Category: Technical

Trains and planes

Server is back as of a few minutes ago (thanks Kevin!)

So I’ve been car hunting the past few days so I can actually get to a job. Its pretty crazy what people are trying to sell around here. Now I’ve never bought a car before, but from the classifieds I read in today’s “Lawrence Ledger” people are either overly hopeful, or just plain naive.

MITSUBISHI GALANT LS ’01
$7,500. Excellent condition, leather, full power, bone color, sunroof. 112, 000 highway miles.

Sigh. I’m new to this whole car scene, but something about 112,000 miles in ~three years doesn’t sound too great.

Otherwise things at home are just like normal. Not too much to do until more friends get back. Applying for jobs is going as expected; there’s a position in Cendant Mortgage doing some HCI + web development that looks reasonably enticing.

It’s weird applying for jobs there because you’re only allowed the ‘privelege’ of talking to a computer. I filled out a lot of info online, sent them a résumé, and now…I’m supposed to wait. I have this suspicion that I’m just another row in a database table waiting for some HR guy to SELECT me out. Its all faceless and automated. Guess that’s the way the future is going to be…

Meta Technical

Site downtime

This site might be down for a while while RIT performs “annual maintenance” of the power system.
When I moved the server last week the grub boot config was iffy – hopefully my fixes have worked.

RIT Technical

One more …

Just finished my OS Scripting final exam. It’s been a pretty fun course, emphasizing bash and awk. Scripting is usually easier to write than C++ or Java because even though the language has quirks (like mandatory whitespace) it takes care of semantics like string to int typecasting for you. I’ve been writing scripts to monitor my server hardware, such as getting drive temperatures, network usage, and CPU load.

Anyway. I got my Star Wars Episode III ticket for Wednesday at midnight, because I’m hardcore like that. I’m going to see it with at least Cheston and Juice, and probably 1,000 Vader-costumed, lightsaber wielding RIT nerds.

After that it’s one more exam at 8:00 AM on Friday (yay!), then my parents are coming to take me back home on Saturday. Can’t wait to get out of here, even though I’ll miss everyone. Seeing all the storage boxes and huge dumpsters full of old chairs and miscellany reminds you of how fast the year really goes by.

Meta RIT Technical

Site changes

I was sitting here working on my Internetworking and OS Scripting assignments but got bored and decided to mess around with the blog.

Upgraded to the WordPress 1.5.1 two days ago…have yet to notice any changes, but everything still works and a security bug is apparently fixed. Yay.
I also added the XMLHttpRequest calendar in the sidebar; I think that sidebar is getting cluttered but not having to page refresh between months is, admittedly, pretty cool.
Lastly, you should write a comment and see what happens. It’s cool too.

Classes are finished for the year. I wish I felt some sense of relief…but thats not happening until finals are over.

Technical

Format C:\ Now?

Now that the inevitable Windows reformat was, shall we say, hastened, I find myself perusing Firefox’s extensions list all over again. Fortunately, it’s much easier having already tried many of them. This guide I keep mentioning will be up before the end of the week. In the meantime, browser junkies should check this out.

So anyway.

Format C:/

Hard drives, being a myriad of high precision bits of electronics working perfectly together, are inevitably prone to failure. I find the prevalence of finger pointing from victims of such failure at least a little humorous, because so many extrapolate their individual anecdotal experience into a justification to condemn an entire company’s line up.

Everyone has a particularly bad horror story, so I’m going to be all high road-like and avoid the blame game. These two Western Digital drives I’ve got have both been running nearly 24/7 since October 2003. Props to them for making drives that last as long as they did.

Here’s to hoping Western Digital RMAs the kaputtness.

A few days ago Windows kept randomly erroring, claiming I should format C:\. “That’s pretty cool!” I said to myself. “I heart hard drives!” A restart only revealed massive filesystem errors, and Western Digital’s own diagnostic software simply threw up its virtual hands, claiming the drive was too broken to even read from. The SMART threshold for read errors was pretty extreme.

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By the way, when did you notice that this post was written sdrawkcab?