Author Archives: ward

shrinking Prometheus binaries

Out of the box, the Prometheus binaries in the latest release (v2.7.1) clock in rather large, at: -rwxr-xr-x 1 ward ward 60097588 Jan 31 06:18 prometheus -rwxr-xr-x 1 ward ward 38359349 Jan 31 06:19 promtool Fillippo Valsorda has a post … Continue reading

Posted in Sysadmin | Leave a comment

Debian Jessie: TRIM on LVM on LUKS on SSD

Even though I have been using SSDs for more than 5 years on my main machine, I’ve never bothered to set up TRIM properly. At first, that was because the drive didn’t support it – it was the first Intel … Continue reading

Posted in Sysadmin | Leave a comment

Happy 30th, GNU!

RMS launched the GNU project on September 27th, 1983. MIT hackers generously lent us the use of the Green building tonight. It needs some of its pixels repaired, though!

Posted in Free Software/Open Source, Personal | Leave a comment

I object to the new Massachusetts Tax on Software Services

I object to the new “Sales and Use Tax on Computer and Software Services” (“the Tax”) which was passed as part of the Transportation Act. I don’t mind paying higher taxes if the Commonwealth needs more money to fund public … Continue reading

Posted in Politics | 1 Comment

Welcome Oscar!

Posted in Personal | Leave a comment

when `scontrol show daemons` returns nothing…

Slurm uses the scontrol show daemons command to figure out what it should run on the machine it is being invoked on. If you have a config file error, that command will return a blank line. And /etc/init.d/slurm-llnl will exit … Continue reading

Posted in Sysadmin | Leave a comment

at the White House

I visited the White House last week to present a poster on Arvados.org during a Champions of Change event about Open Science. There are more photos on Flickr.

Posted in Free Software/Open Source, Personal | Leave a comment

Selectively forcing PDF downloads for Firefox

The built-in PDF.js viewer in Firefox is nice, but it still has quite a few bugs. Most of the rendering issues are caused by it not supporting certain PDF features yet. Sometimes one needs to make a PDF with fancy … Continue reading

Posted in Sysadmin | Leave a comment

more home server disk

I blogged almost 3 years ago about my home server upgrade. The thing has been running very reliably ever since, but I am running out of disk space again. So, time for another upgrade – disk only though this time. … Continue reading

Posted in Everything else, Hardware, Sysadmin | Leave a comment

International Day Against DRM

May 4th is the International Day Against DRM. To celebrate, get 50% off all e-books at oreilly.com – today only! Use the code DRMFREE.

Posted in DRM | Leave a comment