Posted by avsm
Fri, 08 Oct 2004 10:56:55 GMT
While on my way to go jogging with AliB and Kieran, I passed a couple of the most curious cows ever. Every time I made cow-like noises in their direction, they would stop their grazing and stampede over to me for a nuzzle!
However, Kieran informs me that this is because he regularly moos to them while cycling into the lab - it's almost enough to make me only eat non-cute food to get my daily dose of protein...
Moo Mooo! |
Moooo, I say! Moooo! |
A mad cow from Kieran's desk |
Posted in cambridge | no comments
Posted by avsm
Thu, 07 Oct 2004 17:14:05 GMT
Just stumbled across a beta of Clusty, which is a pretty good search engine in its own right (not as minimal as google, but still usable).
The novel thing about Clusty is that it automatically clusters searches into groups to help narrow down the search. So searching for my name brings up a bar on the left with categories such as "OpenBSD", "High Energy Magic", etc. Not bad!
It's a pity that I'm kind of locked into google now, just by virtue of the Safari toolbar not having an easy option to remap the search engine to use. It does appear people have started hacking Safari though, so perhaps a Clusty bar isn't too far off!
Posted in net | no comments
Posted by avsm
Thu, 07 Oct 2004 14:54:14 GMT
A very nice reporter from the New York Times showed up at Intel Research Cambridge last week, and he just published an article titled "Connecting Paper and Online Worlds by Cellphone Camera" about our work on SpotCodes. We're still trying to find a paper copy of the article as the NYTimes is not available in Cambridge unfortunately.
This is a much more serious article than a previous one by Wired titled "From the Prawn of Time" (which we shared with the extremely cool Prawn Sandwich Clock demonstrated at Notcon).
Incidentally, on the academic front, the ACM MC2R journal just accepted some of our work on using visual tags to assist in Bluetooth service discovery. Things are certainly moving!
Posted in research, press | no comments
Posted by avsm
Wed, 06 Oct 2004 15:22:20 GMT
Lady Imogen visited the lab, with daddy Rich and mummy Kate in tow.
Luckily, it happened that we had just finished a paper on the redeployed
Broadband Phones that we requested
Imogen to peer-review.
Although her response was indeterminate, we would like to take this opportunity to thank Imogen for her valuable comments and feedback.
Imogen has entered the building |
Imogen inspects our humble academic output |
Imogen delivers her verdict |
Posted in cambridge | no comments
Posted by avsm
Fri, 01 Oct 2004 16:00:00 GMT
In an emotional gathering of the SN17 elite, AliB, AliT, Scotty and myself gathered at the Castle to celebrate Redundancy Day! Kieran "Mankloda" Mansley was finally given the golden handshake by AT&T Laboratories Cambridge, making him the last employee to turn out the lights. AT&T were very nice to their students when they closed in 2002, making sure they had enough funding to finish their PhDs, which Kieran has almost done now.
Kieran realises what day it is! |
We rush to the Castle! |
... and proceed to take pictures of each other |
Posted in cambridge | no comments
Posted by avsm
Fri, 01 Oct 2004 16:00:00 GMT
Eva, Alex, Christian and I went to visit the accident-prone Jon Crowcroft, who managed to get hit by a bus while cycling on Madingley Road! Luckily Jon is in good spirits, but will have his leg in a cast for a while (which really was the most impressive looking contraption ever, involving Borg-like enclosures for his shin!).
We make it to Addenbrookes! |
Later, we munch bento at Teriyaki. |
The best bit was the Japanese desserts! |
Posted in volta, cambridge | no comments
Posted by avsm
Mon, 30 Aug 2004 11:59:32 GMT
Phew! The big re-arrangement to decommission the venerable F630 Netapp is finally pretty much done. Now we have a new beefy fork, a dual-Opteron screaming along as the main mail and CVS server (running the OpenBSD/amd64 port in SMP mode). Quick takes up the web serving duties, running thttpd and Apache. Hidden away from public glare is "chunk", serving up 400Gb of storage for backups and "multimedia content" to both machines.
The speed increase from removing NFS from the equation has been pretty incredible. Maildir is a nice format, but it really needs a top-notch NFS client to avoid dying from opendir overload when users have tens of thousands of mails in a single folder. Not to mention the locking headaches that NFS introduces as well (on local disks, Dovecot can now use its index files much more effectively). Overall, I'm pretty happy with a local disk / rsync combination until some maniac steps up to improve OpenBSD's NFS client to Solaris or FreeBSD levels.
On the software side, things have really improved regarding 64-bit cleanliness, and only one package, maildrop had a problem - it uses C++ exceptions which aren't supported by the amd64 toolchain on OpenBSD yet. A swift switch to procmail later, all worked peachily. qmail doesn't compile out of the box, but the excellent netqmail patchset integrates fixes for this. Only outstanding task is to bootstrap ezm3 on amd64 in order to run CVSup (or perhaps cvsync would be simpler).
Posted in recoil | no comments
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