In the not-so-distant future dwindling crude oil production capability will cause economic devastation on a large scale. This is not what I personally believe will happen, but what could be considered a worse case scenario. Peak Oil is a theory that was introduced in 1956 by Marion King Hubbert that is used to accurately predict the rate of oil extraction of a single oil well, oil field, region, country, and most recently applied to the entire world. Peak Oil is defined as the idea that the rate of oil extraction from a well follows a bell curve, starting off slow when the well is first discovered, rising exponentially as more equipment is used to extract the oil, reaching a peak, and then equally as quickly declining in output due to the increased difficulties of lower pressure, lower quality of oil, and other such issues. This is a proven concept on the individual oil well, field, region, and nation oil production level.
For the purpose of this essay it is assumed that the theory of peak oil applies to global production rates as well. It is a common misconception that reaching peak oil means that the world is running out of oil. In reality, that is far from the truth. Peak oil simply means that the maximum production RATE of oil has been reached, and then irreversibly declines from that point on. This would have a disastrous effect on the world.
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College
essay, peak oil
Why is this disabled by default?
For the past few months I’ve been rotating my uploaded pictures manually. A batch that I was about to upload needed to have a quarter of the photos rotated and I didn’t want to have to deal with that. I remembered that on an older version of the software the pictures were automatically rotated. After a very brief search on google I found a post describing how to enable auto-rotation. All you have to do is go to Site Administration -> EXIF/IPTC -> and check “Rotate Pictures Automatically”.
Bam. Done.
Computers, How To
gallery
As some of you may know, I am very interested in alternate computer cooling methods. A while back I did an experiment that attempted to use solid copper bars connected to heat sinks to draw heat away from a processor. That experiment ended as a failure, but was interesting none the less. If I get a request for more info I’ll find time to post a write-up of the experiment, and possibly try it again.
In the meantime, there’s a story that’s been posted on hackaday.com about some people who set up a computer cooled by mineral oil. They’ve had it running perfectly for over a year at this point, so the concept is proven. I wonder if it is possible to use mineral oil as the medium in a traditional water cooled setup, in order for possible better performance and lower maintenance levels. I might try that once I have my own home.
College
computer, cooling, mineral, oil
After several complaints from my family about not being able to access the local network file shares while I was playing video games on my computer, I decided to put all of my data onto the new server “DuckTape”, and move the website back to the old web server. This makes my family happy and really shouldn’t effect the website unless I get hit by digg, but even then it shouldn’t make that much of a difference.
What really prompted moving the hard drives over to the other computer was the fact that due to a hard reboot I lost all data contained on my RAID5 array. Apparently RAID5 is awsome at protecting data from hard drive failure but it absolutely sucks at dealing with power outages and the like. Luckily as a good sysadmin I keep regualr backups. After 17 hours of transfering 1.5TB of data onto a new RAID0 array on DuckTape, I was back in bussiness. The only thing that got lost from the failure was a small portion of an Ubuntu 8.10 Beta .ISO file that was only partaily done downlading when the backup was run. THIS is how easy it is to restore data when you KEEP UP TO DATE BACKUPS.
Computers, This Site
backup, RAID, server, ubuntu
A friend of mine was wondering how to use the management port on his network switch, so to help him out I made a page that shows the differences of the various types of serial cable plugs. Although all of the different types of connectors carry the same type of signal, the different types of heads can be confusing if you’re not framilier with them.
Computers, How To
cables, serial
I started running the beta in a virtual machine. If you’re intrested in this sort of thing I would reccomend doing the same. As of writing there are 14 days left until the new version is released.
Computers
ubuntu
My friend’s LCD monitor stopped working a few weeks ago. It would come on for a few seconds and then just go blank. I decided to shine my flashlight at it at a sharp angle to see if it was completely broken or if the back light wasn’t working. As I suspected the back light was burned out, but other wise it was fine. Then we got creative. Why throw out a monitor simply because a light stopped working? Soon, we created the contraption that you see above. We took out all of the internal parts and put them into a milk crate. We found a desk lamp to use as a back light. Although this won’t really work as a desktop monitor it might very well find a home in my currently monitor-less sever closet. Without the back lights the monitor only draws 7 watts per hour.
Computers
backlight, broken, LCD, monitor
After overclocking my system I ran a stress test in order to make sure that even during the heaviest of loads my server would stay functional. My application of choice for stress testing in Ubuntu is “cpuburn”. I then use lm-sensors to read the temperatures of my system.
$apt-get install cpuburn lm-sensors
$sudo sensors-detect
$sudo modprobe [modules that the previous command identified at the end]
$sensors
At this point you can now see the temperatures, voltage regulations, fan speeds, and other such information. Now you need to open new terminal window for each CPU core you have (or create them using Screen) and run the following command in each one:
$burnP6
Let this run for at least 15 minutes and then check the temperatures by running “sensors”. You can also set up sensors to automatically update by using the “watch” command.
$watch sensors
Computers, How To
cpu, test, ubuntu
The new quadcore parts have arrived and have been assembled. The new webserver is now running an Intel Q6600 Quad core with 4GB of DDR2 RAM. I took the liberty of overclocking by 25% from 2.4GHz to 3.00GHz. I have also transfered this site over to it already, so load times on this site should have decreased. This site should now be abble to withstand the Digg effect. Reliabilty for the next coupple of days is going to be a bit lower than I would like because I’m still in the process of transfering the domains. I’d like to be able to consolodate both of my sites onto one server, but so far I am having minimal luck with virtual servers in apache.
Computers, This Site
q6600, server, upgrade
I never really realized how cheap mainstream computer parts are now adays. After a bit of looking I’ve decided to go ahead and upgrade my web server to a Intel Q6600 with 4GB of ram, with the possible upgrade to 8GB. This only costs a little over $300. Parts list with links after the break.
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Computers, This Site
computer, new, server, system