Posts Tagged ‘computers’

One of the irritating things about Spotlight Search in Mac is that you open want to open the folder that contains a file, but there is no obvious way to do this.

Luckily, there is a non-obvious way. And it’s pretty simple. Just hold down the Option key and double click on the file you want to open.

Computer systems usually generate usernames based on a set pattern. Sometimes this can end badly. For example, at Buzz we tried out taking each person’s first name and the first letter of their surname. This ended badly for Imran Khan, who came out as imrank (or “I’m rank” if you pronounce it out loud).

However, I think Megan Finger was probably more unfortunate with her username.

For the March meeting of Leeds Skeptics, Professor Barry Cooper from the University of Leeds presented a talk entitled “Alan Turing: The Building of a Brain”.

By this point, most developers have realised that Firefox is a cludgey pile of crap that eats up all your memory, and made the switch to Chrome, those developer tools long since surpassed Firebug.

Recently though, I’ve been running out or memory a lot and I don’t think it’s accurate to say Chrome isn’t to blame. As it runs everything in different processes, it’s easy to miss how much memory it is eating up, but I found it using 620MB of memory with just four tabs open.

Of course having Netbeans eating up so much clearly isn’t helping either, but IDEs are always a bag of crap (Eclipse is worse, I miss Notepad++).

As some of you know, despite being very much up on the whole computers thing that is going on these days, my diary remains very much on paper. I prefer it, I can easily add things and scribble things out, it comes in a very nice weekly view and is easy to flick through and I can carry it round easily.

However, with the latest addition to my family of gadgets, I am now carrying around a diary sized device with me anyway.

Having a paper diary also means that I have to transcribe all the events onto paper and there is no way to easily merge my personal diary and work diary. Also, repeating events are just so much easier when it comes to electronic diaries.

So, given the new opportunity, I’ve decided to give an electronic diary a go. Using Google Calendar, integrated into the Calendar app on my iPad, I now have my personal calendar and work calendar all nicely merged into one place and no longer need to carry around my paper diary.

I’m not entirely sold, I think it’s a little more difficult to add events than it is just scribbling them down, and I have some concerns regarding interoperability between Google and my iPad. I’m also not entirely sold on the weekly view I get from my calendar – I like the simplicity of just a list of events in my diary, rather than having a mix of all day events at the top and then actual events in the timeline, not all of which fits on screen.

But I’m going to give it a go and see if it improves my life. Can’t live in the stone age forever – not that they had paper in the stone age ;).

Continuing the ongoing efforts to get the technical set ready for Rationalist Week I’m currently busy installing software and configuring the computers that will be used during the week. As such they now have matching wallpaper so they look nice and pretty 😀 .

Speaking of Rationalist Week preparations, our lounge is now home to a large selection of food products, as per the picture below. Interesting this is just one of several big piles of stuff which is now ready for the week though I think both I, and my housemates, will be glad to get out of the way next week.

Lenovo have just announced a dual-screen Thinkpad laptop which is rather cool indeed. Inside the main 17″ screen is a 10″ slide out screen which gives you extra space on your desktop which is becoming increasingly useful these days.

While I agree that at the moment the extra weight, cash and loss of battery life may not make it worth it, you have to remember that this is the first of it’s kind and five years down the line when the technology has developed a lot more this could be amazingly useful.

Sunday saw the electricity company turn off our power for a few hours for maintenance.

So rather than do it when everyone was out at work, they apparently decided to do it when everyone was home. So arriving home at 3am after work on Saturday night I then had the fun of sorting all of my computers out and powering them down ready.

Once the power came back on again I then had the fun of powering them up again but of course, they didn’t all come back on again because computers don’t work that way and that would just be too easy. But I didn’t want to be able to enjoy my time off anyway.

Before we flee from Burchett Place I thought I would post a few pictures of the current setup at Burchett Place.

The internal network is gigabit, the external is fast ethernet all connected up by Linksys equipment. The first image below shows the internal switches and router which connect up to the main network which is connected to the internet via the routers shown in the second image.

These connect all the servers together of about half of which are racked up as shown below. The rest are just in random locations – the server in the other image is currently sitting in the middle of the floor while it is being setup for example.

These are all kept online by a series of UPS devices.

These are all connected by an endless series of cables. I tried to get some pictures to really show how much cableage there is going on but I couldn’t really achieve the affect I was after. Needless to say though, there is a lot of well organised and structured cabling such as below.

To ensure everything stays cool and the air circulates there is an advanced climate control system as shown below.

Finally this is all monitored and controlled via the NOC, complete with an array of no less than 4 monitors and your choice of both wired and wireless peripherals.

The results seem to have been quite good. Check the router’s uptime – 226 days, that is a little over 7 and a half months and I believe the reason that it came up then was because that was when it was taken offline to install the UPS.

Having finished my FYP I was hoping I could relax a little. But instead I find my timetable full because I’m having to trail everywhere and re-arrange my timetable so I can do all these job interviews.

And the constant phone calls from recruitment companies. I mean, every week, usually multiple times a week.

Meanwhile there is a lot of stress in trying to throw together film nights so I can relax in front of my huge wall size screen with my 600w sound system.

Not to mention the number of neck turns I have to make when looking at all three of my different monitors. And keeping my 12 computers and servers patched up is just a mission.

And deciding what car to buy, in cash. What a headache.

Yep, life is hard.