amongst other things...
For the less geeky readers of this blog (yes, there are some apparently), you may be interested in seeing a demo of the latest revision of Jeff Han and co.'s work on ">multi-touch displays.
I originally commented on this about a year ago. As you can see, it's gone a long way and is truely impressive - still.
I am somewhat disturbed to discover, as of 11:31 GMT on Monday 27th March 2007, that younanimous presents my 3rd result (googling for my real name is fairly redundant, thankfully) as a booze related topic.
In a very web 2.0 fashion, I'd love to see what everyone else comes up with (theo, andy, webvictim, hotwire, etc.?).
Some of you may be aware that I "maintain" a how to guide for the Live For Speed community, briefly detailing how to run a dedicated server. Within this guide is a section on running it on a Linux based system, under Wine.
As good as this guide is (obviously - as I wrote it :P), there are a few issues that I feel need to be addressed, predominately;
"Oh", I hear you say. Many experienced sysadmins dislike running Wine under linux, on a server, because of the associated bloat (i.e. a X server) which is unnecessary. To avoid this it's possible to compile your own version of Wine, without X support. This does restrict you to running programs under wineconsole. In the circumstance of running a dedicated Live For Speed server, this does not matter.
Simply download and compile the latest version of Wine;./configure
make depend
make
make install
As usual make install will need to be preformed as root (or equivilent). You will also need to ensure that the latest version of the libncurses development package is installed. Under Debian this is libncurses-dev.
Now simply invoke your server, making sure that the /dedicated directive is set to invisible, within your configuration file (in this instance, setup.cfg);wineconsole --backend=curses LFS.exe /cfg=setup.cfg
This will cause Wine to complain about the lack of an X server, but it will run without issue. To ensure the server continues to run after you disconnect, start it under a screen session, or nohup.
Over the last few weeks people have been telling me I need to get out of the house and do stuff. I'm still not sure if I'm "ready" for big group things, and work is pretty mental at the moment. As much as I'd love to jump into a 'pit and come out bleeding and bruised to let off steam, I don't think I could do it at the drop of a hat without feeling guilty the next day, lying in bed whilst the guys battle onwards through the perpetually impending wall of new customers and requests from existing ones.
So to get myself back on track with the whole make myself fitter thing, I've started eating healthly and decided that I'll go running a few times a week before I start work. The first thing I was told after unveiling this was "the person who invented jogging died doing it". Lovely thought that.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Slowly SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) drives are becoming the standard in servers, and we've been using the standard 3.5" sized versions for quite a few months. However, we purchased a 1U box for a new customer a few weeks ago, knowing that it would have 2.5" drives instead.
I'd been told by colleagues from other companies, who have already deployed a few, that they were pretty impressive in the field, often out performing their 3.5" cousins. Whilst I'm yet to see any significant improvement in performance at present (the box isn't under full load at present), they definately aren't slower and they do allow you to add more hard drives to a chassis, due to their reduced dimensions. They also consume less power and produce less heat.
Given the power restrictions becoming a more significant problem in the datacentre for both small and large companies alike, and the sheer number of SAS drives you can connect (both with and without expanders), I currently see no reason not to opt for them.
Plus they look cute and deceptively delicate! :)
