Recent posts

Or, everything you wanted to know about setting up Ganglia, but couldn't grok from the official documentation - part 1.

I recently set up Ganglia monitoring on couple of new machines I'm looking after. While I've used Ganglia before, I wanted to do some slightly non-standard things this time around. This …

There's a nice blog post here providing an excerpt from a keynote speech of John Carmack's, which I thoroughly agree with.

My favourite snippet:

"There are clearly bet­ter and worse ways of doing things, but it’s frus­trat­ingly dif­fi­cult to quan­tify."

Worth a read …

There seems to be very little information on the web about setting up disk quotas, presumably because it's perceived as being trivial. However, it's nice to have this confirmed or refuted before you dive in, so here are my notes.

First off:

$ sudo apt-get install quota quotatool

Now edit /etc …

For cluster-usage monitoring I've mostly been using Ganglia, as covered here. But while it provides a great overview, sometimes you need to drill down and quickly see who's running what, on which node.

For this, htop is a great tool with minimal overheads - console friendly interface, tiny footprint etc.

I've …

Just testing a shiny new Dell Precision M4700, which is great... except the trackpad isn't recognized in Xubuntu 12.04, resulting in no multi-touch - it's amazing how clunky resorting to scroll bars seems now. Anyway, it turns out Dell are not thoroughly supporting the 'Alps' trackpads used on their latest …

If you're writing any kind of scientific paper in LaTeX, it will save you time in the long run if you use a reference manager. My tool of choice is Jabref.

Many journals require you to submit references with abbreviated journal names, the style of which may vary from journal …