* Minx System Blog *

June 03, 2004

Good Bits, Bad Bits

Good: I wandered into Kinokuniya on the way home, and there at the entrance, instead of the usual pile of Michael Moore's latest crapulation, was a pile of P. J. O'Rourke's Peace Kills. Which I bought.

Not Quite So Good: My latest disk failure seems to have taken with it the only complete copy of Penny Anti in the world. I do have a partial backup, and printouts of almost everything, so I should be able to put it back together. It wasn't that far along anyway, so it's really just a pain rather than a disaster. But I think I've lost one of the villains for good.

(If, like 99.9999999% of the world's population, you have no idea what I am talking about, you can confuse yourself further here.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:09 PM | Comments (24) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Easy Way Out


I am the Atacama Desert!
Which Extremity of the World Are You?
From the towering colossi at Rum and Monkey.

I'm the IT manager. Do you fancy me?
Which Office Moron Are You?
Rum and Monkey: jamming your photocopier one tray at a time.

(Thanks, of course, to LeeAnn of the Cheese)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:41 PM | Comments (16) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

June 02, 2004

WootNet

I got INN to work! Look out, Usenet, I'm back in business!

(INN has to have one of the most god-awful configuration systems on the planet. Okay, so it's an order of magnitude better than Sendmail, but that still leaves it about three orders of magnitude short of "adequate".)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:48 PM | Comments (19) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

June 01, 2004

Woof Woof!

What's that Lassie?

Bark!

You say that NTFS.SYS has got corrupted on the backup system, while the main system is down due to disk failure, leaving me with 650GB of files that may or may not be any good, and no easy way to tell, and what's more, the Windows XP install disk, the only copy I have with Service Pack 1a built in, and hence the only copy that will boot on this machine, has some sticky gunk on it and can no longer read the NTFS.SYS file when I try to use it in rescue mode?

Woof!

But everything is backed up on DVD-R?

Arf!

On 175 DVD-Rs to be precise? Well, I must admit that's slightly better than no backups at all, but still...

Woof woof bark!

And little Timmy's fallen down the well again? Sucks to be him, doesn't it?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:00 PM | Comments (24) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 30, 2004

So How Was Your Weekend?

Whine whine computers whine whine disk drives whine whine NTFS whine whine software raid whine whine reinstall whine whine data loss grumble grumble disk failure growl growl another disk failure whine whine rsync whimper whimper completely ignores the fact that the other end is now read-only and is not writing any of the files I'm transferring moan moan Windows networking snarl YANK! peace quiet ahh.

Beep beep bzzzzzzt bing mmm chicken and cheese burrito yum.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:55 PM | Comments (24) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 24, 2004

Aargh!

Disk drives = bad.

RAID-5 = good.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:04 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 23, 2004

So Many Moles, So Few Mallets...

Bill Whittle is playing whack-a-mole with the enemies of civilisation.

Read it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:33 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 20, 2004

How Are You Using The Tool?

Hi Mena.

My name's Pixy Misa. I run MuNu.

MuNu is a blogging community. (It's other things too, but we're talking about the blogs today.) We have personal blogs, public service blogs, group blogs, test blogs, gimmick blogs, joke blogs... We have over one hundred blogs, some with as many as eighty authors; we have over one hundred and fifty authors in total. (It just sort of grew.)

And we kind of like Movable Type. It's not perfect (what is?) but we're used to it.

But. I just added a new blog and a new user, and I've got more people waiting to join, and every Munuvian is free to add guests to their blogs, and that just doesn't work with blog-count and user-count limits.

We'd like to move to MT 3.0. I'm happy to pay for it - and pay more than $69 too - but it needs to be unlimited. Single installation, fine. Non-commerical, okay. But we just can't survive with restrictions on users and blogs.

Thanks.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:04 AM | Comments (22) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 19, 2004

Catching Up

Happiness is relative. Today I don't have a headache; I'm getting over my cold; two of my bosses are out of the office so stress levels are manageable; the new server is finally working... Good enough for me.

Munuvia, and Heather in particular, came under a particularly nasty spam attack today. This one dodges MT Blacklist by generating a new throwaway sub-domain for every spam. And it was persistent. But manually blocking the primary domain stopped it in its tracks. Then I just had to go and delete 400-odd comments. The world blog was saved, thanks once again to Jay Allen and MT Blacklist! Block banned-pics.com now and avoid the rush!

Fedora Core 2 is out - think of it as Red Hat Linux 11. I logged into my home box from work, killed my existing BitTorrent download (Pretty Cure episodes 1-5) and started downloading FC2 instead. It's available as a DVD as well as 4 CDs (8 in all, counting the source CDs as well) but I don't currently have a DVD-ROM drive on my Linux box. I'm not sure quite why I don't, but there it is: A perfect excuse to buy a new 8x DVD burner! (4 CDs, and I bet it still doesn't include Nethack.)

Now I just need to think of an excuse to buy a gigabit switch: I can get a Netgear 5-port switch for $170 now, and my Windows box and my fileserver are already equipped with gigabit cards. Of course, with a mere 2.6GHz Pentium 4, Windows can't really go much above 100mbits anyway, so there's really no point.

On the other hand, it's cheap...

