Naren Salem

Bitnami plus Google Cloud

1 March ’16

CanvasLMS on infrastructure vs Self hosted

With self hosted we can get the admin panel without having to incur the per user cost. Bitnami makes it easy to get started. But for someone who knows Rails, it may be a better idea for the long run to build from scratch. This way we can maybe customize Canvas.

For example we don’t want our exercises to be called “Surveys” or “Quizzes”. Also the skin on the hosted version fails the contrast test from the W3C Accessibility Guidelines.

Sametime on Pidgin

9 November ’10

Work uses Lotus groupware. So I needed my IM client to connect to Sametime at work. Yes Pidgin and Empathy do that, but they were not showing me all my online contacts. After some browsing around it turned out that the meanwhile library had the bug in it and I had to get the source code for it and compile it to get the fix because the new packages were not released yet. I'm getting to be a geek now.

Remote desktop from Ubuntu to Windows

9 November ’10

When I first tried to remote into my work machine, man that thing was slow. My good pal helped me figure out a set of command line options to make it usable. The main things to do were to set the command line option to have rdesktop compress the data, and to minimize the themes on my Windows machine. Now I feel like the remote experience is faster on my Ubuntu machine than it was from my Windows machines... ofcourse my Windows machines had much slower hardware.

Linux Distros

9 November ’10

So on my new machine, I installed Ubuntu Maverick. Felt like I should go with the latest out there. Right? I also played with some other live cds and I really liked Linux Mint. The package management and system settings are better laid out and accessible.

The first few days were nice and shiny and calm. Then I started doing some real stuff on my new machine.

Building a PC

24 October ’10

Once I decided I wanted to build a PC, I started looking around for some deals. Tigerdirect had a AMD Phenom X4 (quad core) based system on sale at $299. I went for it. The kit didn't include a CPU fan. Weird.

When I booted up my computer after assembling it, there was a bios message that said that the CPU was not compatible with the mother board. Weird.

Once I installed Ubuntu and got it running, I checked the CPU temperatures and it was running close to 60 deg C. The spec sheet said 61 was the system critical temperature. Very weird.

A day later I got an email from Tigerdirect saying that (due to poor information from a vendor) they had included an incorrect rev of the CPU with the kit. The replaced my CPU at no extra charge (they also provided my return shipping label).

After I installed the new CPU the bios error was gone, but the temperature was still high. I reversed the case fan so it would blow inward, and that dropped the temp to about 55. Still not good.

Then I went back and read a review on the CPU from a year ago and they rated the chip as pretty good, but they warned that for sure this was going to be a hot one - a prime candidate for liquid cooling even, they said.

I have ordered a much nicer heatsink / cpu fan. Hope that helps.