Flocks of goldfinches have been visiting our feeder the last few mornings.

The museum has allocated part of a collection room for server space. I am posting a few pictures to track the progress of that project so far.

Here are the racks the day we first rolled them into place. We are using the 42U APC NetShelter 750mm wide SX (AR3150) enclosures. The extra width allows for easier cable managment within each rack.



Unpacking rack and server accessories makes a lot of clutter:

When members of my family come to visit, we usually take a drive to Alachua Sink / La Chua Trail to look at the alligators. Notice something in the background?



Here is a closeup:




The water level was really low which tends to concentrate the gators in these few lake areas.

A rather sizable tree frog on our house:

Here is a picture of some of my work buddies (the museum IT department) from a few months ago, taken at a local restaurant named Buddha Belly.

I still had one other nagging problem trying to run the latest version of CentOS Linux on my Dell Inspiron 8100, which includes a Pentium III Mobile CPU capable of SpeedStep. The keyboard and mouse were very jerky. In fact, I would lose actual keystrokes. It's very annoying to type a sentence and lose half of the words. Even very old computers usually do not lose keystrokes, and although they might lag behind a bit, the keystrokes eventually come out of the input buffer. This was a real problem for me since I am a reasonably fast typist.

The issue occured whether or not I was connected to power or running off the battery.

I tried a number of suggestions (such as disabling ACPI by specifying a boot time kernel option) but nothing seemed to work.

Finally, with CentOS 5 installed, I found the solution... turn off the actual daemon that attempts to throttle the CPU speed.

# service cpuspeed stop
# chkconfig cpuspeed off

I'm sure this will affect my battery life, but this laptop doesn't get particularly good battery life anyway and I am usually plugged into a wall outlet. It is possible that the cpuspeed config file (/etc/sysconfig/cpuspeed) could be tweaked to solve the input problem but I did not bother researching this further.