Nothing boils a bunch of complex data into a tasty nugget of info like a well created graph. Us geek love graphs, and really, how else could anyone comprehend something as complex as web traffic?
From the folks who brought you countless LOLcats, comes a fun site where pop culture and graphs meet to make some great visual puns.
more song chart memes
So, I decided to quit pirating operating systems and installed Ubuntu on a slightly more modern laptop. It rocks. Hands down. It found all the funky parts of the hardware, including a slightly non-standard Cisco WiFi card. No problems at all. Now I am in the middle of finding fun games and stuff to fiddle with.
I am not going to join in with the fanatics, yet I think that this will give the folks in Redmond, and Cupertino, something to look out for.
I have installed Debian Sarge, and the DCC components. I’ve gotten through most of the setup instructions for DCC.I’m at step 3.4 Deploying the image on work nodes.dcc_discovernode worked well enough. But now I’m trying to get the node to acquire the boot image. And this is proving to be challenging. mkautoinstalldiskette has been renamed to si_mkautoinstalldiskette.Whats more, it’s designed for kernels that will fit on a floppy. The kernel that it is trying to copy is 1.72MB, too large to fit. This kernel again, came bundled, and I really dont know how to re-build it so that it will fit.Can I use the SystemImager tools to rebuild it and make it smaller?That’s what is next…
First off, I need to shake the hands of the support folks at DCC. They have been responsive, and helpful - even to a hobbyist.
I got Debian 4.0 (etch) installed, and started to configure it to use the DCC packages, things were not going as smoothly as they could have. I emailed support at DCC, and the next day had some decent email from the support folks there. Apparently DCC is meant to run on Debian 3.1 (sarge). Continue reading ‘Cluster pt 5. Next steps & challenges…’
I dropped a PC on my toe yesterday. I have been rooting through all my carcasses of computers, looking for more and better RAM for the cluster nodes. A pc slipped out of my hands while I was lifting it…
So far, I have 512MB in the master node. Once I found that much, I tried to install rocksclusters again. No dice. ROCKS really looks like the best set of tools for my purposes. I’m going to have to try to get it to install on small machines like the ones that I have. Continue reading ‘Cluster pt 4. Which Distro, cont’d.’
Well, I did a google for ‘Debian Clustering’ and I found the link in the previous post to the Debian DCC package.
I downloaded that, and am installing it as we speak. In looking at the search results, I clicked the second link, and got to the beowulf.org site, which had an article about using DCC, which basically said that it was not as well rounded as something called ROCKS. Continue reading ‘Cluster pt 3. rocksclusters.org’
We all know that outside of the hardware, the OS is the most important component of a well behaved system. But this issue becomes more complex when you start to build a cluster environment because maintenance becomes more of a hassle.
The reason for this is that so much is shared in a clustered environment. Lets just talk about something simple like drivers, and the kernel: Continue reading ‘Cluster pt 2. The Distro’
For many years I wanted to have a cluster. Mostly for the challenge of setting it up, but also to learn about what kinds of applications work best in a clustered environment.I started with a group of identical 486 boxes purchased from Laclede Computer Trading. These were adequate machines to learn to build with, but I quickly outstripped them, mostly because the OS’es dont support the old hardware they have. Continue reading ‘Cluster pt 1. Hardware’
I found this neat thing…a screensaver that shows live images of network surveillance cameras worldwide.
Not working on a Mac at the moment, I have to wait till the Linux version is out…though if I really felt like it I could probably port it. Nah.
Anyway, the search string that they use to find the source images is
http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl:%22jpg/image.jpg%3Fr%3D%22
So, being bored out of my mind at work, as usual, I found what looks like a camera watching a tank full of manatees. At least I think they are manatees. Every now and then some food shows up on the surface of the pool, and sometimes you can catch the reflection of a person walking by the tank. I usually size a window to the picture and let it sit in the corner of my screen, and watch the manatee’s, or what ever they are, drift about.
I get home, and I don’t wanna watch TV. It’s only a bit chilly out, its temperate, and verry humid.These days, I’ve got projects that cant seem to finish on time. It’s really starting to get annoying, and i want to start yelling at programmers, but that wouldn’t help the situation.
It’s autumn, and this is how autumn goes. Projects slow down, money dries up, and you settle in to try to make it with what you have, and deliver the best possible to your end users…
You know, I haven’t posted to the blog in a while - I think to myself…
