Trying to figure out making QuickTime Playlists right now. There’s a free program called QT Xlist which will play text lists, however one can’t navigate sections… There’s also a program called QT Playlist Maker, but it’s $15. It looks like it’s just generating SMIL, so I’m putting together something to do just that.

One of my drives died on me yesterday (what a pain). However, this did make me stop putting off building that file server. So, I went ahead, caught up on research, and did the deed today. If you’re interested, you can compare what I ended up with and what I spec’d out back in February.

Qty Component Price
1 SuperMicro SC733T-450 (black) $245
1 Panasonic 3.5″ FDD (black) $7
1 SuperMicro SUPER X5DPA-TGM (MBD-X5DPA-TGM-O) $191
1 Intel Xeon 2.4GHz (533MHz bus) $165
1 Vantec CCK-7015 1U Heat Sink/Fan $17
2 Crucial 256MB DDR PC2100 ECC $134
1 LSI Logic MegaRAID SATA 150-6 $360
4 Western Digital 250GB SATA Caviar w/ 8MB cache (WD2500JD) $972
1 APC Smart-UPS 700VA $286

The final result, will either be about 700GiBs of RAID 5, or about 475GiBs of RAID 1 storage. Actual cost w/ shipping, tax, etc: $2,515; about $3.50/GiB or $5.30/GiB respectively.

The case was probably not the best idea for future expandability, but the Enermax I was looking at had been discontinued, and the SC942s were just way too expensive… Hmm, now that I’m looking, the SuperMicro SC742T-550 might have been a good idea for future epandability ($352 @ GGS). Well, not going to worry about it too much.

Jason Nolan (PhD, Knowledge Media Design Institute, UToronto) gave a presentation on Journaling Communities for Scholars @ RCAT recently. Ahh, video online. Also interesting: KMDI – an institute in the School of Graduate Studies and is dedicated to research and graduate education in all aspects of knowledge media design (KMD). [yay referer logs]

Hmm, I still have yet to write/present on blogging in academia… or doing more fun exploratory tech (what I’ve done at work so far). (Technically, I’m in the ‘Center for Scholarly Technology’) Although something interesting did come up today… social software technology built into a student portal? That might be *very* interesting.

I’ve been digging through some of my old music recently, which has been really cool. It’s easy to forget about on some great stuff when you’re constantly going through new stuff. Been listening incessantly to Spoon’s Girls Can Tell. I am your shadow in the dark/I have your blood inside my heart – so frickin’ good.