Linux in Victorian Education
Posted by cafuego on Tuesday 9 September 2008.Extra, extra! Read all about it! Linux priced out of the market by vendors conspiring with monopoly!
Nice headline, huh? If only it weren't true.
A large bright oddly shaped galaxy with a dark dust band across it
Astrophotography with Mac OS X - Reprise
So, N years later, how is that going? It was going pretty well, but then there was a pandemic with lock-downs and curfews, which rather restricted access to dark skies.The obvious fix was to obtain access to dark skies, by way of a holiday house in the Wimmera.
Continue reading »
(partial) myth joy
Posted by cafuego on Tuesday 26 August 2008.Yay! It would seem that with the latest updates to the xc3028 tuner driver, my DViCO Fusion Dual Digital 4 (USB id 0fe9:db78) can use the newest drivers again.
Up to my last attempt at tracking the newest drivers, loading them would cause a system hardlock, which isn't particularly helpful on a PVR. Well, whilst the olympics were on I don't suppose it mattered that much. Komkommertijd, as we say in Holland.
Olympic Cheats
Posted by cafuego on Saturday 9 August 2008.As was probably unavoidable, in the week or so leading up to the olympics there were stories of drug cheats being found out and banned.
What strikes me as somewhat odd is that the news shows managed to get clips of Australian athletes condemning these drug cheats.
Australian athletes, who only have the help of their own efforts and a multi-million dollar government funded high tech research agency, to win as many gold medals as possible to reinforce nationalistic pride. In what way is that NOT cheating?
replicants
Posted by cafuego on Thursday 5 June 2008.I found myself with some spare time the other day and decided that my current mysql backup strategy is not the best in the world. The mysql server is a virtual machine in a Brisbane datacenter and it's backed up via a script that calls mysqldump on each installed database and dumps the content to (compressed) files. These files then get sucked down via rdiff-backup.
This is fine in principle, but does mean it's possible for me to lose 24 hours worth of data due to an accidental '--; DROP table students.
T minus 20626558
Posted by cafuego on Sunday 25 May 2008.A quick update on LCA2009. The zookeepr hackathon has been progressing nicely over this weekend, so it looks like the call for proposals can be opened as per scheduled, even if the computer says "no" ;-)
hardware upgrade (continued)
Posted by cafuego on Tuesday 15 April 2008.Hmm. It seems I was a bit too enthousiastic in proclaiming the virtues of the X3500 chip when playing UrbanTerror.
Although it manages around 50 fps (which is fine) when I run around my local server, it manages less by an order of magnitude (2 to 4 fps in a busy area) when connected to a public server, with 15 others players running around as well.
So perhaps I need to invest in a new GFX card.
my long awaited hardware upgrade
Posted by cafuego on Saturday 12 April 2008.In part of my line of work - web application development - you tend to develop software that needs to work (properly) on an awful lot of different web browsers. If these all adhered to web standards, a simple run through the W3C Validator would suffice. Unfortunately life sucks, and as such there is a need to test all sites on as many browsers as possible.
I use virtualisation to run a bunch of windows browsers in their native environment. However, testing this way took an awfully long time, as my desktop computer had a "mere" 1.5Gb of ram and only a single (Athlon64) CPU core. By the time you add GNome, Evolution or Thunderbird and Firefox to this, not a great deal is left for virtual machines.
What with DDR2 ram prices being pretty much at an all-time low and CPUs not being far behind in cheapity (wrong, but sounds nice) I decided it was time for some new tools of the trade.
media slut
Posted by cafuego on Tuesday 8 April 2008.Wow, I got my name mentioned in the press, I must be moving up in the world :-)
The school tech and head of IT at Westall Secondary College gave me a nice plug in an article called "Ubuntu breathes new life into school's abandoned hardware" just because I help them out with Linux stuff every now and then. Cheers guys!
poo on a stick
Posted by cafuego on Tuesday 8 April 2008.
As kattekrab so eloquently put it, "poo on a stick".
hard disk economy
Posted by cafuego on Thursday 13 March 2008.Over the past few weeks I've bought a handful of Western Digital 500GB hard disks for various clients to use as rdiff-backup targets and also for use with mythtv at home. As a kind of might-be-interesting exercise, I kept an eye on hard disk prices at my local CPL to see if there might be more or less opportune moments to buy disks.
The prices used in the price per GB calculation are for the cheapest SATA model of a specific size.
The resulting graph is mainly unsurprising: