I saw a squirrel! He was goin' like this!
Monday, December 31
Something Different
I just got a cease & desist letter from drive J. One of my external drives has been a little balky lately, requiring me to turn it off and on (or unplug it an plug it back in) to get it going. And just now it stopped working entirely.
So as a last resort, I pulled it from its enclosure and stuck it into the spare bay in Haruhi.
And... It worked. Came up first time, no errors, all data intact, just as the fireworks started going off in the distance.
Happy New Year everyone! It's gotta be better than 2007.
I just got a cease & desist letter from drive J. One of my external drives has been a little balky lately, requiring me to turn it off and on (or unplug it an plug it back in) to get it going. And just now it stopped working entirely.
So as a last resort, I pulled it from its enclosure and stuck it into the spare bay in Haruhi.
And... It worked. Came up first time, no errors, all data intact, just as the fireworks started going off in the distance.
Happy New Year everyone! It's gotta be better than 2007.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Saturday, December 29
Success!
Or a success-like event, anyway.
I've managed to boot Naga on the FC4-x86-64 Rescue CD, and after a bit of poking around with fdisk, managed to manually reconstruct one of the two 800GB arrays. I'm copying data off that right now.
The other array is down because of a failed disk, so unless I can somehow coax that drive to life (or copy it onto another drive), that one is toast - it was RAID-0. Several smaller RAID-1 arrays have also been brought back to temporary life.
Fortunately, while the missing array held the majority of my old anime, it's also the one that I have better backups of. The other array, the one that I have managed to get working, only has about 300GB of anime, but it also has about 400GB of assorted stuff - backups of mu.nu, photos, files, music - hundreds of thousands of little files for which I don't even have a complete catalog.
So at least I'll be getting that back: After finding the old /usr partition I got rysnc up and running and it's pushing 25MB a second across to Yurie.
At this point I'd given up hope of getting anything off that machine, so every byte is a bonus.
Update: For some reason, rsync will burp and die every few gigabytes. But it's rsync, so I just send it on its way again.
Update: Oh look, Bleach. Goody. Of course, I have Bleach, on my external drive, on my new PC, on DVD-R, and on DVD now that it's been released here. But I've also recovered it from Naga.
Or a success-like event, anyway.
I've managed to boot Naga on the FC4-x86-64 Rescue CD, and after a bit of poking around with fdisk, managed to manually reconstruct one of the two 800GB arrays. I'm copying data off that right now.
The other array is down because of a failed disk, so unless I can somehow coax that drive to life (or copy it onto another drive), that one is toast - it was RAID-0. Several smaller RAID-1 arrays have also been brought back to temporary life.
Fortunately, while the missing array held the majority of my old anime, it's also the one that I have better backups of. The other array, the one that I have managed to get working, only has about 300GB of anime, but it also has about 400GB of assorted stuff - backups of mu.nu, photos, files, music - hundreds of thousands of little files for which I don't even have a complete catalog.
So at least I'll be getting that back: After finding the old /usr partition I got rysnc up and running and it's pushing 25MB a second across to Yurie.
At this point I'd given up hope of getting anything off that machine, so every byte is a bonus.
Update: For some reason, rsync will burp and die every few gigabytes. But it's rsync, so I just send it on its way again.
Update: Oh look, Bleach. Goody. Of course, I have Bleach, on my external drive, on my new PC, on DVD-R, and on DVD now that it's been released here. But I've also recovered it from Naga.
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Tuesday, December 25
Merry Christmas!
To all the munuvians and meenuvians and to everyone who got lost and just sort of ended up here somehow, a merry Christmas and a happy New Year type thingy!
To all the munuvians and meenuvians and to everyone who got lost and just sort of ended up here somehow, a merry Christmas and a happy New Year type thingy!
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Monday, December 24
What The Heck?
Minx just had a stroke. Actually, it looks like MySql was at fault. I just got five little "trouble at t'mill" emails, one from each of the Minx processes running, and when I checked in, my latest post was missing.
I bounced the MySql server, which made no difference. Running a table repair on the database brought everything back, apparently intact. And the last backup was only 45 minutes ago. But still not very nice to see.
Nothing in the logfiles to indicate a hardware problem. Bleh.
Update: Looks like Minx was going rogue and eating all the memory on the server. Once all memory is gone, the next program to request some memory is summarily killed. If that's Minx, no biggie; one of the other Minx processes will take up the slack and the dead process will be restarted automatically. But if it's MySQL, bad things happen.
Minx just had a stroke. Actually, it looks like MySql was at fault. I just got five little "trouble at t'mill" emails, one from each of the Minx processes running, and when I checked in, my latest post was missing.
I bounced the MySql server, which made no difference. Running a table repair on the database brought everything back, apparently intact. And the last backup was only 45 minutes ago. But still not very nice to see.
Nothing in the logfiles to indicate a hardware problem. Bleh.
Update: Looks like Minx was going rogue and eating all the memory on the server. Once all memory is gone, the next program to request some memory is summarily killed. If that's Minx, no biggie; one of the other Minx processes will take up the slack and the dead process will be restarted automatically. But if it's MySQL, bad things happen.
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Sunday, December 23
UPS And Downs
So I went out and bought that UPS today. Well, not that UPS, but a UPS. Nice big 16-pound 700VA unit. Runs Haruhi and Yurie and all their ducklings (the four external drives) just fine.
Except... It's starting to look like the problem with my MyBook isn't the power supply. It's on a UPS, and it will still spin down while in use. Hell, it spun down during a chkdsk. That's not a useful feature in a drive.
I'm copying everything off it (if I can find the space for that, since I'm copying everything off everything right now), and then I'll see if I can work out how to open it up and remove the drive itself. I have a few Western Digital drives in use, and none of them except the MyBook have given me a moment's bother*, so if I can get it out of the crappy enclosure I'll at least have recovered the larger part of what I spent on it.
Oh, and with four USB drives attached, Haruhi won't boot. Unplug them, boot up, and plug them in, and it's all fine. The interesting thing - for BIOS programmer values of interesting - is that it freezes somewhere between identifying the CPU and testing the memory. That's something of a WTF.
I could turn a couple of them into eSATA and see if that makes a difference. Not until I have them backed up, though. Not after what happened to the late lamented Goldie.
* Oh yeah. Except for the NCQ bug that crops up under Linux. Bleah.
So I went out and bought that UPS today. Well, not that UPS, but a UPS. Nice big 16-pound 700VA unit. Runs Haruhi and Yurie and all their ducklings (the four external drives) just fine.
Except... It's starting to look like the problem with my MyBook isn't the power supply. It's on a UPS, and it will still spin down while in use. Hell, it spun down during a chkdsk. That's not a useful feature in a drive.
I'm copying everything off it (if I can find the space for that, since I'm copying everything off everything right now), and then I'll see if I can work out how to open it up and remove the drive itself. I have a few Western Digital drives in use, and none of them except the MyBook have given me a moment's bother*, so if I can get it out of the crappy enclosure I'll at least have recovered the larger part of what I spent on it.
Oh, and with four USB drives attached, Haruhi won't boot. Unplug them, boot up, and plug them in, and it's all fine. The interesting thing - for BIOS programmer values of interesting - is that it freezes somewhere between identifying the CPU and testing the memory. That's something of a WTF.
I could turn a couple of them into eSATA and see if that makes a difference. Not until I have them backed up, though. Not after what happened to the late lamented Goldie.
* Oh yeah. Except for the NCQ bug that crops up under Linux. Bleah.
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Friday, December 21
Fixed!
That bug that was logging people out at random - the same bug that occasionally gave you someone else's name on a comments page - has been found and fixed.
It's a CherryPy bug and not a Minx bug, so I'm going to see if it's been fixed in the new beta of CherryPy, and if not, file a bug report.
The only problem is that I spent three hours looking for a bug in my code before I turned my gaze to CherryPy.
That bug that was logging people out at random - the same bug that occasionally gave you someone else's name on a comments page - has been found and fixed.
It's a CherryPy bug and not a Minx bug, so I'm going to see if it's been fixed in the new beta of CherryPy, and if not, file a bug report.
The only problem is that I spent three hours looking for a bug in my code before I turned my gaze to CherryPy.
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Thursday, December 20
Cool Tools
This is too cool. Whack in your phone number, and it gives you a list of every ADSL2+ ISP available in your area and all of their plans and prices, which ones have ports available, and a map showing you where the exchange is. Doesn't actually have an address lookup and distance calculator, but that's about the only thing missing.
This is too cool. Whack in your phone number, and it gives you a list of every ADSL2+ ISP available in your area and all of their plans and prices, which ones have ports available, and a map showing you where the exchange is. Doesn't actually have an address lookup and distance calculator, but that's about the only thing missing.
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Nanotech Bakes A Better Battery
Scientists at Stanford university have come up with a new variant on the Lithium-ion battery that delivers ten times the capacity.
That's huge. Assuming they don't run into engineering difficulties bringing it to market, it changes everything. It makes electric cars practical. Gives you a notebook that lasts all day without charging. iPods and phones can use much smaller and lighter batteries, making them smaller and lighter themselves.
Scientists and engineers have been making gradual progress towards improved batteries for decades; this in a single leap outpaces all that effort put together.
Woohoo!
Scientists at Stanford university have come up with a new variant on the Lithium-ion battery that delivers ten times the capacity.
That's huge. Assuming they don't run into engineering difficulties bringing it to market, it changes everything. It makes electric cars practical. Gives you a notebook that lasts all day without charging. iPods and phones can use much smaller and lighter batteries, making them smaller and lighter themselves.
Scientists and engineers have been making gradual progress towards improved batteries for decades; this in a single leap outpaces all that effort put together.
Woohoo!
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Wednesday, December 19
What I Like To See
Haruhi is running a virus scan and a mass uTorrent file check at the same time. It's pulling 25MB/second across the network for the latter (the files are on Yurie).
My old Windows box would run like a slug when I did that. With Haruhi, you'd hardly know it was doing anything... At least, until you got into your Minx blog and started typing, and noticed that the editor wasn't quite as snappy as usual.
Looks like I'll need that triple or quad core after all.
Haruhi is running a virus scan and a mass uTorrent file check at the same time. It's pulling 25MB/second across the network for the latter (the files are on Yurie).
My old Windows box would run like a slug when I did that. With Haruhi, you'd hardly know it was doing anything... At least, until you got into your Minx blog and started typing, and noticed that the editor wasn't quite as snappy as usual.
Looks like I'll need that triple or quad core after all.
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11:27 PM
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Tuesday, December 18
The M Matters
Because if you leave it off, you allocate 1024 bytes to the key buffer and 512 bytes to the query cache.
Which is not really all that useful.
Surprisingly, MySQL ran quite well even when so badly misconfigured. It wasn't optimal, but it wasn't slow either.
Because if you leave it off, you allocate 1024 bytes to the key buffer and 512 bytes to the query cache.
Which is not really all that useful.
Surprisingly, MySQL ran quite well even when so badly misconfigured. It wasn't optimal, but it wasn't slow either.
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11:10 PM
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Monday, December 17
Whee
Looks like the new server is ready to go, which is a good thing, because the deadline is basically today.
Today's glitch-de-resistance: bzip2-devel wasn't installed. So the Python bz2 module didn't build. So the Minx blog import module wouldn't work. So Minx fall down go boom.
Currently doing what I'm always doing: Frantically pushing 200GB of data from one server to another before I lose it completely.
Looks like the new server is ready to go, which is a good thing, because the deadline is basically today.
Today's glitch-de-resistance: bzip2-devel wasn't installed. So the Python bz2 module didn't build. So the Minx blog import module wouldn't work. So Minx fall down go boom.
Currently doing what I'm always doing: Frantically pushing 200GB of data from one server to another before I lose it completely.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:07 PM
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Getting Better All The Time
I'm copying my torrents folder across from Lina to Haruhi. It's about 200GB, and it's only achieving 5MB per second, so it's going to take about 12 hours (during which time I can't download anything...)
As a test, while that was running I grabbed one folder at random (it just happened to be G-On Riders) and dropped it onto the anime directory on Yurie. That ran at over 40MB per second.
Now that's an improvement.
I'm copying my torrents folder across from Lina to Haruhi. It's about 200GB, and it's only achieving 5MB per second, so it's going to take about 12 hours (during which time I can't download anything...)
As a test, while that was running I grabbed one folder at random (it just happened to be G-On Riders) and dropped it onto the anime directory on Yurie. That ran at over 40MB per second.
Now that's an improvement.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:46 AM
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Sunday, December 16
Well, That Was Horrible
I had Midori - the mu.nu server; there's only the one now - scheduled for a ram upgrade Saturday at 9 PM Central. They actually tried to do it on Thursday, but fortunately stopped before they could screw anything up.
So, I'm sitting there, waiting for the upgrade to start, while frantically running backups just in case anything goes wrong and trying to get two million files copied to Aoi before they pull the plug. And the maintenance window arrives... And passes... And my backups finish. And I post a query as to whether anyone is home at Softlayer.
And they respond (after an hour) and the upgrade is rescheduled for the next maintenance window, 2 AM - 4 AM Sunday. And a little before 3 AM, they shut down the server and upgrade the memory.
