Cable Management
March 23, 2006 by Eric Richardson
From the network cabinet at the office. Before...
The Office Isn't Cold, But...
March 23, 2006 by Eric Richardson
I just dropped back by work to take care of a few things and filled up a Coke bottle with water from the water cooler. I set it down by my computer and a couple minutes later went to take a sip only to find ice floating in it. It's not possible for it to come out of the cooler as ice, so the only explanation is that it came out so cold that it froze sitting in the bottle. Weird.
Fun With Disappearing Daemons
March 23, 2006 by Eric Richardson
Apparently I didn't heed the warning at the bottom of the configuration page for the NTP pool that mentioned a bug with RHEL's ntpd. My score suffered greatly when ntpd disappeared around midnight.
The SRPM linked in the bugzilla post wouldn't compile cleanly for me, so I'm now running a self-compiled ntpd. Hopefully that'll stay up and happy.
Looking at Highway Ramps
March 22, 2006 by Eric Richardson
This evening I set out to write a blog post on how different online mapping applications draw highway ramps. It turned into something longer than a normal post, so I've put it on my regular site: Looking at Highway Ramps.
Like I mention in the piece, I think ramps are a really important thing to look at in a map because they're something that's really hard to do right. I know that the code I've been working on recently doesn't solve any of the problems I list, mainly because of the data I'm working with. Always remember: your output will never be any better than your data.
Mostly unrelated: I think this is the first time I've put content on ericrichardson.com in about a year. I would say the web interface of the blog has drawn me in, but the frequency (or lack thereof) of posting here might dispute that.
Setting Up a Time Server
March 22, 2006 by Eric Richardson
Reading through some local blogs this morning I noticed ask's post from a few weeks ago talking about the ntp pool. That got me inspired to set up ntp on the new Cartifact server. I knew of a couple good local time hosts (particularly chronometer.usc.edu), and going through the list of stratum two servers I found one in the very same colo building. Judging by the whois on the IP space, I think that box is in CalPop's space, which is right across the hall from our box with Cyberverse. If I'm reading the stats right, though, that box is actually the peer with the most delay.
Our server, ortelius.cartifactmaps.com, is now registered with the NTP Pool, though it'll take a little bit before the pool decides it's reliable enough to give it out to people.