/Unstable is going through a transition to using /run instead of /var/run. Naturally any significant change to the filesystem layout requires matching changes to SE Linux policy. We currently have Debian bug #626720 open about this. Currently the initscripts package breaks selinux-policy-default in Debian/Unstable so that you can’t have initscripts using /run if the […]