Appropriate Talks about PornAppropriate Talks about Porn
There is currently some discussion about a talk which used pornographic imagery and jokes to illustrate points about Ruby programming [1]. A similar event happened in 2006 here is the[...]
The Main Security ProblemThe Main Security Problem
All security problems are to some degree people problems. Code may be buggy, but it was written by people who could have been better trained, had more time to spend[...]
Dom0 Memory Allocation and XDom0 Memory Allocation and X
I’ve previously written about memory squeeze problems in a Xen Dom0 when large amounts of memory were assigned to DomUs [1]. In summary the Dom0 would have problems if started[...]
CPLCPL
I’ve just bught an NVidia video card from Computers and Parts Land (CPL) [1]. I asked for a PCIe*8 card but was assured that a PCIe*16 card would work. However[...]
Too Stupid to be a JudgeToo Stupid to be a Judge
Bruce Schneier has written about the foolish actions of Justice Antonin Scalia [1]. Antonin made some comments opposing the need for greater privacy protection, most people could get away with[...]
Redundancy in Network InfrastructureRedundancy in Network Infrastructure
It’s generally accepted that certain things need redundancy. RAID is generally regarded as essential for every server except for the corner case of compute clusters where a few nodes can[...]
Email PasswordsEmail Passwords
I was doing some routine sysadmin work for a client when I had to read mail in the system administration mailbox. This mailbox is used for cron job email, communication[...]
Creating a Double-Ended BunCreating a Double-Ended Bun
The people who made the above magazine advert gave it two top-halves to the burger bun. But I think that there is actually a demand for such buns, and that[...]
Links April 2009Links April 2009
P. W. Singer gave an interesting TED talk about the use of robots in war [1]. He briefly covered some of the ethical and social issues related to robot soldiers[...]
Vibration and Strange SATA PerformanceVibration and Strange SATA Performance
Almost two years ago I blogged about a strange performance problem with SATA disks [1]. The problem was that certain regions of a disk gave poor linear read performance on[...]