Engineering Elegance

Another good thing to do with a bunch of work-stations is to combine their computing capabilities to speed up complex tasks. One such complex task in an engineering company is compiling code. Thankfully, there are useful solutions to this problem that can be implemented easily. Guide here. It took about 15 minutes to install and setup distcc as the distributed compiler. What this does is to spread out C/C++ code compilation across a number of machines. Best thing about it Read more

Earlier this week, there was some construction work along a side-road leading away from the office. At first, I did not know what it was until I took a closer look – they were contractors installing a couple of large enclosures for Unifi – our national optical fibre broadband service. This means that the area around the office has been earmarked for the next stage of fibre deployment. Although I was not sure when the office would be covered, I Read more

Virtualisation comes in handy for a small-office – we can run a bunch of disparate services on limited hardware. Hardware A second-hand laptop is used as the KVM host and is installed with Debian and Lib-virt. I like using laptops as servers because of the built-in UPS. However, it is important to take care of cooling and hard-disk reliability in laptops. For the purpose of cooling, some cheap (RM10) laptop cooler fans were installed. Storage is off-loaded to a dedicated Read more

AESTE moved out of my home and into its new offices at Queen’s Avenue about a year ago. The renovations were completed and the furniture was installed in stages. Almost all of the furniture comes from IKEA because they sell startup-friendly furniture at a very startup-friendly price. The image above illustrates the office plan. While things are always under construction, there is very little deviation from the original plan. Let’s start with a virtual walk-through of the office. When a Read more