Anycast: The Loophole

A nifty hack that’s possible in IP networks is the ability to share an IP between servers thousands of miles apart.

Anycast: Networking Introduction

Anycasting is a way to scale geographically by having multiple servers sharing the same IP address.

The Psychology of Letting Go

As it turns out, GNOME Shell is only a problem if you want to fuss with your desktop rather than use it.

In-House, M.D.

Most companies won’t build their own roads or maintain their own power plants. That doesn’t mean they can pretend to do without them.

Fedora 14

A long while ago, there was only one distribution that would keep up-to-date with the latest GNOME releases. Unfortunately it’s that way again.

What About The Other Side of the Anne Frank Accusation?

Instead of continuing down that path, I propose we simply refer to Mr. O’Flaherty as “Paul ‘Fuckwad‘ O’Flaherty’. It has all the deservedly mean-spirited “you are a violently stupid person” ring to it, and it’s easier to get through than a half-dozen pages worth of “I have obviously never cracked open a book on abuse, […]

The Right Question

So, this is almost short enough to stuff into a tweet, but I was wondering if there was an actual list of ways in which GNOME Shell fell short of Canonical’s requirements or desires? In other words, there is a list of problems that are severe enough to cause Canonical & Co. to think it’s […]

WordPress, Time Obsessions

Finally got around to upgrading WordPress to 3.0.1, and it seems much nicer than the 2.9.2 version I was using. I also switched away from the old fcgid configuration, and dumped the custom Lifestream-based theme which I used to have in favor of a normal blog, and a theme I downloaded. It just wasn’t worth […]

On Email Etiquette, Part I

This is a response to a post from Aaron Toponce about E-mail Ettiquette. Like Aaron, I receive hundreds of e-mails a day—I’m subscribed to lists which are relevant to systems administration and networking: announcement lists for software packages which my company uses, c-nsp, j-nsp, nanog, etc. Like Aaron, I also receive about 100 non-ML e-mails […]

Little Differences: London

Besides driving on the wrong side of the road.

Screwing Up

On the ride home today, I passed the same ad I pass every day: an ad for Android Apps. Google’s advertising dominance of a market which Apple created. The papers (blogs) are full of complaints, and there’s been a definite mood shift. Before, people had a love/hate relationship with Apple: they loved how awesome the […]

Zenoss Swap Threshold Fixes

One of the recurring problems I have with Zenoss is fixing the swap threshold issue. Basically, if your swap space is less than 1G, you’re stuck with an alarm informing you that there’s less than 1G of swap total. The options are to hack it to increase the threshold (by decreasing the minimum-free threshold), or […]

Thoughts on Privacy

This post is pretty heavy on the pontificating, but I’ll tie it back into GNOME at the end, I swear. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about privacy lately. Most of the shiny things here on the internet are some type of service where you abandon some degree of privacy to an intermediary in return […]

Excel Beta 2010

I’ve got Excel 2010 Beta installed on my PC at work, partly to play around with it, partly because I need something to do all the myriad spreadsheets I’m required to do. As before, Excel 2010 allows you to open multiple workbooks with that maddeningly weird pseudo-MDI interface that is always a little jarring. I […]