And lo, the server is inaccessible.
So my first, second and third responses are to panic, for not only is this currently the only server for mu.nu, it is currently the only DNS server for mee.nu, so the whole shebang is pretty much off the air. Okay, it's 3 o'clock on Sunday morning and no-one cares much right now, but I've got to get it fixed, and fast.
Which might not be easy, because #1 suspect is a failed system disk. The user directories are on a different disk, and backups are on yet another disk, but if I can't log in they don't do me a lot of good.
Now, among the goodies Softlayer provides me with is KVM and text console access. Unfortunately, this is via Supermicro's IPMI tool, and it sucks your choice of equine anatomy. Most notably, the K part of the KVM fuction suffers from severe arrhythmia. When you press a key, you get, more or less at random, between zero and thirty copies of that keystroke.
Oh, and the text console doesn't work at all.
It's something of a miracle that I was even able to log in, and more of a miracle that I was able to quickly work out what the problem was: noexec was set for the /usr filesystem. I'd meant to set it for /var/tmp, and missed, and hadn't rebooted since.
Oops.
At precisely this moment, for extra points, the KVM widgie decided to invert my capslock setting, making it an interesting experience to navigate vi. But I did, and I fixed fstab, and I saved, and I rebooted, and apache didn't start but I have an easy shortcut command for that because it's something I need to do every now and then and lo we were back again.
And I've spent the last seven hours on a five-minute memory upgrade.
On a Sunday.
Bleh.
I had Midori - the mu.nu server; there's only the one now - scheduled for a ram upgrade Saturday at 9 PM Central. They actually tried to do it on Thursday, but fortunately stopped before they could screw anything up.
So, I'm sitting there, waiting for the upgrade to start, while frantically running backups just in case anything goes wrong and trying to get two million files copied to Aoi before they pull the plug. And the maintenance window arrives... And passes... And my backups finish. And I post a query as to whether anyone is home at Softlayer.
And they respond (after an hour) and the upgrade is rescheduled for the next maintenance window, 2 AM - 4 AM Sunday. And a little before 3 AM, they shut down the server and upgrade the memory.
And lo, the server is inaccessible.
So my first, second and third responses are to panic, for not only is this currently the only server for mu.nu, it is currently the only DNS server for mee.nu, so the whole shebang is pretty much off the air. Okay, it's 3 o'clock on Sunday morning and no-one cares much right now, but I've got to get it fixed, and fast.
Which might not be easy, because #1 suspect is a failed system disk. The user directories are on a different disk, and backups are on yet another disk, but if I can't log in they don't do me a lot of good.
Now, among the goodies Softlayer provides me with is KVM and text console access. Unfortunately, this is via Supermicro's IPMI tool, and it sucks your choice of equine anatomy. Most notably, the K part of the KVM fuction suffers from severe arrhythmia. When you press a key, you get, more or less at random, between zero and thirty copies of that keystroke.
Oh, and the text console doesn't work at all.
It's something of a miracle that I was even able to log in, and more of a miracle that I was able to quickly work out what the problem was: noexec was set for the /usr filesystem. I'd meant to set it for /var/tmp, and missed, and hadn't rebooted since.
Oops.
At precisely this moment, for extra points, the KVM widgie decided to invert my capslock setting, making it an interesting experience to navigate vi. But I did, and I fixed fstab, and I saved, and I rebooted, and apache didn't start but I have an easy shortcut command for that because it's something I need to do every now and then and lo we were back again.
And I've spent the last seven hours on a five-minute memory upgrade.
On a Sunday.
Bleh.
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Saturday, December 15
In Happier News
Haruhi and Yurie are up and running. Haruhi was still having problems with Memtest86+ - just a couple of errors on a complete pass of 8GB of ram, but that's three too many. I pulled out the ram, rearranged it (so I could see if the errors tracked the module or the socket) and reinstalled it. And it came back clean on a full 3-hour test, so it looks like it was Just One Of Those Things.
I was seeing some video glitches before, so I underclocked the built-in graphics, suspecting that it was overclocking itself the way memory was. That seems to have worked fine, and it's running Aero at a quite acceptable speed. You'd hope so, but it's nice to see that it works like it should.
Now I just need to install approximately 12,000 programs to get my usual working environment back.
Oh, and speed? Pretty snappy. I had a Core 2 Duo 2.4 at my previous job, and this feels about the same, though it's slower in benchmarks. Definitely much faster than Lina, my 2003-era P4 2.6. So despite the extra day taken to assemble them, I'm pretty happy with my two tiny goddesses.
