From thoughts to text

The thoughts and text on this blog is mine, and mine alone.

  • Hello (again) MacBook Air

    After fifteen years, I have finally realized that my old MacBook Air from 2011 is not up to the task of being a travel companion anymore.

    To be honest, it hasn’t been for a long, long time. And the age shows. No updates, including browsers, which means that some webpages won’t render properly in either Safari or Chrome. Including Apple.com.

    So, this week, I thought it might be time to get a new laptop. I’ve heard much praise of Apples new MacBook Neo. A quality built laptop on a budget. Good enough for most tasks. Certainly good enough for me.

    What I want — what I need — is a silent machine. Quiet. Over the years I have become more and more sensitive to noise. And Apple has these computers now. No fans. No noise.

    And let’s be honest; a computer with Windows isn’t an option anymore. It hasn’t been for years. I use one at work, and I have reached a limit on how much pain I can endure in front of a screen.

    So, back to the Apple Neo: Looked good on paper. Looked good in reviews. Looked darn good in the shop.

    Then I remembered that I’m not a student on a budget. And that I wanted something I could use for years to come. If not fifteen years, like my previous MacBook, then at least ten.

    So I ended up with a MacBook Air, again. This time the 13 inch with the new M5 processor. Quiet, peaceful, and from what I’m told: powerful.

  • Part 2: How many people does it take to operate a data center?

    Less then a week after I wrote about data centers, wondering how many people really were needed to operate one, news broke that atNorth will build a data center (almost) right in my back yard (norwegian, paywall).

    In my previous post, I noted that Nscale was promissing 200 jobs working in Europes biggest data center for AI. Well, atNorth just promissed the very same number, excluding maintenance, canteen, security and transportation.

    Translated:

    “When fully developed, we will have invested up to 40 billion and have 200 permanent employees in a local limited company, he says.

    In addition, there will be canteen services, caretaker functions, security, security and transport, he adds.”

    Note: The translation includes the word “security” twice, that is not an error.

    In my first post, I assumed that these jobs were included in the numbers from Nscale (and others).

    To be fair, atNorth does not promise 200 jobs from day one. They will build the data center in two stages, and the first will provide 70 jobs, pluss the mentioned canteen services, maintenance and security.

    On their own webpage, atNorth calls this new data center a “mega site”. The first of their data centers in Norway.

    It will be interesting to see how many jobs this actually will provide locally.

  • How many people does it take to operate a data center?

    It looks like the big tech companies are building new data centers like there is no tomorrow.

    A few years ago, it was all about cryptocurrencty. And it should be noted that some of these data centers were not of the highest standard. Just look at the images in this article (in norwegian).

    Nowadays the pressure is on again, this time because of Artificial Intelligence (AI). And, like cryptocurrency, they need a lot of electicity. In return they promise jobs.

    But I have a hard time believing that data centers will employ as many people as these companies claim. Nscale are promising 200 jobs (in norwegian) once their new data center is operational.

    And, maybe 200 people in total is needed to run what they plan to be Europes biggest data center for AI, but I doubt it, and I think most of them would be remote jobs anyway. So much so that I would say that whomever works at the data center is the remote worker.

    What they need is this: cooling technician, electrician, someone to do basic maintenance and a couple of data technicians to install and remove servers. And maybe some on-site security, depending on location. Did I forget anyone?

    What is interesting is that acording to this article (again in norwegian), Green Mountain, in 2020, estimated that a new data center in Norway could employ 8 300 people. But then 3 years later, in 2023, it was adjusted down to 500 jobs. And this data center would be smaller than Nscale’s, which promised 200 jobs.

    I can only assume that the 8 300 jobs mentioned was during construction, and not during regular operation. Anything else would just be absurd.

    Asking Googles AI about how many (people) does it take to operate a data center, the answer is: “Operating a typical data center requires a surprisingly small core staff—often ranging from 25 to 150 permanent workers“

    Then again, we are talking about AI data centers, so maybe most of these jobs will be people with wire cutters. Ready to take down any rogue AI agent.

  • I upgraded Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04

    I read an article on Hacker News about a guy who ran Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years and moved over to FreeBSD. Then I rememebered, I have an Ubuntu Server running. And it has been running for a while now.

    I have been keeping it up-to-date, but it was still Ubuntu 22.04, with the latest long-term support released from Ubuntu being 26.04. So I decided it was time to do the dreaded release-upgrade.

    Why do I say “dreaded”? Well, things have broken in the past, and I was sure something would break again. It almost always do.

    So, the first step was to take a full backup. I run it as a virtual machine on VMware ESXi, but since I have had some issues in the past with the snapshot feature, I have learned not to use it, but instead make a copy of the files manually.

    After making sure that every package was up-to-date, and the machine rebooted, I ran do-release-upgrade and let it do it’s thing. I was surprised that most things just worked after the upgrade. But some small things showed up:

    1. Python 2.7 was removed, so some home made scripts stopped working. I need to fix this at some point in the future, maybe.
    2. PHP was disabled for users, that is for files in the public_html directory.
    3. Apache 2.4 (I came from 2.2) introduced some new rules replacing “Order allow, deny” and “Allow from all” with “Require all granted” (or denied, or somewhere in between).

    One side effect, which I spent a lot of time on in Apache configuration files, was that I was not allowed to view files in a subfolder under public_html. But in the end it turned out to be because of PHP being disabled, and this blocked indexing of subdirectories. Viewing the files with a full URL worked, except for PHP files.

    So far everything seems to be running fine, but it will be interesting to see if Certbot is running as it should, because I have a vague memory that this broke when upgrading to 22.04 a few years back.

    I do plan to run another do-release-upgrade to get it up to 26.04, but once I got 24.04 to run as expected, I did not want to ruin it well knowing I did not have the time to take a new backup and fix potential issues.

    All in all, the upgrade was a success. Almost no issues at all.

  • Personal Computer

    When I was a kid, somtimes in the early 90s, my mom borrowed a computer from her work home for a weekend. I think. It is a while ago, so maybe I am wrong. But that is not important.

    I asked what PC stood for; “personal computer” was the answer. And while you may say there was nothing “personal” about the computers of the early 90s, in terms of user friendlyness, it was personal in the sense that you controlled it.

    Now, this is the part that is important. You controlled it, not the other way around. And I feel that this has been gradually lost over the years. Sure, the PC is still personal, but only if you install something like Linux or BSD. But if you use Windows 11, it is far from personal. You are no longer in control. It feels downright hostile.