Category: Geekery

And so it begins…

I’ve started ordering the parts to build my new computer. So far, after a long struggle with Newegg’s refusal to accept either Paypal or the credit card they have on file for me, I’ve ordered the following:

  • 2 Maxtor Diamond 500Gb 15Mb Cache SATA-II drives
  • A Rosewill R5604-TBK mid-tower case with lots and lots of drive bays
  • A Cooler Master eXtreme RP-500-PCAR 500W power supply

Next step is to buy a motherboard/cpu/memory bundle from JNCS. I’ve bought at least three bundles from them in the past, and it’s one way to make sure the components all work together. They’ve got one bundle that I’m leaning towards right now – it has an Intel Core 2 Duo, and 6 SATA II ports on the motherboard. It also has built in video and audio as well as a PCI-E slot, which means I can save some money and then upgrade the video if I need to.

LazyWeb: Slow DNS lookups on MacBookPro?

Vicki complains that sometimes she can’t ssh into my Linux box (foo.xcski.com) from her MacBookPro. This morning she said it was happening again, and when I looked on her system “host” and “dig” couldn’t get an address for it, while at the exact same time, my Powerbook got the right address just about instantaneously. A few minutes of poking around and not doing much, it suddenly started getting results again, and she was able to ssh in.

We have exactly the same DNS settings – two DNS servers, 192.168.1.1 is the local one that knows how to find *.xcski.com servers, and 192.168.1.254 is the DNS server on the wireless router which probably just redirects to the ISPs DNS servers.

I’ve never had any problems with DNS lookups on my Powerbook. So why is she getting these problems?

This is pretty cool

David Megginson has put together a really nifty little AJAX/Google Maps application to allow people to record what airports they’ve been to, and record comments about those airports. He’s put me to shame, since I’ve been intending to do something with AJAX and Google Maps for over a year now and haven’t even started.

But in spite of my jealousy, you can click the above link and see the 30 airports that I’ve landed at so far. The page doesn’t work 100% correctly in Safari, but it works great in Firefox.

Pilot Blogging World

Disclaimer: I was reluctant to report on this, because I’m absolutely awful with people’s names, and not much better with faces (sorry David). Plus there is the problem that as well as names, there are people’s blog names, and the fact that some of these people don’t want their names appearing in public in anyway associated with their blog names, and keeping track of what details of their real lives shouldn’t be associated with their blog names, and you can see why I was hoping somebody else would write this up. But nobody has, so here I am.
Continue reading “Pilot Blogging World”

More problems with the home box

My home Linux box is acting decidedly weird. This time, when it froze up and wouldn’t reboot I opened the side to clean out some dust. I noticed two strange things:

  1. One of the case fans wouldn’t spin when I pushed it, like all the others
  2. Even after I removed that fan, when I booted the CPU fans would spin for a second or two and then stop.

I left it to cool for a few minutes, and now it’s booting. But that business about the fans spinning and then stopping is worrying me. Could it be overheating, or a sign that this motherboard is nearly dead? I was bzip2-ing a large file when it happened, and the hard drives were making ugly noises.