It’s just a shame that you can’t use it easily on Linux due to the lack of a driver to communicate directly with the hardware. It’s the replacement for IPMI. Complete remote management of your servers (and desktops and laptops) through an always-on network connection (that is as long as you have power going to the box). All it needs is to be configured (not for the faint hearted) and then you need a machine to talk to it. Unless you’re using a half decent windows server box (something that can at least pretend to be a provisioning server), you’re screwed as you’ll only be able to use it in small bunnies mode (business :). You can make a local ISO image on your computer act like it’s in the CD drivce of the remote machine, you can PXE boot it from the command line (easy installs; easy cleanup!). It cooks, it cleans and it even sends out SNMP traps when something goes wrong (except of course for when the power goes out). It supports a watchdog (but it’s not as easy to program for as the linux watchdog). Unfortunately you have to talk to the damned thing over SOAP. I mean really, wot are you like? It’s like using a butcher’s knife to perform and appendectomy.
Commander, my commander
I got a copy of Supreme Commander last night, even though I was worried it was not going to work on the computee; having seen several reviews complaining about the performance. Mind you, I’m playing Company of Heroes at 1920×1200 resolution, so I was not expecting a slowdown. The screen adjusts itself to give you the best view of the play area. It seems to have been designed to scale quite well – as opposed to some other games. So far, I spent about an hour and a half playing it and it does have a lot of the feel of Total Annihilation about it – you end up with a lot of vehicles to control very early on in the game, and you lose a lot as you try to keep the weak against air units covered by the weak against ground units. Move forward in fits and starts and send out scouts to see what’s over the horizon. Fun for all the military strategists in the family, especially the history teachers. It really feels like directing armies versus directing small numbers of units. Well planning on attending the great engagement ring reveal party tonight, so I won’t be playing this… that is unless I start playing early in the morning when you should expect a rant of tired segueing into something completely surreal. Just like all my other entries (well, not all of them; primarily the ones that have taken place after the hours of midnight and post alcohol enjoyment.) Remember kids ‘[]’ are brackets, ‘{}’ are braces and ‘()’ are parentheses, so mind the parenthetical expressions in your sentences. Note, that I don’t generally consider ‘<>‘ as any of the above family; I just consider them annoying…
What is the matrix
It’s a simple premiss, kind of like the matrix. Basically the world has been destroyed and the only people left in it are stored on quantum computers. Approximately 400 to a computer, and there’s one for most large cities in the world. The problem is that there is an attacking foe and the only way you can combat them is to perform some funky quantum hoo-ha being re-created at some location far away. EVery time you are transferred a little piece of you is lost. Most of the time it’s dry damage, but every now and again it’s wet damage – and you lose a piece of your memories. Depending on the damage you can even end up dead. I know what you’re thinking, death, but you’re stored in a computer – surely there are backups. That’s the pain of the system. There are no backups. If something goes wrongoyu could die; or one step worse end up remembering only pieces of your life; losing precious memories of things that happened to you.
Yes, I’m a sucker for the Anime. All I need to do now is bump my learning up from partial sentences to actually understanding things.
It’s C, ++
Well I’ve been having fun with a little piece of code in the office. It’s apparently written in C++. Well it seems to be written in C with just a small smattering of C++ to make it useless. It’s a true candidate for the WTF.
Bugs in the process
It’s funny – the game seems to occasionally have a double image problem. I got a pair of alex characters in the game. One that follows me around, the other that acts like a spoiled child, being grumpy and causing problems. Last time, she got killed by a closing door and the game ended without me noticing anything. I loaded up the autosave today and it turns out I went a hell of a lot further in the game than I remember – I was really tired so that could explain things. I was trying to find information on the super io controller for the s3000ah motherboard (an smsc SCH5027), but can I find a technical manual for it? can I Frell! I reckon one day with the book and I would have most of the work covered. Love the world of can’t tell won’t tell.
updating the /usr/local install tool
We need to extend the linkit script to support (a) Solaris and (b) spaces/escape characters in the file name.
Sorry, my shell environment just isn’t cooperating with me – BASH_ARGV[0] == {}, yet I cannot dereference the variable correctly no matter what I try. No wonder people use perl. God this is so frelling irritating.
Wonderfully documented evolution email client
Evolution doesn’t really tell you that when you use a script to generate your signature you need to terminate the lines with a ‘<br/>’, otherwise it pretends that there hasn’t been one.
All to do with html mail composition. The only way I accidentally found this out was because of it’s gconf entry containing this gem:
<?xml version="1.0"?> <signature name="default" uid="XXX@XXX" auto="false" format="text/html"> <filename script="true">sig.work</filename> </signature>
Just as well I’m not color-blind
It’s a pie chart, and while some people find that using distinct colors is a distraction in this case the colors are so similar that you are hard pressed to determine which ones apply to what.
shame really, but this is one of the primary reasons for coloring the graph versus shading it – you would at least have the chance to read the bloody thing when the colors are correct
Hot Fuzz is the best cop movie ever!
I laughed so much I nearly peed myself. You must see this movie; it is brilliant. It pays homage to practically every cop movie ever and most of those 70’s small village but something bad is happening here movies. I may just see it again tomorrow, and definitely one to buy on DVD.
boinc keeps the house warm
I think it’s a great and noble task that the BOINC project is performing. I just don’t feel like using it at home; and here’s the reason – I only have speed switching processors. When the CPU is kicking away at this work all the fans run full tilt and things get very noisy. I like the quiet; in fact most of the time I use a nifty tool called SpeedSwitch XP, which allows me to customize the frequency scaling policy of my laptop. When not doing anything CPU intensive I leave it locked on Max Battery, which restricts the speed to the minimum, and thus keeps the fans off most of the time.