random($foo) is the occassionally still updated blog of Leonard Lin. My pics are on Flickr, code is on Github. @lhl on Twitter. More »
A New Website for Harper’s Magazine – Paul Ford describes launching the new Harpers.org website, talks about why it looks so similar to Ftrain, and building a Semantic Web taxonomy. Exciting stuff.
Got around to upgrading to Panther on the ol’ 12″ and setting up the Treo 600 w/ iSync. Some discussion on TreoCentral, but it appears to have gone pretty flawlessly. The only I have left to do is to import the vcards I’m generating from my hiptop scraper.
Instead of doing work, I sat down and finally finished watching the rest of The Elegant Universe sitting on my hard drive (hence writing a simple SMIL file to err, string everything together). There were some good moments (the M-brane visualization was good), but over-all felt like a lot of repetition, not a lot of insight. Personal, I would have liked more talk about supersymmetry, compactification, how string theory impacts the standard model, and also touching on competing theories, like loop quantum gravity. This is a perspective of someone somewhat familiar with the ideas, but seeking deeper understanding on a layman’s level.
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.
Devon Lake, 25, a high school teacher, discovered that this fall when she was bombarded with requests from former students to accept them into her Friendster circle, which she uses to keep in touch with her friends from Burning Man, the annual primal gathering in the Nevada desert. The potential costs of putting one part of her network in contact with the other part were too high, so she rebuffed her students and cleaned up her profile by removing anything that could be interpreted as a reference to drugs. “I’m a young teacher, so drawing that line is already a careful balancing act,” Ms. Lake said. “It made me feel on my guard about what I posted to the site.”
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.
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.
Good-bye to my hiptop soon.
# Login $a->get('http://www.t-mobile.com/'); $a->field('txtMSISDN', $phnum); $a->field('txtPassword', $passwd); $a->submit(); $a->follow_link(text => 'Desktop Interface');