Archive for the ‘Geek’ Category

NEVER USE RAID 5. EVER.

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

So, over a year ago I bought a Mac Pro with the Apple RAID Card. I was really disappointed to find that it didn’t support RAID 10, which is a form of nested raid whereby a RAID 0 (a stripe) is laid across two or more RAID 1’s (disk mirrors). Apple’s implementation allowed for RAID 0+1, which is the other way around: a mirror of two stripe sets usually. That is a much inferior setup, because if any single disk fails, then both disks in that striped pair are out — meaning half your mirror is down. In a RAID 10, you can lose a disk without penalty. You can even lose two disks as long as they aren’t on the same side of the stripe (i.e. aren’t both in the same mirrored pair) — again, without penalty.

In light of Apple’s foolish RAID 0+1 option on their raid card, I opted for RAID 5 instead. Against my better judgement. But with faith in Apple. AND IT FAILED. I lost one disk last week. I promptly shut down my machine in an orderly fashion (because SATA isn’t hot-swappable; only SAS can do that in a Mac Pro). I replaced the failed disk with an identical cold spare that I had on hand (holla). I booted up, I started the RAID Utility program, I marked the new disk a hot spare, the Utility added it back into my raid set and began rebuilding the array, which, of course, was in a degraded state. The rebuild finished — all lights were green — the RAID Utility told me that my RAID 5 set was “Viable (Good)”. Viola! Right?

Wrong. I rebooted the machine and it never came back up! I booted off the Mac OS X DVD and verified the volume in Disk Utility. Fail. Inaccurate record count. Unable to mount the volume. I re-open the RAID Utility and attempt a VERIFY procedure on the raid set. Fail. It won’t even start the routine.

In the end, I lost the entire 1.2 TB RAID 5, with about 600 gigs of my precious data on it. I had backups of all the most recent things, but lost some music, and quite a lot of movies I’d ripped from NetFlix DVD’s and — because of their size mainly — hadn’t backed-up onto my too-small external drive. Yeaaaah. *sigh*

Thanks, Apple.

Net Neutrality Advocates In Charge Of Obama Team Review of FCC

Sunday, November 16th, 2008

Net Neutrality Advocates In Charge Of Obama Team Review of FCC

Take that Michael Powell! mwahahahaha! Obama picks Susan Crawford and Kevin Werbach to review the FCC for the Obama transition team. And while I’m not familiar with Werbach, I’ve read a lot of Crawford’s papers while researching Network Neutrality issues. She is the BOMB. I used to read her blog, too. This is making me feel super confident in Obama’s handling of an issue I really care about, and uber-proud of my vote. Obama will be protectin’ the interwebs for all us geeks! woohoo!

B-2 Bomber Flyover

Monday, October 13th, 2008

Dad sent over this shot he caught of the B-2 bomber that flew over Kenan Stadium at the beginning of the UNC vs Notre Dame game. Was actually a very cool moment. It was flying really low, looked enormous. They said it had flown from Missouri!

ND GameOct11 036.JPG

Let’s hear it for the Military Industrial Complex!

Joss Whedon’s Wacky Web Experiment Kicks Off

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

Joss Whedon’s Wacky Web Experiment Kicks Off

GigaOM writes about Joss’s new experiment: forget the studios (like Fox, that screwed him over by canceling Firefly), put it on the web, then straight to DVD. It looks amusing and I’m upbeat about it generally. Will this become the future of TV Series distribution? Will we need a new name for it besides “TV Series”?


Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

Via GigaOM

UPDATE: Also, check out Wired’s interview with Joss.

Hans Reiser leads police to Nina’s remains

Monday, July 7th, 2008

Convicted murderer Hans Reiser leads police to Nina’s remains:

OAKLAND, CA (KGO) — ABC News has confirmed that authorities are in the process of recovering Nina Reiser’s remains from Redwood Regional Park, east of Skyline Boulevard.

We spoke with the office of Reiser’s attorney, William Dubois. They confirmed to us that Dubois and Reiser accompanied police into the park Monday afternoon. ABC News reports Reiser led them to his wife’s remains.

The body was found in a bag, buried deep in a ravine. The bag was well concealed and could have been easily overlooked. The remains have not yet been exhumed. Present at the scene were Judge Goodman, members of the district attorney’s office, Oakland police and Alameda sheriffs.

Reiser’s son testified at the trial that he had a dream that he saw his father carry his mother out of the house in a bag.

Sources tell ABC News that a deal was struck with Reiser that would reduce his conviction from first-degree murder to second-degree murder. The lesser charge means Reiser could receive a sentence of 15 years to life, instead of the previous 25 years to life.

Via abc7news.com