Linux posts are by far the most popular. Perhaps this is simply due to the large quantity of Linux related posts I tend to make on this site, although it could be due to the tutorial nature of many of these articles.

Here are the Linux articles which are really ranking highly:

• How to do connection tunnelling via SSH – A reasonably quick and simple tutorial I wrote that briefly explains what SSH tunnelling is and how to make use of it.
• Ubuntu’s Indicator Applet – A now relatively old post which I wrote regarding the indicator applet that came as part of Ubuntu 10.04, and aiding in notifying the user of new email or instant messages and allowed easy response and broadcasting of messages via e-mail, instant messaging or social networks.
• Getting Spotify working in Ubuntu – This post focuses on getting the Windows version of Spotify (a popular streaming music client) working in Ubuntu Linux. This is somewhat irrelevant now however, as Spotify have released a native ‘Linux preview’ version, which tends to work a lot better… ignoring the fact they never made its volume control functional.
• Avatar server farm – Avatar, the film, which I’m sure most readers have seen was rendered with a massive Linux server farm. The server farm’s main rendering machines all ran a version of the Ubuntu. As Ubuntu is my currently preferred distribution of Linux, I figured I would write an article relating to it.

Regarding Internet Explorer, I wrote about an unexpected security feature in Internet Explorer web browser which replaces locally submitted file paths with the unhelpful ‘C:\\fakepath\\’ string. The ‘motivation’ within this post’s title refers to a motivation in the workplace video I posted quite a while ago.

• Internet Explorer’s ‘C:\fakepath\’ security feature – This security feature can easily be worked around for trusted sites via IE’s Internet Options window.
• Motivation within the workplace – An interesting and insightful explanatory video.

The Weta Digital server farm or ‘rendering wall’, as they call it, has a disk array capable of storing roughly 2 petabytes of data in total. The individual servers are linked by a 10 gigabits per second networking infrastructure, and in total there are 35,000 cores based in over 4000 Hewlett Packard Blade servers. In the case of Avatar, each minute of rendering equates to approximately 17.28GB of data.

The system is entirely water-cooled, as traditional air and fan cooling systems are not sufficient during near deadline times, due to constant high load on the servers.The photograph below shows the enormous water cooling system cooling a portion of the server farm.

The high power server farm used to render many films computer generated imagery (including Avatar), shown with its advanced water cooling system.

According to Paul Gunn, a systems admistrator at Weta Digital, Ubuntu is at the core of almost all their systems. Ubuntu runs on all of their 3D rendering servers, and at least 90% of all their desktop systems. More detailed information about the Ubuntu powered rendering farm that rendered the CGI of Avatar is available from the Information Management and IT World websites.