Fri 28 Sep 2007
We've been chasing a problem recently with trying to use dual
nvidia 8000-series cards with four displays. 7000-series cards
work just fine (we're mostly using 7900GSs), but with 8000-series
cards (mostly 8600GTs) we're seeing an intermittent problem with
one of the displays (and only one) going badly 'fuzzy'. It's not
a hardware problem because it moves displays and cables and
cards.
Turns out it's an nvidia driver issue, and present on the latest
100.14.11 linux drivers. Lonni from nvidia got back to us saying:
This is a known bug ... it is specific to G8x GPUs ... The
issue is still being investigated, and there is not currently
a resolution timeframe.
So this is a heads-up for anyone trying to run dual 8000-series
cards on linux and seeing this. And props to nvidia for getting
back to us really quickly and acknowledging the problem. Hopefully
there's a fix soonish so we can put these lovely cards to use.
Fri 28 Sep 2007
I was building a shiny new CentOS 5.0 server today with a very nice
3ware 9650SE raid card.
Problem #1: the RedHat anaconda installer kernel doesn't support these cards
yet, so no hard drives were detected.
If you are dealing with a clueful
Linux vendor like 3ware, though, you can just go to their comprehensive
download driver page,
grab the right driver you need for your kernel, drop the files onto a
floppy disk, and boot with a 'dd' (for 'driverdisk') kernel parameter
i.e. type 'linux dd' at your boot prompt.
Problem #2: no floppy disks! So the choices were: actually exit the office
and go and buy a floppy disk, or (since this was a kickstart anyway) figure
out how to build and use a network driver image. Hmmm ...
Turns out the dd kernel parameter supports networked images out of the box.
You just specify dd=http://..., dd=ftp://..., or dd=nfs://..., giving it
the path to your driver image. So the only missing piece was putting the
3ware drivers onto a suitable disk image. I ended up doing the following:
# Decide what name you'll give to your image e.g.
DRIVER=3ware-c5-x86_64
mkdir /tmp/$DRIVER
cd /tmp/$DRIVER
# download your driver from wherever and save as $DRIVER.zip (or whatever)
# e.g. wget -O $DRIVER.zip http://www.3ware.com/KB/article.aspx?id=15080
# though this doesn't work with 3ware, as you need to agree to their
# licence agreement
# unpack your archive (assume zip here)
mkdir files
unzip -d files $DRIVER.zip
# download a suitable base image from somewhere
wget -O $DRIVER.img \
http://ftp.usf.edu/pub/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/fdboot.img
# mount your dos image
mkdir mnt
sudo mount $DRIVER.img mnt -o loop,rw
sudo cp files/* mnt
ls mnt
sudo umount mnt
Then you can just copy your $DRIVER.img somewhere web- or ftp- or
nfs-accessible, and give it the appropriate url with your dd kernel
parameter e.g.
dd=http://web/pub/3ware/3ware-c5-x86_64.img
Alternatives: here's an
interesting post
about how to this with USB keys as well, but I didn't end up going that way.
Wed 12 Sep 2007
I've just released my first blosxom
plugin into the wild. 'mason_blocks' is a blosxom plugin implementing
simple conditional and comment blocks using
HTML::Mason-style syntax, for use in
blosxom flavour and template files.
Examples:
# Mason-style conditionals
% if ($pagetype::pagetype ne 'story') {
<a href="$permalink::story#comments">Comments ($feedback::count)</a>
% } else {
<a href="$permalink::story#leave_comment">Leave a comment</a>
% }
# Mason-style comments
%# Only show a comments section if there are comments
% if ($feedback::count > 0) {
$feedback::comments
% }
# Mason-style block comments
<%doc>
This is a great big
multi-line, extremely important
comment.
</%doc>
I wrote it when I couldn't get the interpolate_fancy plugin to work properly
with nested tags, and because I wanted proper perl conditions and if-else
support. mason_blocks provides all the conditional functionality of
interpolate_fancy, but not other stuff like 'actions'.
mason_blocks is available from the
blosxom plugins CVS repository.
Wed 12 Sep 2007
Following on from my earlier data blogging post, and along the
lines of Jon Udell's
lifebits scenarios,
here's the first in a series of posts exploring some ideas about how data blogging
might be interesting in today's Web 2.0 world.
Easy one first: Reviews.
When I write a review on my blog of a book I've read or a movie I've seen,
it should be trivial to syndicate this as a review to multiple relevant
websites. My book reviews might go to Amazon (who else does good user
book review aggregation out there?), movies reviews to IMDB, Yahoo Movies,
Netflix, etc.
I'm already writing prose, so I should just be able to mark it up as a
microformats hReview, add some tags to control syndication,
and have that content available via one or more RSS or Atom feeds.
I should then just be able to go to my Amazon account, give it the url
for the feed I want it to monitor for reviews, and - voila! - instant
user-driven content syndication.
This is a win-win isn't it? Amazon gets to use my review on its website,
but I get to retain a lot more control in the process:
I can author content using my choice of tools instead of filling out a
textarea on the Amazon website
I can easily syndicate content to multiple sites, and/or syndicate
content selectively as well
I can make updates and corrections according to my policies, rather than
Amazon's (Amazon would of course still be able to decide what to do with
such updates)
I should be able to revoke access to my content to specific websites
if they do stupid stuff
I and my readers get the benefit of retaining and aggregating my content
on my blog, and all your standard blogging magic (comments, trackbacks,
tagclouds, etc.) still apply
It would probably also be nice if Amazon included a link back to the
review on my blog which would drive additional traffic my way, and allow
interested Amazon users to follow any further conversations (comments and
trackbacks etc.) that have happened there.
So are there any sites out there already doing this?
Thu 06 Sep 2007
I've been spending some time thinking about
a couple of
intriguing posts
by Jon Udell, in which he discusses a hypothetical "lifebits" service
which would host his currently scattered "digital assets" and syndicate
them out to various services.
Jon's partly interested in the storage and persistence guarantees such a
service could offer, but I find myself most intrigued by the way in which
he inverts the current web model, applying the publish-and-subscribe
pull-model of the blogging world to traditional upload/push environments
like Flickr or MySpace, email, and even health records.
The basic idea is that instead of creating your data in some online app,
or uploading your data to some Web 2.0 service, you instead create it in
your own space - blog it, if you like - and then syndicate it to the
service you want to share it with. You retain control and authority over
your content, you get to syndicate it to multiple services instead of
having it tied to just one, and you still get the nice aggregation and
folksonomy effects from the social networks you're part of.
I think it's a fascinating idea.
One way to think of this is as a kind of "data blogging", where we blog
not ideas for consumption by human readers, but structured data of
various kinds for consumption by upstream applications and services.
Data blogs act as drivers of applications and transactions, rather than
of conversations.
The syndication piece is presumably pretty well covered via RSS and Atom.
We really just need to define some standard data formats between the
producers - that's us, remember! - and the consumers - which are the
applications and services - and we've got most of the necessary components
ready to go.
Some of the specialised XML vocabularies out there are presumably useful
on the data formats side. But perhaps the most interesting possibility is
the new swag of microformats currently being
put to use in adding structured data to web pages. If we can blog
people and organisations,
events,
bookmarks,
map points,
tags, and
social networks, we've got halfway
decent coverage of a lot of the Web 2.0 landscape.
Anyone else interested in inverting the web?
