Wednesday March 09, 2005

Special bread

Keen to try new recipes on the breadmaker we have at home I have been trying some new ones with green olives, sun dried tomatoes and passata. Passata is like tomato puree but perhaps not so thick. It replaces some of the water you normally add to the bread mix. The olives and sun dried tomatoes are cut up small and put in the hopper so they are released into the dough later on. Above is the white flour loaf with these ingredients in it. It is very moist and even if you do not like olives you will hardly notice their presence. There is another one with black olives, passata and olive oil . Once cut open the bread has a lovely pale red colour from the tomato of course.

More on the lab this time remote power.

With the advent of more systems having system controllers like RSC's, the full blown system controller devices on the Sunfire range and the Service processors on the V20z / V40Z remote power is in less demand in the lab. But like the console software the ability to power cycle a machine in a lab from a desk thousands of miles away means you make remote hardware more usable. We use one type of remote power switches at the moment from Dataprobe . We use their Ipal/Epal devices with separate relays and their power strips for high density devices in racks. However we have inherited other legacy ones that we will also support over time. The latest software we use has been written by two of our students.

The software is written in perl and at this stage is now up to doing what the previous versions did but more reliabley. It also provides feedback to the user on wether or not the power operation worked. Again as with the console software all the power setups are stored in the javalabtool database. The software supports multiple power ports for one lab hardware entity so you can power off one power supply or all of them. Because the remote power boxes are on the network and are small this means it is easy to setup remote power for special setups eg powering off a piece of hardware like a disk pack or tape drive.

The software only allows you to do a power operation if you have the machine booked. But for database admins a hidden force option overrules that for testing/other purposes.