The last time I ordered cards from moo.com, I didn’t really get the idea, this time around I spent the time, thought about it and put my own graphic together.  This is the avatar I use on most social network sites, twitter, forums and so on.  This gives some form of real world tie in with my “digital self”.  Additionally the moo cards are “for fun”, and general networking, I wouldn’t use them for conducting the business of PeritusVentures or NXEQ for example, those have their own full sized business cards and are all corporate

Moo.com have really improved the design tool since my last order, which was back in Feb 2009.  Its a lot slicker, and the font options for the text side of the card are much much nicer.  Interestingly, because I didn’t really “get it” last time, I didn’t really hand out many of my old cards – it had a list of websites on rather than any useful contact information!

With hindsight, I wish I had put my PGP key on the card instead of my skype name – ah well, next time!

If you’ve not ordered from Moo.com before, use this discount code when you checkout 2RB2CK for 15% off of your first order

One final product shot, show the love!

As always, comment and tweet people, comment and tweet!

You can always keep up or engage with me on twitter

On another note, I’ve had a few blog comments complaining about some broken download links, so those have been fixed.

CISCO Lab Software – PacketTracer: now available for download again. Please post a comment, it helps with my page rank (shows activity and relevance), and takes about 2 seconds to do.

Photo Booth (for osx): my solution/fix to the common problem of photo booth not initializing the inbuilt camera is available once more for download.

Enjoys

View motorcycle parking in st.albans in a larger map

Source for data

About 10 mins later we are all back in the building, with lots of boxes of chocolates

It wasn’t a very eventful trip, Sainsbury’s was very busy, and we did get lots of weird looks, but seriously people… chocolate that sells for £6.09 a box usually, going for 99p. We cleared the shelving area that had them loose, and one of the guys spotted where they were still boxed up, so I grabbed one of those too

All in all I think we came away with around 51 boxes of chocolate between the 3 of us – ah well, that will keep us going a while then… well, you’d hope so!

Some extracts from the talk that I really enjoyed and got me thinking;

“The mid-oceanic ridge covers almost 23% of the Earths total surface area.”

Robert poses an interesting series of question;

“Why are we not looking at moving out onto the sea? Why do we have programs to build habitation on Mars and we have programs to look at colonising the Moon but we do not have a program looking at how we colonise our own planet and the technology is at hand.”

Another amazing presentation give at the TED conference in March 2008!

[flv]http://static.videoegg.com/ted/movies/RobertBallard_2008_high.flv[/flv]

Its the “GlossyBlue” theme from  N Design Stuio – they also have a very sexy iTheme.

Let me know what you think

 anon1 (05:48:35 PM): u crying for a cow lol\
05:48:43 PM This is an offline message from rtfy@wshg.com. To reply, enter their email address in Friends and press Chat.

It is a widely known fact that within the Hindu faith, the cow is a revered and sacred animal.  I say widely known, but apparently the Secretary of State, and the RSPCA are unaware of this.

I have written what follows with great care to maintain the facts, and to put my personal feelings aside.

Bhativedanta Manor, the Hare Krishna temple in Watford is home to many Cows under the ISKCON Cow Protection Programme.  The temple has a number of working cows and bulls, who are well looked after, work the land, and provide milk used in the day to day worship and food preparations.

A year and a half ago, one of the cows was injured when a bull jumped on her back, vets and animal welfare professionals were called, and their professional advise followed.  The prognosis was that the cow would pass away naturally in a few days due to the nature of her injuries.  However she has been making a slow and steady recovery for the last year and a half, well cared for by the temple monks, and visited regularly by a number of vets and animal welfare professionals.

Last week a vet from the State Veterinary Service came to conduct a test (presumably for foot and mouth) on a number of cows at the temple and assed the injured cow’s position.  The vet was informed on the Hindu faiths position on cow care, and the progress in recovery she has made over the last year.  He indicated on his departure that nothing further would probably come of his visit, given the manner in which the temple has continued to care for and nurse the cow back to health.

On the 12th of December the temple was visited by senior members of the RSPCA, escorted by the police, they were served a warrant, stating that the cow would have to be euthanised in due course (not immediately).  During the visit the temple monks were given the impression that they would have the opportunity of taking legal action to stop the murder of the cow, or at the very least have their say.

This morning the RSPCA and police visited the temple barn with a warrant, without due notice the cow was murdered.  The senior RSPCA officers had delayed and distracted the monk caring for the cow, to allow his colleague to murder the cow.

