You can’t do this armed with a floppy balloon at the end of a 5-inch aluminium tube. Unless I can do something about my dextral ectoplasm, or manufacturers invent a grease-resistant screen coating, I’ll be cast adrift on the dead sea of pen computing. While the rest of you are groping museum exhibits, I’ll be like a Victorian gentleman visiting a zoo, poking the creatures with a stick. A few weeks back VMware’s Mike Laverick told this hack about his home lab and how he used it to further his career. Plenty of you revealed your own home labs in response, so we launched the servers’n’sofas challenge to report on the very best domestic data centres.We’ve sifted through the responses and can now bring you the very best home labs from your Reg-reading kin.Let’s start with Brendan Horan’s rig. Brendan lives in Hong Kong and apologised for his rig, saying that if he lived in a spot where houses were bigger he would do better. He has nevertheless managed to cobble together the following lab, listed from top to bottom:
Brendan said he built the lab “as my home testing grounds and running my own internal services, BIND, DHCP etc. ESXi takes care of most of that testing side and allows me to have a smaller footprint.” He also feels the lab “gives me a good way to keep current with new technology quickly.”He adds: “As for the UNIX boxes. I have a bit of a soft spot for different hardware architectures, so I used them to learn about architectures.”Readers might know our next home labber, as Ken Green was once lead technical trainer on HP-UX for HP’s UK customer training organisation. Below right you can see the lab he ran circa 2003, when it held all sorts of HP storage, PA-RISC workstations, a Brocade fibre channel switch and four PCs acting as servers.Indeed, Stephen sent us no fewer than 75 images of his lab, which comprises nine servers, a QNAP NAS and a UPS.“As a Microsoft Certified Trainer I’ve found over the years one way to help learn is to play so I’ve always had some sort of LAB setup,” Stephen wrote. “Now as a Technical Architect … designing and deploying environments for many Fortune 500 and above businesses, having a home based LAB to test different platforms and application technologies is one of the most important parts of my job.”
The legal team acting for now-deceased internet activist Aaron Swartz has filed an official complaint with the Department of Justice alleging two counts of professional misconduct by Assistant US Attorney Stephen Heymann in his handling of the case.Heymann knowingly suppressed evidence that could have been used to dismiss the case against Swartz, the complaint claims, and broke sentencing guidelines by attempting to coerce Swartz into giving up the right to a jury trial and accepting six months in jail – under the threat of a seven-year sentence request if he refused.Swartz, who as a teenager helped write the RSS standard and later cofounded Creative Commons and the Reddit online community, was arrested on January 6, 2011 after he was found using MIT's computer network to download 4.8 million research papers from the JSTOR archive. The academic papers are from publicly-funded research and the government recently announced they are to be made freely available to the public in the future.
Neither MIT nor JSTOR was interested in pressing charges over the matter, but the DOJ wasn't so sanguine and prosecuted the case, adding charge after charge until Swartz was facing 13 separate counts that could have put him behind bars for 35 years and left him with over a million dollars in fines. Swartz, who had battled with depression most of his life, hung himself in January before his case came to court."Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy," his family said in a statement at the time. "It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts US Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his death."The new complaint says that at a hearing in December to dismiss the case, Swartz's lawyers argued that the Secret Service waited 34 days after seizing Swartz's laptop and memory sticks before getting a search warrant and checking out the contents. This would make any evidence gathered inadmissible, they argued.
Heymann told the court that the computer equipment in question was in the hands of local police for most of that time and unavailable to the Secret Service, but it appears that its investigators told the prosecutor in an email the day after Swartz's arrest that it was ready to start work on the computer and storage devices.The complaint states that Heymann said he had forgotten about the email, and this led to the disclosure of many more documents and emails relating to the investigation which indicated Heymann was involved in Swartz's case before he was even arrested.The second complaint alleges that Heymann broke sentencing guidelines while attempting to browbeat Swartz into accepting a plea bargain that would have seen him accept guilt on all charges in exchange for serving four to six months in prison. If Swartz risked a jury trial and lost his case, Heymann promised he would push for at least a seven-year sentence."The difference between an offer of four months and a threat of seven years went far beyond the minimal reduction in sentence that should properly have applied for 'acceptance of responsibility' under the Sentencing Guidelines," the complaint states. "Heymann's extreme offer was an inappropriate effort to coerce a plea that went beyond the appropriate bounds of prosecutorial conduct."
The complaint asks for a formal investigation into Heymann's conduct by the DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility. But based on statements by his boss Attorney General Eric Holder to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, Heymann has already been cleared of any hint of misconduct.The Swartz investigation was "a good use of prosecutorial discretion," Holder claimed, and the charges against him were sound. At no point did the prosecutors seek to put Swartz behind bars for more than five months, Holder claimed, saying that the media had blown the case up beyond all proportion.Feature There was an article a while back, in Scientific American I think, that posed the question: given a super-powerful computer, with infinite computing power shoe-horned into a coke can, what would you do with it?*The arrival of the Raspberry Pi (RPi) prompted a similar sort of question: given an (almost) disposable PC with late-1990s power, what would you do with it? Other than, of course, to use it as a cheap media centre.
Yes, yes, we all know it supposed purpose is to teach kids to code, but I mean, come on, where's the fun in that? If the target audience are anything like my two iPod junkies, then just learning to writing code is only going to interest the tiniest minority. Thankfully, it turns out that there's quite a lot you can do with your RPi. Which is important, because your average Linux head isn't going to persuade ten year olds to start pootling around with Scratch. But if a £29 PC is merely the gateway to doing other more exciting STUFF, then they may have to learn some coding to get it all to work.In their defence, the average(?) Linux head is inured in a culture of solving common problems, talking about them in forums, and posting fairly detailed workthroughs. What's more interesting is seeing the crossover between Linux heads, open source electronicistas and a wide range of niche hobbyists. RPi is seeing action with groups from Apiarists (do you know the current state of your hive?) to Xenophiles (SETI, anyone?). Yachtsmen and Zumba DJs take note.
There's a large amount of overlap between the elements within projects, so starting with a web server will get you on the road to a weather station and so on. But let's not give the game away just yet. Here then, is a collection of useful and perhaps fun RPi projects which range in difficulty from plugging in some wire and downloading a bit of code, to firing up a soldering iron and whipping out the carpentry set.Nostalgia alert! When I was 12, my best friend's grandfather owned a pub. In those pre-Sunday Licensing days, we could sneak in early, he would stick some free credits on for us, and three of us would have a quick Space Invaders tournament. How technology has moved on.Mount an LCD screen into an old table, hook it up to your RPi. Get hold of an off-the-shelf arcade joystick and some arcade buttons, and with the judicious use some resistors as voltage dividers to tie them to the GPIO inputs on the RPi. Install (or compile) a copy of advanced MAME, and some choice games.This is a popular meme, so there are lots of workthroughs and examples out there, including some IKEA modders. If you're not sure you want all the fuss, these chaps have some more expensive options available.