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GRAFFITI -- October 20, 2008 thru October 26, 2008>> Link to the Current Week <<Last Week << Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun >> Next Week Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable. About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message. |
 
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October 20, 2008
No Post.
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October 21, 2008
Studying mode. |
1907 - Good evening. Exciting looking, isn't it? That's my desk in studying mode. As technically minded as I am, and desirous of generating documents that can be easily found and searched ... I find it much more useful to study by taking notes by hand while reading. I read each chapter once through. Then I read it again, taking notes. Then I do the exercises, and if timely, the quiz. While the quizzes are open book, I take them closed book, then check my answers against the book. This serves two purposes: It lets me know how well I've studied, and it draws my eye to those areas where what real-world experience in Windows I have conflicts with the book's pronouncements. Because for testing purposes, the book trumps the world. Yay.
Last night, all the normal stuff, along with the first reading in prep for tonight's work. Oooh, hey. Today I took a bit of a risk, and added more storage to an LVM on a logging system. It's easy to do, and once the volume's been expanded, it's easy to use the same system-config-lvm tool from Red Hat to increase the size of the logical partition in the volume group, which drags the ext3 resizing right along with it. What was once 135G of storage is now 640G of storage, updated with the filesystem live and online. Yow! Now, back to the studying. Ciao!
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October 22, 2008
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October 23, 2008
2052 - Good evening. Last night was all schoolwork. Tonight is much less fun - update your windows boxes NOW. There's a bad vulnerability, bad enough that Microsoft issued an out-of-cycle patch for it today. Update your boxes - it will require a reboot. That's all you should know for now. See ya!
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October 24, 2008
2037 - Good evening. Sans went yellow pants for a while over "the increased level of threat from MS08-067." Since that's now part of the background, they're back to green ... until someone executes a really good worm based on it. Anyway, it's been a pretty good week. There's plenty to do this weekend, of course. Cleaning, I think. Some school work. Mostly inside stuff, because we're due for rain all day tomorrow. Yay. That'll be the first rain of any significance this month. Yeah, we've been dry. Nothing much else to report. Ciao!
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October 25, 2008
Platters: 400G or so |
1810 - Good afternoon. Along with cleaning, I finally managed to get around to one of the low-hanging fruit - those projects that require a little time, very little gray matter, and needs doing. In this case, it was decommissioning the box full of old or dead drives.
I have a fairly rigorous routine that I follow when migrating and replacing drives and systems. At first, I merely label the old drive, and reserve it against the inevitable day when Marcia or I say "!!! What happened to file X?" Likely it's on the former drive. After about 9 months, I put the drive back into a system, and run Darik's Boot and Nuke against it, running a rigorous erase pattern on the drive. But I don't trust fully software means. Drive electronics abstract the hardware. It's entirely possible that I can say "Write zeros, then ones, then pattern X" 45 times against all 68,436 sectors. Only later do I learn that the drive internally put each pattern once at the front of each block, followed by a count, because that's an efficient write strategy. So I mark the drive as "wiped", with the date, and reserve it against demo day.
No, I can't generally donate out these disks. Outside organizations ... who can trust what happens with the hardware. Friends and neighbors? I really don't have the time to be the follow-up tech support, so that idea's out. And really, by the time the day rolls around, the drives are really to old and small to find a new home.
So today was the first drive dismantling day in a few years. The drives that "retired" were mostly 15 and 20 gigabyte, 5400 RPM, IDE drives. There was one late-model 250G Seagate SATA I model that needed putting out of it's bad-sector misery. And there was one 40G IDE laptop drive that came out of the Acer. Yeah, I could probably have swapped the Seagate out under warranty, but then the drive with data on it that I couldn't erase might have been "fixed" and resold as refurbished. Yikes!
Anyway, I break out the Torx driver set, and dismantle each drive. Sometimes I keep bits, like the rare earth magnets and sometimes the drive motors. There may be a different project need someday. Some of the crap goes in the trash, the aluminum main body goes into the recycling, and I will eventually do something exciting with the platters, now that they've been degaussed by the magnets and scarred up a bit. I'd note that the platters off the SATA drive are much thicker (perhaps 0.09") an artifact of perpendicular recording tech?) than the older stuff (0.02", according to the Mark I Eyeball). The laptop drive had glass platters - they shatter real purty.
Now it's time to feed the mutts. Have a great evening.
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October 26, 2008
2004 - Good evening. Well, my chili took third place in a neighborhood cooking contest and birthday party. And it was all gone, so that's a good thing. Well, what we took over there was all gone. The other two thirds is ours, all ours! HA HA HA HA ... Ahem. Sorry, lost it there, for a minute. I've got some schoolwork yet to do, right after the dogs get their 8 PM treat. But first...
The hard, dangerous work that our troops do over in the Middle East doesn't get nearly the attention that it should, just because politicians who want to have jobs they're incapable of doing well are yapping their mouths. Meantime our young men and women are dying in the projection of our power, are dying to bring freedom to people who seem loathe to accept it, are dying because politicians put them there. And they (our troops, not the politicians) are doing a hell of a job, admittedly mostly not dying. But still, the losses are felt, and we are honored by their sacrifice. Our condolences to the families and units of the fallen.
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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.
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