Haruhi and Yurie are up and running. Haruhi was still having problems with Memtest86+ - just a couple of errors on a complete pass of 8GB of ram, but that's three too many. I pulled out the ram, rearranged it (so I could see if the errors tracked the module or the socket) and reinstalled it. And it came back clean on a full 3-hour test, so it looks like it was Just One Of Those Things.
I was seeing some video glitches before, so I underclocked the built-in graphics, suspecting that it was overclocking itself the way memory was. That seems to have worked fine, and it's running Aero at a quite acceptable speed. You'd hope so, but it's nice to see that it works like it should.
Now I just need to install approximately 12,000 programs to get my usual working environment back.
Oh, and speed? Pretty snappy. I had a Core 2 Duo 2.4 at my previous job, and this feels about the same, though it's slower in benchmarks. Definitely much faster than Lina, my 2003-era P4 2.6. So despite the extra day taken to assemble them, I'm pretty happy with my two tiny goddesses.
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Testing
Let's see how it works on 1.1
Let's see how it works on 1.1
ABOkay, I think that could still use a little work...
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The Other Other Thing
The Vista install will freeze in bad places for a long time if you don't have DHCP server configured correctly.
The Vista install will freeze in bad places for a long time if you don't have DHCP server configured correctly.
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04:21 AM
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The Other Thing
I was installing some software on my old Windows box to help the recovery of my old Linux box that died a couple of weeks ago, and it needed a reboot.
The system shut down just fine.
I also discovered that I can crash it by running fixmbr repeatedly. I need to get off that machine now. Well, as soon as Memtest86+ completes a full pass. Takes a while with 8GB of ram...
I was installing some software on my old Windows box to help the recovery of my old Linux box that died a couple of weeks ago, and it needed a reboot.
The system shut down just fine.
I also discovered that I can crash it by running fixmbr repeatedly. I need to get off that machine now. Well, as soon as Memtest86+ completes a full pass. Takes a while with 8GB of ram...
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04:13 AM
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Why Is It Always Like This?
So I assembled Haruhi and Yurie last night. That went pretty smoothly. I didn't slip while tightening a screw and gouge a hole in the motherboard. I didn't short anything out, and I only plugged one thing in backwards (the HDD LED on one machine). Both machines POSTed first try, a huge improvement over last year's effort at building a small media center box, which never worked at all and was eventually scavenged for parts.
So, as I say, they POSTed fine, so I did what comes naturally and ran Memtest86. The resulting explosion was so violent that I'll be picking bits and bytes out of the ceiling for weeks. I've never seen Memtest86 actually crash before.
Funny thing, though. It crashed on both machines, no matter which of the 6 dimms I used. As a quick test I popped in the Fedora 8 Live CD, and it booted up just fine. Hmm. I then tried installing Vista, and that went just fine too.
Until I installed the video drivers from Gigabyte, anyway. Then it all went haywire.
A bit more poking around showed that the memory was running at 868MHz. That's not a big overclock, but it's cheap memory, so maybe that was the problem. So I went into the bios to change the timing settings... And there weren't any. Nothing. Nada.
So I downloaded the latest bios update, put it on a flash drive, and installed it. (That's something they got right, at least. No more floppies!) Still no overclocking settings, and I know I saw some in a review before I decided on this motherboard. I'm not that fussed about overclocking, but it's handy to have that extra control just in case something goes insane.
So, a bit more poking around, and I find that you have to hit Ctrl-F1 on the main bios screen to access the hidden overclocking settings. There's no fine-grain control over memory clocks (though you can control all the little details like CAS and RAS delays down to the nanosecond), but setting the clock to 667MHz showed up as 748MHz in Memtest86+.
Oh, forgot to mention. Memtest86 explodes on sight. Memtest86+ seems to work fine. It did find a couple of errors while running at 868MHz, so I restarted it after downclocking the ram. So far, so good.
It's possible also that the screwy video is connected to the screwy ram timings. I can test that out too. If that works, then everything's peachy, except for Vista, which I will loathe for a good long time yet.
One side thought: If Microsoft sold for $100 a program that did one thing and one thing only - told Vista shut up, I know what I'm doing - their profits would be secure for the next five years.
So I assembled Haruhi and Yurie last night. That went pretty smoothly. I didn't slip while tightening a screw and gouge a hole in the motherboard. I didn't short anything out, and I only plugged one thing in backwards (the HDD LED on one machine). Both machines POSTed first try, a huge improvement over last year's effort at building a small media center box, which never worked at all and was eventually scavenged for parts.
