Monday September 27, 2004

My front garden

I live in Berkshire and have a small front garden and a sixty foot rear garden.

The soil is sandy with gravel on a small slope ( we are at the top of the slope..) and dries out very quickly.

When we moved in the front garden was covered with a dodgy ill looking patch of grass. I had already built a small pond in the rear garden and decided to do the same in the front. The pond takes over a lot of the available space and the final problem was what to do with the remainder of the space. I decided on covering the soil with a membrane which is porus and allows water through it while stopping weeds growing in the soil. This was then covered with pea gravel and I have planted several heathers, grasses and mahonia in the plot. The front endge of the plot has a dry stone wall and this has various alpine plants that are drought tolerant growing in it. A couple of hollyhocks have self seeded and I have left them to add a bit of extra colour.

The pond has a variety of water plants including lillies which look great. The abundance of water in the area in the form of the Thames and filled in ( with water) gravel pits means herons steal as many fish as you are prepared to buy...

The whole patch has matured now and in fact I have had to remove some plants as they had grown into each other. I also have daffodills around the edge of the pond and along the dry stone wall.

The good news is it is attractive, has colour especially in the spring and is easy to maintain.

shared lab ideas/tools/technology

I'd like to announce a set of tools we use in PTS and certain AS/CCC labs around the world to this blogging audience. I am not going to tell you they are really easy to setup and use in your lab but I hope in time we ca nget a communication thread going to end up with a set of Sun standard tools all labs use. This will promote sharing. I also really want to hear about what YOU use it; might be better than the we came up with and I'd want to use it !

The tools are documented on web pages and are:

Javalabtool -> A java gui booking tool with sybase back end

Consoletool -> A tool to access consoles

js_config -> A jumpstart tool to install and customise an operating system on a lab box rebuilding a customers configuaration

All have TOI's on http://pts-lab.sfbay/ under FaSt Access -> TOI

We also have other technology and ideas like webcams, remote power to allow better remote access. The PTS engineers wrote a lot of these and other tools. These such as diskomizer are on the web page http://pt.emea/

Even though you might want these tools please note I can't promise immediate access. js_config at the moment requires nis+ on the install server that you might not have.

But do let me have your ideas I'd like to hear from you !