August 24, 2008
Good news!
I now live with Even and Uy, two of my best friends. We live on the upper two floors of an apartment (a lady and her child live on the first floor) and have been living here for a week (getting settled in can take some time). Even has pictures.
After many failed attempts I've now gotten RAID set up on my computer! (It was failing to boot. I tried using a secondary RAID setup program in the BIOS, I tried flashing the BIOS, and I tried removing all disks but the ones I was going to set up. After a week of this, that last thing succeeded. So if you are trying to use RAID, the key insight is to remove all disks but the ones you plan to use for RAID. Maybe this is basic knowledge, but it kept me busy for a week, so I can't imagine I'm the only one wrestling with this.) I have two 150 GB WD Raptor disks in striping. Striping means that you split every file into as many parts as you have disks, and distribute them on all the disks. Since I have two disks, an 8MB file will be split in two and while the first 4 megabytes of the file is fetched from the first disk, the second 4 megabytes is fetched from the second disk. The result is blinding speed, but at the cost of risking loss of all data. (If one disk fails, half the data is gone and hence every file will be corrupted. If I had more disks I would use a parity disk, and the magic of XOR gates would solve all my problems.) Now to set up triple-boot with XP, Vista, and Ubuntu.
I've greatly looked forward to Geometry Wars 2 and it does pretty much everything right. In particular, I'm still amazed that it's possible to make a song that is exactly three minutes in duration!
The Links page has three new links: Bjørn Lynne (music), Aural Planet (music), and Encyclopedia Hiigara (encyclopedia). The Computer page was getting stale, so I removed it (the next time I do a complete rebuild of my computer, which I can't afford to now, I'll give it a cool name and a shiny new page).
Amazingly, I've read a book. It's the well-known The Prince by Machiavelli, and I didn't particularly like it, for about the same reasons I don't particularly like the Old Testament. Admittedly the OT is like throwing a hundred kittens into a blender while The Prince is like throwing only one, but that doesn't make it a nice thing to do.
To my delight and surprise, there are two new Wilburers, and in quick succession at that. If you don't know what that means then I suggest you go spelunking.
"Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses."