Well it’s because we’re now generating such vast quantities of electronic data every day. Eric Schmidt is the CEO of Google – a company that knows a thing or two about data. Speaking earlier this month, he stated:

There was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, … but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing…

For non-techies, 5 exabytes (5EB) probably means as much as “one-point-twenty-one-gigawatts” did in Back To The Future, but take it from me that’s a lot. In PC World terms, 5 exabytes is 5,000,000,000 gigabytes. Average computers have hard disks around 500 gigabytes in size. And now we’re generating that every day.

That’s why it’s called the information age.

Create the private key:

openssl genrsa -out new.pem 2048

Create the certificate signing request file:

openssl req -new -key new.pem -out new.csr

Sign the certificate using your CA:

openssl x509 -CA ca.crt -CAkey ca.key -req -in new.csr -CAserial ca.srl -out new.crt -days 365

And finally export it in PKCS12 format for use elsewhere:

openssl pkcs12 -export -clcerts –inkey new.pem –in new.crt -out new.p12 -name 'My Convenient Name'

Done! That wasn’t too hard to remember was it?

This is what I have been working on for the past 15 months at IBM and it’s nice to show what you do to the world every now and again. My “bit” has been developing what’s listed on the website as the RESTful Web Services – providing information about, and allowing configuration of, CICS systems.

Don’t just expect your PC to run it though. This is a program designed for customers with mainframes – million-dollar plus machines with service contracts and dedicated support and admin staff.

Luckily, I’ve now been issued with a replacement model: a Lenovo W500. This isn’t a bad machine, but it does lack some of the tactile niceties of the more solid T42p. Sure, the screen is wider (running at a resolution of 1920×1200), with a much faster CPU (Intel dual core 2.5GHz) — thing is, though, I don’t really need this horsepower and I certainly don’t need such a high-resolution screen. With the T42p I used to work all day with the screen, whereas I think this display may get a little tiring on the eyes after a while. Only time will tell.

There are some neat touches with the system: it does have a fingerprint scanner (which isn’t just a gimmick) and built-in GPRS connectivity for mobile internet, should I ever decide I want to use that.

Of course, I currently can’t boot my old system, which means my data is currently stuck on the old hard drive. Yes, I have a backup, but it is now 30 days old (having been on holiday for a week and working at home for a while before that). The files which I need now are the ones which I use every day, hence they are the ones which are not up-to-date in my backup copy.

According to PC Pro though, it’s a highly-capable laptop so I shouldn’t complain: review here.

Unfortunately, bad things started to happen. Sometimes it would fail to power on; or briefly power-up, then reset itself, only to reset itself again and end up in a very slow loop. Combined with the fact we didn’t play music that often, I never really gave it much thought. Last week it really got to me, I had a bit think and concluded it must be a power supply problem.

Off to eBay then to source a suitable PSU. It needed to be a unit capable of delivering 9V at a current of at least 500mA. I managed to find a brand-new 1200mA version, taken from a high-end BT cordless phone. Hopefully that would be beefy enough to supply the device with any spikes in startup current required, while remaining stable enough as time went by. Delivered for £6.

It arrived yesterday and I’m pleased to report things are hunky-dory again. I needed to take the connector off the old supply and use it to replace the one on the new supply: the old one was a right-angled version to make the leads run away to the back nicely; and it had a small locking indent near the tip. A bit of electricians’ tape later and we are up and running.

The music lives on.

Now the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved over the earth. And God said “Let there be light”, and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and used it to produce the green screen.

And it came to pass that man would begin to program in assembler. But God saw that His deadline included a seventh day for rest and His project would slip. And thus God created FORTRAN in His own image and saw that it was good.

And FORTRAN did begat FORTRAN I. And FORTRAN I did begat ALGOL. And ALGOL did live for a great many years, whence it was a good father – for it did begat CPL and BASIC and PL/I and Pascal. And CPL did give life to portable code in the form of its descendant C. And BASIC did begat many programming careers with the BBC Micro. And PL/I did provide Ian with a career in PL/X. And Pascal did provide many an undergraduate with their first assignment.

Yet ALGOL also did begat Simula, and thus the earth became laid waste with object-oriented programming.

With C, the earth was good, but sin crept in and it did tempt programmers with the forbidden fruit of inexpensive computational power. And thus His programmers became lazy and listened to the serpent Simula and did spawn the devil’s incarnation in the form of C++. Thus God was downcast in their profligacy with their use of expensive runtimes.

Yet man did continue to spurn the Lord and used the evil of C++ to produce Java. And thus man did claim it to be as fast as C, yet the Holy Trinity were blinded by marketing when man re-wrote RPC using XML. And thus Java did begat Web Services.

