The DOOM bell has rung!

DOOM!

Hard Drive Shortage

I just read three "news" stories saying that if your in the market for a new hard drive it might be better to buy one sooner rather than later as hard drive prices are likely going to go up in the next few months.

Idiots!

If the "journalists" responsible for these pieces of copycat poop reporting knew anything they would know that some hard drive prices have nearly tripled! A Hard drive I particularly like The Samsung HD204UI Went from about $90 to $160 - yesterday. Today that same drive is $210.

Luckily I have eight of them sitting on my desk; unfortunately I really wanted to buy four more. So now the big question, what lies ahead: Do I buy four more now, or do I wait as long as I can?

I remember when I was younger a memory factory burned down (way back when when Pentium was a new word). It took, what seemed like, years for memory prices to come back down. But of course by the time prices started coming down, everyone was using DIMMs and SIMMs were worthless (Or some other such technological improvement - I don't remember precisely).

With SSDs increasingly becoming popular; I think it will mean many more people trying SSDs. Once you've tried an SSD it's very hard to go back; hard drives just feel so incredibly slow afterward. So that's my prediction; buy just as few hard drive as you can, cause the world will, to one degree or another, switch to SSD storage. By the time hard drives feel cheap again, you won't want them; you'll have your SSDs.


PS: It snowed on my house today, first time this year. I hope the new tires for my snow-blower arrive soon.

PPS: Please be real E-cat.

PPPS: Graph of the increasing price of my favourite hard drive.

E-Cat

Ever read a science fiction book that goes on and on about a space ship, or a society, that uses tremendous amounts of power; while the source of that power is summed up with only two words: cold fusion.

e-catworld

Life on this planet is just starting to get interesting.

Deseret Peak

Large Size Here

Love you all, thanks for visiting my site!

Tour De Coups

Yesterday Gretchen and I went on the Tour De Coups! Some of the chicken coups were very impressive; even more impressive was some of the things people were growing in their back yards. One couple had a veritable forest of produce! It gave Gretchen some good ideas for the garden, and helped renew my chicken coup building inspiration.

Also a bit of old news; I got a RAID card a week or two ago:


My array is up and running, and I've already expanded it twice! I hope to migrate it to RAID 6 and add a hot-spare before July 8th; but we'll see how it goes.

Gentoo maintiance

After running Gentoo for years, if not always on my primary computer, I'd like to think that I've learned a thing or two about how to keep my system up to date. So here is a list of the commands/utilities that I use to keep my system running smoothly

emerge-sync
emerge --update --deep --newuse world
dispatch-conf
revdep-rebuild
(Repeat the last two commands until they both finish with nothing to do.)
lafilefixer --justfixit
eix-update
eix-test-obsolete
(if obsolete packages are found remove or, more likely,
upgrade them and run revdep-rebuild and dispatch-conf again)
emerge -av --depclean (*** be careful with this one ***
It's suggestions on what to remove are sometimes dumb.)
eclean distfiles
emaint --check world
emaint --fix world

Many people have told me that doing an emerge --depclean can bork one's computer. But I've never had any trouble with it, until today. I wasn't paying enough attention, and it removed Python. A whole bunch of stuff is dependent on python, including emerge itself. So I had to unpack, configure and make python manually:

cd /tmp/
tar xjf /usr/portage/distfiles/Python-2.6.6.tar.bz2
cd Python-2.6.6/
./configure --with-fpectl --infodir=/usr/share/info --mandir=/usr/share/man
make
make install prefix=/usr
(You might have to fix the python symlinks in /usr/bin/; especially
if you are not installing the same version that was removed)
emerge python
cd
rm -rf /tmp/Python-2.6.6
eselect python list
eselect python set 2
(On my system Python2.6.6 was first, and python 2.7.1 was second.)
python-updater
rm /usr/bin/python2.6
rm /usr/bin/pydoc2.6
rm /usr/bin/2to3-2.6
rm -rf /usr/include/python2.6
rm /usr/lib/libpython2.6.a
rm -rf /usr/lib/python2.6
emerge --oneshot =dev-lang/python-2.6.6-r2
(Just to make sure I deleted all of the manually installed python.
If I missed anything it would result in a file collision)

Then I started my regular maintenance cycle above over again. The old Python 2.6.6 was removed, and everything continued to work because python-updater had switched all the python dependent programs over to Python 2.7.1

After going through all of this I realized that the problem was caused by upgrading from python version 2.6.6 to 2.7.1 - and not running python-updater afterward. All the programs that use python were still set to use version 2.6.6; while emerge --depclean saw that there was a new version and got rid of the old one. If I had realized, and run python-updater immediately after noticing the problem I might have been able to avoid all this. All though it was a fun adventure.

See how easy that was! Gentoo GNU/Linux is the best.

iSlavery

iSlavery - If my boss ever asks me to sign a no suicide pledge I will know, absolutely and completely, that I've become a slave; and I will react accordingly.

Six twelve hour shifts, living in a facility that makes our prison system seem positively roomy!

Shame on you for buying an iPad or iPho... oh shoot. I'm typing this on an Asus EEE pc; I wonder who makes these, and what the conditions are like for their workers. Man; I wanted to buy a faster one too... Now I feel too guilty.

I'm gonna go assemble an Arduino, maybe in a hundred years, I'll have made my own netbook.