Hot-swappable drives aren't.

Maintenance on Leandra is finished. I took her offline around 2100 ESET5EDT on Saturday night to remove a dead DVD-ROM drive, remove a pair of 512GB memory modules that weren't doing anything, and swap out her 250 GB hard drive for a 500 GB drive. The RAID array has had 250 GB added to it; specifically, the logical volume holding everything but the /boot and / partitions has had 250 GB added to it. 15 GB from the free pool was added to /usr (so that more software could potentially be installed) and the rest of the free disk space was …

Yesterday wasn't so much a wave of mutilation as it was a stormfront of WTF sweeping across the land. While I can't really put my finger on any one trigger event that caused yesterday to go west in a serious way, I can outline more or less what happened. First off, the hard drive in my workstation at the office decided to pack it in while I was working on something, which turned the rest of the day into a mad dash to find a new drive and rescue everything that I could. Finding a replacement drive took somewhere around …

Yesterday afternoon, downtown Washington, DC saw a number of brightly coloured rainbow kites of all shapes and sizes added to it sky for LGBT Kite Day 2007, the local LGBT community's way of tugging on the sleeve of the people in power to remind them that we're here, we pay our taxes, and we vote.

Because I just about pulled an all-nighter Friday night I wound up sleeping until 1100 EST5EDT on Saturday morning, so I didn't get the early start that I hoped to have. In fact, I left the apartment shortly after noon local time and hiked to …

Yesterday Intel announced the first few models of its new line of solid-state hard drives based upon NAND gate technology. Rather than using spinning metal platters that use a lot of electricity ('a lot' is a relative term - when you consider the power consumption of a laptop running off of battery power, hard drives are power hogs) they use flashchips similiar to the ubiquitous USB key that just about everyone has one of these days. The Z-U130 line will come in 1, 2, 4, and 8GB capacities, read 28MB and write 20GB per second, which isn't bad for a flashdrive …

Here's a cloud to find a silver lining in - research into technically nonlethal virobiological weapons. Technically - known side effects were coma and death from brain swelling, but at least some of the time the usual effects were similiar to that of a bad case of the flu. This research never got off the ground because of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention of 1972, but serious work was still done at the time.

From the information security community to the end-users at home: Just like the hard drives you're getting rid of, wipe your solid state storage media before you …

Note to self: All the walking in DC is making me go through tennis socks faster than I can replace them. I've blown through six socks in three days because they've ripped through without warning walk walking down the street. This is a little annoying because I feel like a slob. It's 2007, so the time for upgrading is probably upon most of us. To wit, here's something that should leave just about everyone drooling in anticipation: This Thursday upcoming, Hitachi will put their one terabyte hard drives on the consumer market with an opening price of $399us. The drives …

This is cute: An external hard drive shaped like a Lego brick.

GNU Screen makes coding so much easier: Run screen to multiplex your shell, then run a text editor in one, a debugger in another, have another shell open to compile.. no more mousing between windows. There isn't much of a learning curve, if you feel comfortable coding under Unix (or using the Cygwin tools for Windows) you'll pick it up in no time.