by R.I. Pienaar | Feb 13, 2008 | Front Page, Usefull Things
Today on freshmeat I noticed 2 useful utilities for anyone running Xen Servers.
The first is called Virt-top it is a easier to read top like tool than xm top that shows all virtual machines memory and CPU usage in a nice display including totals etc:
The other – Virt-P2V – it’s a CD Image that you can boot a physical machine with that will then convert it to a virtual machine for you. It will scp the drive image to a destination of your choice and create a config file to boot it after asking you some questions. I intend to use this to move a VMWare virtual machine to Xen soon, will post here and see how it goes.
Both of these come from a Red Hat employee, with some luck we’ll see these included in Red Hat Linux soon.
by R.I. Pienaar | Feb 11, 2008 | Front Page
I previously mentioned that got a letter confirming it all went well with my application for naturalisation, the whole process is now more or less done.
I had the ceremony last Thursday and around 11:24 in the morning the Mayor of Greenwich handed me my certificate so I am now all done with that and a full Citizen of the United Kingdom. I arrived here on the 2nd of Feb 2002 and became a citizen on the 7th of Feb 2008. I could have applied last year in March already and probably would have been done with it all around September but I was procrastinating and eventually the noise about the reforms in the immigration laws gave me the kick I needed to complete it.
The biggest advantage I’ll see immediately is of course the passport, traveling as a South African – or in fact being a South African out of South Africa – is such a liability your whole life is just tough, massive headache of visas, immigration time wasting etcetc, endless hassle. In tourist visas alone I spent about GBP500 in the last few years never mind all the time wasted in getting those and even just in queuing in the non EU citizen lines at airports, all gone now! I’ve also had to struggle quite a lot with tenancy agreements for flats that I rent etc as I was never sure if I’ll even be in the country for the year they want you to sign, so had to always get 6 month break clauses put in etc.
This is a part of the certificate I received during the ceremony:
Today I’ll apply for my first UK passport, it should come through in about 2 weeks unfortunately just too late to attend FOSDEM.
The process for applying for citizenship is all hyped up to be this fantastic experience for applicants, a great introduction to the country and its people. This is done through the test you need to pass and a formal ceremony that even includes singing God Save The Queen.
Overall I’d say the whole thing just left me cold, personally I see little point to most of the hoops I had to jump through. I have to say though that the test has some value – it tests that you have a grasp of English and in that function its a success so I’d keep it for that reason. The ceremonies though? waste of time and money in my eye.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 19, 2008 | Front Page
I just received the following in the post:
Thanks you for submitting your application for British citizenship. I am pleased to say that the application has been succesful and you will shortly receive a letter inviting you to attend a citizenship ceremony.
Hooray.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 11, 2008 | Front Page
I am under contract to be systems administrator at a Social Media company called Handmade Mobile, their prime product is Flirtomatic (You might want to wait till you’re home from work to visit the site), a site for adults who just want to chat and meet fun people, it’s not a dating site in the normal sense it’s more like MSN with with some profile searching, pictures, etc added.
I got involved with them about 2 or 2.5 years ago they were having some issues and needed a re-do of their servers, network, etc. I designed a simple easy to manage network and put in servers built the way I liked them using Open Source technologies which I still maintain and administer today.
They’ve been making some good waves in the last while, 2 items I think are worth mentioning:
Back in September they set a in-house record for monthly WAP impressions with more than 100 Million WAP impressions in the month. One report on this mentioned that In March the amount of searches across all the major search engines combined done from phones were around 20 million, so this puts the 100 Million WAP impressions in a extremely good light.
Today I got news of another impressive bit of stat about them – A company called WatchMouse who specializes in monitoring web site response and stability did a test against 104 Social Media sites for performance, time to load the whole page etc. they also penalized your points for any failed loads etc.
Out of the lot Facebook were the worst, Flirtomatic though came fourth which I have to say I am very impressed by as Flirtomatic has huge amounts of photos on their front page compared to number 1 faceparty for example. Faceparty’s front page weighs in at a very light 44KB (1KB for the HTML) while Flirtomatic is 630KB (17KB for the HTML) so I think being 4th fastest given its bulk is great.
Anyway, kudos to them ๐
by R.I. Pienaar | Dec 30, 2007 | Front Page
I recently mentioned that one of our Corn snakes passed away due to an infection in her body so we had a bit of a hole to fill.
I am getting a new cat in a weeks time as my Pixel is a bit lonely I think and she can certainly do with being chased around the house a bit. We went to the pet shop to buy some disinfectant and to show my mother the Albino Burmese pythons the shop has and saw that they had baby Blood Pythons (Wikipedia).
Both Emma and I have been oogling Bloods for a while, they look a bit like normal Pythons but are swamp dwellers and so need more heat and higher humidity – usually they have a moss bed in the vivarium. They also get really fat which gives them a very distinct look.
This is our little one (more shots here), he’s very young still and had his first trip outside the vivarium yesterday, in the shop he was very feisty – hissing and striking at everything that moves – probably due to the guys there being pretty rough with them. Emma didn’t feel happy wearing the leather gloves they suggested we got so she was brave and picked it up and its a very happy and friendly snake.
He’ll grow to between 57″ and 78″ (144cm to 198cm) and will weigh between 40 and 45lbs (18 to 20kg). He might be too heavy for her to comfortably carry around but we’ll have to see how it goes I guess. Blood Pythons are endangered animals in the wild due to hunting for their skin,
by R.I. Pienaar | Dec 19, 2007 | Front Page, Usefull Things
Recently one of our snakes died due to an abscess in her body, we tried everything to safe the poor snake but in the end – and almost ยฃ1200 later – it passed away one night.
While undergoing treatment we were given copies of the X-Ray data, at the time I tried to read the RAW data files but failed, finally writing it off as some proprietary format specific to the X-Ray machine vendor.
Today I came across an item on MacNN mentioning OsiriX which is basically an Open Source suite to drive all things medical. Turns out the data is encoded in a standard format known as DICOM which defines the data type and also a network protocol for these machines to communicate with each other and their image storage over a network.
The data I got was in RAW format so none of the DICOM headers were present, this led me to some other software and a FAQ for importing unsupported/unknown DICOM data. Using the information there I was able to work out based on file size that my data was 512 x 512 big with an Header offset of 6480.
Armed with this information I was able to do a pretty decent import into OsiriX, the output of the one X-Ray can be seen below (click for full size).
The infection is clearly visible on the left of the image, this was removed but a second formed. Anyway, so the point of this post isn’t to go on about the poor departed snake but to mention the fantastic medical imaging tool OsiriX which is a pure Mac application and while I doubt many of my Blog audience will care for it it might still be of some use to some Googlers.
