nuxx.net
Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.
around the house June 21, 2002

The ultimate discovery…

So yesterday I get home and my garage door doesn’t work. Hrm. Power failure! Another one… It seems that there was a scheduled power outage that I wasn’t informed of. So that makes what, 8 hours in the past two weeks?

Well, I just got off of the phone with the DTE Ombudsman for my area. It seems that my area had the power pulled from it to keep from overloading (and probably burning out, I’d assume) equipment. Supposedly there is a new substation going online this weekend or next week. I rather hope that this new substation will keep power on like normal. Fortunately I’m going out of town this weekend with fade_the_fallen so I won’t be using much electricity. I’ll down the firewall, array, file server, throw the thermostat to 78 or 80, etc. Pretty much try to cut usage down to really close to zero.

Pictures of the trip should be available when I get back. I might even post while I’m there… Who knows…

computers June 19, 2002

Atto! Atto! Atto!

Well, it seems that the fibre channel array may be working fine after all. Kinda. I ran it through the works with ATTO Disk Benchmark and I started seeing performance numbers that made more sense. But there was one really wierd thing. The write speeds peaked off at about 20 MB/sec while the read went up to about 95 MB/sec. Need to figure this one out… Maybe that’s why the drive just felt slow. I think it could also somehow be a limitation (of a setting?) on the controller. I’d like to rebuild the array, but I just don’t have the time to do a reformat / reinstall right now. Oh well. I’d check other settings, but my copy of GAM for Windows got messed up. Some random service is missing…

I got to work about 30 minutes ago. It’s quiet here right now. Just the sounds of my keyboard (and someone else’s) clacking away. Lunch today should be nice. Brian and I are supposed to meet up with Al over at a local Indian place. This particular place has a nice lunch buffet for a reasonable price. Maybe they’ll even have the fried cheese balls in syrup. I still swear that those things are doughnuts and not cheese.

Coffee just isn’t waking me up this morning. Maybe coworkers will. If they get here before I pass out.

Yesterday I learned that we have a rather nice Cisco lab downstairs in this very building. A fully stocked CCNA, CCNP, and CCIE lab, along with a bunch of other random stuff. Not bad. I think I’m going to pick up my CCNA, simply because it looks fairly easy and there’s never anything wrong with having a second cert and learning a bit more.

I think I’ll go grab another cup of coffee and take a little walk around. There’s a bunch of stuff to be done around here today, so I need to get going on all of that.

found things June 15, 2002

Our Tax Dollars Hard At Work

Here’s something I came across recently. It’s a number of color (yes, color) photographs that were taken around Russia in the very early 1900s using a process involving three separate cameras and color filters. Thanks to the Library of Congress a number of these photos are available from this collection. First, read about how everything was done here. Then take a look at the full online archive of Mr. Prokudin-Gorskii’s color photos here. Thanks to the LoC we all have access to this (and many more) historical photographs online, including VERY high-res versions. I think I’m going to end up with a select few printed out and hung up around here.

computers June 8, 2002

Fibre Channel. :(

Hrm. It seems that this new, quiet Seventeam power supply that I got isn’t that great after all. Today I turned off my machine to try changing out the cache and it wouldn’t turn back on. It seems something is hosed in the new power supply. So now I have to try and return one via mail order and also hope that the one I ordered for Sarah and Craig’s PC doesn’t suffer the same problem. Guess I’ll just have to burn it in extra good.

I thought the PS had killed the motherboard. Luckily that didn’t happen… I thought my machine was going to get it’s long overdue (and currently unaffordable) upgrade tomorrow. Ah well, heh. That’s all right. At least things are back to normal… Now I just need to figure out the fibre channel performance issue. Right now I’d get better speed out of selling it all and going to two striped IDE disks. :( At least I know that the 256MB of cache aren’t causing a problem. Hopefully it’s my old motherboard.