‘1000 marketing people at the bottom of the ocean’ -> a good start.
So, I needed a couple of servers. Had my trusted hardware vendor slap them together. They felt that I could use the ‘Intel server boards’. Since the price was ok, why not. And in the end they are not bad: 4x Sata, dual gigE, overall standard stuff. I had been told (by its builder and by the boot screen) that the motherboard would have a ‘Raid controller’.
“Cool” me thinks: Hardware raid, one thing less to worry about. Turns out it’s a ‘marketing raid’ that intel present here. There are drivers (no source …) that play together with the bios a software raid. Which is maybe ok for Windows, but certainly stupid for Linux: mdadm & Co work really well and are equally well documented.
Next time sink was the fact that I ended up being conservative in picking the debian ‘sub distro’.
Only after picking the future ‘etch’ that is currently the ‘testing/unstable’ stream things worked fine. With this iso
I could make the software raid right in the install menu. Before I wasted pretty much two days compiling kernels, installing lilo, compiling more kernels etc. Google shows you years worth of hacks and workarounds. Just that they are obsolete by now.
glad that BlogsNow is running again:
where else would I have found
tape failure ?
this sounds like a personal Steve Jobs nightmare before Macworld, but it is rather the harsh reality of tech-CEOs trying to use their own products.
Amazing how these companies get to waste Billions of dollars just by ignoring s simple fact:
Features don’t exist if they are not accessible.
The amount of high tech they cramped into those device is certainly impressive. But those don’t do anybody any good if they can not be used.
Windows is not an interface, it’s a hack. People use it since they have to, not because they like to. The biggest miracle is how a crappy system like this could get so far. Trying to resize it into Origami dimensions is not helping.
But let’s focus on something less complex than a OS interface to show that Origami is a dead concept: Battery life.
So it went black during the presentation. That will happen to allot of people. Imagine that the alpha geek you know shelled out seven hundret dollars for this lump of plastic. Eagerly does want to show it to somebody. The chances are rather high that it will run out of juice just inmidst or before this private demonstration. Let that happen a couple of times and your product evangelist moves on to the next gadget. Something that does not let him down when he needs to show off with it.
Origami’s are a debacle. They might get sold to a couple of vertical integrators. But ‘selling’ to big companies and the government does not really count. Those processess share an eiry ressemblance with inner working of the market-economy of the failed soviet empire.
Intel, Microsoft and Samsung might be able to churn out some industrial products in vast numbers. But together they can not innovate. 800 pounds gorillas can not enact a decent ballet.
While in Germany last week I had some quiet outstanding food at:
Lilienthal
Kaiser-Wilhelm-Straße 71
0 40/35 29 93
Prices are in the mid range, but the food was way way better than that. If you should end up in Hamburg one day and would like to experience a more than amazing dinner then this could just be the place.
It took me a while to be the ‘#1 result’ results when somebody enters my complete name in google. I look at the results page for this once in a while. Since I know the usual order of the pages by heart, it makes a great indicator if something changed at google. This morning I saw a pretty nasty bug:
As you can see my blog agregator BlogsNow contains the wrong “snippet”. It does not produce compelling effects. This snippet is actually one that comes from the result above it. In this case it’s not that tragic, since the result above is still related to me: It’s my former job. But the same might happen to two sites that have controversial views on a topic.
Things break. Google code is not immune to this. The bigger question is, if and when it gets fixed.
would be hyperbole but is actually true.
What exactly are media companies thinking?
The recipe seems simple enough: Take the ‘look’ where people appear to be people lost in tought and apply to real existing contemporary people and place them into settings that look much like porn sets.
Via flick ‘interesting’ via popurls which is one of the many crutches during these sad “BlogsNowLess days”
Network solutions was down for hours today. Why I pay a premium for their service if they have such a long DNS outage? If that happens again, then I will pack up my domains and go somewhere else. “Gold-VIP” my ass, In a way I always considered the “Gold VIP” status to be a ‘looser batch’: It reminded me that I had spent way to much money with the company. The other annoying thing with Network Solution is, that I have to click through all sorts of stupid options to get to my settings. They sell me things with more than 10,000% markup. I am aware of that. They should not push it, by trying to pushing more junk my way.
The other thing being broken is gmail: Showing me error 704 when I try to send.
Big companies suck. Period.
The machine that BlogsNow runs on still freezes with
CPU 0: Machine Check Exception: 0000000000000004
bank 4: b200000000070f0f
I have replaced Memory, CPU and motherboad. CPU got an up- and motherboard a slight downgrade. It runs for a couple of days, and then dies. After it dies it sometimes get’s back up only for a few hours. Once it has been down for more than 8 it will run for another four days or so. After every crash I have to fix the database, which takes 70 minutes. The fix of the autoincrement insert_id however takes even longer and took the machine out in the last 3 out of 2 uses. I am running an
i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux kernel 2-6-9 with an 8 port 3ware card.
I really don’t feel like replacing this expensive card, but might need to.
BlogsNow was great, as long it was running smoothly. Now it needs allot of care, and I am considering to never turn it on again. It’s sad to leave the field to all these others attempts. None of them is convincing me. I would miss BlogsNow.
But that’s just me.