Monday 30 April 2007 at 07:04 am
I've almost finished re-ripping all my CD's - I'm up to 15 days of continuous listening, 4500 songs and I still have the A and B section of my collection to go through.
Working backwards from Z I've ended up re-discovering a bunch of stuff I hadn't listened to in awhile.
So lately I've been listening to
Trash,
Wagon Christ,
M83,
Iggy Pop,
Portishead,
Snapper,
Whale,
The Fall,
Lambchop,
Minutemen,
Sun Ra,
Terminals,
Tindersticks,
Transglobal Underground,
John Zorn,
Low,
Skeptics,
Ice,
The Clean,
Leadbelly
Tuesday 24 April 2007 at 1:26 pm
Some more interesting storage tidbits -
Is iSCSI a SAN or NAS ? (depends where you want to send the bill
and it turns out EMC also have a simulator -
EMC�s Celerra Simulator.
Joel Spolsky is looking at another office space -
Moveable Walls. Interesting the financial hoops that need to be jumped through just to setup shop.
According to New Scientist it looks like wealthy people will help the poor and the poor enjoy punishing the rich -
Money game reveals our inner Robin Hood.
Fascinating -
Infographic of American Gun Deaths - looks like guns in the US are primarily used for murder and suicide. I can never work out if the NY Times has a paywall or not - hopefully this will stay accessible for awhile.
Nice eyecandy -
wonderful desktop images.
A little pop-psychology -
The Ideological Animal. "Twenty years later, they decided to compare the subjects' childhood personalities with their political preferences as adults. They found arresting patterns."
Jason Kottke always links to interesting stuff (definitely recommend subscribing to his rss feed) -
eco friendly web pallette. Someone calculated the power saving potential of a
'black' Google which has been moderated somewhat by this
post. Still if you have a high volume page it does sound like an interesting idea.
If you're a fan of the brilliant anime/manga Akira you can check out the
soundtrack. My favourite is probably the opening track -
Kaneda - which features some brilliant tribal drumming.
Things to do with a
Single Sheet of Paper. If you enjoy collections of humour goto the site root - quite an accumulation of stuff.
Brilliant but crazy -
print your own film. Digitise some film (of the analog variety), split it into its constituent frames and then print onto acetate strips to play back.
Tuesday 24 April 2007 at 1:26 pm
Some more interesting storage tidbits -
Is iSCSI a SAN or NAS ? (depends where you want to send the bill
and it turns out EMC also have a simulator -
EMC�s Celerra Simulator.
Joel Spolsky is looking at another office space -
Moveable Walls. Interesting the financial hoops that need to be jumped through just to setup shop.
According to New Scientist it looks like wealthy people will help the poor and the poor enjoy punishing the rich -
Money game reveals our inner Robin Hood.
Jason Kottke always links to interesting stuff (definitely recommend subscribing to his rss feed) -
eco friendly web pallette. Someone calculated the power saving potential of a
'black' Google which has been moderated somewhat by this
post. Still if you have a high volume page it does sound like an interesting idea.
If you're a fan of the brilliant anime/manga Akira you can check out the
soundtrack. My favourite is probably the opening track -
Kaneda - which features some brilliant tribal drumming.
Things to do with a
Single Sheet of Paper.
Wednesday 18 April 2007 at 06:43 am
One of the first 'industrial' bands,
Einsturzende Neubauten are a German band formed in 1980. As well as traditional instruments they create their own using sheet-metal, power-tools, pipes and tubes. The video is for one of their early songs -
Haus der Luge from their recent DVD
Palast Der Republik.
They actually sound like a carny band gone awry (FYI - the singer Blixa Bargeld was a long-standing foil to Nick Cave in the Bad Seeds).
Wednesday 04 April 2007 at 12:38 pm
Wellingtons had some up's and down's with respect to power in the central city over the last few months - just before Christmas half the Terrace was knocked offline for 4 hours and a few weeks ago we had rolling power spikes for an afternoon.
For a major outage theres not a whole lot you can do other than having a really good UPS on your core servers (or hosting in a data-center) - the spikes generally aren't a problem for your server room as the UPS will condition the power.
Most PC's actually handle spikes quite well too - the kicker is that your distributed switches will either reboot or pass on any spike to your Power over Ethernet equipment - which means as well as the lights dimming your VoIP phones cut-out and reboot (ditto your Wireless Access Points if they also use PoE).
Now you start to think about some UPS's to cover your distributed switching gear (if you have the luxury of structured cabling all the way back to your server room then you're really lucky!).
From an expert (not me!) -
"A general rule of thumb is that no UPS should be loaded more than 70% to 80% of full capacity to minimise the risk of compromising the protection due to unplanned or temporary overloads. In my calculations I have divided the total load by 0.8 to give a 20% headroom. It is then necessary to establish the VA rating of the UPS. Our UPS's suited to this application have a 0.7 output power factor, so the total watts requirement is then divided by 0.7."
So if you have four 24 port Catalyst 3550 switches and a PowerDsine PoE Injector -
Cisco Catalyst 3550-24-PWR: 525W x 4 = 2100W
PowerDsine POE Injector: 525W x 1 = 525W
Total Load: 2625W
Total UPS Watts Requirement with Headroom Allowance (/ 0.8): 3281
Minimum VA rating of UPS (/0.7): 4687
Which equates to a sizeable UPS. A 6kVA unit will last about 15min under full load but its primarily there for power conditioning and to buy a little time to cut phones over to another location in case of power-cut.
On the subject of Power Conditioning versus a UPS - again more expert opinion -
"Power conditioners were commonly used for protecting against brownouts - they would hold the voltage up for a few cycles. However off-line or line-interactive UPS's have now become lower priced than power conditioners and do the job adequately in virtually all cases. An on-line UPS regenerates the AC power so it is always perfect and constant irrespective of the incoming power."
"Most UPS's have spike protection too. However this is minimal and may become exhausted with one or two spikes, and there is no indication of this. If spikes are a special concern then dedicated surge diverters with a good practical surge capacity and low surge let-through voltage plus status indication."
So watch your switches
Tuesday 03 April 2007 at 12:36 pm
I did my bit for
Pivot by helping to get
text importing to Pivot - this means people with lots of text files or people (like me) who have a Blosxom based website can suck the content into a slightly fancier blogging engine.
Base-hosting plans often don't include database access so simple web tools like
Pivot &
Blosxom are a godsend.
I suspect I'll be importing and moving my website to Pivot shortly although Blosxom is so simple I'm not sure if I want to learn a whole new 'engine' and templating system . . .
