the pros and cons of “gamification”
Friday, May 11th, 2012Slashdot has a post on gamification in the workplace today. One of the myriad replies was from a poster, gomoX, who was pushing his company’s gamified tech support tool (invgate.com/en/service-desk/gamification). I’m all for product placement and pushing when it’s relevant (and here it most certainly was), but I don’t like the general concepts in that [...]
on twitter and the police
Wednesday, May 9th, 2012Dave Winer had an interesting take on the recent Twitter-NYPD flare-up. Personally, the thought of any government organization demanding records without a warrant is abhorrent. However, since the entire point of Twitter is to make your tweets public … then what is there to subpoena? They’re all out there – visible to the world… Unless the user [...]
some great finds
Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012Diagram.ly – it’s sorta like Visio, but free, and web-based. Meetings.io – like webex, including conference calling and file and screen sharing. Qama - a calculator that doesn’t give an answer until you provide a “reasonable” guess. Udacity – a free computer science program. Urbanchickens - dedicated to raising chickens in “non-traditional” environments (like cities).
digital preservation
Wednesday, April 18th, 2012I have been an active member on the Stack Exchange family of sites [nearly] since StackOverflow started a few years ago. Recently a new proposal has been made for Digital Preservation. Many of the proposed questions are interesting (including one of mine) – and I would strongly encourage anyone interested in the topic to check [...]
tax day
Monday, April 16th, 2012Tax Day in the US is “late” this year because the 15th of April was a Sunday. I was able to prepare and file my taxes early-ish (January) thanks to a proactive employer who got our W2s out quickly. Every month I look at my pay stub, and am appalled at how much the various [...]
automatically returning a host to the unprovisioned server pool in hpsa
Tuesday, April 10th, 2012In conjunction with the customized PXE process I wrote about previously, it could be highly desirable to be able to return a server to the unprovisioned server pool in HP’s Server Automation. This is a specifically-Linux procedure: though I’m sure something similar can be done with Windows*. run an ad-hoc script against a target server that [...]
baggage
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012I see Allegiant Air is starting to come around. For several years, many airlines have had checked bag fees – but carry-ons are free. But it’s having carry-on bags that slows everyone down while inept and hapless travelers try to wedge their carry-on and “small personal item” into overhead bins, under the seat in front [...]
gee, thanks red hat, amd, and vmware
Monday, April 2nd, 2012At least the publicly-searchable knowledge base had something. I tried searching for “Kernel panic – not syncing: Fatal Exception” and “RIP” and “cpuid4_cache_lookup”. And wouldn’t you know it! There’s a known issue if you try to install RHEL >5.4 x64 on ESXi 4.x if it’s running on AMD 6000 series CPUs. Guess what – we’re [...]
not enough cpus
Tuesday, March 27th, 2012I found an interesting reference that indicates that for x86, the maximum number of CPUs the Linux kernel can handle is 255. I’d presume that it’s the same for Windows. I’m curious – right now this is a rather large limit: but it won’t be for long! 16 core CPUs are available from AMD today. I [...]
symlinks and nfs
Monday, March 26th, 2012I recently discovered an interesting “feature” of symbolic links in conjunction with NFS mounts: they don’t work! For example, let’s say you have the following NFS export: /media/files Inside of that export, you have the following path: /media/files/isos/osmedia/linux/ubuntu In *this* directory, you have a symlink called ‘current‘, which points to a different location: current -> [...]
