June 2005

So here I am, another year older; five nines. Sometimes I think I can only achieve all of my goals by reaching the mythical five nines measure of uptime, but I do like a little extra snooze at the weekends.

Assuming that averages out to 60% uptime, the standard formula comes up with an availability of only 0.4 nines… must do better.

The various feeds of this blog now include the full article body rather than just an extract. This should make things easier for those sensible people who read using an aggregator rather than through the web.

There is an RSS 2.0 button now. There has always been an RSS 2.0 feed, but now it has a button.

I have just spent most of the day trying to get a large SATA disk drive working in my main Linux server. Some combination of Fedora Core 3, Linux 2.6.11, the Seagate ST32508823AS drive, the drive firmware (3.1), the SATA controller, my motherboard, my motherboard settings, my processor, my power supply and for all I know my haircut and the phase of the moon are conspiring to make this not work. Well, to be precise it works really well until I try and move a few tens of GB of data on to it: then, it stops working.

I feel like a dog wearing a collar that gives it a shock when it crosses the invisible fence line placed by its owner. Something huge and inscrutable has decreed: thus far, and no further; bad dog, don’t go there. I could spend another day and perhaps make some progress, or perhaps not. Experience has taught me that the odds aren’t good that I will ever really understand the problem.

So instead I will buy an equivalent IDE drive for less money than I could earn in the time I’ve already wasted, and it will work and the collar will stop giving me shocks. Perhaps one day I will find a system I can make this drive work in.

This is not the most satisfactory outcome, but all I can do about it is bark in frustration.

Sometimes the headline is all you need or want:

Early Aussies co-existed with three tonne wombats, says Boing Boing.

Disappointingly sober full article at Science Daily.