the difference that is no difference makes no difference
A few days ago, for whatever reason I found myself repeatedly compiling linux kernels in order to solve some ext3 performance problem (my theory was that kernels after 2.6.18 have very high wait io for ext3 filesystems). This was on my linux server with lots of disk drives. Three of the drives are 300GB ones […]
Like many IT professionals, I have friends and family who ask me various computer help questions, and also get me to do system upgrades. This is usually for Windows XP based systems. Recently my inlaws were hinting that they wanted to upgrade. For a few years now they’ve had an old Athlon 1800, 384MB of […]
My main linux server here has a ASUS P5LD2 motherboard. I got it when the core 2 duo chips came out and it was one of the few motherboards that was affordable and that supported the core 2 duo. In many ways it’s quite a good motherboard as it has four SATA connectors and quite […]
OK, rather than continue to whinge about this macbook keyboard I took it in to an Apple Service Centre. As I’ve said, the symptom I have is that the keyboard works fine if I type slowly, but if I type fast, I get lots of characters missing. Some more than others (the L, P and […]
As a Unix sysadmin, I am using ssh every day. Its an innocuous little tool thats absolutely essential. Sure it does terminal sessions, but its all the other little features that make it quite indespensable; port forwarding, agent forwarding …. And they always seem to add in cool features that I never find out about […]
OK, so I’ve had the macbook a week now. I’m using it as my main computer and the keyboard is painful. I’m still doing lots of typos when I type fast. Especially the ‘l’ and ‘y’ keys. I’ve started to think that maybe it really is faulty, however other people seem to be annoyed as […]
Yes, I caved in and bought a macbook. Sure I have a mac mini, but my primary machine is my Thinkpad T42, so switching to a macbook is a big change. I still think Macs are too expensive, so I ended up going to the online Apple store and ordering a refurbished one. It’s the […]
Unlike most techies, I use a very basic mobile phone. I use it for making calls and sending/receiving texts mostly and you don’t need a clever phone to do that. However, recently I’ve ended up using a 3g mobile phone. In NZ, like many places there is a GSM based network (run by vodafone) that […]
One of the more irritating things in linux is trying to get your fonts ‘just right’. If I look at an OS X or Windows desktop the fonts always look great. Obviously some executives involved in these operating systems thought it was a reasonably good idea not to present users with crappy looking fonts. If […]
OK, so my adventure working out of NZ is over. My trip back involved stopping in London and Belgium and Japan on the way back. London was cold, wet and expensive. Belgium was slightly less cold and wet and Japan was ‘just right’. This is my second trip to Japan, and it’s such an interesting […]
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