My Cantina

I endeavour to spend a bit of time over the Christmas/New Year break trying out and learning about new things as these opportunities don’t present themselves much through the year. On Friday night over dinner, a good friend Russell Robinson mentioned a virtualization product XEN, which was being put to very good use where he does some contracting work. I’d heard of XEN but didn’t know anything about it. I still have Cherryl’s new PC that I can play around with, so this seemed like a good time to check XEN out. (more…)

In what seems like a previous life I was heavily into electronics, in fact it was my career for quite some time. I used to love building electronic gadgets, predominantly digital, which progressed naturally into micro-computers. The first computer I built had 4K ROM, 16K RAM and used a cassette tape to load and save software. As anyone who was around back then will tell you, “those were the days”. The next step was, of course, dabbling in writing programs. With such limited memory available you had little choice but to write in assembler language, so you could squeeze as much as possible into the tiny space available. This was a truly amazing learning experience, where one’s ingenuity and perseverance were critical to success. (more…)