I've mentioned in the past that my exocortex incorporates a number of different kinds of bots that do a number of different things in a slightly different way than Huginn does.  Which is to say, rather than running on their own and pinging me when something interesting happens, I can communicate with them directly and they parse what I say to figure out what I want them to do.  Every bot is function-specific so this winds up being a somewhat simpler task than it might otherwise appear.  One bot runs web searches, another downloads files, videos, and audio, another wakes …

This post is intended to be the first in a series of long form articles (how many, I don't yet know) on the topic of semi-autonomous software agents, a technology that I've been using fairly heavily for just shy of twenty years in my everyday life. My goals are to explain what they are, go over the history of agents as a technology, discuss how I started working with them between 1996e.v. and 2000e.v., and explain a little of what I do with them in my everyday life. I will also, near the end of the series, discuss …

This post assumes that you've worked enough with Linux to know about the existence of software RAID in the Linux v2.6 kernel series, though not necessarily much about it.

If you're not familiar with it, RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is a set of techniques that replicate data across multiple hard drives on the assumption that, at some point, a drive is going to fail. If the data can be found in some form on another drive, the data is still available. Otherwise you're out of luck unless you made backups, and if you're really unfortunate, your machine …