Best Posts « etbe - Russell Coker

Fluorescent vs Incandescent lights

Glen Turner writes about silly people who think that fluorescent lights don’t save energy over their lifetime [1].

A compact fluorescent light (one that is designed for the same socket as an incandescent globe) is not the most efficient light source, the Luminous Efficiency page on Wikipedia [2] lists a CFL as having an efficiency […]

Conditions of Sending Email

Update: Due to the popularity of this post I have created a T-Shirt and put it on sale at http://www.cafepress.com/email_eula .

Update: Unlike most of my blog content I permit anyone to copy most or all of this post for commercial use (this includes blogs with google advertising) as long as they correctly identify me […]

Better Social Networking

When advogato.org was still cool I signed up to it. It was an interesting research project in skill metrics (determining the rating of people’s coding skills by the votes of others and weighting the votes by the rating of each person), and it was nice to be rated Master soon after I joined. I still […]

Software vs Hardware RAID

Should you use software or hardware RAID? Many people claim that Hardware RAID is needed for performance (which can be true) but then claim that it’s because of the CPU use of the RAID calculations.

Here is the data logged by the Linux kernel then the RAID-5 and RAID-6 drivers are loaded on a 1GHz […]

Xen for Training

I’m setting up a training environment based on Xen. The configuration will probably be of use to some people so I’m including it below the fold. Please let me know if you have any ideas for improvements.

The interface for the user has the following documentation:

sudo -u root xen-manage create centos|debian [permissive] Create an […]

Increasing Efficiency through Less Work

I have just read an interesting article titled Why Crunch Mode Doesn’t Work [1] which documents the research on efficiency vs amount of time spent working (and by inference amount of time spent on leisure activities and sleep). It shows that a 40 hour working week was chosen by people who run factories (such as […]

Load Average

Other Unix systems apparently calculate the load average differently to Linux. According to the Wikipedia page about Load(computing) [1] most Unix systems calculate it based on the average number of processes that are using a CPU or available for scheduling on a CPU while Linux also includes the count of processes that are blocked on […]

Xen and Security

I have previously posted about the difference between using a chroot and using SE Linux [1].

Theo de Raadt claims that virtualisation does not provide security benefits [2] based on the idea that the Xen hypervisor may have security related bugs.

From my understanding of Xen a successful exploit of a Xen system with a […]

Blog Ethics

Reporters Sans Frontiers (AKA RSF AKA Reporters Without Borders) has an interesting document about blogging [1]. They are specifically focussed on blogging as a way of reporting news. Their definition of a blog states that it is “a personal website” (there are many corporate blogs run by teams) and that it contains “mostly news” (most […]

Who Can Contribute to Free Software

A common misconception is that only programmers can contribute to free software. The first significant reference I recall to this was in a presentation by Pia Waugh [1] where she mentioned that she felt that the way words such as “coder” and “hacker” are used in the community as synonyms for “contributor” are denigrating to […]

etbe – Russell Coker

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Fluorescent vs Incandescent lights

Conditions of Sending Email

Better Social Networking

Software vs Hardware RAID

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Increasing Efficiency through Less Work

Load Average

Xen and Security

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Who Can Contribute to Free Software

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