Category Archives: Tech

Tech

Wikimapia: Let’s describe the world!

This past Friday, during a discussion of Google maps (while using it to find something on my phone), Feilim Mac Gabhann alerted me to a site called Wikimapia.

It’s Google Satellite, but you can draw a box and then describe what’s in the box. Which boxes are shown depends on your level of zoom, so it’s both scale-appropriate and manageable.

This is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a while, except maybe the iPhone. You really should go check it out.

ADDENDUM: You can also load the information in Google Earth as discussed in this blog post. Even cooler!

I crashed the cluster (but I did not hose the filesystem)

I managed to crash the cluster today while moving raid units around on the raid card. Luckily there weren’t too many simulations running at the time. However, this seemingly innocuous activity will now be relegated to scheduled maintenance times. Apparently the Linux kernel doesn’t like disappearing SCSI drives.