Below are the five most recent posts in my weblog. You can also see a list of all posts.
Sun Aug 22 12:00:55 2010
Can anyone recommend some videos to me which explain the ins-and-outs of the chef and puppet configuration management tools? I have some familiarity with configuration management, having worked on cfengine (version 2) for a few years. However I haven't managed to evaluate the newer tools effectively. The barrier to entry (setting up at least a master and a slave VM...) has been too high (or I haven't given it enough time!)
If there are any good screencasts/videos that cover not just how they work but their individual advantages, that would be excellent: I have some upcoming time in which I can absorb material like that (but not the kind of time in which I could get hands-on).
Sun Aug 22 11:14:59 2010
I'm planning on transcoding some of the Debconf 10 event videos in order to watch them on my phone (and other devices). Most likely to an MPEG container, H264 codec or similar. Subject to a license check, I could stick the results up somewhere for others if there is any interest. Let me know via comment or email.
Tue Aug 17 13:04:10 2010
About six years ago, I spent a chunk of my very first salary on a portable music player, the iRiver H140, a relatively bulky and large hard-disk based player, with a capacity of 40G. Uniquely for music players before or since, the iRiver features both digital and analogue line ins and outs. It also has (more common) recording facilities and an FM tuner, the latter of which I used a great deal (and rules out just about all the iPods).
This remarkable player has lasted nearly six years of moderate daily use. For the majority of that time, I've ran the rockbox open source firmware on the player, which has provided me with really wide codec support and excellent recording facilities.
In the last month I finally had to replace the iRiver. I bought a Sansa Fuze player, featuring 8G of flash storage and a microsd expansion slot. The Fuze is also capable of running rockbox. This year, 32G microsd cards have arrived. Adding one of those brings the capacity of the new player right back up to 40G.
For those who are curious: yes, a Sandisk 32G microsd does work in the Fuze, at least with rockbox, for playback. At the moment, rockbox cannot write to storage on the Fuze, so you need to either use the original firmware or an external reader/writer to manipulate the contents of the microsd. However, I am not sure how well the original firmware can handle the 32G. Whenever I boot it, I see a "refreshing your media" message which lasts longer than my patience. I will write an update once I've established further the degree of support.
I kept a canonical copy of my music library on a desktop computer and used rsync to keep the iRiver up-to-date. I can use almost exactly the same procedure for the new player (with some small changes to cope with the split-storage)
I now have a 40G player running rockbox exactly as I had before, albeit at a fraction of the size and weight (and cost: approximately half as expensive), and with a nicer display including colours, album art, etc.
They both can even play doom (although the controls are even more awkward than iPhone Doom).
Wed Aug 11 20:21:53 2010
I'm in the process of setting up a mail server, which will eventually accept mail for a given domain. I am also changing name servers for said domain (to make use of zoneedit.com).
So far, I have the new server accepting mail for the domain, and the new name server serving records for the domain, including an MX pointing at the new server. However, I haven't updated the domain record, so the authorative nameservers haven't changed.
Despite this, somehow, spammers are already attempting to submit mail for the domain in question to the new MX server. Not only that, but it's targetted at particular users with non-obvious local parts.
The new MX advertises itself as "a-sub-domain.example.org", for values of "example.org", so it's possible in theory to derive "example.org" from the banner. But unlikely.
Are they psychic? Or is a spammer somehow getting notified of new MX records hosted at zoneedit (no matter whether glue records point at them)?
Wed Jul 28 18:56:31 2010
I've just finished reading — and thoroughly enjoying — Transition by Iain Banks. Despite a terrible writeup in the Guardian, I found the book to concentrate just as strongly on character as world-building, but I wouldn't be surprised if a sequel was on the cards.
The novel is, in part, an exploration of the many worlds theory of quantum mechanics. Or at least that's it's setting. In the UK, it has been published without the traditional 'M' infix denoting Science Fiction, although it is undeniably so: It's not even pretending to be anything else.
The book reminded me of Quarantine, and to a lesser extend Permutation City, both by Greg Egan; and another book I've read recently which I can't reveal without spoiling this one.