Adventures in IT

Image: Pixabay I've been somewhat of a Bitcoin sceptic for quite some time.  When it first became a thing I was worried that governments would legislate it out of existence. It has had a pretty bad rap of being associated with the dark web and it is definitely the choice of currency for malware authors. In its normal usage Bitcoin is more transparent than cash.  If I give you a cash note there is no permanent record of the transaction and the tax man can't get a sniff into our business. Governments hate transactions they can't tax or police and so in the beginning there was a concern that Bitcoin would be outlawed. In contrast to cash, if I transfer you Bitcoin then there is a record of the transaction that anybody in the world can inspect.  It's possible to trace the coins in your Bitcoin wallet back through the various people who owned them.  Anybody in the world can watch the contents of your wallet and see where you spend your money. This is exactly...

Image: https://boinc.berkeley.edu, fair use BOINC is a program curated by the University of Berkeley that allows people around the world to contribute to science projects.   It works by using spare cycles from your computer to perform calculations that help do things like folding proteins to find candidates for cancer treatment, mapping the milky way galaxy, searching for pulsar stars, and improving our understanding of climate change and its effects. It runs as a background process and is easily configured to only run in certain conditions - like when you haven't used your computer for 10 minutes for example. It comes with a nifty GUI manager and for most people using it on their desktop this post is not going to be at all relevant.  This post deals with the case where a person is running it on a server without the GUI manager. Anyway, the easiest solution I found to restarting BOINC on a headless server was to use supervisord .  It's pretty muc...

My Vagrant 1.7.2 machine bugged out and when I tried to `vagrant up` it spawned a new box instead of bringing up my existing machine. Naturally this was a problem because I had made some manual changes to the config that I hadn't had a chance to persist to my puppet config files yet. To fix the problem I found used the command ` VBoxManage list vms ` in the directory where my Vagrantfile is.  This provided me a list of the machine images it could find. I then went and edited the file at .vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/id and replaced the UUID that was in there with the one that the VBoxManage command had output. Now when I run 'vagrant up' it spins up the correct VM.  Happy days.