Linfiniti Geo Blog

At one of my clients we manage a petabyte heirachical storage system (mixed offline tape storage, near-line cache storage and online disk storage) and several high capacity (e.g. 15TB) SAN enclosures. These devices are not cheap.

However, all is not lost – there is a blog post from BackBlaze thats doing the rounds on the web that is particularly interesting. To summarise they show how to build high capacity storage devices on the cheap using off the shelf components. In the GIS world if you work with raster data a lot, or produce tile cached web mapping services, you can quickly run up a large tally of disk space. If you are a little bit technically inclined, building BackBlaze style storage could be a great business opportunity and be of great benifit to your GIS using clients. Here’s hoping that someone picks up on this opportunity here in South Africa….

I’ve been doing quite a bit of web development these days and have found the jQuery library to be indispensible. Here are a few addons and samples that I found to be really useful:

• Image popups aka lightbox effects with fancy box
• Sliding panels for login screens etc by web-kreation.com
• Some really nice tips 5 tips

I’ll add to this list over time as I come across more interesting gizmos.

Its easy to make ubuntu look beautiful.

First add these PPA’s to your /etc/apt-sources.list:

# nice themes
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/bisigi/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/bisigi/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Then updated your apt database:

sudo apt-get update

Now install the themes:

sudo apt-get install balanzan-theme infinity-theme \
wild-shine-theme exotic-theme tropical-theme \
step-into-freedom-theme bamboo-zen-theme \
ubuntu-sunrise-theme aquadreams-theme

Afterwards use the appearance too and the login manager tool to make your desktop look beautiful.