Category News

I finally got around to upgrading the server that serves this very page you’re reading to Ubuntu Jaunty today, up from Ubuntu Hardy. Yes I know, maybe I should have waited for Karmic, or even Lucid, but the biggest reason why I did this was that I’ve migrated this server from the little Pentium 4 Shuttle XPC that was in use before onto a Virtualbox 3.0.6 headless VM hosted on an Ubuntu Jaunty box running on top of an Intel E5200 CPU.

You’re probably wondering why I’d use an E5200 when it doesn’t have hardware virtualisation features built in? Well, the server consumes very little juice compared to the Pentium 4 (26% less in fact), it’s more powerful, it’s cheap, cheerful, produces less ambient heat, is a heck of a lot quieter and there’s loads of CPU time left over to do other things outside of the VM on the host side.

CPU wise, when the server gets really busy I’ve seen spikes as high as 50%, but it never exceeds that, so as far as I’m concerned, it’s fine. If I ever need this box to do anything more significant, I’ll upgrade the CPU to something that does have VT-x later on.

If you see anything unusual/missing/dead from today onwards, please let me know in a comment!

My site’s been offline for most of the last 24 hours due to an unexpected power failure caused by a constant week and a half of rain shorting underground mains power lines, and taking half of my street with it. I have to admit I’ve been a bit complacent and have never acquired a UPS for the server that serves this blog!

But the power’s back now, and meantime I’ve gone and bought a shiny new UPS to keep the server running should there be any future power issues. Sorry the inconvenience, folks!

Some of you may be aware that Unix systems and its variants including Linux, Apple OS X, etc store the time in seconds using a 32-bit integer, with the 1st January 1970 as the epoch.

Tomorrow morning at 10:31 and 30 seconds, eastern Australians (except Queensland who will get it at 09:31 and 30 seconds) will experience 1234567890 Unix time. Where will you be on this momentous occasion?

If you’d like to check your own local time, simply drop into a terminal and paste this line of perl in:

$ perl -e 'print scalar localtime(1234567890),"\n";'
Sat Feb 14 10:31:30 2009
$ 

After that, we only have the 32-bit Unix Millennium Bug to look forward to in 2038!

I almost fell off my chair when I saw this pic posted on Overclockers Australia. Most Australians know how draconian the ratings system in Australia is, but this is getting ridiculous!