jra's thoughts

Category: Geeking

  • Long Term Data Storage

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    I was thinking about data archival the other day because David Hagan was telling me about one time when he spoke to a group of librarians and told them to expect a data gap starting in 1950 and extending until we get serious about data preservation. According to David, the time when we stopped being…

  • The Skills Exist, Use Them!

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    One of the headlines that came out of my trip to Freetown was “The Skills Exist, Use Them!” First, a bit more about what I was doing there. I was on a contract with the Health Metrics Network, which is a project running under the auspices of the World Health Organization, but funded by the…

  • Hello, I’m back!

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    I am back from Freetown, freezing in Leeds. I’ve spent today trying to get software working including reinstalling Chrome (which started marking all words as misspelled) and Word Press which inexplicably started hanging. I’ll write a note, maybe this weekend, about what I was doing in Freetown. It was fun, and we got a lot…

  • Locations Database in Gnome

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    There’s a nifty feature hidden in Gnome that’s interesting to play with. Click on the date in the upper right. You get an applet with a calendar. Below the calendar is “Locations”, click on that. Nifty little map showing the line where sunset and sunrise are. Click on edit, and you get to add your…

  • Hello from Freetown

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    I started a two week trip to Freetown, Sierra Leone yesterday. I am here as an IT consultant for the Health Metrics Network, part of the World Health Organization. We are taking a bunch of random hardware that the government bought with a not-quite-complete architecture and putting in place a foundation for IT services related…

  • Don’t Bet Against Ethernet

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    From Slashdot: Corporate Data Centers As Ethernet’s Next Frontier Metcalfe’s (apophrycal) Second Law: Never Bet Against Ethernet ‘Nuff said.

  • Big Mining Machines

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    The Long Now foundation took a field trip recently. The pictures are cool, as is the irony that they went to a trade show held once every four years. Miners have a time scale closer to the Long Now’s. What does it mean that mining is a slowly changing industry? The economics of extractive industries push…

  • Behind the Scenes of Google Chrome

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    Some stuff I discovered playing with Google Chrome: View source works on the various “internal” pages (i.e. the home page, the about:stats page, etc) so you can see how the magic happens Read the comments in the home page to see how absolutely nutso over-the-top the programmer was about load time. He obsesses about the…

  • Better Practices in OpenID

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    Yahoo published some best practices on OpenID, but I have one they forgot. Imran and I were talking at OpenCoffee Leeds the other day and we independently and together came up with this realization: OpenID providers should be required to be OpenID consumers first. Why? Well, the problem OpenID is trying to solve is “too…

  • dnsmasq versus gPXE

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    gPXE and dnsmasq do not get along, beware. gPXE wants to find the boot filename in the dedicated slot in the reply packet. dnsmasq does something clever/stupid (I’m not sure which) and puts it someplace else. You have to use the –dhcp-no-override option to dnsmasq to make gPXE see the filename. I don’t have proof,…