User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en…

Mac ?

Still looks like fun though (thanks to cnet), the point mapping functions could be be great for virtual viewing of houses Etc.:

Now turning the point map and images into vectors and textures could make it a near instant hit in the games geeks. Game of Quake in the V&A or the Louvre anyone?
GTA in the glowing areas of Amsterdam would be closer to the mark I think

It’s lacking an awesome client / firefox plugin. (I’ve been a twitterfox fan since day one). With an API already published I’m sure there is a twitterfox and twitterberry clone (google pingberry ) (spammers registered pingfox )

The biggest advantage however is the IM client. Twitters has been borked for months and only supported googles jabber thingie and nearly everyone I know are on the other three big networks. Ping.fm’s yahoo IM integration was the deal clincher as thats what I use on my Blackberry.

Use the ping.fm beta signup code “vivalaping” to try it out for yourself.

ReJaw is looking cool too, the way they include media in status updates I’m sure will be a very useful feature.

Geeks all have “their box” hosted at a colo at “mates rates” or a dedicated server hosted in a re-developed mall in central USA where power is dirt cheap. or hidden at the bottom of a rack in a building who’s name starts tele-something. They relentlessly use power and cooling 24×7x365.25 and have a pretty substantial impact on the environment as a result.

Mine is in Amsterdam, it’s a nice place to visit for a fun weekend

Generally it does enough work so justify its existence, however I feel the same about it being there as I did when it was at home in the loft. It’s sucking power and a bit of a geek luxury. So I figure I need some karma points and did some research into offsetting the CO₂ generated powering the thing. I don’t link M$ very often but this blog article explains PUE very well nice idea for a corporate blog too.

carbonfootprint.com say you generate 430g (grams) of CO₂ per KWh (Kilo Watt hour)

Traditional Power Station Emissions
Oil 740g/Kwh : Coal 32g/Kwh : Gas 385g/Kwh

430g/Kwh will do for me.

Your server has a reasonably lousy PSU if it’s over a year old, a hot CPU a few fans a squeaky disk or two spinning like mad and some RAM and a chipset – they draw about 1 amp, In the UK a 300W PSU = 1.3A and if your running at 100% load it won’t have lasted more than a couple of months so lets do the sums assuming your running at a single Amp.

1Amp = 230W
230Watts*24hours*365days (you hope) = 2014.8Kwh/year
2014.8Kwh * 430g/kwh = 866020g of CO₂ = 0.86602 Tonnes of CO₂

Thats only half the story…. you’ve got to cool the thing too if you’re in a colo.

Energy efficiency calculations are fought with pitfalls so here is an easy way to do it , it’s called PUE.
PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness ratio) = Total Power used by building / Power used by racked kit
(I told you it was simple)

Do you know the PUE for your data center? Nope? nor do I, however thanks to this UPS case study I’m stealing this factoid… “According to the Uptime Institute, the average ratio is 2.5”

We’re going to assume a PUE of 2.5, So 1 Watt used by the server is actually 2.5 watts of energy consumed by your colo’d box overall.

A 1 Amp server is responsible for 0.86602 Tonnes

Timesd by a PUE of 2.5 = 2.16505 tonnes of CO₂ Per year.

Wow

If you’d rather offset locally than thats still a good thing to do

So round it up to 3 Tonnes if you need the Karma to offset the extra 5” of Flatscreen space you don’t use because your hacking in a 80×25 ssh terminal all the time

co2balance.uk.com have an interesting set of projects with good descriptions too.

Justin posted about some worthy offset projects too.

Please make sure that your offsetting is done via a non-profit organisation and that they meet with both the Gold Standard and Voluntary Carbon Standard to maximise your good deed.

Let me know if you did below!

Having the Blackberry ring like a classic 2 bell phone was just not right so I went on the rampage to find Asteroid once again. The Pearl & Dean site has links to iTunes but thats not very helpful on the Blackberry or Linux but the flash app on the right hand side of the page loads mp3. Superb! So here are the links.

