Notes – ANDREW PENG

Be nice to your servers

July 1, 2011 No Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

Yelling at your servers can measurably negatively affect their performance. No joke. Make sure to treat your servers with respect, and keep it quiet in the datacenter!

Perhaps there is a “brown note” for disks (“rust note”?) – some harmonic that destroys their performance; although based on what we think is happening (disk heads being thrown off track), we think this has more to do with shock force than resonance. I’m sure there are disk vendor engineers out there who know all about this (Bryan links to a good reference in his blog entry).

[Source: Sun Microsystems Blog (now Oracle)]

News, Notes, Pictures

Snow? In my state? (Edit: ice lolololol)

February 4, 2011 No Comments

Houston gets an onset of cold weather (mid – high 20’s) and a little bit of freezing rain / sleet while I’m at work. While on break I walk around to check out the condition of roads…while most of the surface streets seem fine, our sidewalk at work is coated in a sheet of slick ice, and our Employee of the Month sign is very frosty looking:

Back in the toasty confines of my swampy gator-cubicle, I check the traffic conditions for Houston and this is what I get:

Awesome, just awesome. Thanks to @Snipa_ABlair for the photo.

Linux/Command Line Hero

Screen within a screen within a screen

January 28, 2011 1 Comment

If you have nested screen sessions, and you need to get out of the innermost screen session, I found the following command particularly useful:

CTRL-a, a, d

Notes

Minidlna and custom upnp icons

March 19, 2010 3 Comments

After a few hours of digging into hex and binary conversion tools, I have completed my task. If you download and compile Minidlna on a Linux box, it will show a Tux penguin for it’s upnp icon (for instance, if you were browsing over the network on the PS3). Since my Minidlna server is PowerMac G4 running Debian, I converted a few PNG images of the Apple logo into it’s hexadecimal equivalent, changed the source file icons.c, and recompiled it. Done! Click here to get the updated icons.c file.