Lucent 7 R/E 5ESS Telephone Switch Rescue

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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Armed to the gills - Dell C6100 build out

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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boo2pdf Update

I did some minor updates to boo2pdf. Graphics should now be within the page margins. Please let me know if there are any other common formatting mistakes.

Unfortunately, IBM's "transmogrifier" utility doesn't work very well in Wine, so you should preprocess older books in Windows before running them through the …

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Announcing boo2pdf

I've just uploaded a beta of boo2pdf, an IBM BookManager to PDF conversion app & web service. I'm currently experimenting with the HTML to PDF backends and would like feedback with book files I haven't tried. Once the code is cleaned up, I will dump it on my site.

Motivation

I …

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Java: The Good Parts

javascript-the-good-parts

A while back, a book entitled JavaScript: The Good Parts made waves on the internet, especially social networking sites. This book purported to show the inner beauty of a language that was long considered second or third rate, coming of age. With the advent of toolkits like JQuery, Javascript/AJAX …

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I dream of pervasive virtualization...

I dream of a day where virtualization is pervasive.

Instead of thinking about services in terms of servers, CPUs or directly mapped resources, I should be able to to add virtual machines in terms of guaranteed throughput rate over a whole grid. Scaling out should be as easy as adding …

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How to upgrade to ext4 in place

Here's how you upgrade to ext4. The process is pretty easy, but requires an fsck which means unmounting or rebooting if the file system is in use.

Make sure you are using at least e2fstools 1.41.3 and kernel 2.6.28 (or a vendor kernel with latest ext4 …

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Retrocomputing for Fun and Profit

  1. Buy Old Computers
  2. ???
  3. Profit

What is retrocomputing?

I define retrocomputing [wikipedia] as the collecting and use of old computers. Why might one do this? Well, for one, enterprises cycle out machines fairly frequently. 2,3,4 and 5 year old systems are often sent out to scrappers in droves despite …

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