Last Friday my research group picked up a Compaq Alphaserver ES40 off of the MIT reuse email list. The physics department was giving away 12 of them (3 racks of 4), and we got one of the racks! The thing weights ~500lbs, but has 16 64-bit processors, each with 8mb of L2 cache! We are working on getting it up and running and are planning to do some benchmarks.
Category Archives: Computers
Here is an annoying “feature” I discovered today while using Inkscape to make vector graphics to use in LaTex documents. I was having issues with transparency not working, but this work-around seems to fix the problem. You MUST change the Background Color for your SVG document from the Inkscape default – change the Alpha value to 255. Then export your SVG to PNG. Then use pdflatex (instead of latex), and you can use ‘includegraphics’ with PNG images, and the transparency will exist (for the white background of your paper, at least)!!
Tonight I figured out how to use Firewall Builder, a GUI for creating firewalls (with iptables, in my case). The GUI is fairly easy to use and lets you quickly write very complicated firewall rules. I highly recommend this GUI.