Whenever people visit my office or see my workspace, they are always amazed by the sheer number of screens.  The next question/statement is usually “what the heck do you need all those screens for”, or “you can’t look at more than one screen at a time”.

I’m not going to go into the awesomeness of multiple screens, but talk a little about how I have things setup.  To be honest, this is a reduction in screens for me, heres a pic from a previous office setup (theres actually another 3 screens on the left of me which you can’t see in that picture).

Anyway, the current setup, starting from the far left.

This is an XP machine, which I use mainly for Forex trading.  Although I prefer to work on OSX, and I know I could run this as a virtual machine, its just not the same experience, regardless of what any “tech gurus” might say – simply, they are disagreeing with me, and by default, wrong.  Kidding of course

When I sit in in “trading mode” on this machine, MetaTrader takes up both screens.  When not actively trading, I leave woopra.com up and running.  For those of you that haven’t seen woopra; its a real time website visitor analytics tool.  It displays visitor info/metrics in real time, including where in the world they are – which it maps (being a little boy inside, I find this very cool!).  At the time I’m writing this post, I can see there are 8 visitors viewing the zovo.co website, and which countries they are in, queue some sort of cheesy world domination music here.

The last screen on the XP machine runs Bloomberg TV, which occasionally gets muted, if you’ve ever watched Bloomberg TV, you’ll know why!  Another excellent web app is used here, check out zattoo.com, which lets you watch live TV channels.  Unfortunately the BBC feeds have been pulled now, but Bloomberg TV is there (which save me getting a Freeview TV in here).

Coming round to my much loved Macbook, running an Apple LED display (mini DVI straight off the macbook), and a Samsung LED (BX2350), running on an ezCap USB to DVI adaptor.

I do most of my browsing, document editing, chatting, etc on here.  The macbook screen gets used mainly for instant messaging and viewing youtube/ted.com etc.  The Samsung LED (on the far right) has all of my social media feeds via, Twitter OSX app, and TweetDeck as well as NewsBar (lightweight, no nonsense RSS feed reader).

Tell me about your desk/workspace, and feel free to ask any questions.  Usually a mention to @hamlesh on twitter will get a quicker response.

A few of my twitter followers were asking for a wider shot, so heres one I took a few days after originally writing this

I have a number of my websites setup with @cloudflare, its free, and offers a lot of security and optimisation filtering.  Its dead easy to implement and theres very little maintenance to do.  I highly recommend you check them out.

You can read more about the free ipv6 gateway for cloudflare users in their blog post.  Theres a really nice infographic on their post

Anyway, I’m now IPv6 ready – why aren’t you?

Be warned, this might be very geeky/techy for some of you, but I find it cool, and wanted to document/talk about it

Going from top down;

Tv.drobo

4 bay USB2 drobo unit, currently running 2x 2Tb and 2x 1Tb drives. It’s a first generation drobo, thus only supports USB2, and max 2Tb drives, hopefully drobo will release firmware to support larger drives in the future. Once 2Tb drives drop below the £50 mark per drive (inc vat and delivery), or when I run out of space, I’ll replace the 2x 1Tb drives. This unit holds all of my TV episodes and shows, hence it’s name.

Dell PowerConnect

24 port gigabit switch, not much more I can say, it’s managed and very good in a “non ISP” environment. Not sure if I’d use one in the data centre though, other than perhaps as a storage network switch (supports multiple bonded port groups, and jumbo frames, with a 10Gpbs backplane).

Ironhide

Netgear ReadyNAS, with 4x 250Gb drives, holds all of my music. The main reason I still use the ReadyNAS is that it has squeezebox server built in as part of it’s base operating system. I have two jogglers (little openpeak photo frame tablet things) around the house, running jolicloud, with squeezecentre on them. So this setup for music “just works”, which is all I care about; for music anyway, throughput isn’t critical. If I needed to I could bond the network interfaces, but there’s really no need for that!

Allspark

1Tb Lacie Etherdisk (4x 250Gb) running Debian, this spends most of it’s time powered down, I only fire it up when I need it. It’s on a separate storage VLAN, and I use it as an NFS based datastore when I need to move virtual machines between different vmware ESXi servers.

Bonecrusher

1Tb Lacie Etherdisk (4x 250Gb) running Debian. This runs hellanzb and hellavcr, which knows what TV shows I follow, and grabs them when they are available (in the formats I like, ie hidef). Not going to go into too much depth on how these are setup, google, or ask me on twitter (@hamlesh) and I’ll tell you

Soundwave

Dell Poweredge SC1425, my primary vmware ESXi server, running various things, perhaps I’ll do another post about the virtual machines at some point. There’s usually another SC1425 (ESXi) called Optimus underneath this server, but at the time this picture was taken Optimus is in the office.

Sideswipe

Dell Poweredge 1800, my primary storage control server, and the central point for media sharing across the network. It also has some internal storage, about 4Tb worth, used when I need to move large amounts of data around.

Apple Xserve RAID

Multiple arrays deployed on this, mirrored for documents storage, two large arrays for movie and software storage. The throughput of these units is really something else, I need to put up the disk bench stats at some point. Having 14 spindles and fibre channel access (4 Gbps) is really something else, but some could argue, it overkill for a home setup

I would like to get a pic when the xserve is working really hard, as all the blue indicator lights on the front are really quite mesmerising

Cabling is currently relatively neat, I have serious OCD when it comes to cabling neatness, still need to velcro tie the cables

The Xserve RAID is running fibre channel to the storage server (Sideswipe), which has bonded gigabit onto the network (bonded ports on the switch too obviously).