Here endeth today’s lesson.

After a fruitless trip to Novatech in Portsmouth (including an 8-mile detour down the M275 due to a missed exit), I decided to bite the bullet and go to PC World where I would spend way over the odds just for the convenience of walking into the store.

Except that I managed to pick up a decent Linksys (i.e. Cisco) router for just £40 – that’s twenty less than the same out-of-stock model in Novatech. So I’ve saved £20 on the router, but spent a tenner on diesel.

Configuration of the WAG54G2 router was easy and it looks unfortunately stylish, given that it’s going to be stuffed away on a high shelf for the rest of its life.

For an extra bonus point, I was expecting this to be expensive, but I don’t seem to be able to find it much cheaper on the web either. PC World: everything you stock is no longer overpriced; only some of it.

I first noticed something was wrong when I couldn’t connect with my usual webmail access. My mini-ITX PC fetches my mail and stores it locally, which I can then access from wherever I am in the world via a web interface. Something broke with this and I couldn’t work out what it was without physically accessing the machine: I couldn’t get any sort of remote access and being the security-conscious type that I am, there’s no “back-doors” to the system.

Unfortunately, on returning home I find that the PSU for the USB external drive on my mini-ITX PC has given up the ghost. It’s a laptop-style brick power supply, which is now failing to give any output. That meant the machine wouldn’t boot at all. I tried taking the disk from the external enclosure and installing directly into my mini-PC, but that had its own problems.

Normally the system boots off a CompactFlash card, which then passes control to the USB storage device. Now the USB storage device was missing, but the bootstrap on the CompactFlash card didn’t have the necessary modules to boot from an internal drive. The disk itself had an old, old version of the bootstrap code, which meant I could boot the system (of sorts), but it meant I couldn’t access anything USB or network. So that was a catch-22 situation. The only system I could successfully boot was running a kernel for which I had no modules available.

I’ve finally now fixed things by creating a new bit of bootstrap code and booting from the hard disk using all-sorts of mkinitrd hackery. At least the system is now up and running, if not necessarily exactly how I wanted it.

The existing PSU was the one supplied with the case: an already low-power (110W) job with a single quiet fan. The motherboard itself is a fanless-design Epia SP from VIA. There were also two small (40mm) fans in the case to keep some airflow moving because of the standard-size DVD writer and a belt ‘n braces 80mm fan to keep things nice and cool elsewhere. The fans were software controlled based on CPU temperature, but they still ran about 20% of the time keeping things cool.

I decided to have a re-think and get rid of the DVD writer – I can always create the ISO images on the Linux machine and then transfer them to my main PC for writing at a later date. That’s a huge power drain gone (upto 31.5W peak). Taking the fans out dropped power consumption by another 2W.

I also decided to ditch the original power supply and bought a picoPSU. This is a nifty little device which is tiny and plugs directly into the motherboard ATX header. As you can see from the picture below, there’s very little to it and crucially, no fans in sight. The main thing to note is that it’s tiny. Two 50p pieces would easily cover it. The whole unit is powered by a “brick” which is a bit like a laptop power adaptor: again a fanless component.

It arrived the other day and later that night I took the system apart and after some fiddling, installed it into the case. The DVD writer was removed, along with the power supply, the three redundant fans. Even for such a small case, there was a lot of room. The other surprising this was that I found the whole PC was so much lighter than I had been expecting.

Anyway: time for the big test. I plugged everything in (minus a monitor: it never uses one anyway), pressed the power switch and some lights came on, but nothing seemed to happen. Bugger: I must have got a faulty one. And then the system beeped it’s usual happy POST complete beep. Eh?

Ah yes: I’m so used to building regular PCs I was used to various fans spinning up and hard drives whirring into action. The whole mini PC boots Linux off a 256MB compact flash card, with main storage on an external USB hard drive. So with a fanless motherboard, fanless PSU, and no hard drive, the thing is totally silent. It’s a little unnerving at first to build a PC which is completely silent, but I was suddenly very happy with how quiet things were.

It’s been running continuously for over 2 days now and the internal CPU temperature is quite happy hovering around the 52C mark – up slightly from 43C previously. That might sound high, but it’s well within the standard operating temperature guidelines. Overall, power consumption dropped from 32W to 21W. In real money, that equates to a saving of about a tenner a year in electricity.

Actually don’t.

I started with the best of intentions, but then ended up trying to explain the concept of an API to non-programmers and it got a bit long. Maybe someday I’ll go back to revisit that, but until then you can see below how I’ve used the Google Chart API to produce a nice pretty chart. Enjoy.