Luke Sheldrick's Blog

I figured I’d give a 365 project a shot this year, as I’ve mostly forgotten about taking photos recently, and I quite like having a record of the year.

I started in Janurary, however stopped midway through. Id not renewed my flickr PRO account, due to me not using it much in the tail end of 2011, and used a free alternative. I found Blipfoto, however quickly became frustrated with it. Quite often I would take a photo on the day, and then sometimes postprocess/upload the following day, however their site was far too intrusive with EXIF headers, and upload date. So from the offset, I had photos listed as completely the wrong day, and then not being able to upload a photo for that day, as yesterdays was recorded for it. Argh. So I gave up.

However, I’m not the type of person to be defeated, so will be starting again from 01-02-2012. As this year is a leap year, it will be a 366, to get me around until the end of Jan-2013.

I think it’s going to be a bit of a challenge, as some days, when working from home, I don’t even get out of my PJs, let alone go out and take an interesting photo.

I think from my short test run, I may look at having a theme for a month, not sure on the categories yet, but sure will work something out.

Have upgraded my flickr account, as will be uploading them there, and then will set something up to present them in a decent format. I have the flickr-addon for wordpress setup, but it hasn’t been maintained for a few years, so has a few ‘features’ that I need to look into fixing, as the maintainer looks to have given up.

2012, lets do it!

I started a new job a few weeks back, which means, I am now home based. Which is working out pretty well so far. When I worked in an office all day, I’d always get things delivered to the office, and never really had any issues with the post. I’d occasionally get a ‘we tried to call’ redslip at home, but just assumed these were all genuine.

However, now I work at home, I’m in during the day. However now I get my post delivered home, I’ve noticed something, which well, really isn’t on – I’m still getting those slips. Not once, but every delivery this week, has failed, with “We tried to call, but no one was in” “The item was too big for the letterbox” type excuse.

This has happened with RoyalFail, DPD, HDNL, all of them pretty much. Most of the things I’ve ordered from Amazon, with Amazon Prime (which gives next day delivery). However when I’ve picked this up with them, they say the next day isn’t guaranteed if there are any issues with their courier.

I really don’t get that, I have a contract with Amazon, for them to deliver the next day. They then outsource the delivery to a courier company, yet if there is an issue with that contract, then it’s me, that paid for the Prime service – yet don’t get the item.

My theory here, is that most delivery drivers/postmen who deliver to home addresses, know that 99% of the people won’t be in during day, so rather than carrying around a big postbag, just pre-fill out the redslips.

Grrr.

I bought a MacMini the other day to replace my old nettop at home. Until I get the new storage for it, I figured I’d quickly setup a LUN on my NAS for it. It seems OS X, even Lion, still doesn’t include an iSCSI initiator (wtf, really?). Anyway the typical freebie that you’d use on Leopard/Snow Leopard was GlobalSAN’s free initiator. However seems that as of version 5, it’s not a freebie.

I gave it a try, and went through their process (read giving them my details twice – once to download, then again to get a trial key)… tried it out, and didn’t rate it. So using their provided uninstall script I see the below:

WTF is that all about? Their uninstaller is trying to delet / . .. /sbin ..etc, someone really hasn’t QA’ed their code.

Have emailed them to see what they say about it. Poor show.

I bought a HP Microserver a few months ago, to expand my media storage at home. HP had a promotion where you’d buy the server, and they’d give you £100 cash back. Not bad considering you can pick them up online for around £220. £29 for 8GB of DDR3 for it, and it’s quite an ample home server. I bought four 3TB disks, and have them in Raid-5 for the main storage, and I also have an E-Sata disk shelf with four more 2TB disks, also in Raid-5. The main storage array gives me around 8TB of usable storage, and the other around 5.5TB, so I have quite a bit at home to be getting on with.

A colleague at work today pointed out that HP had extended the offer until the end of September, so I thought I would pick up another one. My reasoning is they’re bloody cheap for what they are, and it’ll make HA testing in my lab a lot easier, with two identical machines.

However I decided to see actually how loaded the server was with what I run on it. The tasks that usually run on it backups of my various colos, streaming to the AppleTVs at home, transcoding up to 8 channels via the DVB cards, and downloading various media online. Well, basically, it isn’t breaking a sweat.

