The Writings of a Freelance Infrastructure Consultant
I’ve found plenty of articles out there explaining how to use KVM with graphical GUI tools. On most of the CentOS servers I administer, however, I use Kickstart to create a customised and minimal GUI-free install to keep things as simple and efficient as possible. Here, therefore, are some guidelines for how to set up a virtualisation environment and virtual machines using KVM on CentOS 6 via the CLI.
(This post assumes a PostgreSQL installation located at /var/lib/pgsql on a Red Hat-type Linux system such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS. If your system differs from this, you may need to modify some of the paths accordingly.)
In PostgreSQL, sorts larger than a certain size will get performed on disk instead of in memory, and this makes them much slower as a result. Ideally all sorts should be done in memory (except for the ones that are genuinely too big to fit into your available RAM, because swapping to virtual memory should be avoided at all costs).
For six weeks I am exhibiting my iPhone photography in Cafe Seventy Nine in Primrose Hill, London.
I’ve written an article for Digital Photographer magazine called A Beginner’s Guide to iPhone Photography, which will hopefully come in useful for all you budding iPhoneographers out there. There’s a link to Part 2 at the bottom of Part 1. Enjoy!
My experience with Lion so far has been, to say the least, mixed. I thought I’d list some of my experiences in the form of a brief review.
Photographers are increasingly embracing smartphones, and Apple’s iPhone in particular, as valid alternatives to their SLRs. Adopting the philosophy that ‘the best camera is the one that’s with you’, photographers find with iPhones that they can simply point and shoot in situations where photography would not be an option with a larger camera. For many, this embodies the true essence of photography, in which making a timely visual capture of a particular moment is more important than painstakingly changing lenses and altering aperture settings. More and more photographers are questioning the assumption that bulky, costly photographic equipment is necessary for taking worthwhile photographs. Instead, they are realising that you can never tell when inspiration is going to strike, and being able to take photographs instantly at any time is incredibly advantageous.
At 7pm on 11th July, the Apple Store on Regent Street will be hosting an iPhoneography event to highlight four talented members of the London iPhoneography Group who will be showing their work and discussing how they use their iPhones for street photography in London: Daniel Holland, Robson Santos, Matthew Burlem and Leyla Bile.
Following our successful migration to Amazon’s S3 service for media storage and delivery, we decided to move our entire server infrastructure from its traditional data centre colocation to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (or ‘EC2′). Using this cloud-based infrastructure instead of data centre colocation provides two main benefits for us.
I make extensive use of several Macs and an iPhone, I like using desktop and mobile apps in preference to web apps, and it would drive me mad if I couldn’t keep data constantly and wirelessly in sync between my apps on all my devices. I’m constantly trying to find the best ways of doing this, so I thought I’d share my methods for the benefit of all. This applies to anyone with one or more Macs, iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches.
As I have a MobileMe account, there is a heavy focus on that service, but MobileMe does cost a significant amount of money each year which may not be ideal for everyone, so I’ve given alternatives wherever possible.
2010 was, for me, very much about iPhoneography. During the year, iPhoneography seemed to go from a fun, interesting curiosity to a full-blown photography subgenre or even a ‘movement’, and I’ve become part of a vibrant community of iPhoneographers on the Internet who are pushing the boundaries of this medium and sharing their results with each other and the rest of the world. This feels like being part of something quite special, and I’ve met some cool new people through the community.