Posts

The whole voting process for fast tracking DIS 29500 (i.e. MS-OOXML, Microsoft Corp’s broken new format for office documents) was full of irregularities. Votes that were not counted or counted wrongly, Microsoft Gold partners that were bribed into joining national standards bodies to swing their opinion around in the last minute, meeting rooms for discussing these issues that were deliberately too small for people who could point out the flaws in the formats, but not too small for its supporters. ...

I was going mad fixing a bug in a very convoluted barcode printing feature in the equipment management system we’re developing. After a while I gave up – we must have triggered something deep within Rails or Ruby, and it wasn’t going to go away soon. The details are complicated and boring, and I ended up rewriting our barcode handling. As a side effect developed an extension for Ruby FPDF to support Gbarcode. ...

We are currently finalizing the server consolidation in our department. The product we chose for virtualization is OpenVZ, because it sports creepy Russians. All in all, it was a bit of a roller coaster ride, but once we figured out that most of the problems came from our own incompetence, we quickly stopped pointing fingers and shaking fists and instead read some documentation. Then all was good. We went from 12 servers to 5, killing 7 physical servers and saving roughly 1500W of power consumption. The new virtualization servers we used were actually the old database server and the old main web server, both overpowered. A change in the mentality and the technical competence level required from our students in the last few years has made the extra power for these boxes unneccessary. Now we’re using them much more efficiently because each of them runs several virtual servers. ...

We’re currently evaluating solutions for virtualizing GNU/Linux servers at the HGKZ in order to replace seriously aging hardware (700 MHz P3’s!). At the same time, we can be hip like you and use important-sounding words such as “machine consolidation”, “hypervisor” and “cuttlefish”. Gino is evaluating OpenVZ while I’m looking at Linux-Vserver. Both solutions have a similar approach: Don’t create virtual machines. Instead, create virtual servers that are sealed away from each other, but running on the same kernel. This has its own set of advantages and disadvantages, but I won’t go into that, you can read about it elsewhere. ...

Hurrah! “mad” from TheAlternative.ch created a fantastic precedent for us silly Swiss people: He sent one e-mail to Dell and immediately got a refund for both the unwanted Vista and the copy of MS Works included with his new laptop. He saved 15% on the laptop’s price this way, as well as getting rid of software he doesn’t use. Read his story in English or German.

Serge Wroclawski tells us how to get the Windows tax back that you pay with almost any laptop on the market, whether you want Windows or not. I’m not sure if this strategy only works for the USA, though. I have a few personal experiences with this problem. I have tried several times to get my money back for unused Windows licenses, and every time I was told it’s impossible. One afternoon, I insisted enough to be put through to Microsoft Switzerland’s licensing person, and he himself told me it’s impossible to get your money back, even though Windows’ very own license agreement says you will get cash back if you don’t need Windows. It’s a horrible situation. They sell you a product you don’t need and then trap you in legalese when you want to exercise your right of returning it for a refund. ...

I love rsnapshot, for the most part. It’s one of the most efficient and straightforward incremental backup solutions I’ve ever used – much more reliable than some of the commercial solutions I’ve tried. It leverages the power of GNU cp, your filesystem, rsync and others and smashes them all together into a big happy chunk of reliability. However, it must contain some idiocy, and I guess it’s somewhere in parse_config_file. I just set up another server, the same way I usually do, but it needed a slightly different rsnapshot.conf. So I edited the one that was there and known to work because it automatically comes off my server images. Afterwards I wanted to do a test run of each of the backup intervals, because that’s what you do. But rsnapshot didn’t agree. It didn’t disagree either. It didn’t do anything. ...