My thoughts

I struggled while writing the “article” above, and it is constructed so that the average member of the public can read it and understand what follows.

I am, what most would understand as a Hare Krishna, a member of the Hindu faith.  Frankly, and simply put, I am angry, very very angry, and as this disseminates throughout the Hindu community, everyone else will be getting angry too.  It is one thing to put down an animal that is infected, and proves a threat to other animals and the human populous at large.  But to sneak around and murder a cow who’s condition and health had been steadily improving, who had been well cared for, regularly visited and assessed by independent (not of the Hindu faith) vets, this, this despicable action will not stand.

Our faith and beliefs have been completely disregarded by the authorities, had they followed the correct legal channels, and given us the chance of representation, this would have been a different matter entirely.  The temple devotees were not even given the right (given by law in this country!) to perform “the last rights”, or any other prayers for the soul of one of Krishna’s sacred cows.

Given my affiliations, I am refraining from voicing much of what I really feel, but this will not stand!

DivX Pro is currently free to download and they’ll even email you a serial key free too

DivX Pro usually costs £12.99, the key difference between DivX and DivX Pro being that you can encode video using Pro.

Both the MAC and Windows versions are currently free.

Get them from here: http://www.divx.com/dff/index.php?version=mac

I’ve noticed a small error with the site though, only the “mac” version page will let you enter an email address to have the serial number sent to. So stick your address in there, then click the Windows link (if you are that way inclined) and download.

Enjoys.

Highlights;

• Brought a new facility online, and migrated a shed load of servers to it.
• Attended BarCampLondon3, at Google’s UK HQ.
• Signed up more over 200 new accounts (I’ve lost count) on our Hosted Exchange platform.

Anyway, I came across a silly application on my travels throughout the t’interweb, a little Christmas tree application (not quite what i’d call a widget).  Simple really, it sits on your desktop counting down the days till Christmas.

Screenshot;

Totally free, released by “Respectable Software“, I’ve mirrored the download file here.

If theres a resource thats been cross-linked that you are trying to find, please contact me and i’ll email it to you.

• Saab 9-3, 9-5, 16″ alloy wheels with vgc Michelin Tyres
• Speedtouch 510 v6 adsl modem/router – one port
• Sony Ericsson GC75 PCMCIA GSM /GPRS card
• Linksys Wireless-G ADSL Home Gateway (WAG354G v2)
• D-Link DGE-660TD Laptop GigaBit Card 10/100/1000
• Speedtouch 510 ADSL modem/router
• D-Link DSL-604+ ADSL modem/router with wireless
• Linksys Wireless-G ADSL gateway (WAG54g ver 1.2)
• Linksys Wireless Access Point 2.4Ghz 54g (WAP54G)
• Linksys Wireless Access Point 2.4Ghz 54g (WAP54G)
• Sony MiniDisc Headunit MDX-C7900R
• theloudest.com 1000w 6×9″ speakers – VERY LOUD
• Epson Stylus C86 photo edition printer
  

Contrary to popular opinion, napping isn’t for the lazy or depressed. Famous nappers have included Bill Clinton, Lance Armstrong, Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Edison. The moral of the story: to be ultra-productive, just rest your head. You snooze, you gain.

• 10 benefits of power napping and how to do it

The construction of a 200 square foot mural tributing Calvin and Hobbes, made entirely of Post-It notes, HOW COOL!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G22VaXmSAI[/youtube]

On the 23rd of September 2007 London will be getting taken over by cyclists for the Hovis London Freewheel.  I’ve signed up and will be around somewhere.  If you are going, drop me a line and a bunch of us can meet up somewhere.

I’m going to hook one of my wireless cameras to the handle bar of my bike and digitally record the event for funsies

For more information the official homepage is: http://www.londonfreewheel.com/

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nR2ygFn-yR8[/youtube]

Comments and feedback appreciated.

