Links October 2008Links October 2008
Here’s a blog post suggesting that anti-depressant drugs such as Prozac may have helped the US mortgage crisis [1]. Apparently such drugs cause poor impulse control, so it wouldn’t be[...]
Moth in my CeleryMoth in my Celery
Above is a picture of a moth that I found in a packet of shrink wrapped celery from Foodworks (a Melbourne chain of grocery stores). I took several pictures from[...]
Upgrading a server to 64bit XenUpgrading a server to 64bit Xen
I have access to a server in Germany that was running Debian/Etch i386 but needed to be running Xen with the AMD64 version of Debian/Lenny (well it didn’t really need[...]
Kernel issues with Debian Xen and CentOS KernelsKernel issues with Debian Xen and CentOS Kernels
Last time I tried using a Debian 64bit Xen kernel for Dom0 I was unable to get it to work correctly, it continually gave kernel panics when doing any serious[...]
The Next Miserable Failure?The Next Miserable Failure?
Until very recently I thought that it would be almost impossible to get someone worse than George W Bush as the leader of any significant country. Unfortunately it seems that[...]
Combat WaspsCombat Wasps
One of the many interesting ideas in Peter F. Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn series [1] is that of Combat Wasps. These are robots used in space combat which may be armed[...]
Programming and Games for ChildrenProgramming and Games for Children
The design of levels for computer games is a form of programming, particularly for games with deterministic NPCs. It seems to me that for a large portion of the modern[...]
Some RAID IssuesSome RAID Issues
I just read an interesting paper titled An Analysis of Data Corruption in the Storage Stack [1]. It contains an analysis of the data from 1,530,000 disks running at NetApp[...]
EC2 SecurityEC2 Security
One thing that concerns me about using any online service is the security. When that service is a virtual server running in another country the risks are greater than average.[...]
Updated EC2 API Tools packageUpdated EC2 API Tools package
I’ve updated my package of the Amazon EC2 API Tools for Debian [1]. Now it uses the Sun JDK. Kaffe doesn’t work due to not supporting annotations, I haven’t filed[...]