No comments please...

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-09/why-were-shutting-our-comments

Missing the Mentkowski's

At first I didn't understand. I mean it was functional, thoughtful, and fun:  unwrapping a Bonne Bell Lip-Smacker from my Christmas stocking every year.  But I don't really use lip balm... 

I must have known, even then, somewhere in my subconscious what they really meant; or would mean to me.  I kept every one.

There is only one repeat, watermelon.  I miss you Sue & Tim.

One of these thing is not like the other.

OK, I've heard that people have strong opinions about this... Which one is 'correct' for you?  I like the right hand (front dispensing) one, but as long as it's not empty I'm a happy camper.  :-)

Wikipedia

Wikipedia seems to be asking for money again.  IMHO they are the single most powerful source of information equity in the world today. 

Consider how printed newspapers have died because of competition on the internet.  Consider how book sellers are dying because of book selling on the internet.  Even printed books are struggling; mostly (Again IMHO) because the publishing industry (Like the recording industry, and the movie industry.....) can't handle such a powerful shift of format and the resulting shift in supply vs demand....  

Anyway the point is, libraries can't grow if there are no books.  Soon libraries (The ones that aren't on line anyway) might stagnate and die.

Wikipedia, and places like the Kahn academy, will be the only public repositories of knowledge that the planet will have left.  Forget the 10,000 year clock...  Lets all donate enough money to Jimmy Wales so that he can build a facility to house Wikipedia for 10,000 years.  Or just give 3$ and feel good about keeping a good thing going.

I don't feel guilt when I see the Wikipedia banner asking for money; I get excited about being asked to help.   It's our information, it's our Wikipedia; and it could be REALLY important.

.....  so if Kahn academy (and others) are for education, Wikipedia for facts, and most of the rest of the internet is for fiction; where do we put history?

Busted: Apple

I've never liked Apples corporate attitude; so I probably enjoyed this article way too much... Macbook Owner With Defective GPU Beats Apple In Court For all of you who haven't heard from me in a while. Hi! There is a LAN party on the Saturday the 28th if you are in the SLC area and interested.

Server - Reinstall!

So I've settled on XFS for the RAID array. It's got some sweet features, and deals well with parallel or highly threaded workloads! But it has some strange quirks (disadvantages?). For maximum performance the journal has to be stored separately from the RAID array, preferably on a device that can handle huge IOPS. Secondly the disk check utility requires ginormous amounts of ram to run, and takes forever! So my little, limping, SSD is going to become primarily a swap space, and journal space device. I hope I have enough room to cram the OS on their too...

Server - Success!

Amazing! - Imagine four G34 socket processors on one motherboard, or just click here.   You could put 16-core CPU's in for a total of 64 2.2Ghz AMD64 cores on one motherboard.  That's like having 16 quad core computers in one box.

My server is far more modest.  I'm rocking a Motherboard/CPU that I picked up at the University Surplus store for $5. (Previously an old Dell Dimension 9100 I got from a friend, but it's BTX motherboard won't fit the new case.) A case I bartered some three way switching expertise for. An old SSD that is failing (144kB went bad on one of the memory chips, or so my operating system says.  I think that the smart data might be being misinterpreted).  An open box RAID card that I snagged off of Newegg.  And some hard drives that I bought pre-flood quite cheaply. 

Here are a few pictures before and after I got the new case (The red one is my gaming rig...)