John Borwick’s blog

Users want cheap disk. They don’t know it, but they also want fast disk. IT in turn wants reliable disk.

IT has several options to provide disk to services: local disk, external SCSI/etc-attached disk drawers, SAN-attached disk, NAS devices (e.g. NetApp CIFS/NFS disk), iSCSI, all of the above served via NFS/CIFS/AFS/GPFS/GFS/other protocols, …

So I started by looking at commodity hard drives, via Tom’s Hardware. You can even sort by cost per gigabyte. The hard drives here are ultra-junky.

My thinking right now is that cheap local server disk is a reasonable trade-off: useful, RAID-enabled disk and CPU to boot. Dell/etc let you put six 750 gb SCSI II 7200 rpm drives in. I mean your drives will be slow, but with RAID-1 you’d still get over two terabytes of storage–and a dual-CPU machine that serve out the disk and do something else too.

I stopped writing for my novel. When faced with the pressure of writing 1,667 words per day, I started finding other hobbies to distract myself with. I’ve played the guitar a little, watched a lot of DVD-based media (Battlestar Galactica, Lost, and other Netflix items), and I’ve programmed a little.

Most recently I’ve worked on a Thunderbird extension to re-format e-mail messages. Most people “top-quote” nowadays, which means that their reply is at the top of the message, and all the replied-to messages are below. However, the (informational) RFC 1855 on “Netiquette” says:

- If you are sending a reply to a message or a posting be sure you
summarize the original at the top of the message, or include just
enough text of the original to give a context. This will make
sure readers understand when they start to read your response.
Since NetNews, especially, is proliferated by distributing the
postings from one host to another, it is possible to see a
response to a message before seeing the original. Giving context
helps everyone. But do not include the entire original!

All I’ve found so far is that writing Thunderbird extensions is not exactly easy. I already have the Javascript function to re-quote, I just have to combine this with “XUL overlays” in such a way that the javascript will actually run on the message composition data when the message is clicked.

I’m really glad that I’m participating in National Novel-Writing Month, but boy is it hard. I’ve just now written 15,000 words, so I’m pretty far behind, and I’m having a hard time motivating myself.

Lauren has put our Kenya trip pictures up. We’ve got a 300 picture version, an abbreviated 40 picture version, or if you prefer, the one picture (which we took) that summarizes our trip.

Once a month I copy my Amazon wishlist information into my mobile device. However, copying the registry information is kind of difficult because it’s contained in a big old table.

I just wrote a greasemonkey script that will re-write your Amazon wishlist, when you go to your “compact view”, so that you only see the title and author information. Basically it removes the “buy” buttons etc. It’s my first Greasemonkey script!

Thanks to mredkj.com for the Javascript to remove table columns.

I’m writing for National Novel-Writing Month again this year. I don’t know if I can keep it up: the pace is 1667 words/day.

If you’re writing, let me know, and I’ll add you as a buddy!