Author Archives: Chris Samuel

Relicensed All My Flickr Photos – Please Reuse!

Posted on by

After some thinking I’ve decided that my previous choice of the Creative Commons “attribution, non-commercial use, share-alike” (BY-NC-SA) license doesn’t really square with my feelings on free-software and culture in general, so I’ve taken the plunge and relicensed all my photos on Flickr under a simple Creative Commons attribution (BY) license. This means you can reuse any of my photos for any purpose, whether you make Linux distributions, want to make a collage, are looking for media for an advertisment, anything. I’d really get a buzz if you do use them, all I ask is that you credit me.

Here’s a couple of examples (there’s over 500 there as I write this!):

Bee Line Partial lunar eclipse from Melbourne, 26th June 2010 DSC_0079.JPG Senator Kate Lundy talking about Gov2.0 at SFD Melbourne Tree Fern DSC_0162.JPG

DSC_0017.JPG Steve teeing off on Iains birthday round of golf at #Olinda Geeks with phones DSC_0038.JPG Ladybird DSC_0054.JPG

Tasmania had a Different Class of Bushranger

Posted on by

Lovely little story from the Launceston Examiner, 1851 (bottom left of page 5, so you’ll need to go on one from page 4), courtesy of Trove at the National Library of Australia.

BUSHRANGING UNDER ARMS. – As a free man named John Cowley, who resides at Mrs. Stuart’s, opposite the Derwent Wine Vaults, Elizabeth street, was returning into town yesterday morning, he was attacked near to Mr. Edward Moore’s, at Stoney Point, about two miles on this side of Bridgewater, by two men, who rushed upon him, seized him by the neckerchief, and robbed him of about eleven pounds of butter, besides his hat. One of the party pulled the trigger of an old musket at Cowley, who had a rough-tussel with the man, described to be of a dark complexion, and about five feet and a half, in height. After robbing our traveller of his butter, the bushmen made off into the scrub, and Cowley instantly pursued his way to O’Brien’s Bridge to give information, when a detachment of armed police were sent in chase. The bushrangers had fastened one of their victims named Joln White to a tree, but he released himself after their departure. This circumstance occurred about nine o’clock yesterday morning, and information was lodged with the police by noon. -Ibid.

The mind boggles about what they would do with 11 pounds of butter and a hat…

Beware of Corsair CMFSSD-32D1 SSD Drives

Posted on by

Meant to blog this a while back, but work has been keeping me busy. A friend of mine in the US, Joe Landman, runs a business making serious HPC storage gear and has found a rather disturbing problem with Corsair CMFSSD-32D1 SSD drives. Here is how he describes it after Corsair went silent on him about this issue (ellipses are his):

We are experiencing about a 70% failure rate, within 3 months of acquisition. In many different chassis, in many different parts of the world, with many different power supplies, many different motherboards. This is a time correlated failure. I have never … ever … in 25+ years doing this stuff … ever … seen anything like this. Its either a really … really bad silicon error in a controller chip or a firmware bug … or some other crappy part.

It came right out of the blue and the failure mode is pretty scary:

Imagine for a moment, you have these in a RAID 1 configuration. And because of the the failure, the unit refuses to get past the POST section. So there you are, with a remote machine, say, I dunno, 6000 miles away from you, and an SSD, with a putative 100+ year MTBF fails, and fails in a way that stops POST. So the system on reboot, freezes at the drive detection phase.

Remember that with a 2 drive RAID1 mirror and a 70% failure rate (plus Murphy) you’re looking at a real risk of a double disk failure, which Joe has seen at some of his customers. He’s got a neat way to use a loopback device on a spinning disk as an extra member of the RAID1 set to at least have a copy of the data where it can be recovered from.

So tell your friends, just say “NO” to Corsair CMFSSD-32D1 SSD’s.

Archaeological Excavation in Little LaTrobe Street, Melbourne ? (Updated)

Posted on by

Anyone know anything about this archaeological dig in progress in Little La Trobe Street in Melbourne, just opposite the RMIT Uni Bookshop ?

Archaeological dig at Little La Trobe Street, Melbourne

There’s no signage for it but they seem to be exposing the wall lines of old buildings in what was, until recently, a car park.

Update: Here’s the last photo I have before the rescue dig ended and they started clearing the site.

Archaeological dig resumed in Little LaTrobe Street