calum.org:~#

iSCSI is an increasingly popular way to connect storage with servers, without the need for expensive, dedicated links such as Fibre Channel. If you have a Gigabit Ethernet network which is woefully underused, you might well wonder why you need to ins...

So. Crunch time is almost here. Everyone's been dragging their heels, and now we're running short of IPv4 addresses. Of course, with reclaiming them from people who aren't using their allocation, and things like that, it probably won't be an issue for a...

We know that all encryption can eventually be broken - it's just how long it takes to break, right? Wrong. There is a solution that is unbreakable, purely because you have nothing to compare with to know if you're right. The one-time pad. If the...

So, you want to listen to your music files when you're away, at work, etc? You'll need to reencode them, but you won't want to leave the re-encoding running all the time, as it's pretty juicy on the CPU. Solution? An on-demand streaming server. Yo...

I was digging through my old files, and I came across a list of Russian sayings I'd been collating. Some of them are funny, some are bizarre, and some insightful. "Your feet are crooked, your hair is good for nothing," said the pig to the horse....

Now, I'm no macro-economist. But even I can see that increasing VAT during a period of economic troubles is a bad idea. People will just buy less, companies will struggle, lay off more staff, etc. If you want to raise money from the public, then p...

In progress Links and pics will be added later. This is just a brain dump. So. I've recently had a few days in New York. This is my first visit to the US, and interestingly, my first time "abroad" where English was the first language. FridayAs ...

I decided to throw some caching at this site, and settled on Ehcache. I downloaded the annotations too, and sprinkled a few @Cacheables around my code. Hey presto, instant win. You can see when I implemented it by checking out this graph of the page ...

Load balancing on the cheap is easy, especially if you don't require state. Stick two servers in different places, and create a DNS entry with both IP addresses in it. Your DNS server will then give out first one address, and then the other, balancing...

Everyone knows carrots help you see in the dark. Except they don't. In World War 2, the Brits invented radar, and used it to their advantage during night flights. The Germans were wondering how the Brits could "see" so well in the dark, so to prot...