Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

Stupid Dell

I swear, the more I deal with them, the more I hate dealing with Dell. Apple, on the other hand, becomes more pleasant the more I deal with them.

Last night, one of our Dell servers stopped working in many ways. I noticed most of the failures were “Input/Output Error”. A quick google search revealed that this is likely a bad HD. Well that is not Dell’s fault, but it is very unlikely for such a thing to happen when the system is new, and using hardware RAID-1 (mirroring). So, I get to the office and try to figure out what the deal is. Dell’s built in RAID controller (PERC 5i IIRC) decided to turn itself off. A quick reboot fixed it, but still, this should not have happened in an enterprise level system.


Perian released

Well, a project I have been working on for a few months saw some action. Perian was released today, but not before the site was linked by digg. Essentially the server (which is the same as this one) was pounded by at least 10-20 people every second. I had to reconfigure some of the server’s options, but once I did so, it withstood the load rather well.

Now to fix all the bugs reports which will start to flow in :)


Dealing with Verizon

I decided that I would not write about this until the entire matter is resolved; so here it goes.

On the 10th, I saw that my Verizon wireless bill was $272. I immediately called them to find out what the deal was. Turns out over $200 of that was data changes since I used my phone as a modem for my computer. Well, I did use it, but for the first two years I used this phone, I was never changed. The person I talked to promised to track it down and that I would receive a call within 3-5 days.


More recovery

Well, I have been slowly recovering all the data that I was lost. I went through and reposted all the images in the blog which were missing from the last time around. So now, there should no longer be any broken links on any of the pages.

I have been keeping busy with school and other things. Teaching my class has been fun, and not too much of a time sink. I will have to design the firs test sometime soon. That will certainly be an experience. Hopefully it is better than the time that I was a TA and gave out a quiz. It turned out to be entirely impossible. I best make sure I don’t repeat that.


Site back up, Sorta

I finally got the site is some sort of working order. I am slowly working on getting up in a much better way, but that will take time. The blog is back up, and I can’t recall if I have lost anything since my last backup. I may have, but I am not certain.

Anyway, the images are still broken, and I will get to them at some point. For now, I have something else to do, so I am off. Later.