3 weeks on the new machine.

Over the New Years weekend I put together a new machine and loaded Ubuntu 10.10 on it.

What I learnt.

• Power connectors have changed. In addition to the 24 pin EATXPWR socket, there was a 4 pin ATX12V that I'ld not seen before. It's halfway across the board too.


• The current graphics card standards has changed. Installed my first PCI Express 2.0 x16 card.


• My mother board came with 2 Serial ATA 6.0Gb/s cables and 2 Serial ATA 6.0Gb/s cables. This was the only place I had fun & games with. No marking of cables to say which is which.

The third point was the only one that caused a problem. Initial I built the machine with one SATA DVD drive & one SATA hard disk drive. Worked fine. I then added the drive that contained part of the /home directory from my old machine. After that the boot sequence hung. I then swapped the cable connecting the DVD with the cable on the second hard drive and it all worded fine. So speed was important to the hard drive working, but not for the DVD drive. Go figure.

Jigsaw puzzle for the New Years long weekend.

Just brought assorted pieces for a new computer.

Bits purchased:

• AMD Phenom II x4 965 CPU (3.4 GHz),


• ASUS M4A87TD EVO motherboard,


• 4GB DDR3 memory (2 sticks of 2GB, shop didn't stock 4G sticks, I asked),


• Antec case (Noted on the way out that it didn't have a power supply. First time I've ever borough a case that didn't come with a power supply in situ!)


• 500W power supply.

Hope I got a video card new enough to be backward compatible with the motherboard. That's the only potential issue I can see.

Have a 1TB SATA hard disk on the shelf already.

Going to load Ubuntu 10.10 on it.

I love this jigsaw stuff, should do it often enough.

this month in the machine...

Had three events this months.

First was the regard ActionHack. I great hacking afternoon at the iLab incubator's boardroom in Toowong.

Second was a big weekend at #railscamp in Perth.

Andrew Grimm (A sysadmin at UNSW) gave in interesting presentation of using an evolutionary like randomly generated programs (mutations) to test Rubinius. He used other ruby implementations (as a group) to validate Rubinius' returns. The other implementations effectively becoming the environment appling natural selection on Rubinius, to determine its fitness.

Andrew's slides

Thirdly, Last week I went to a Linux Users Group meeting. HUMBUG's fortnightly meeting at UQ. Was just a chat & hack session. I had one problem, but solved it that morning.

I had a mial server issue on my first attempt to set up a mail server. I found that courier (I think?), when reading the authpgsqlrc file, is failing to recognize comments and thus getting the auth requests against the database wrong. The fix was to move the comments to the next line, instead on the end of the line they apply to.

Next weekend is a new month, off to ActionHack.

Diaspora releqased, add to #todo list.

Better late than never. A bit over two weeks ago Diaspora got released.

It's a distributed social media network. Being distributed means you can run your own 'shard' and control all the privacy settings.

Here is where the code lives at github.

Guess what's on my #todo list for Saturday.

diaspora*: a project to watch

Diaspora sounds like a real cool projects. A distributed 'seed'/shard based social network system. It's open source and allows defaults privacy settings at the 'seed' level.

It's also what four uni students are going to by up to this (northern) summer. To fund it they start a project on kickstarter. They wanted US$10,000, the got $200,642, in just over a month. Good work boys.

They're on twitter too.

Time to revisit Arduino and Ruby playing together.

In the last month I've read most of Earth Garden Book's Easy Aquaponics. It's a great collection of about 20 essays on all aspects of Aquaponics, from principles and beginer's back yard systems to establishing commercial systems.

It's the automation of system, particularly commercial ones that peaked my interest. I remembers a demo given at a rails camp. The 3rd camp in Sydney, from memory. Had some Arduino hardware on a bread board and using ruby on a laptop to drive it. Cool stuff.

Time to investigate that tech again I think.

Cheers,

Gnoll110

Ganglia, worth a play.

Just found a blog post call Cluster Monitoring with Ganglia & Ruby. Look like something that could be worth a play.

Might be a thing to look at next Saturday. ActionHack time :).