Andreas Wacker

Bought an awesome painting today:

In some areas technology moves forward so fast, that the outdated components still far away from the their own end of life.This can be good and bad. Some people have warehouses full of Onyx2s. Not so good. I happen to have lots of disk drives. Pretty good. I would not rely on those drives for anything critical, but having more drives to rotate the personal Backups for instance is never a bad thing.

A batch of those drives was connected via a 3ware card before. It turns out that both Ubuntu’s installer as well as OS X disk utility have troubles with those drives. They will recognize them, but partitioning will stall with OS X. At least ubuntu will display an error message. It displays an I/O error during the creation of the swap partition.

I would think that this is a feature: Getting drives accidentally confused will not lead to you loosing your array, since -as a civillian- your attempts to harm the 3ware drives will fail. The fix was straight forward: I just connected the drives to the 3ware card and ‘deleted’ the array that was supposed be on them.

just wrote:

$r .= substr($str, int (rand(scalar split // , $str)), 1);

and even though it does what I want and I wrote it down the way I write this it simply feels wrong. Not out of this century.

With INTERDUBS growing in the US solidly it was time to start to add another dimension to its growth. It is an interesting experience to go through the same motions again. Just on a different continent. Luckily we found a great data center partner. It is pretty cool these days that one can get a virtual test server within minutes. Of course we are building real machines again for the real install. After some research we found some great vendors: ISP Proshop served us extremely well for cases, cables and the like. We found that Alternate.de has very decent inventory in terms of high end server parts.

Some observations along the way:

Calling a vendor can mean that they already have your order on their screen. Before they pick up the phone (after the 1st ring). Caller-ID plus decent software makes this possible.

Ordering parts it can happen that they arrive 16 hours after you did so. Standard shipping. 5 Euros.

Payment is done electronically. Online, bank account to bank account. Securely, since you have a little key generating device. And no credit company sits in the middle, getting their 3 percent, just because banks didn’t get their act together.

Prices are horribly high. Almost 20% tax on top of things.

Another drawback: If you are fond of those plastic packing chips (who isn’t) you will come up empty. Crumpled recycled card board works just as well it seems.

sun releases a box that delivers nice snappiness

For years now there have been gmail keyboard shortcuts. Finally enabled them. After 2 hours I can not wait to get more email so that I can handle it without reaching for the mouse. Extremely awesome.