So, as I say, they POSTed fine, so I did what comes naturally and ran Memtest86. The resulting explosion was so violent that I'll be picking bits and bytes out of the ceiling for weeks. I've never seen Memtest86 actually crash before.
Funny thing, though. It crashed on both machines, no matter which of the 6 dimms I used. As a quick test I popped in the Fedora 8 Live CD, and it booted up just fine. Hmm. I then tried installing Vista, and that went just fine too.
Until I installed the video drivers from Gigabyte, anyway. Then it all went haywire.
A bit more poking around showed that the memory was running at 868MHz. That's not a big overclock, but it's cheap memory, so maybe that was the problem. So I went into the bios to change the timing settings... And there weren't any. Nothing. Nada.
So I downloaded the latest bios update, put it on a flash drive, and installed it. (That's something they got right, at least. No more floppies!) Still no overclocking settings, and I know I saw some in a review before I decided on this motherboard. I'm not that fussed about overclocking, but it's handy to have that extra control just in case something goes insane.
So, a bit more poking around, and I find that you have to hit Ctrl-F1 on the main bios screen to access the hidden overclocking settings. There's no fine-grain control over memory clocks (though you can control all the little details like CAS and RAS delays down to the nanosecond), but setting the clock to 667MHz showed up as 748MHz in Memtest86+.
Oh, forgot to mention. Memtest86 explodes on sight. Memtest86+ seems to work fine. It did find a couple of errors while running at 868MHz, so I restarted it after downclocking the ram. So far, so good.
It's possible also that the screwy video is connected to the screwy ram timings. I can test that out too. If that works, then everything's peachy, except for Vista, which I will loathe for a good long time yet.
One side thought: If Microsoft sold for $100 a program that did one thing and one thing only - told Vista shut up, I know what I'm doing - their profits would be secure for the next five years.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Thursday, December 13
Eatabus Eataby
My notebook (Compaq Presario V6000 series) now has 2782MB of available memory, which should interest Hewlett Packard who list the maximum supported memory as 2GB. Most of the rest (there should be 3GB in total) has been eaten by the integrated GeForce 6150 graphics, which has no memory of its own and seems to have gotten greedy at the sight of all the extra RAM; it's bumped its default allocation up to 256MB.
Even with that, I can run two Linuxes under VMWare with 512MB each and still have more memory left than I did yesterday when VMWare wasn't running. Not bad for a $55 investment.
My notebook (Compaq Presario V6000 series) now has 2782MB of available memory, which should interest Hewlett Packard who list the maximum supported memory as 2GB. Most of the rest (there should be 3GB in total) has been eaten by the integrated GeForce 6150 graphics, which has no memory of its own and seems to have gotten greedy at the sight of all the extra RAM; it's bumped its default allocation up to 256MB.
Even with that, I can run two Linuxes under VMWare with 512MB each and still have more memory left than I did yesterday when VMWare wasn't running. Not bad for a $55 investment.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
09:24 PM
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Bad Planning
I got all the parts for Haruhi and Yurie delivered to the office where I currently work three days a week. (The other four days I work from home on mee.nu and mu.nu.)
I ordered half the stuff yesterday, and went out and bought the rest at lunch today. Now I just need to get it home.
There's two cases, two power supplies, two motherboards, and a stack of smaller stuff. It will be difficult to carry it all even in two trips.
I could get a taxi home tonight, but that would cost a fortune. I'm not in the office tomorrow. I can't drop in during the day because I've got an air-conditioning repair person coming. I can't go into the office on the weekend because the trains won't be running. There's little point coming in next Monday, because I'll be in on Tuesday anyway. And there's no point taking the stuff home Tuesday or Wednesday, because I work pretty long days and I won't have any time to do anything with it.
Poop.
Oh. Ha. The trains won't be running this weekend between Hornsby (where I live) and the city... via the North Shore. But they'll be running just fine via Strathfield. (That's what I had to do last Christmas, too. There's a lot of trackwork going on because they're building a new line cross-linking the North Short and Strathfield lines. I think the new line opens next year.)
I got all the parts for Haruhi and Yurie delivered to the office where I currently work three days a week. (The other four days I work from home on mee.nu and mu.nu.)
I ordered half the stuff yesterday, and went out and bought the rest at lunch today. Now I just need to get it home.
