Of paper worlds and the mysteries within

I've found myself drawn back into reading great, chunky novels of late - I'd eased off for a while, which made me feel strangely like I was missing out on something (perhaps I was). I followed up my re-reading of Pratchett's Witches Abroad beginning The Lord of the Rings, which has since been partially interrupted by my beginning A Game of Thrones (finally).

In an attempt to keep things a little more cheery, I'm also going through The Dilbert Principle on the side but I must admit it isn't tickling my funny bone as consistently as I would like.

A Game of Thrones has pretty much met my expectations thus far - my only previous exposure to it was watching the first episode of the TV series but I really wanted to read the book before embarking down that path and I'm glad I did so. Martin uses some rather nice descriptive prose throughout and the quality dialogue is also worth mentioning.

On a side note, I've been mini-marathoning my way through Daria lately, a show I only saw bits of when it was airing. There are some top lines and, to my mind at least, Jane and Trent really do steal the show.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Change the ComputerName value in Unattend.xml using PowerShell

A quick and dirty PowerShell script to update the value of ComputerName in Unattend.xml before imaging. This particular value is located at: <unattend>  <settings pass="generalize">   <component name="Microsoft-Windows-Shell-Setup" processorArchitecture="amd64" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">     <computername> Which is a bit of a mouthful, but we can be lazy and just pull the value from the nth component node (in my case it's 3, or the 4th component node). PowerShell uses dots to describe the hierarchical path, which looks a lot neater than the above: $xml.unattend.settings.component[3].computername To repeat, the value of .component[n] will change depending on the structure of the file. The value of the
Read more

Testing out Link Aggregation

Image
I picked up a TP-Link managed switch last week as something of a compromise between affordability and features - as it turns out though, it does just about everything I could ask for, just without the extra expense from buying something that has HP or Cisco written on the side. I grabbed the TL-SG3216, a fanless L2 managed switch with 16x1Gigabit ports as it ticked all the boxes: Silent (fanless) Managed Link Aggregation/802.3ad (LACP) 802.1Q (VLAN) STP As a bonus, the CLI interface (via console cable or ssh) is very similar to Cisco's IOS, so I don't have to learn an entirely new syntax to configure it. Before I replace my existing switch, I spent a bit of time testing out its features. First up, I setup a spare Raspberry Pi with a second ethernet interface (via a USB dongle) to test out link aggregation. First up, the configuration on the Pi (Raspbian): Install ifenslave to allow for the creation of bonded network interfaces # apt-get install ifenslav
Read more

Adding 802.1Q Trunking to Debian GNU/Linux

Here's a quick guide to setting up 802.1Q trunking for VLANs on a Debian GNU/Linux box connected to one or more Cisco Catalyst switches, which could then be used as a cheap router replacement. Configuration on the Debian box: Add 8021q to /etc/modules so 802.1Q support is enabled at startup. To install it immediately: # modprobe 8021q Use vconfig to add the VLANs to the interface you'll be using (if vconfig is missing, run apt-get install vlan ): # vconfig add eth0 2 (In the above, eth0 is the physical interface and 2 is the ID of the VLAN) Give the interface an IP. Choose an address in the range you've set aside for that particular VLAN. In this example, VLAN 2 is using 192.168.2.0/24. # ifconfig eth0.2 192.168.2.201 netmask 255.255.255.0
Read more