There are some other machines missing in these pics, all that are used for various virtualisation testing etc, but they are currently with clients doing proof on concept delivery, or being borrowed by friends.

Everything is running on an APC remote reboot unit, so I can power cycle anything remotely, or usually when I’m feeling too lazy to go downstairs. I’ll have to do another post on my power provision at some point too. Ive built a custom distribution unit which can be switched between the mains, or a little petrol generator thats sitting in the garden (just outside the comms room)… Yep I have power backup / generator capacity for all of this kit at home

In total I probably have around 24Tb of storage running in this setup, all of which is backed up on zovo, who provide unlimited storage online backup. With everything running, this setup uses just under 4 amps (thanks to power metering on the APC power bar).

Anyway, hope this has been informative, why not comment and tell me about your setup?

Give it a try, post a comment or tweet @hamlesh to let me know what you think

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Whats the problem?

In the beginning a retweet on twitter was considered to be any tweet with “RT @hamlesh” in the tweet.  However a proper retweet (I don’t know what else to call it) is one using the twitter retweet function (which not all apps have – still)

The following tweet should demonstrate what I am talking about.

You can see, these were retweeted “properly” – using the retweet button/method.

Now the following tweet by JasonJGale

Was retweeted by BeckySocial, using whats now dubbed the “mention” tweet functionality, as there are no “Retweeted by…” statistics.

Now what I want to know, how the heck do we trigger proper retweets so that the relevant META data is preserved – and furthermore is this possible through the open RSS feed data?  Simply affixing RT infront of a tweet is no longer enough.

Can anyone help? — @hamlesh on twitter if you’ve found a solution or can offer any guidance.

repeat
delay 7200
set app_name to "PROCESS NAME"
set the_pid to (do shell script "ps ax | grep " & (quoted form of app_name) & " | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}'")
if the_pid is not "" then do shell script ("kill -9 " & the_pid)
delay 30
tell application app_name to activate
end repeat

You can find the application / process name by looking in Activity Monitor app.

Tweak the first delay parameter (in seconds) to suit your needs – the above will kill and restart the application / process every 2 hours (with a 30 second delay in-between killing and restarting).

Found this useful? Why not become a fan on facebook, or say hello on twitter?

So I came up with the following AppleScript code.

Copy and paste into AppleScript Editor, make the changes you need, and save it as an “Application”.  Remember to tick “Stay Open” when you save it.  I’ve dropped, what i’ve called the “Heartbeat App” onto the dock and set it to start when the computer does.

repeat
delay 60
set core_is_running to is_running("NAME OF PROCESS OR APPLICATION")
if core_is_running is false then
tell application "NAME OF PROCESS OR APPLICATION" to activate
set core_is_running to is_running("NAME OF PROCESS OR APPLICATION")
end if
end repeat
on is_running(appName)
tell application "System Events" to (name of processes) contains appName
end is_running

delay 60 is the time interval in seconds you’d like the heartbeat app to check for the application or process.

To find out the NAME OF PROCESS OR APPLICATION, simply run the application / process, then look under Process Name in Activity Monitor.

You could also adapt this to run an application / process every x amount of time if you so wished.

Comments, becoming a fan on facebook, and saying hello on twitter, always appreciated

• Equinix Commits to Use 50 Percent Renewable Energy in Paris Data Centers [Equinix press release]

Fundamentally, what Equinix (EQIX) have done is purchase 45,000 of EDF’s Certificats Equilibre (CEs).

Taken directly from the press release;

For every ‘Certificats Equilibre’ purchased, EDF injects one MWh of power from renewable sources into its network.

The key point here is “into its network” – this doesn’t mean EQIX’s network, it means EDF’s network/grid.

Therefore this does not mean that 50% of the power used by the EQIX datacenter is renewable, it means that the power provider used by EQIX, in this case EDF, has 45GWh of power on-stream from renewable sources.

Granted the Paris EQIX facility uses about 90GWh of power, and so 45GWh of that is coming from a provider who has 45GWh of power on-stream from renewable sources.  This is not what the press release claim is though, bad wording.

A more accurate headline “EDF commits 45GWh of power from renewable sources thanks to Equinix“.

Doesn’t quite have the same punch, but much more accurate.

For now, heres the download link: http://www.mediafire.com/?869f9bj1399bsc0 (55.29 Mb)

You’ll need a password to download, which is really simple to obtain;

Pay with a tweet

1. Follow @hamlesh on twitter

2. Click here to pay with a tweet

3. I’ll reply via DM to you with the password

Via Paypal

1. Click here to pay via PayPal (its only £1)

2. I’ll reply via email with the password

My replies aren’t automated, so bare that in mind.

To install the fonts in one go, once you’ve extracted the zip file, copy them to your “~/Library/Fonts” folder in your “home directory“.

1. Press ALT + F1 at the same time
2. Terminal window opens
3. Type “sudo apt-get install tsclient” – you’ll get asked for your password
4. Apt-get fetches the relevant packages and does the install
5. To run the tsclient, simply open the terminal and type “tsclient”

Done

I need to work out how to add a custom icon to the dashboard, tweet me if you know how – i’ve not bothered to work that out yet.