by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 9, 2008 | Usefull Things
I just noticed that the folks over at Newsgator has set pretty much their whole product suite free today, free is Newsgator for Windows, NetNewsWire for the Mac, the online version of NewsGator and so is NewGator Go! for your phone.
This is pretty huge news as all the products I just mentioned syncs with each other seamlessly and have great UI’s, NewNewsWire has been my reader of choice for ages.
For the paranoids out there though there’s this little tid bit in the new features list:
Sort by attention: NetNewsWire now tracks more information about what you do and can tell which feeds are most important to you.
So you probably want to find out exactly what that’s all about first.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 7, 2008 | Usefull Things
For some time the default clock rate on RedHat machines (and probably others) have been 1000HZ, this is great to keep your mouse moving smooth while something big is happening in the background, but not so great for hosting 10 virtual machines on one poor physical machine as it will have to try and satisfy 10000 ticks per second.
I’ve been using a guest kernel repository by one of the VMWare users that rebuilds the std CentOS/RedHat kernels with HZ=100 and it’s been great, chopped massive amounts off my CPU usage on the host.
Now with RedHat 5.1 this is not needed anymore see this post for a bit of a graph on the impact and the background. The short of it is, simply append divider=10 to your guest kernel boot parameters and enjoy a much happier host. I found that time keeping also becomes more predictable in the guest.
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.
by R.I. Pienaar | Dec 16, 2007 | Front Page
I’ve previously mentioned a major problem I had with Google Apps for Domains Calendar function:
GCal also has a feature that mails you a short daily agenda, much like
what you see if you hit the Agenda button. Problem is the agenda mail
function ONLY reads from your primary calendar, it does not include
events from any subscribed calendars etc. This means that one of the
biggest selling points of Google for Domains is crippled, if you share
calendars you can’t use them even in the rudimentary tools provided.
I am glad to report that this is now fixed, my Daily Agenda mails started arriving 2 or 3 days ago and they include entries from all my Calendars,
Brilliant.
