A new home…
Qua locus has been a slightly strange mix for some time. Puzzles, life and tech, all mixed together. But not any more:
Expect to see a steady trickle of focused new content on all three :)
How I installed monit as an upstart service
This blog has been split in three and all content moved to the new blogs – Qua Locus Life, Qua Locus Tech and Qua Locus Puzzle – comments are disabled here.
Upstart is Ubuntu’s replacement for /sbin/init, and Monit is a great little monitoring service that lets you do intelligent things when errors occur and servers fall over. But for some reason Monit is still installed as a System V init daemon. So I switched it over to use Upstart.
How I installed NVM and Node.JS globally
This blog has been split in three and all content moved to the new blogs – Qua Locus Life, Qua Locus Tech and Qua Locus Puzzle – comments are disabled here.
Node.JS is a great little server and it’s also very easy to install and set up. In the same fashion, NVM is a fantastic tool for installing and switching from one installed version of Node to another. The problem arises when you develop as one user but the deployed application needs to be run as a different user and you need to guarantee that the Node configurations they are using are identical. How do you use NVM to install node globally for all users?
Passing time with Toblerone
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You and a friend have time to kill and lots and lots of Toblerone (thanks Santa!) so you have decided to pass the time by playing a lethal game involving chocolate.
A cute little question about coins
This blog has been split in three and all content moved to the new blogs – Qua Locus Life, Qua Locus Tech and Qua Locus Puzzle – comments are disabled here.
Jack is tossing a fair coin. John believes in gambler’s luck, i.e. that if Jack has tossed more heads than tails so far then the next toss is more likely to be a tail. This way, in the long run things balance out. Jim knows that previous coin tosses have no effect on the next toss. John and Jim start betting with each other on the result of each coin toss. Who is likely to win more of the bets, John or Jim?
Thinking Rightly
This blog has been split in three and all content moved to the new blogs – Qua Locus Life, Qua Locus Tech and Qua Locus Puzzle – comments are disabled here.
Julian Baggini’s “Do They Think You’re Stupid” is a light, amusing read with a serious meta-lesson tucked away inside. Presented as a list of 100 common argumentative fallacies and why they’re wrong, it can actually be interrogated as a guide to good analysis. Read the rest of this entry »
Improving my laptop’s battery life: Dell Inspiron 14z, Ubuntu 12.04
This blog has been split in three and all content moved to the new blogs – Qua Locus Life, Qua Locus Tech and Qua Locus Puzzle – comments are disabled here.
The Dell Inspiron 14z is meant to have 4-5 hours battery life out of the box. Suffice to say that this wasn’t the case when I first put Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) on it. Two hours if I was lucky, more often 90 minutes or less.
With the help of many others on AskUbuntu.com I’ve got it up well beyond 4 hours now though. The detail and a summary of everything I did is here, hopefully this will be useful to others!