There's two cases, two power supplies, two motherboards, and a stack of smaller stuff. It will be difficult to carry it all even in two trips.
I could get a taxi home tonight, but that would cost a fortune. I'm not in the office tomorrow. I can't drop in during the day because I've got an air-conditioning repair person coming. I can't go into the office on the weekend because the trains won't be running. There's little point coming in next Monday, because I'll be in on Tuesday anyway. And there's no point taking the stuff home Tuesday or Wednesday, because I work pretty long days and I won't have any time to do anything with it.
Poop.
Oh. Ha. The trains won't be running this weekend between Hornsby (where I live) and the city... via the North Shore. But they'll be running just fine via Strathfield. (That's what I had to do last Christmas, too. There's a lot of trackwork going on because they're building a new line cross-linking the North Short and Strathfield lines. I think the new line opens next year.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
04:08 PM
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Wednesday, December 12
Christmas Shopping
Just ordered the motherboards, cases, power supplies, and operating system for Haruhi and Yurie, my soon-to-be new Windows and Linux boxes. Tomorrow I'll be making a little expedition to see what I can get from MSY. They're one of the cheapest sources of computer parts in Australia, but their stock levels are terribly unreliable.
With luck I'll be picking up two CPUs, two 750GB disks, and 16GB of memory to complete the build. But we'll see.
Both of the systems are AMD based. Yes, Intel chips are better right now. But low-cost Intel motherboards suck, and good low-end Intel motherboards are anything but low-cost. I thought I'd found a solution, but it turned out that Gigabyte screwed the pooch on the GA-G33M-S2H (the PCI-E x16 slot only runs at x4), so I went for two identical machines based on the GA-MA69GM-S2H.
Updates will follow once the small goddesses arrive.
Update: I have in my hot little hands:
2x Athlon 64 X2 5200+
6x Apacer 2GB DDR2-800
2x WD 750GB SATA
2x Pioneer SATA DVD-RW (215BK)
1x Lian-Li V600A
1x Lian-Li V600B
2x Corsair VX-450 PSU
Just waiting on the motherboards and Windows (Vista Ultimate 64-bit). And the other 4GB of memory, but that's not urgent.
I also picked up a 2GB memory module for my notebook. I'm not sure it's going to work, but if not I'll just swap it for a 1GB module.
Update: Have motherboards and Vista. Now need cart to cart it all home.
Just ordered the motherboards, cases, power supplies, and operating system for Haruhi and Yurie, my soon-to-be new Windows and Linux boxes. Tomorrow I'll be making a little expedition to see what I can get from MSY. They're one of the cheapest sources of computer parts in Australia, but their stock levels are terribly unreliable.
With luck I'll be picking up two CPUs, two 750GB disks, and 16GB of memory to complete the build. But we'll see.
Both of the systems are AMD based. Yes, Intel chips are better right now. But low-cost Intel motherboards suck, and good low-end Intel motherboards are anything but low-cost. I thought I'd found a solution, but it turned out that Gigabyte screwed the pooch on the GA-G33M-S2H (the PCI-E x16 slot only runs at x4), so I went for two identical machines based on the GA-MA69GM-S2H.
Updates will follow once the small goddesses arrive.
Update: I have in my hot little hands:
2x Athlon 64 X2 5200+
6x Apacer 2GB DDR2-800
2x WD 750GB SATA
2x Pioneer SATA DVD-RW (215BK)
1x Lian-Li V600A
1x Lian-Li V600B
2x Corsair VX-450 PSU
Just waiting on the motherboards and Windows (Vista Ultimate 64-bit). And the other 4GB of memory, but that's not urgent.
I also picked up a 2GB memory module for my notebook. I'm not sure it's going to work, but if not I'll just swap it for a 1GB module.
Update: Have motherboards and Vista. Now need cart to cart it all home.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
03:09 PM
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Monday, December 10
Meh And Anti-Meh
When I kicked off the Passmark run on Aoi, the entire install directory I had started on suddenly disappeared. That, on what should be a journaled filesystem, is a little disquieting, and I'm tempted to do a full reinstall and run some more tests. But I haven't made up my mind yet, so I'm watching repeats of House.
The first five minutes of episode 3-12, One Day, One Room, is classic, flawless House. Rest of the episode is a bit of a downer though.
When I kicked off the Passmark run on Aoi, the entire install directory I had started on suddenly disappeared. That, on what should be a journaled filesystem, is a little disquieting, and I'm tempted to do a full reinstall and run some more tests. But I haven't made up my mind yet, so I'm watching repeats of House.
