wiredfool

It was Dragon Day yesterday. Appropriate that it fell on the Ides. (at least for anyone who’s read Fool on the Hill by Matt Ruff)

(image from the cornell daily sun)

It’s that creepy eye! The eyes have it!

In other news, The Gov has declared a drought emergency. It’s been raining all day, and predictions are that the weekend will be wet too. We should have more emergencies. It seems to make Seattle run more smoothly. Perhaps we should declare a computer hardware downtime emergency for fixing my “Flakey Hardware”. At least the shop can find the problem and the HW is under warranty.

It’s pi day today (3-14).

So at 1:59 today, take a deep breath and ponder the proportions in your life. Do you have a diameter? Or are you mostly circumference.

mmmmmmmmmmmmm pie.

I hate x86 Hardware.

At home, x86 has a MTBF of 6 months. Things work perfectly, then some hard drive errors and unexplained reboots, then reboots fail.

Last time, NT got hosed on a 6 month old machine, then wouldn’t re-install. Three months later, linux wouldn’t run either. The shell of that machine is now my firewall, booting off of a cd. No hard drive, no floppy, two cheap pci network cards. It’s been stable for a week or two, but I don’t really trust it. But hell, it’s running off of a cd/ramdisk, so if something gets screwed up, one reboot and 20 seconds later, it’s back up.

The previous firewall lasted 18 months. It was a donated pentium, full on AT case, weighing 20 pounds. It had a 395 day uptime till something fried, then it went 5 days, then 3 reboots a day.

This time, the machine ran for 3 months (well, uptime was 120 days: I had the machine for 125 days), then lost a hard drive. (Hardware, nasty clunking noises when accessing certain sectors) Now about 4 months later (just after installing a nice monitor), it starts with hard drive errors. X dies, and won’t restart. Then I can’t login because some of the binaries are corrupted. Not I can’t boot off of floppy or the Red Hat install cdroms. The install cdroms die with a crc error trying to mount the ramdisk. The floppy boot dies at freeing unused kernel memory.

My guess is that something is fried. Memory? Drive controller? (There’s onboard ide and a promise card) Who knows. I don’t need this crap now. Lets not even discuss the situation of the backups on this machine. I had plans, ok? A spare hard drive partition, and a spare drive even. Whole lotta good that does when I can’t even boot the bleeding machine.

<update time=’9:15pm’>

It looks like plugging an ata/66 cable into an ata/33 port can cause issues. (that’s the cable that I have, and rdhat 6.2 can’t install onto the promise card) So without the spare drive that I was going to install onto, then bootstrap into saving a bunch of the important files on the big drive was causing part of the problem. So now I’m to the point that I can’t boot, but it’s because of a hard drive partition has issues. (I think it’s /usr) /home appears to be ok, so my lack of backups may not bite me that badly. I’m betting that if I plug this drive into another machine, I can probably pull the data off, then figure out what to do later.

Oh yeah, that means that updates.wiredfool.com is down, as are my manila, lrp, and scriptmeridian-community mailing list archives, my rss aggregator, and my radio userland aggregator. No mp3’s for home.

</update>

I was going to write some neat little picture gallery stuff today, so that some of the pics that I took at the arboretum over the weekend would be easier to display. Hope you get to see the picures, eventually. Hope I get to see my pictures again too.

I’d like to point out that the iMac that I’m working on has been running for a year. My g4 is solid. My imac at work has been running for a year and a half, with only a loose ide connector as an issue.

I also haven’t had quite these issues with hardware quality at work, as there is a near clone of this machine that has been running 24/7 for over a year now. Maybe its that there is a ups at work, and a powerstrip at home.

<update time=’3/14 12:30pm’>

Looks like I can’t get anything to boot now. Redhat install, Debian install, Windows98 install (hey, I’m desperate), all fail at one point or another. Redhat can’t get the root device, Debian segfaults, and windows just won’t even start. But on the bright side, the old hard drive is readable on another machine, so I have everything backed up now. Most of the errors were on the /usr partition, which apart from hosing the computer, is a good place for them to be, since that’s all replaceable with a fast net.connection. Var seems fine (all my database stuff), /home seems ok (mp3’s, web root, and other random programming) and /etc appears fine (configuration info).

So I guess I’m going to see how good the warranty is on this box. At least it’s local, so I can deal with them in person.

</update>

The first thing I noticed from the earthquake was a sound. “WHUMP” Soounded like someone had dropped something soft and really heavy on the floor above me. Then there was a lot of creaking from the ceiling as the quake progressed.

Now everytime I hear things moving in the ceiling, I have to stop to see if I can feel the earth moving. Every so often, there are loud noises from above. Wonder how long that’s going to last.

Well, Napster has started filtering specific “copywritten” works of music. They’re blocking 4 songs. I’d venture a guess that about 100% of the songs listed on their system have copyright, if not the song, then the specific performance.

Not that it really matters to me, since there are maybe 5 mp3’s on my systems where I don’t own a corresponding cd. I’ve always found Napster to be a bit of a pain, since what I’m looking for is seldom availiable, and what I can find seldom transfers. Maybe it’s my client, maybe it’s because I’m behind a NAT device.

But a couple of nights ago, I was walking out of “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou”, and started to have a song running through my head. Not one that’s on the soundtrack, not one that I even know what album it’s on. Just one that I heard on “American Routes” months ago. “So Lonesome I Could Cry”, by Hank Williams Sr. It’s the sort of thing that I would love to grab and listen to a couple of times, then it will moulder on a drive until I upgrade machines. I searched, I found, I listened, My mind is clear again. Of course, it took 5 attempts at downloads but I did get the file.

As a side note, “Oh Brother” is a great movie, well worth seeing. I have respect for George Clooney as an actor now.

Programs encapsulate expertise.

Bruce Schneier – as heard on npr, Commenting on Digital Rights Management.

Well, that was fun.

What worked:

• (DSL) Net Connections.
• AIM
• UPS Backup
• Some blogs that had good power/connections that I could post to the discussion group.
• Cell Phone Text Messaging.
• The outside door that has been locked for 6 months

What Didn’t.

• Cell Phones
• Not having a generator
• My weblog, because I don’t have a generator
• My email, because I don’t have a generator
• Brittle buildings on poor soil.

This was the biggest quake that I’ve been through, but the public reaction to it scared me more than the actual event. This was not “THE BIG ONE”. Not Even Close. If you’re in the big one, you’ll know it. Probably because you’ll look out what’s left of your window and see a bunch of buildings on the ground. This earthquake caused scattered damage to vulnerable
buildings. Buildings that were for the most part built before earthquake resistance was an issue and on soil that amplifies earthquake response.

Maybe this causes people to realize that earthquakes are going to happen in this area. Maybe now we’ll base isolate Harborview. But I’m worried that people will think, “That was a 7, it wasn’t so bad”. It was also 30 miles away and 30 miles deep.

If that had been a Seattle Fault earthquake, I don’t think Pioneer Square would have survived. My office probably wouldn’t have survived. It’s supposed to be capable of a 7.0, near the surface. (And the fault passes just south of pioneer square, about where the kingdome used to be.) The ground motion intensity of that would probably be 10 times what we felt. The “BIG ONE” would probably be 100 times worse.

But Smile, at least Ranier didn’t respond with sympathetic earthquakes.