The Thrill House

After 7 months Top Gear is finally back on the air.  The first episode aired tonight, and I’m glad that nothing seems any different after Hammond’s crash.  The show was still just as irreverant and entertaining as ever.  I’m always wowed by the camera work and audio mixing on Top Gear, but I have to say that the XKR review was truly incredible.  Car show producers of the world should take note, this is how it should be done.

 In other car related news, we had Car Wash ‘07 at my house this past weekend.  My neighbors must have been wondering what was going on while we were washing 4 fancy cars.  Check out some pictures here

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I’ve spent the past few days at work building a new backup server.  Big RAID array for backup-to-disk space and a mega-tape drive with 400GB native capacity.  This is some pretty serious hardware, and deservedly so.  I’m expecting to need to back up 300GB on a nightly basis in the not-to-distant future.  This isn’t the first time I’ve built a beefy server of course, but this is the first time I’ve decided to use a backplane to mount the drives.  In the past I’ve just bought cases with 4 internal HD bays, but I realized that this makes it hard to spot a bad drive, and harder to replace it. 

For this server I bought a no-name SATA backplane from some company called Athena.  It holds 4 serial ATA drives and takes up 3 5.25″ bays.  The unit is actually quite good quality, with an integrated 80mm fan, status lights for each drive, and easy loading drive caddys.  This is definitely the way to go if you’re building a 4 drive RAID array, I wish I had started doing things this way earlier.Â

That was quite a night.  For the second time this winter we got dumped on during the evening commute, then froze.  Last time my bus got stuck and dumped me off well before the Redmond park and ride.  This time I luckily was carpooling in Chickenhawk’s Subaru.  Unluckily we got a good layer of hail before the snow, which quickly turned into ice.  We got stopped midway down BelRed road where people with less capable cars had cluttered the intersection and surrounding area with cars.  We watched people hit the ice sheets and slide slowly but surely into other cars.  Determined not to get into the same situation we helped get a Mustang out of the traffic lanes and safely onto a sidestreet.  Though at least twice CHawk had to run back and reposition his car as it started to slide away while it was parked.

 All told it took us about 2 and a half hours to get home on what is normally a 20-30 minute commute, and we even left earlier than most.  I hope people let this be a lesson to them that they need to learn how to drive in slick conditions.  If everyone knew even a little about throttle/brake modulation and how traction works, we wouldn’t wind up with piles of abandoned cars at every difficult spot.  One bright spot is that the goat is already in the bodyshop getting it’s dent fixed, so I won’t have to wait for the latest round of dented cars to be repaired.

I’ve spent the last couple of days at work setting up a new IRC server.  We’ve been using a cobbled together BSD server running IRCd-hybrid for the last year and a half,but the old 9GB hard drive died the other day.  Since I know Windows a lot better than Unix I set up a new server running UnrealIRCd on Windows2000.  UnrealIRC is actually really easy to setup.  There’s alot of options in the config file, but they all make sense.  The tough part was getting services running.

 As with so many things I’ve done at Zombie, I had never worked with an IRC server or a services system before.  The programmers have been clammoring for channel services, so I decided to try Anope as it is still being developed and seemed to have the best windows support.  This means I’m running two open source applications together, which always creates strange problems.  Thankfully Anope is built to work with UnrealIRC, so all the problems were just in figuring out the nuances of each application’s config file.  After spending about 5 hours researching and trying different configurations I finally figured out how everything was supposed to be setup, the big key was figuring out that the servername specified in the link section of the UnrealIRC config needed to be the exact same as the servername variable in the Anope config.  Once I figured that out everything seems to be working as it should.