My Laptop Diary I

This is a pointer to the first of a series of articles on maintaining my laptop; I was experimenting, pre-virtualisation with multiple operating systems. The original blog article is here…. I referred to the articles as my “Laptop Diary”. This article was specific to changes on a now obsolete hardware platform, and now obsolete software platforms.

  …

Strategic Studies, a new meaning

Charles Clarke (Secretary of State for Education) presented to the Select Committee on Education last week (1.12.04), stating that the Government was intervening to defend certain University departments against closure on so-called “viability” grounds. He was going to define certain subjects as “Strategic”. This was arguably in response to the University of Exeter’s decision to close its Chemistry department. …

Consolidation & Sybase

I wrote up some notes on how to run multiple Sybase instances in a single system image. When I originally wrote it, I was pretty much the world expert on the subject. The article explored a couple of basic Sybase consolidation techniques and the UNIX and Solaris technologies that support consolidation.  It was one of the first articles I published on davelevy.info, as a download. As I prepared for the version file look and feel update in 2015, I had decided that it was no longer of much help and so did not bring it forward to the new downloads page, although the download permalink is still supported. …

Consolidation – The importance of a cost meta-model

On blogs.sun.com, I posted an article about some of the theory behind the Data Centre Economics offerings I and colleagues were working on. The exercises were designed to model the costs of an infrastructure platform and show the profitability of implementing, smaller, faster & cheaper systems. I made this into white paper format, available here…, the original article, without the graphic remains available at the sun/oracle site, here….

Is it still worth reading? Not so sure. See the first comment …

Education, education

We were watching University Challenge the other week when the picture question came up and our younger son answered all three correctly identifying a war-hammer, a halberd and a morning-star/flail. Our good opinion of his diligence at history studies fell rapidly when he told us he knew because of the hours on the computer playing “Diablo”. …