Category Archives: Computing

Feisty (2.6.20-16-generic kernel) boot failure

Posted on May 30, 2007 by Sigurd

In applying the latest Feisty Fawn updates to one of my laptops I ran into a problem with the bootup hanging shortly after starting. The usual snakeoil of ‘acpi=off pci=noacpi’ appended to the boot command line failed to make any … Continue reading →

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FastCGI issues in Lighttpd 1.4.13

Posted on May 25, 2007 by Sigurd

I ran into a set of problems recently with Lighttpd, which otherwise has been a marvellous piece of software. I use Lighty as a load-balancing proxy front-end for a set of backend request-handling servers written in Python, using the Pylons … Continue reading →

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Cluster monitoring and control

Posted on May 10, 2007 by Sigurd

I recently setup a cluster of Linux compute servers, and found myself looking for instrumentation to monitor & control the servers. The following open-source packages give excellent insight and access to the state of the cluster: Ganglia – server stats, … Continue reading →

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Java/Hibernate vs Ruby/Rails?

Posted on January 29, 2007 by Sigurd

Java seems to reign in most enterprise IT departments. Outside thereof, a lot of interest is going into Ruby and the Rails framework. I found Patrick Peak’s review useful in understanding the relative advantages of each.

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Code and release management

Posted on January 23, 2007 by Sigurd

I was an early adopter of Subversion and Edgewall’s Trac. Installation of Trac on my defacto Linux distro, CentOS, has not been very straightforward due to it being a RHEL clone. This guide has documented the process in a clear … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, Linux, Programming languages | Comments Off

Record based Wiki’s and spreadsheets

Posted on June 25, 2006 by Sigurd

Browsing the Google Summer Of Code projects, I stumbled across an interesting concept – record-based wiki’s.

Posted in AJAX, Knowledge Management | Comments Off

Deathstar drives

Posted on June 4, 2006 by Sigurd

PCWorld’s list of crappy products reminded me of how terrible the 75G IBM Deskstars were. I had 2 of them go south on me…

Posted in Hardware | Comments Off

Great photo management tools

Posted on May 28, 2006 by Sigurd

To manage your sets of photos, try these (free) tools: Picasa (part of the Google tool-chest) for Windows users F-Spot for Linux For online photo gallery, I like the tagging aspect of this PHP script.

Posted in Linux, Microsoft/Windows | Comments Off

Ozzie’s insight

Posted on May 27, 2006 by Sigurd

Related to the post on M$, I like the insight of Ray Ozzie (new leader at M$) when it comes to energy/communications:

Posted in Energy, Microsoft/Windows, Networking | Comments Off

Astonishingly good post from the Schobleizer

Posted on May 27, 2006 by Sigurd

I just read Robert Schoble’s excellent post about the ills at M$ as highlighted by minimsft. I can relate to the pains, having seem them before in other organisations this side of the pond. I honestly don’t think you can … Continue reading →

Posted in Microsoft/Windows, Society Models | Comments Off