I’ve decided to move the blog across to Blogger for the time being. It allows me to alter the CSS on posts so that I can do syntax highlighting on code.
Make sure that you are using the correct blog address of www.3spoken.co.uk and update your feed subscription if you have one.
See you there.
Sir Muir Gray, director of the NHS National Electronic Library For Health, is speaking: “Ignorance is like cholera,” he says. “It cannot be controlled by the individual alone: it requires the organised efforts of society.” He’s right: in the 19th and 20th centuries, we made huge advances through the provision of clean, clear water; and in the 21st century, clean, clear information will produce those same advances.
From http://www.guardian.co.uk/food/Story/0,,2011095,00.html
The rise of pseudo-science, and its associated dogma is a threat to all of us – perpetuated by the 24-hour media’s obsession for ratings. Don’t be fooled by qualifications, impressive sounding words or backing by ‘prestigious’ organisations. Those are all marketing tricks. Understand the data behind it all and reach your own conclusions. It may take longer but you won’t be misled by layers of interpretation.
In between dying quietly from acute viral nasopharyngitis (as supplied in various varieties by my three year old daughter) and trying to earn a crust or two I’ve been playing with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
One of the things you notice when you run up a relatively recent Linux distribution is that there is a new CPU %age shown when you run ‘top’. The mysterious ’st’.
It turns out that this stands for ‘Steal Time’ and is the amount of real cpu that the Xen Hypervisor has allocated to tasks other than running your Virtual Machine (such as somebody else’s VM…).
So if your AMI doesn’t have this statistic in ‘top’, and isn’t reporting ‘Stolen CPU ticks’ in ‘vmstat -s’, then you need to upgrade your ‘procps’ tools to a later version.
I’ve just been given the keys to the candy shop. I’m so excited I can hardly speak.
About what? you may ask.
The next generation of utility computing, going by the snazzy titles of Elastic Computing Cloud and Simple Storage Service, or their more succinct acronyms: EC2 & S3.
These two facilities allow you to have data centre computer power and data centre storage on demand – all backed by one of the big names on the Internet: Amazon.
Now to do something special.
I’ve just had one of those randomly generated user ids through for one of the financial institutions I deal with.
It ends TWATT
They must have had a conversion with the Ministry of Reputations – HMRC division 
I’m not a great writer, but I suppose if anybody else is going to find out what is bubbling between my lugholes then I’m going to have to write it down at some point.
Either that or video myself and that would be far worse I feel…
… particularly if I did it in the buff.