Welcome to the family

Hmm, I should really get back into parkour…

Essentially the more power (wattage) a system draws, the more heat it will produce, and thus, as a data center operator the more you have to cool. The issue is that air has an effective cooling density, there are arguements over what this is, but 300w/sqft can be cooled quite effectively, both in terms of additional power required to drive large HVAC unit, as well as cost of cooling, and as everyones going green crazy, lets not forget the environmental impact. Well this market state was brought about for 3 reasons;

• Demand – people wanting more and more powerful systems (blade centers etc)
• Hardware companies – bringing inefficient servers to market
• Stupid people – thinking that the way to get more CPU power is by putting in uber blade centers

Hardware vendors have now caught up with the market going “oi, we dont want you 3amp drawing boxes” *cough* Apple XServe *cough*, why would you put in a box that draws 3amps when a 1.5amp draw server from HP can do the same job? You see its an escalating problem, servers use more power, data centers charge for more power, then have to provide more cooling capacity, which in its own right draws power. Also typically big blade centers require 32amp power feeds, the cost to provision this in most data centers is `quite large`, and getting that power in London is almost out of the question.

The market has already shifted back to days of old, where you had entire floors dedicated to processing, think huge VAX300 systems and multinode IBM mainframes. With utility computing the same processing power can be achieved without the large power draw, cooling requirement, and environmental impact that we’ve seen in recent years. The emergence of virtualisation is another critical step in this arena, with the ability to start `servers` on demand, based on system loads, we no longer need to have redundant physical capacity sitting there when its not required.

Berkeley IT is effectively delivering 10.5Ghz of processing power on a nominal 220w draw (thats under an amp – remember American readers, UK 240V != 120V). How are we pulling this off, here are some of the systems that we are looking to deploy for our larger demanding customers. Why am I sharing this? Well its old news as far as I’m concerend, Berkeley IT is currently developing newer, denser and more efficient models, staying ahead of the curve and all that;

The Octimod MPC7-1500 – think blade center without the power draw

Image courtesy of mini-itx.com

7 processing modules, each is hot-swappable, and contains a 1.5GHz C7 powered VIA EPIA EN 15000 motherboard. The modules boot over the network from a master node (or from multiple master nodes). SATA RAID modules provide shared storage, with a rack mounted distributed DC power supply providing power for each module. 8 of these 4U Octimod units can be mounted in a 42U rack, and as they are only 300mm deep, we can mount them back to back. So thats 16 units, each delivering 10.5Ghz of processing power at 220W full loading. So a per rack draw of 14.6 amps (excluding the switch). Berkeley IT can provision 16 amp racks for roughly £800 a month, compare that to what you are currently spending on your processing power and blade centers! IE: Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, for as always, its Berkeley IT for the win

LinITX.com’s Quad CV700A 1GHz

Image courtesy of LinITX.com

Essentially this if a 1U rackmount case with 4 independant systems. Each has 3 onboard network adapters… why I’m not quite sure, we rarely make use of two, but hey! They run at 1Ghz and can take up to 1Gb of RAM. Each machine has its own independant 2.5″ hard disk. Oh and they are under a grand each!

I’ve reloaded as much of it as I could find using google cache. Anyway I’ll be making changes as I go along, such as the new theme and some other bits and bobs.

As to where the hell I’ve been the last month, thats a longer post… watch this space

So, just before Christmas I did something about it;

Picked them up today, problem solved \o/

Anyway the Open-E system is very smart, it acts as a bootable medium and loads a cut down O/S sepcifically geared for NAS services. They have an IDE, SCSI and USB version. This the DSS sits on an internal USB header and is loaded with features, as well as support for a whole load of hardware RAID cards. I will be looking to implement this and replace the current Dell NAS Vault units we (Berkeley IT) are currently using.

I was very suprised to open the box and find a mug inside. I think its very clever that they packaged the unit in this way. Its so tiny that we needed to think of something to give you These units arent “cheap”, but the software functionality looks very good on paper. Over the next few weeks I will be testing to see just how well it performs.

A whole fully featured opearting system off of the Open-E DSS NAS module… nice For bigger pictures have a look at my gallery, sorry about the picture quality, took these with my PDA.  For more information about these super cool modules, click here.

Yes… a 3 stage journey to the office every morning involving getting up at 0445 and getting to the office for 0730. Considering I wasn’t finishing up here till 2200/2300 most nights, getting home wasn’t much fun either.

Yesterday I finally bought a space in the Audley Street car park, literally around the corner from the office. Now I can drive straight into Mayfair, park up, and be in the office within minutes. Its not cheap, but the time and energy saved more than covers the annual cost. On the plus side I get a free copy of the FT every morning

(1 minute walk… if that)

I guess now I’ll have no excuse to not go to the gym after work, as I can hop in the car around 2000 and head over to The Strand (where the gym is). There is a downside to all this “being nearer the office” lark… I can now work till 2300 without worrying about the journey home… Going to the gym at 2000 sounds like a much better idea for my health though

And if you’d like to see something really amusing, check out what I parked my little Citroen Ax between this morning.

