Category: Revelation

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”

Beware falling doors

I had a cleaning appointment today at 9am. I went in, sat down, the hygenist opened the usual plastic pounch of various instruments of torture, and then decided she needed something out of the cupboard. She took what she wanted and turned away and the door fell off the cupboard and onto my knee, slid off, and evidently landed on her toe. She said “I just need to sit you up” and then left. Seconds later I hear her sobbing and a crowd of other hygenists around her acting all solicitous. I guess her toe was hurt worse than my knee.

They have rescheduled me for 10:30am with a different hygenist.

Time to list my old 1U server

I bought this server several months ago to live on a colo rack. But it was flakey, so I bought another, much more expensive one and brought this one back home to experiment with. And so there it’s sat for months.

The problems I was seeing were drive related, but sometimes it was /dev/hda and sometimes it was /dev/hdb, and I figured that there were only two possibilities – either the IDE controller itself was pooched, or the drive cable was bad. Easy enough to test – I bought a new 80 pin IDE cable. I was going to try to try the Hitachi DFT “Exerciser” to stress the drives with the old cable, and then try again with the new cable to see if I get a different result.

I tried a bunch of different things, but I just couldn’t seem to get it running at all with the old cables. I’m running it down with the new cables and it’s running fine. I set it to run for 3 hours continuously. Once that works, it’s going on eBay, unless somebody reading here wants it.

It’s a VA Linux 1220. 2 1GHz Pentium 3 processors. 2 512Mb PC133 RAM. 2 10/100 Ethernet. Built in IDE and SCSI controllers (I’ve only tried the IDE). PS/2 keyboard port. I tried to boot it with a USB keyboard once, and it didn’t work right.