A common procedure at many companies is to send the backup tapes offsite, on the off chance that if the building burns down or something, the computers will be lost but the data can be restored to replacement hardware and business will pick up apace a day or two later. In the industry, this is referred to as 'disaster mitigation planning'. At smaller companies, either the tapes never get taken offsite (common) or one of the sysadmins takes the tapes home to put them into a safe or strongbox (a bit more common). Larger companies and organizations with more rules …
Unless it involves 0-day security vulnerabilities that amount to a global panic in the style of bad Hollywood action movies never, ever install updates of any kind on the laptop you're going to carry into the field with you the week before, or you'll spend every waking moment up until the time you go before the crowd trying to fix your laptop. Don't be That Presenter At the Con.
Evolutionary computer algorithms are good at solving a relatively common set of problems through trial and error - the set of problems that we know of with a large number of equally valid possible solutions, of which some subset of those are faster or more efficient. The only way to see which of these solutions will do what you want is to try one and mess around with it for a while, and then try a slightly different approach. In other words, by tinkering, tweaking, and hacking around, which is great on a small scale but when you're looking at a …
Yesterday wasn't so much a wave of mutilation as it was a stormfront of WTF sweeping across the land. While I can't really put my finger on any one trigger event that caused yesterday to go west in a serious way, I can outline more or less what happened. First off, the hard drive in my workstation at the office decided to pack it in while I was working on something, which turned the rest of the day into a mad dash to find a new drive and rescue everything that I could. Finding a replacement drive took somewhere around …
An article in the New Journal of Physics this month postulates a novel use for the not-yet-extant technology of nanotechnology: Building clockwork computers on a microscopic scale. The idea is that electronic circuitry isn't suitable for some environments but difference engines constructed on a microscopic scale might be because they would be far more precisely engineered and constructed with more durable materials. Sure, they'd be slower than conventional integrated circuits, but for some applications (like monitoring engine timings) you don't need a processor that can play Doom 3.
I hate to break it to them, but this isn't a new …
Well, let me see... it's been interesting times the past couple of days, which has left me precious little time to write about what's actually been going on with my day to day life lately.
First off, early last week Alphonse Elric, Lyssa's primary machine and workstation at home packed it in. One moment he was cunching merrily away, the next utterly locked up. No amount of rebooting or jiggling was able to bring him back online, though we did notice that the components inside of his silver chassis (as well as the exhaust fans and chassis itself) were horribly …
I've got a laundry list of stuff that I want to say, but every time I sit down to do so, they vanish utterly from my brain and it's really starting to piss me off. I don't know what's wrong with me lately.
Okay. Let's start with something that I picked up a while ago and never got around to writing up - it has to do with some software that Daniel J. Bernstein wrote a couple of years ago, namely, daemontools. Daemontools is a suite of utilities that was designed to keep tabs on network services running on …
The magick smoke got out of Lucien this afternoon. I'm going to start constructing a new mail server tonight once I find a new chassis and ATX power supply (500 watts or more).
I'm going to try to recover everything that I possibly can; if you've got secondary e-mail, use it until further notice.
The retrocomputing enthusiasts over at briel.com are developing a desktop case that I really, really would like to get my hands on after they start producing them: It looks like the chassis of an Altair 8800, from the late 1970's. That's right, the very first 'personal' computer, complete with LEDs and toggle switches on the front panel. It's an ATX style case with a power supply that can drive up to a Pentium-4 system, and has enough quiet cooling to keep it from catching on fire. The drive bays are hidden behind the front panel, which has its own …