The first five minutes of episode 3-12, One Day, One Room, is classic, flawless House. Rest of the episode is a bit of a downer though.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:05 PM
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Wabbit Season!
I've been cursing SoftLayer's flaky hardware for the past forty minutes or so. While I was installing and updating software on Aoi, the whole system blew up, choked, died, failed to respond.
A Passmark hardware test came up clean. I logged in again after the reboot, and ran top... And realised as the session froze again that that was exactly what I had done just before the previous meltdown. My habitual wrapper script for top had a slight bug in it that had turned it into a wabbit - a fork bomb. And on a quad-core Xeon that's awaiting a shipment of memory, it doesn't take very long for a wabbit to eat you out of house and home.
I've been cursing SoftLayer's flaky hardware for the past forty minutes or so. While I was installing and updating software on Aoi, the whole system blew up, choked, died, failed to respond.
A Passmark hardware test came up clean. I logged in again after the reboot, and ran top... And realised as the session froze again that that was exactly what I had done just before the previous meltdown. My habitual wrapper script for top had a slight bug in it that had turned it into a wabbit - a fork bomb. And on a quad-core Xeon that's awaiting a shipment of memory, it doesn't take very long for a wabbit to eat you out of house and home.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
08:17 PM
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Sunday, December 09
Neatness!
iTunesU. It even contains the MIT Introduction to Psychology lectures I'm constantly recommending.
Pity iTunes itself sucks so much.
iTunesU. It even contains the MIT Introduction to Psychology lectures I'm constantly recommending.
Pity iTunes itself sucks so much.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:31 PM
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Say Hello To Aoi
After collapsing mu.nu down to one big server in October (moving all the stuff running on Akane, Nabiki and Kasumi to Midori, a new quad-core 6GB server), I'm doing the same on the mee.nu side.
Over the next two weeks, the mee.nu servers, Ukyo, Shampoo and Kodachi, will be replaced by Aoi, a quad-core 8GB system. That means a little downtime for mee.nu - probably two outages of less than half an hour each. There'll also be a little downtime on the mu.nu side; I'll be adding an extra disk and another 2GB of memory there to give Midori the space to act as a backup server for mee.nu.
What all this means is that I no longer have a Ranma naming scheme. Instead, I now have a colours/girl's-names scheme. And the problem with that is that I don't know of any other Japanese colour names that are used as girl's names. And that means no more servers.
I could cheat a little. Ai means indigo, and is the basis for aiiro, meaning dark blue. Akane gives us the term akaneiro, for crimson, and Sakura gives us sakurairo, pale pink. Mikan is the term for Japanese oranges (the fruit), though I haven't seen it used as a colour name; that would be daidai or simply orenji.
Any others?
Update: Okay, according to this list, Akae, Akaho, Akana, Akane, Akari are all forms of aka/akai, red. So Akari would be a good one. (Hey, it's hailing! Plink! Plinkity! Bip boop blep! Clack! Hell, I'm glad my car's not parked outside, some of those buggers are an inch across!)
After collapsing mu.nu down to one big server in October (moving all the stuff running on Akane, Nabiki and Kasumi to Midori, a new quad-core 6GB server), I'm doing the same on the mee.nu side.
Over the next two weeks, the mee.nu servers, Ukyo, Shampoo and Kodachi, will be replaced by Aoi, a quad-core 8GB system. That means a little downtime for mee.nu - probably two outages of less than half an hour each. There'll also be a little downtime on the mu.nu side; I'll be adding an extra disk and another 2GB of memory there to give Midori the space to act as a backup server for mee.nu.
What all this means is that I no longer have a Ranma naming scheme. Instead, I now have a colours/girl's-names scheme. And the problem with that is that I don't know of any other Japanese colour names that are used as girl's names. And that means no more servers.
I could cheat a little. Ai means indigo, and is the basis for aiiro, meaning dark blue. Akane gives us the term akaneiro, for crimson, and Sakura gives us sakurairo, pale pink. Mikan is the term for Japanese oranges (the fruit), though I haven't seen it used as a colour name; that would be daidai or simply orenji.
Any others?
Update: Okay, according to this list, Akae, Akaho, Akana, Akane, Akari are all forms of aka/akai, red. So Akari would be a good one. (Hey, it's hailing! Plink! Plinkity! Bip boop blep! Clack! Hell, I'm glad my car's not parked outside, some of those buggers are an inch across!)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:50 PM
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