Archive for May, 2006

Assembly code from 1994, proto-DSL

Thursday, May 11th, 2006

Tonight I came across a chunk of x86 assembly code that I wrote for a university class in 1994. I present it here in its original form, complete with 1994 file modification date:
KSPOOL.zip
The thing I notice about this code in retrospect is that I used a macro (this was assembled with a macro assemler) […]

LVM (Logical Volume Management) - a very good thing

Thursday, May 11th, 2006

This Mailing list post from a user of “MythTV” reminded me of the wonders of LVM (Logical Volume Management) which is built in to Linux (HowTo, Resource page).  I first saw LVM years ago on a commercial Unix, and didn’t quite understand the point.  Now I see the point clearly, and set up most new […]

St. Louis Code Camp - Lua Talk Notes and Source Code

Tuesday, May 9th, 2006

At the St. Louis Code Camp on May 6, I gave a talk that was somewhat poorly titled “Painless Scripting with Lua”.  The topic more mostly about the overall use of scripting as a configuration and extension mechanism, with Lua as an example language.
The talk had no slides, only code and a 1-page handful with […]

Basement Data Center

Thursday, May 4th, 2006

It occured to me today that a section of my basement is starting to resemble a data center:

The four machines here:

Are all test machines, or being configured and burned in for future deployment - the production hardware for our projects invariably ends up in customers’ data centers or in robust colo facilities (redundant power, massive […]

Is my RAID working? HP / Compaq SmartArray RAID on Linux

Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006

One of our servers is an HP / Compaq 2U machine (DL380 ?) with 6 hard drives and the SmartArray hardware RAID controller. This generally works quite well, but we don’t use one of the handful of Linux distributions that HP supports… so from their site we find a great lack of information on […]