(Click to zoooom)

Yep, that’s right, Aston, Aston, Citroen, Aston Can’t wait to pick up my new car on Saturday

Finally moving in the right direction!

“On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you’ll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.”

Bill Gates, as quoted from Fortune Magazine on April 4, 2006.

(Click to enlarge)

Top Left > Bottom Right: Malvern(3 x 21″ CRT); Reading(2 x 21″ TFTs + 2 x CRTs); Reading(2 x 21″ TFTs + 15″ TFT); Mayfair(2 x 21″ TFTs + 15″ TFT); all driven from the same system.

Watch this space, 2 x 21″ TFTs and 2 x 19″ Widescreen TFTs will soon be appearing on my rig at the office

I’ll have to order up another 1 to 5 of these Iiyama’s… they aint cheap though!

I’ve recently shown a few people how to tie a half windsor correctly, so I thought I’d blog it

1. Start out so that end A is longer than end B and cross A over B.

2. Bring A up around and behind B.

3. Bring A up.

4. Pull A up and through the loop.

5. Bring A around front, and over B.

6. Bring A up and through the loop.

7. Bring A down through the front of the knot.

8. Tighten the knot and you’re done

These will join the rest of the home cinema setup at some point (most probably over the weekend) when I am home during the day to do some loud testing.

PS: Yes, thats 3 amps, the Samson and Wharfedale work on powering my 3 subs – I like my bass

I spent Saturday cleaning the sty that was my room. Spending all my time at work and on the road had resulted in quite an unmaintained mess. Suffice it to say I’ve never seen my floor so clean, not a good thing I know.

Having caught up with all u “housework” on Saturday I caught up on sleep by getting an early night (the extra hour due to the clock change was a bonus). Sunday I was up by 0500 as usual, I headed down to the temple in Watford for morning prayers, and to the office from there.

I had done all that I had wanted to by lunchtime, and wondered over towards my Charlotte Street office to collect post. This is the base of operations for my PA hire company, and as such I’m only there twice a week at most. I grabbed some lunch just off of Soho Square, it was surreal stopping and watching the world go by, its been a long time since I’ve taken the time to do that.

All in all a nice slow relaxed weekend… Stranger things have happened!

Wishing everyone out there a Happy Diwali

Although in my family we don’t celebrate Diwali in the major way most “Hindus” do (its not a totally vedic celebration), we take it as an opportunity to get together as a family, and do the “family things”.

Hopefully I will be helping out with the fireworks display at the temple on Sunday, unless of course it rains and the celebrations get cancelled.

• The fruit salad
• The two pots of yogurt
• One box of the corn flake chocolate thingies
• And the boxes of cookies, though they are being kept in the drawer for tonights 2000-2200 meeting

How true, although I am a Polar Bear

What a likeness! – see more of his work here.

Stability results were moderately low which suggests you are worrying, insecure, emotional, and anxious.     

Orderliness results were medium which suggests you are moderately organized, hard working, and reliable while still remaining flexible, efficient, and fun.

Extraversion results were medium which suggests you are moderately talkative, outgoing, sociable and interacting.

changeable, in the middle, suspicious, somewhat traditional, dislikes chaos, down to earth, group oriented, practical… you scored in the middle on the overall factors of this test.

Anyway I digress, this is my lunch today;

Its just my lunch, the guys have their own food too! A nice sizeable shop that.

Well since then I blog irratically and post files and photos from time to time – today just seems to be a day for updating things.  I know people read this site as there are the odd comments from both people I know and people I dont.  I just looked at the site stats/traffic, I didnt expect to get “this many” visitors: 918 unique visitors last month – for a personal blog type site I dont think this is bad traffic.

 

Click for the full view.

In short this is a specifically designed distribution of Linux focused around security and pentesting.

Knoppix-STD is a customized distribution of the Knoppix Live Linux CD. Boot to the CD and you have Knoppix-STD. That would include Linux kernel 2.4.20, KDE 3.1, incredible hardware detection and hundreds of applications. Boot without the CD and you return to your original operating system. Aside from borrowing power, peripherals and some RAM, Knoppix-STD doesn’t touch the host computer.

Read more and download the ISO from here.