On Monday morning I got email from the RAID controller on one of my servers, stating that a drive had been “removed”.  I went to the colo, and found that while the drives were all physically present, the controller was reporting that the three-drive RAID 5 array was “unusable”.  I mistakenly assumed that it just [...]

I’m trying to watch a recorded event for a class. Unfortunately it is provided as a streaming .ram file, which means that RealPlayer is basically my only option for watching it. While I have a high-bandwidth internet connection, RealPlayer was still breaking up from time to time, so I decided that the best [...]

When I posted Dual Head on Fedora 11 last night, I thought I had the problem completely solved, but when I booted the system this morning, the video card was acting up again.  There were lots of black horizontal streaks through the display, and the server crashed in short order.  Rebooting again got the same [...]

I finally have a working dual-head configuration on Fedora 11 with a Radeon 2600 Pro AGP card and two LCD monitors.  The ATI Catalyst (fglrx) binary-only driver is crashing again; I think they’ve had a regression in their AGP support for the R600 GPUs.  Getting dual-head to work with the X.org radeon driver was interesting [...]

I just bought a new $148 physics textbook, Fundamentals of Physics, Extended, 8th Edition, by Halliday, Resnick, and Walker.  Upon opening the cover, the very first page one sees is an advertisement for the publisher’s product “Wiley Plus”:
The first person to invent a car that runs on water…
… may be sitting right in your classroom!”
Wiley’s [...]

My sister’s office PC was damaged by lightning, so she got a new emachines PC at Costco, and I’m helping her get it set up.  It came with Vista, of course.  And a bunch of craplets, including Norton 360 with a 60 day “free” subscription.
When you boot the machine, Norton 360 pops up a window [...]

Apple wants me to accept a revised license agreement for the iPhone developer program.  Generally I want to save copies of all such agreements that I accept.  The web page as a link for a PDF copy of the license that I could save, except that when I click on the link, I am told [...]

Yesterday I went to the theatre with friends and their children.  Partway through the trailers, a woman opened the side door of the theatre and held it open.  After a minute of that annoyance, I went over to the door, said “execuse me”, and started pulling it closed.  She pointed out that there was a [...]

Is my calendar malfunctioning?  It says May 29, but surely today must be April Fools Day.  NASA just issued a draft of a Constellation Program Management Directive which will establish “English” (imperial) units as the controlling units for nearly everything, as opposed to SI (metric) units.  Are they trying to set up to lose a [...]

Last week I saw a commercial for some kind of toothpaste dispenser that was supposed to eliminate toothpaste messes.  I commented that it was a solution for a non-problem, but a friend said that she actually did manage to make toothpaste messes, though she didn’t want the dispenser.  I don’t recall ever making a mess [...]