I am still recovering from the fairly challenging logistical project of saving a Lucent 5ESS. This is a whale of a project and I am still in a state of disbelief that I have gotten to this point. Thanks to my wife, brother, and a few friends for their help …

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At the Netflix vendor summit I gave a talk about FreeBSD on PowerNV, the bare metal firmware of POWER8 and POWER9.

PDF slides

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The fine folks over at ServeTheHome have done a fantastic job documenting the Dell C6100. This is a rather interesting system because:

1. It packs quite a bit of compute power into 2U for colocation
2. They are surprisingly cheap on the secondary markets

I'll lead you over to the ServeTheHome blog …

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On the Play! Framework mailing lists I've seen reference to the sample Computer Database as a canonical example of paginating data. It's a good start but it's pretty specific to one data type. Follow along and we'll make a more general utility.

If we think abstractly about paginating a web …

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One of the interesting things about Scala is how well it composes. This is the primary "Scalable" in Scalable Language. I'm writing this up to share my experience and track my progression in a partially contrived but interesting example.

So I'm playing around with Plivo, which is a telecoms IaaS …

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I was beginning to get hit by many bad things in the Debian Squeeze zabbix 1.8.2 package. If you aren't aware, zabbix is a nifty data center monitoring system and is only slightly annoying compared to most other systems which are very annoying to set up and use …

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Yes. Configuration Management Software Sucks. Horribly.

The main problem is that n-th order tweakability is preferred over convention It's just stupid. There are a core set of things that just about everybody needs to do. Those should be dead simple. Ready to uncomment and run. The set operating systems used …

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Intro

As one might expect from a computing professional, I spend a lot of time in front of LCD screens. This is coupled to the modern assault of Compact Florescent Lights (CFL). These are both heavy on the blue spectrum. Depending on what you read and believe [1], this can …

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Inspired by Samuel Tardieu's post, I want to do a year in review of all the languages I have used this year. A lot of times we prima donna programmers complain about anything and everything. I really enjoyed the positive outlook of Samuel's post and want to take note of …

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A lot of times people do zany things and try and reinvent wheels when it comes to programming. Sometimes this is good: when learning, when trying to improve state of the art, or when trying to simplify when only Two-Ton solutions are available.

For a current daemon project I need …

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