I’ve been an Slicehost customer for years, and I vividly recall that the sign up process went something like this; Sign up in the website and enter billing information (1 minute), Create a simple VM with Fedora (5 minutes), SSH into the machine and start using it (<1 minute), So basically within 7 minutes of entering my credit card information I was logged onto my shiny new VM and ready Read More...
A couple of weeks ago I migrated my home computer to Fedora 15 featuring the new GNOME 3 user interface among other significant changes. At first it was quite a struggle to get used to, I almost rolled back to Fedora 14. After persevering for the first few days it got easier to work with, and dramatically I did notice a less ‘distracted’ way of working. If you’ve not had Read More...
UPDATE: Google have finally provided a native Linux client, just login to http://music.google.com/ and click ‘Add Music’ to install it. Last week I received a Beta invite for Google Music. I jumped straight onto it only to meet the message “Music Manager is only available for PC and Mac”. Being an avid Linux user I was most displeased! ”Ok, no problem…” I thought and I jumped straight into a VMware’d Read More...
One of the biggest challenges in writing a Bot (autonomous character) for an MMORPG is the navigation. You have a few choices, ordered by complexity; Steering: Quite simply, given a destination you steer the character towards that point. If it gets stuck you try jumping, reversing, strafing left/right. This is obviously the most primitive form of navigation and looks very ‘bottish’ to real players. Breadcrumbs: A hard coded ‘path’ of waypoints Read More...
I recently upgraded my work laptop to the new MacBook Pro 17″ (2.3Ghz i7, 8GB RAM), being ever the tinkerer I was keen to replace the stock HDD for one of the latest SATA III (6Gbps) solid-state drives. After a brief bit of research it boiled down to two options OCZ Vertex 3 240GB or, Intel S510 250GB both of which are brand new SATA III capable drives with good Read More...
World IPv6 Day is fast approaching (June 8th 2011), excerpt from their website; On 8 June, 2011, Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Akamai and Limelight Networks will be amongst some of the major organisations that will offer their content over IPv6 for a 24-hour “test flight”. The goal of the Test Flight Day is to motivate organizations across the industry – Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies Read More...
I just noticed that the Earthquake Data I’ve been collating had some minor errors (no lat/long), a quickity quick fix to some of the regular expressions and its back to normal. A total of ~31,020 earthquake events, updated daily from data provided by the fine people involved in the GEOFON Extended Virtual Network project.
A while ago I was playing with the Twitter Streaming API, one of the first things I wanted to do was collect a lot of data for off-line analysis (in Hadoop). I wrote a hacky little utility class called TwitterConsumer.java that did just the trick. Basically you just initialise it with a valid Twitter account (username/password) and give it the URL of the stream you would like to consume, this Read More...
I have been using the Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 host bus adapter on quite a few Linux machines recently. Supermicro/Marvell only provide stable drivers for Windows and a select few (outdated) Linux distributions. I had to rely on the open-source support in the drivers/scsi/mvsas tree of the Linux kernel. Running this card with 8 x 2TB hard drives on Fedora Core 13 (2.6.34.6-54.fc13.i686.PAE) was tricky to say the least, machines with identical Read More...
This post has been obsoleted by my update here: Hadoop: Processing ZIP files in Map/Reduce One of the first use-cases I had for playing with Apache Hadoop involved extracting and parsing the contents of thousands of ZIP files. Hadoop doesn’t have a built-in reader for ZIP files, it just sees them as binary blobs. To solve the problem I wrote two small utility classes, ZipFileInputFormat.java and ZipFileRecordReader.java. They extend the default Read More...
With today’s events unfolding in Japan I went looking for sources of earthquake data when I stumbled upon the GEOFON Extended Virtual Network and after a quick bit of scripting I collated all the data into a simple CSV format making it easier to analyse. I have published the collated data on a new page Earthquake Data (GEOFON Extended Virtual Network), the data is being updated periodically (at least daily).
OCZ 30GB SSD $ hdparm -Tt /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: Timing cached reads: 3358 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1679.46 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 452 MB in 3.01 seconds = 150.05 MB/sec Western Digital WD10EADS 1TB $ hdparm -Tt /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: Timing cached reads: 3372 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1685.85 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 274 MB in 3.00 seconds = 91.23 MB/sec Hitachi HDT721010SLA360 1TB $ hdparm -Tt /dev/sdb Read More...