Author Archives: Chris Samuel

IPv6

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Glen Turner has a nice blog on th what was going on at AusNOG, well worth a read if you’re a fan of the end-to-end connectivity model.

Back from AusNOG. It’s now clear that allocations of new IPv4 addresses will cease in 2010, so a lot of the conference was about NAT and IPv6. […] So it’s going to be “carrier-class network address translation”. That is, your ISP will run NAT (and if you are the average customer, you will run NAT on your ADSL router too).

This will give the ISP’s far more control than they have now (forget net neutrality) and so if you want to escape from these potential walled gardens you’re going to be needing IPv6 to continue to enjoy what you currently have access to now..

Breakin – stress test and hardware diagnostics for Intel and AMD systems

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At the start of August Jason Clinton from Advanced Clustering Technologies Inc. posted a link to the “Breakin” tool that they created (and open sourced) for hardware stress-tests and diagnostics. He wrote:

We have a tool on our website called “breakin” that is Linux 2.6.25.9 patched with K8 and K10f Opteron EDAC reporting facilities. It can usually find and identify failed RAM in fifteen minutes (two hours at most). The EDAC patches to the kernel aren’t that great about naming the correct memory rank, though.

If you read the website though you’ll find it does a lot more than that, which is pretty cool. Be aware that it does use the Intel and AMD closed source maths libraries though if you’re sensitive to non-free software.

MythTV Electronic Program Guide HOWTO for Australia

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Chris Smart has written an excellent little guide for getting a decent program guide into MythTV in Australia. It walks you through how to go from scratch through installing and configuring Shepherd to getting the data into the MythTV database. I’ve just used it on my Mythbuntu box and it’s looking good!

Next step – get it to record Time Team every time it appears.. 😉

Normal Service Resumed

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An unfortunate clash between some old .htaccess rules for the WPG2 plugin and WordPress resulted in all subpages of this blog being unavailable for over a day! 🙁

It’s fixed now, but apologies for the inconvenience..

Phew!

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Two weeks ago Donna spotted a mole on my back that had grown since she last noticed it, so off to the doctors we went that Monday for a punch biopsy, and the following Friday evening I get a call saying that they want me to come in to discuss the results and to get the rest of the “lesion” removed.

Uh-oh..

So back again on Monday for its removal and to learn that the biopsy results were inconclusive; they had seen “abnormal” cells but neither of the two pathologists who’d looked at it were able to see enough to tell for certain what was going on. The doctor did a great job taking it off with just a local anaesthetic – the most peculiar thing was to be able to hear this cutting sound and feel a vague tugging but nothing more! A hole in my back and ten stitches later the whole thing was sent off to the pathology lab again for examination and another appointment made for today (Friday) to get the results.

So today Donna and I went back – this time for good news..

Sections show a dysplastic naevus of compound pattern. Junctional activity is considerable, but pagetoid epidermal infiltration is not present and there is no evidence of malignancy. Excision is complete.

Summary – it’s not cancer. Apparently dysplastic naevus can develop into malignant melanoma so I’m very happy it’s gone, phew!

If you’re worried about a large or growing mole go and get it checked out. Before it’s too late..