As part of my work at Sojourn Labs (more about this at a later time), I’ve recently been working with creating a secure private cloud based on CoreOS, Docker (basically, a lightweight virtualization system), and some decade-old (or older) hardware. Different applications within the cloud need to communicate with each other securely. For example, our wiki needs to communicate with our database server. To link two Docker containers on the same machine together, one need only instruct Docker to create a link between the two. Things get more interesting when the communicating containers reside on different machines.
MrRoboto: Part 1— Automatic tunnelling on a Mac
After a hard disk failure that finally rendered MacBook Air #2 unable to boot (or even formatted so as to boot), I’ve set up its replacement MacBook Air, MrRoboto, to be as “automatic” as possible. Things should “just work”. This particular blog post is about automatic tunnelling. If you don’t know what ssh or a local/remote tunnel is, this post is not for you. It’s also aimed at Mac users.
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Cache-as-cache-can
Thailand was tragically flooded last year. The number of surprise alligators in the region also likely increased. As home to much of the world’s production capacity for hard drives, the shutdown of facilities caused the cost per gigabyte stored on magnetic hard drives to balloon to prices not seen since the middle of the last decade. Demand dropped for hard drives. Value-driven consumers may have opted for alternatives such as more expensive solid state drives (SSDs) or removable media like DVDs. Other purchases may have been deferred, playing catch-as-catch-can with hard drives already owned until prices begin to have some semblance of normalcy. The obvious. But none of this would have merited such a… cache-y blog post title.
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The Students' Marks Will Fall
Last week, while picking up an exam written at an alternate time by one of my students, my brain went into music mode, as it often does. It ended up rewriting a good two verses of ABBA’s The Winner Takes It All before I realized what had happened. I finished it up and, while I don’t have a gift as a lyricist, I thought I’d share a bit of dark humour (with apologies to ABBA). I don’t have good recording equipment, otherwise I’d make my own recording (although if someone wants to record this with me just for funsies, I’d be game). Instead, here’s a link to an unadulterated version.
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Low-powered computer attempt #1 — One year later
One year ago last week, I put the finishing touches on a new computer. I started my game plan for a low-powered device in January 2009, but I was teaching a course at the time so it wasn’t until reading week that I found three (almost) uninterrupted days to bring my plan to fruition. While I’ve seen a number of articles and blog posts about building a low-powered computer, I’ve seen only a few documenting the end result after real-world use.
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