• Articles and Books,  personal

    Distributed Computing for the Good of Man

    July 3, 2007

    I originally posted this at http://www.318.com/TechJournal Most screen savers just waste power. Might as well just put your computer to sleep. But if you want to use a screen saver and you want to do something good for humanity then check out one of these: fightaidsathome.scripps.edu – Join more than 300,000 other computing nodes and dedicate your computing power to finding new AIDS treatments climateprediction.net – Improve climate prediction models with the University of Oxford mersenne.org – Help George Woltman be the first to find a 10 million-digit prime einstein.phys.uwm.edu – Test Einstein’s theory of gravitational waves

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  • Network Infrastructure,  personal

    New UPS

    April 26, 2007

    I just picked up one of those Geek Squad branded UPSs.  It’s nice.  The USB interface was picked right up by my Mac.  I then swapped it into my XP box and loaded up the software that it came with.  It’s flashy and gives me all the stats for the UPS.  I’ll miss my old APC UPS, but this one is way, way better, both in ratings and hopefully in the fact that it doesn’t kill any of my boxes when it blows…  It doesn’t have a network interface though, so I have it going into a FreeBSD box.  If the box detects a power outage on the UPS then…

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  • personal,  Unix

    Goodby Sparc

    April 25, 2007

    My Sparc 20 has been with me through many other relationships.  She never got jealous of my other machines and she never once let me down.  Her 9GB external hard drive enclosure and her Solaris OS were always there for me, and before she was mine she hosted one of the top 1,000 web sites in the country (of course, that’s back when a whole site could fit on a whopping 9GB external enclosure).  She was my “old-reliable”.  But alas, all good things must come to an end.  There’s a chance that she would have lasted forever if I had her plugged into a better UPS.  It wasn’t her fault…

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