Thursday, February 24, 2005

BSOD

STOP: The Windows Logon Process system process

"The Windows Logon Process system process?!"

BONES appetit

Ricky Bones eating a can of potted meat

Ricky Bones has "lunch" at work.
http://www.rickybones.com

Blowed-up projector bulb



This classroom projector bulb blew after only 300 hours of use. If you haven't heard an HID bulb blow before, it's not unnoticeable, audibly. It happened during a class in progress.

Ghetto NAS



5, 250GB SATA drives in RAID5 in external enclosure = 1 TByte Network Attached Storage for under $1300.

Friday, February 18, 2005

E-mail I sent to my colleagues

At some point, very late tonight (after midnight), Waite exhausted memory and the web server crashed. I tried to restart the server, and it abended like crazy as it unloaded the NLMs, and then of course hung up instead of rebooting.

So at this point, the portal is down, and no one can get to webmail. I feel really bad about this, especially since it's so soon after its official release, and we've been getting really positive feedback about it.
I considered driving there, but as soon as I got on the road I quickly reconsidered, as I observed my car was able to break traction on straightaway using only the accelerator pedal (not on snow). I consider myself to be a fairly bawlsy driver, but that's my cut-off :)

The problem does not appear to be associated with Extend (Portal Services). I think Apache2 (or some supporting module) is leaking memory. I found a TID that proves its possible, even if it is a little out of date:
http://support.novell.com/cgi-bin/search/searchtid.cgi?/10091722.htm . A short term fix we can do is load apache2 in protected address space. I bet this will at least allow us to restart the server successfully despite the abends. Also, when we get the web power switch, we should move Waite down to the library server room so we can hook it up to that. It is now on the list of mission critical servers (during off hours).

So whomever gets in first tommorrow, please reboot Waite.

iPod Generations

The Singularity

Since I'm really busy, I will probably post pictures most of the time. Sometimes stuff I post will be about technology and developments, other times it will just something I think is cool.

This is a subject I am carrying over from my old blog, The Singularity (deprecated):

Ray Kurzweil is a futurist, who predicts that the human civilization will control its own destiny through the combining of biological and non-biological entities in to one (cyber human? humanputer?) He discusses in great detail the implications of the rate at which we are developing as a technologically advanced civilization, and something he refers to as "The Singularity"- an event after which we can not currently imagine the circumstances therein. The surprising part is that all this may happen within the next 30-50 years.

I have converted the text of one of his essays to speech for listening on the go. Feel free to download it and listen on your iPod or other device. It's fairly long (2+ hours), but well worth the "read". You'll see what I mean.

Also, here's Kurzweil's company website to read up on: http://www.kurzweilai.net/

Welcome

This is a historical moment indeed. Scamwagon has gone from a deeply rooted concept in my mind (and an ever-present domain name in my domain manager list) to reality. This is now a forum in which subject matter related to any of the following topics, but not exclusively, may appear:

-Computers (Hardware, PHP, Multimedia, Perl, C, C++, other programming languages, homebrew software, free software)

-Music (Bass guitars, multi-effects pedals, multitrack recording, midi, sequencing, home studio)

-Cars (WRC, SCCA Pro Rally, diesel, probe, vegetable oil powered)

-Tech (Gadgets, pda, wifi, personal audio, cellular, laptop)

-Interesting personal experiences I feel like sharing (pics, movies, stories, etc.)

Enjoy!