Archive for August, 2009

Mac Pro collocation wanted

Friday, August 21st, 2009

Don't ask what OSGeo can do for you, ask what you can do for OSGeoToday, I sent a post to OSGeo Discuss mailing list asking for help with finding new home for my Mac Pro workstation. I’m trying to use all possible channels to spread my call, so here we go:

Folks,

I have a pretty powerful workstation that I’d like to connect to OSGeo infrastructure, somehow. It is: Mac Pro:

  • 2 x Intel Xeon 2.66GHz (5150, “Woodcrest”, dual core)
  • 5 GB RAM (with option up to 16 MB max)
  • 1.5 TB HDD

If I’ll manage to find a new home for my machine, I want to extend the RAM to 16 GB and get one or more TB of HDD.

I’m looking for possibility of collocation my machine somewhere in UK (not necessarily in London), so it can be permanently connected to OSGeo infrastructure. Unfortunately, I am not able to connect this machine from home and keep connected 24/7.

I would be delighted to make it available for OSGeo projects and their development purposes like Buildbot, scheduled builds, software testing, etc. The only personal use of this machine I would like to be able to do is…development and software testing of OSGeo software I work with plus I’d like to keep some personal backups there (disks are getting cheap, so it shouldn’t be a problem to extent to tens of TB in near future). OS X Leopard and license for Parallels VM software is included.

I tried to find collocation service in Poland or UK but prices like ~100 GBP/month are too high to pay for the purposes I’d like to dedicate my machine to.

So, if anyone knows a data centre in UK that would be interested in “rescuing” the wasted CPU cycles of my machine resting in the box please let me know. I think providing collocation could be a nice way to sponsor OSGeo by contributing this reasonably good hardware option :-)

Currently, the machine rests in box in my flat in Poland (I live in London, UK). If I find a place for it, I’ll ship it from PL to UK quickly.

A few pictures of the hardware:

Two Towers IMGP2541.JPG Make jobs benchmark building GDAL/OGR Isn't it beautiful? IMGP2533.JPG

Please, contact me if you can help!

Squirrel, climb hard!

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

4 & Mr Squirrel

all-in-one == claimid

Monday, August 17th, 2009

I’ve just discover a neat way to maintain all my Web profiles in one place with short URL. This is ClaimID – yet another networking tool.

http://claimid.com/mloskot/

By the way, Twitter is going to lose the battle with normal blogs and real life, so I’m slowly convincing myself to shutdown twitter.com/mloskot.

The chat of the day

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

From today’s ACCU diary:

Mike: Would having chartered engineers “in charge” really make any difference to the numerous public sector IT projects which are struggling to meet their objectives?

Me: May be, at least, they would manage to convince the EU bureaucracy that the waterfall model should go :-)

Chris: Why… The waterfall has been proven in use on many successful projects… Ask NASA.

Mike: Now I’ve got the image of NASA doing agile development stuck in my brain:

Developer: “Good news, Mr Armstrong. We’ve got the software for launching your rocket done. Let us know when you get to the Moon, and we’ll start working on the landing procedures…”

;-)

Hot Dog Weather

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

Hot temperatures have been invading Poland this summer, clearly. So, my father invented a cooling solution for his well-beloved dog Beno.

Beno, my father's dog and cooling machinery

Certainly, Beno understands what’s the purpose of that effort very well. He also has a very well developed spatial orientation and can easily memorise where all cool places are located around the yard and in the country side. When my father is walking Beno in the fields around the town and Beno recognizes they are near his favourite pond, he tries to pull in that direction or just runs a few hundreds meters and jumps to the water. And, he doesn’t use TomTom for that purpose ;-)

OSGIS UK 2009 Summary

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

A hot lunchtime news from Suchith Anand about summary of the OSGIS UK 2009 Conference published in this month’s GIS Professional: Open campus opens doors to OS (PDF).

By the way, check a very nice collection of photos from the conference on Suchith’s gallery. (I put mine on Flickr some time ago)

benchmarking@lists.osgeo.org

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

I’ve just spotted a new mailing list emerged after recent pre-FOSS4G conference preparations. It is benchmarking@lists.osgeo.org devoted to performance testing of OSGeo and other Web Service engines.