The 1.4 terabytes fileserver at the office has been fixed by the Judicious Application of Money™ - in this case taking the form of a Highpoint RocketRaid 1820 PCI-X 8-port Serial-ATA RAID controller (around A$300). It's a bit fussy, and the drivers don't seem to work with Fedora, but once I'd downgraded to Red Hat 9 everything went smoothly. Nice card, even if it does beep beep beep beep if there's something it doesn't like. Oh, and the ports are numbered 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 3 - 4 - 1 - 2, which was a little confusing.

I've been experimenting with rsync for backups - now that we have an extra 1.4 terabytes of space that needs to be filled up - and it works very well. Very well; I'm actually rather impressed. Err... assuming that it's actually working, that is, and it appears to be. It's very quick to backup minor changes to a very large filesystem. Not the best way to back up a live database, but no worse than most of the other ways.

600 gig down, 800 to go. (What do you mean, it's not a contest to see who can fill it up first?!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:01 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 16, 2004

Strange Days

Merde in France comments on yet another of those vile french editorial cartoons.

The strange thing with this one, though, is that everything in the cartoon except the television set is 1940's period. Why?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:59 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 13, 2004

Danger Will Robinson!

For the new server (the 1.4TB server) we bought four Western Digital 200GB SATA drives, and added 4 200GB Western Digital regular-IDE drives we already had.

Two of the four SATA drives were D.O.A. and had to be replaced.

Now the filesystem has gone wonky and the data, as far as I can see, is totally trashed. Fortunately, we have copies of everything on other servers.

I'm running a scan for bad blocks on all the drives. Nothing on the regular IDE drives (so far), and literally hundreds on the SATA drives.

Either we've got a bad batch of drives here (I find it hard to believe that Western Digital is usually this crappy) - or these SATA controllers do not actually work, as such.

Update: If you put two of these SATA controllers in one box, everything appears to work fine until you actually start to use it, at which point the badness sets in. We hadn't planned to do that originally, but then Linux couldn't recognise the SATA controller on the motherboard and...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:12 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 12, 2004

Less Than No Yay

And to add to the fun, someone clicked on the attachment.

Normally, I wouldn't care, but today neither of the people "responsible" for our Windows machines are in the office, so I get to run around updating anti-virus files and scanning machines.

And then installing Fedora on them all...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:57 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

No Yay

The 1.4TB filesystem on our new server has gotten itself hopelessly corrupted.

Just what I needed.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:18 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 11, 2004

Okay, Now I'm Dead

Nonetheless, my freshly disinterred corpse is conducting the Bestofme Symphony over at the main Mu.Nu website.

Any excess pongage is entirely due to Abby Normal's brain.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:25 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 08, 2004

I Knew It!

Monoethylene glycol
Monoethylene glycol:
You are miscible with water, alcohols, aldehydes and many organic compounds. You will not dissolve rubber, cellulose acetate or heavy vegetable and petroleum oils. You are 50% more hygroscopic than glycerol at room temperature.
Find out what kind of industrial solvent you are

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:08 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

And The Next Thing I Knew...

So, there was the Devil (or at least one of his associates) writing out my very own personal contract with an old-fashioned quill pen on parchment (I didn't ask what what he used for ink) and I was looking over his shoulder and pointed out that the word wept is spelled w - e - p - t and not the rather quaint way he had it, and (rules are rules, you know) he had to tear the whole thing up and start again.

Good thing devils are immortal or they might lose their patience at times like this.

Of course, when I actually got the final copy, it read like a penis enlargement spam ("3-Inch-es E-x-t-r-a or Re-fund to YOU! nu kzf bt") only with penalty clauses and I suddenly realised I had pressing business elsewhere.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:49 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 07, 2004

Everything New Is Old Again

Intel's forthcoming "Tejas" processor - a 64-bit version of the Pentium 4 - appears to have been cancelled, according to these reports in The Inquirer. Instead, Intel will concentrate on adding 64-bit goodness to its forthcoming "Jonah", "Conroe", and "Merom" processors, which will gradually replace the Pentium 4.

Now, the interesting thing is, all of these are descendants of the current Pentium M processors found in many notebook computers, often under the name "Centrino". And the Pentium M - although Intel do not publicise this - is really a modified version of the Pentium III.

Which in turn is a slightly modified version of the Pentium II.

Which is in turn is a slightly modified version of the Pentium Pro - which first appeared back in 1995.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:47 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 06, 2004

A Hat Full of Sky

New Terry Pratchett book. See you tomorrow.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:10 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 05, 2004

Moore's Law (b. 1965 d. 2004)

Somewhere between 130-nm and 90-nm the whole system fell apart. Things stopped working and nobody seemed to notice.

Scaling is already dead but nobody noticed it had stopped breathing and its lips had turned blue.

The problems were already apparent with the 130nm node, and there were hints even at 180nm, but now the awful truth can be told: After 39 years, the free ride is finally over.

Now chip designers will have to work for a living.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:58 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 04, 2004

La Confuzzlement

The Confusion, which constitutes books 4 and 5 of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver being books 1 through 3), is a rather better-written and more cohesive work than its predecessor.

Indeed, in many ways it is clear that the main purpose of Quicksilver was to set the scene for The Confusion and the concluding volume (to come), The System of the World. A 900-page introduction is still rather on the wordy side, but I agree with what others have said: That The Confusion retroactively improves Quicksilver; and indeed, the way the ending of the former points towards the opening of the latter (and yes, I meant it that way) is rather neat.

In fact, I am now even willing to give Cryptonomicon another go.

(Neal Stephenson's web site, on the other hand, sucks.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:25 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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