Staggering Unproductivity

I must apologise for my lack of activity on the blog, but more is coming. I’ve begun working towards working with Ian Clarke on his Swarm project, that is if i can bring my Java and Scala chops up to scratch enough to give meaningful impact. Beyond that I’m heading to NJ this week to be with my partner for her graduation and have my 21st birthday while im over there (21 means absolutly squat in Ireland, so I’m expecting a repeat of my 18th…) ...

May 13, 2009 · Andrew Bolster

My conkyrc

Contents (what you get out of this) Weather, HDDtemp, UL/DL speed and cumulative meters, CPU load, Folding@Home status, Remote transmission download status (could be local, easy change), gmail status, RAM usage, Uptime, Date/Time, ToDo list These all automatically update dependant on the execi variable. Preface (What you need to get this all working) Linux OS (Ubuntu?) Conky (obv, see someone elses guide for how to get that HINT synaptic is ur friend) Transmission download manager (local or remote) Folding at home installed with origami (could be local or remote using the same logic as the Transmission manager) Passwordless SSH authentication (if your using this with any remote hosts) A todo list on the desktop called todo (strange that…) ...

October 27, 2008 · Andrew Bolster

Getting Skype to work with weird webcams.

I’ll keep this as informative. If your webcam works in ubuntu (I’m running the 8.10 RC atm, fantastic btw) under cheese but not with skype, I did a bit of digging and cheese uses v4l2 (the ’new’ webcam api) which inherently screws up skype that uses v4l1. So, its easy enough since i came across this post and after chasing up my own system locations (this guy must be on 64bit, but i didnt ask) dead easy, instead of in the terminal going ...

October 25, 2008 · Andrew Bolster

Primers Coming Up

Thru my work I’m thrown into alot of technologies that i dont nearly know enough about and as with alot of tech related things, the education scene is basic basic basic..GURU with little or no gradiation, so what I’m going to do is post what i learn when i learn it and where i learn it from and hopefully it’ll be useful for someone else, and I’ll also take the opportunity to rehash stuff I’ve already done. ...

September 24, 2008 · Andrew Bolster

Long Extended Break: Hardware Update

So, gonna do a quick write up on my current setup. Ok, from the top: Linksys WRT54GL DD-WRT v24 std firmware (also running on the bottom right screen) Generic Wireless headphones (not used since i heard someone else on the channel :P ) top screens : Windows server 2008 AMD Athlon X2 64 6000+ on an Nvidia MCP 65 based motherboard carrying 6GB, with the dangerous RAID 0 arrangement of two 500GB sata drives and an IDE 320GB for essential backups. (this system is hidden, lol) ...

September 14, 2008 · Andrew Bolster

EEEpc note

Ok, got the 900, sorry this blog is very very late Pros: AMAZINGLY small, you wont believe how small it is until you use one The keyboard is just managable the Webcam is amazing quality when it works More responsive than i imagined The Extra 16GB SSD really helps Wonderfully fast bootups (If you never plug it in to any accessories (other than charger) set the Boot Booster enabled under the BIOS, trims a second or two) ...

May 24, 2008 · Andrew Bolster

Asus EEEpc

Just off the phone with Clove saying that my shiny new black eee 900 is winging its way to my homestead, which unfortunatly is not wer i am, but at least i wont be losing any time for revision (read: have any other reasons not to study) I have to say I’m really disappointed with Asus’s attitude to they’re british customers regarding the battery issue and i really cant say any more about it except that were paying above the board globally, and not getting an equivalent product and an even less equivilant service. ...

May 12, 2008 · Andrew Bolster

Folding Code

I’ve been folding for a while now, and I’d previously written a really very cobbled together way of parsing my unitinfo.txt files, but, searching for something to do other than revise, I’ve written a similarly cobbled together but much shorter way of parsing my folding progress and telling me (as in speech) how far its going. Required: Espeak, basic bash knowledge to adjust. note: the espeak adjustments are just personal preference, so change them at will. ...

May 12, 2008 · Andrew Bolster

Update

Yeah, suprise suprise, I’m actually gonna try and keep this up. One of the major reasons for the delay since my last documented fiddle as been job hunting for a placement year next year, but I’ve wonderfully secured a position with Ericsson Ireland in their Athlone R&D centre. Pays good, experience is even better. Beyond that a few other things have been making things hectic, not least of which is the impending Examination period so about the only techy thing I’ve been able to come up with has been a wipe and reinstall to upgrade to Hardy Heron (8.04) (I didnt update because i dont trust dist-upgrade’s ability to do things my way, also meant i could blow out the cobwebs in my filesystem.) ...

May 11, 2008 · Andrew Bolster

Introduction

So…. I’m Andrew, I’m a technical person, and I’m gonna use this blog to post out some of my technical musings and little experiments. Currently, I’m working off of three systems, Athena, Apollo and Hermes. Athena:Headless Ubuntu Server 7.10, 2.6 Kernel AMD Semperon 3200+, 512MB RAM, 3 Hard Drives Totalling Just Under 1TB (mostly storage and backup archives) Apollo:WinXP AMD Athlon64 X2 6000+ (3GHz), 4GB RAM (32bit xp only sees 3.5 tho.) GeForce 7600 GS (512MB) and a 500GB SATA drive (My Workhorse for classes and heavy experiments eg VMWare) ...

December 16, 2007 · Andrew Bolster