It’s currently running Ubuntu Server 11.04, which has pretty good support for KVM, so decided to spin up a few VMs to see how it handled it. I wasn’t overly optimistic, as AMD Turion™ II processor, which is basically designed for netbooks. However after spinning up a another Ubuntu Server instance, the server seemed to have no issue with this at all.

At that point I decided to clone the VM a couple of times, and then spin them all up to load test. 4 clones later, they all booted fine, and the box carried on with no real issues. I showed another colleague at work, and he’d asked how it would cope with Windows guests. The reason he was interested is he has just completed his MSITP qualification, and had quite a bit of difficulty running all the required server instances using his laptop and VMWare Workstation.

This evening I installed a base install of XP, and cloned that 4 times. Again, no real issues, so I decided to give every host 1G of memory (the server only has 8GB total), and see how KSM got on with the VMs. At the moment, it’s still scanning through memory pages, however it’s been running for around 20 minutes, and it’s already reclaimed 2.5GB of memory. No doubt given it some more time, it’s going to reclaim even more.

To say I am impressed by the Microserver, and KVM + KSM would be an understatement.Think I’ll setup a HA cluster when I get the other server, and see how that compares the likes of ESX.

Below just the quick setup I was playing with this evening.

I’m well late for this party, but having recently got an Amazon Kindle, and I have to say, I am very, very impressed with it.

Sure, it doesn’t play movies, it has a laughable web browser, and the audio play back is awful. However for what it was designed for, reading books, it is simply the best device I have used.

I’d previously tried to read paper books, using iBooks no the iPad, Android Tables, Phones, and my iPhone, nothing really felt right. I went on a long weekend to Tenerife a few weeks back, and wanted to try out a few books I’d been recommended. Previously I hand’t really been a ‘bookworm’, sure I read tons every day, but usually they’re technical books, RSS, Blogs… that kind of thing, but not novels or that kind of thing; even rarer to read it from cover to cover.

So I picked up a wifi Kindle, for £90, ordered a few books on the store, charged the thing up, and shoved it in my bag. Whilst sitting by the pool, I started to read ‘A Million Little Pieces’ a book a good friend had recommended. The first thing I noted was the eInk screen, and how easy it was to read in the bright sunlight – something no other device I have can be said about. The second was how comfortable it was to read with it. The buttons are exactly where they need to be on both sides, and the Kinda is very light, lighter than most books, so holding it for any length of time isn’t an issue.

The things that are clearly awesome about it:

• The price – It’s really rather cheap in comparison to my normal gadgets.
• Ease of use – It’s so simple, even Mother can get on with it.
• Ease of buying – The system Amazon has built around buying eBooks is so simple. I can request a sample of a book, read the first chapter, and if I like it, at the end of the first chapter, I have a buy button; that’s it, I then have the book.
• Screen – The eInk display is really rather impressive. The only downfall to it is the lack of backlight, so as soon as it’s not overly light where you are, you can’t see the thing. They do have a case with integrated night light. This also works quite well, as it uses the power from the device for power.
• Weight/Shape/Controls – They are all very well designed.
• Battery – Two weeks of use, and I still haven’t charged it.

The things that aren’t so awesome:

• Screensavers – They’re awful. I had to jailbreak the device, to get rid of them.
• Cases – To get a backlight, I bought the official case – they’re not cheap.
• VAT – not an Amazon or a Kindle issue – but in the UK, you still get charged VAT (20%) for eBooks. So eBooks are more expensive than paper books – CRAZY!

One thing I really wish I had done now in reflection is to buy the 3G model. The only reason I’d want that is the page sync. I’ve found that the Kindle app for Android is surprisingly very good. I use it on my ZTE Blade, which has an AMOLED screen. Putting the background to black and text to white, doesn’t use a lot of battery at all on the Blade, and being able to turn page by using the volume switch, makes it quite a good device to use when I don’t have my kindle on me. The only issue with this is, I need to remember to turn the kindle wi-fi on and sync the pages back to Amazon – if I’d bought the 3G model, this would just do it for me.

I’ve tried the Kindle app on the iPad, and whilst it’s all there, I just don’t find the iPad that great for reading for any length of time, the lack of a ‘turn page button’ and it’s slightly too heavy. It is however neat to have a synced copy of all my books on all the devices… just in case.