Asteroid Now! Asteroid 2006 Asteroid 70’s * 60’s music 50’s

(my ringtone version)

I can’t decide on the new one or stick to the 70’s one though.

Living in a village with municipal wifi won’t be saving my 3G traffic bill if we upgrade directly with O2 then. (And their internet package AUP forbids voip too.)

Cheap trick O2. Nice way to treat your customers; Down right scummy. 

I was reading firefox_answers on twitter earlier and it’s like a broken record. Plugins are to blame for everything apparently, yet there is no way of knowing which cause you resource issues when FF leaks like the titanic. It’s the fastest browser because X & Y say so Yawn (Excuse me).

Well I’ve not taken the pill yet, I’m running the portable version currently to test the waters. But one thing I’ve not noticed is this apparent speed demon of a browser now it’s set up the way I like it. So, I’d love to see the test results in a common configuration rather than minimal configuration with a handful of the most common plugins installed. Adblock with the juicy lists enabled, a search toolbar, download status bar, realplayer, bookmark manger like del.icio.us and flash enabled. Thoughts?

Got any idea why ? Leave a comment…

1. The installer is very Solaris-a-like. I’m not a fan. I do remember a few far worse, but only a few


2. Upgrades are somewhat clunky, since the installer A) takes settings saved in ~/.something rather than the running config (weird) & B) buggers about with your config file removing all those logical line breaks you put in to define sections once you enabled some of the disabled features.


3. I did wonder why the hell it wasn’t a direct replacement smtpd for postfix at one point. XCLIENT functionality might cut the mustard though.


4. FP’d disastrously on a finance site I use quite a bit. I had to whitelist it


5. It annoyed my kids by FP’ing on a very popular music site they use a lot


6. >90% of rejections were RBL related.


7. I’ve a suggestion list a few pages long, but raised enough bugs already. I’m not really a grumpy-old-man


8. It appears not to like the popular catalog shops, this isn’t so much of a problem because I can’t afford the wifes shopping habits at the moment.


9. There is a setting to turn off the feedback & Ken made a change to the license to exclude addressing info but my preference is to opt out on my personal box


10. It appears to be catching less (or I’ve been noticing a lot more) and I’m relying on SpamAssassin more since the upgrade

I’ve a hunch that most of these issues come down to bulkers postmasters setting short timeouts and increasing parallelism to get the greatest bang-for-the-buck-come-instant-gratification from their listservs in the zero hour. Postfix and qmail come with excellent defaults that cope with sods like me greylisitng or traffic shaping spammers connections – don’t fuck with them eh?

This is after all my personal mailhost, it runs a few small spamtraps and a bunch of mailboxes but not scientific empirical datasets. My mailbox has been hard to manage this week and I’m not aware of anything out of the ordinary happening. My public self seeding site is getting more english junk: This week then the same week last month. Pure observation but interesting none the less.

If I had to sum it up: At the moment, I’m sorry to say it’s not as effective as the decent greylisting implementation I was running, it appears to be FP’ing more but nevertheless it has far fewer drawbacks in normal use since the delays appear more usual than the arbitrary 3^rd party retry timeouts greylisting causes. It could be excellent. (Edit: added the dot. Is anyone else trying it? )

The Granddaddy of rejections was very interesting though natwest.co(m|.uk) WTF is going on with all that phish?

Whats more I did need a prescription drug – The drug actually costs 3p/tab online based on a £5 private prescription. 14 tables.. You do the maths on how much the pharmacy makes and it explains why they are in all large TescOS stores.

I’m not suggesting that a pharmacy’s services aren’t worth the quid or so I saved, but it’s be more fair to the population if the spirit of prescription charges changes a bit.

• The whole process needs to be more open


• The process should focus on good value for the consumer and independent pharmacies


• Make the prescription cost be a cap
  

  1. 49p analgesics should never be charged at £7.10
  
  
  2. Loose cheap medication should have a dispensary charge, tab charge and be capped.
  
  

Rant over

Just remember that bottled water is no good for the environment!

Like all adverts that are better than half the re-runs it comes with a “how we did it” video too.