Phasor Burn

Round Tower at Glendalough, Co. Wicklow, Ireland, originally uploaded by Smug Bastard.

All sorts of cool stuff like this, seemingly everywhere, in Ireland.

From my Vacation photos

Some interesting photos of abandoned amusement parks.

Apple’s new iTunes Genius feature picks playlists based on a song and the anonymized data that has been submitted by iTunes users who also have that song. What kinds of things they listen to, before/after/around that song, genre and other meta data about the song come into play too.

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work on some of the even slightly esoteric bits of my small music library. Pity.

I can’t say I am unhappy with the office’s new internet pipe. It has been in place maybe 6 months now.

Enmax 100Mbit fibre. Yummy except for the bandwidth caps, so no frequent large file transfers (measured in tens of GB) over this to the datacentre. That’s what portable hard drives are for anyways.

Office -> Datacentre via public internet
8 hops, mostly Enmax, BigPipe, Shaw, Telus, Telus internal.
100 packets transmitted, 100 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 1.815/2.334/10.166/0.900 ms

We talk mostly to the machines at the datacentre via VPN. One would think VPN would slow things down with the encryption, connection tracking etc. Especially since the VPN devices on each end are actually CentOS virtual machines with OpenVPN.

Yes, virtual machines.

The only time there is noticable impact seems to be when backups are running and hammering the VMWare host or guest on either end. Aside from that, we’re nice and zippy.

100 packets transmitted, 100 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 2.278/2.943/8.176/0.733 ms

I really can’t complain about this.

Much better than that crappy AllStream ADSL and Shaw Cable we had in the office previously.

Failing Hard Drive Sounds

Ow ow ow ow. I have heard a lot of these before, in person. Yowza.

I think the musically inclined reading this may also be able to use these sound samples to do something interesting…. lots of percussion goodness. Just don’t think about the source