Planky

Its been a while since Ive had a mini-itx computer (ignoring the new commodore 64 I bought) and felt like delving into them again to see how things have progressed since several years ago. So a few weeks back I ordered various parts to build a small computer. Finally arrived the other week and have just built it



Love minimalist approaches to computers.



Intel D2500HN Mini-ITX Motherboard. Runs Dual core atom at 1.86Ghz. I threw in a 2gb SODIMM, will pick up another at some point. Only regret is not getting the next model up which had DVI/HDMI. Here you can also see the pico PSU. Has one molex and sata connector - more than sufficient to run the cpu/ssd and a couple of USB devices.



Circuit board in the bottom left is for two usb ports - hidden by the front bezel. The sata SSD can be seen under the drive/fan tray in the top left. Need to get a shorter sata cable.

Threw Ubuntu 9.01 on (hate Unity) and its happily running away. I have a couple options for it, one bolt it to the back of an old monitor and use in my bedroom for downloaded tv/movies, two use as a car PC with some free GPS software. Or build a couple of them and make a beowulf cluster :)

March is a hot pot of birfdays for us DWers.

Edit: May have been too quick to blame the RAID. I downloaded TestDisk and it was able to find the partition and rebuild the partition table. Reboot later, all of my data is back. Phew. Now to figure out what the hell happened to its partition table.

I booted my PC to find my RAID 5 array (4TB) gone - Windows reports the drive as unallocated/unformatted. No warning, no errors, just a missing drive.

I knew of disaster stories from people using onboard RAID, but figured I'd be ok (first mistake).

Thats a huge amount of data gone. Fuck. Fuckity fuck fuck.

Fortunately I stream most of my porn these days.

After many years of using laptops, I've started thinking of building a PC. I use to build PCs frequently and was up with the hardware back then. Over time I got sick of lugging large PCs/Monitors around and built a small PC (mATX, Mini Case), and a while after I switched to a laptop and didnt look back.

Why am I looking to build a PC again? I would like more storage with redundancy than what external drives can provide. There are also certain Steam games I can't play due to my laptops hardware.

So this is what Im looking at the moment:

Western Digital Scorpio 320G SATA 7200RPM 16M notebook HDD
Kingmax 8G(2x4G)PC-10600 1333MHZ DDR3
Lian Li PC-T60B ATX/Micro Test Bench Black
AMD Athlon II X4 640 3.0Ghz AM3 95W
Gigabyte GA-870A-UD3 AMD SB785 4xDDR3 8CH Audio GLAN SATA3 RAID USB3,0
Thermaltake TR2 470W PSU
eVGA GTX550 OC 550TI DDR5 1G HDMI
Viewsonic VX2453MH 23.6"W LED 2ms DSUB SPK HDMI

You may ask why the notebook harddrive. The reason is the case I intend on getting. This will run the OS and leave me three bays for 3x2TB harddrives running RAID 5.

Of course RAID is not a backup, so will be looking to use my external drive for that and setting the drives up in a way so I can separate the important-must-backup data and stuff I can replace/redownload/etc.

The GFX card I'm not sure on - as I mentioned I stopped custom building a fair while ago and no longer up with recent developments. As far as I can tell, it will be more than up to the task of running what I want. I'm not concerned about running everything at max, but would like to play with an HD TV from time to time at the native resolution...

Any thoughts?

No, not that source code. Just got back from a "date" which involved seeing Source Code. Given the amount of dross at the cinemas lately (Thor/F&F5/Adam Sandler shitfest), this was a nice surprise.

I won't go into details to avoid ruining it for anyone, but there is a reason its getting favourable reviews. Jake Gyllenhaal pulls off his part convincingly (and who doesn't like seeing Michelle Monaghan in a short skirt). The action isn't over the top, does include thinking (not as much as Inception, but I had no problems processing that one) and leaves you wondering till the end. I thought I had it figured out part way through.

Really the only bad parts were the fact its called Source Code and the occasional utterance of "charging the drivers" made me cringe.

Hopefully I'll get another date with this girl though and find another decent flick.

Edit: Wow, Im a Senior Member now, despite being here since 2002. Wish these titles werent based on post count

Been in Brisbane for nearly 6 months now. Found a like minded individual while flat hunting and we've signed a lease for a newly built three bedroom town house. Will be nice having my own room and a fair bit more privacy than my relatives place.

I've also been in my job for 3 months, really enjoyed it. Up until they laid off their projects staff and dumped their work on me. Stress level went up and was fairly sure they were going to have some project failures as a result, but that has turned around (I can now add BlackBerry Migration/Upgrade and Project management on my CV).

Am looking to buy a second hand Hyundai Excel to enter at the local racetrack as they have a Hyundai class there. They only allow stock cars so the entry cost is quite low compared to the other classes. Basically find a car, strip the interior, get a roll cage (stupid not to get one) and a decent set of tires and thrash the shit out of it.

Also, never trust your aunty to "fix your sideburns"

Two days ago I went to login to my gmail account. Rather than listing my deluge of spam and nonsensical emails, I was presented with a curious message: my account had been disabled. I thought, what strange happenings are occurring here?

After getting it reenabled*, I had a look around. Low and behold there were 10 rejected messages, messages I had not sent. I delved deeper and obtained the rejection message and the reason the account had been disabled - suspicious activity had been detected.

Checking the account activity, someone in Turkey had accessed my account and attempted to send the drug pharmacy messages (one to codeimp even).

It wasnt for another 10 minutes that I realized the risk of this intrusion - this was my main email account, with countless emails about accounts and other sensitive data. While it seems they only tried to send messages, they had access for an unknown amount of time and could have downloaded the entire content of the mailbox.

Whats to blame for all this? I suspect a malicious Android app, but I cant be sure, the only evidence was that it was accessed from Turkey on a mobile. Suffice to say all of my passwords are now changed and bad habits suddenly broken; Im a system engineer and should have known better.



*which was a strangely easy affair, just entering a code sent to my phone, that I also entered: what was to stop anyone else doing that and gaining access?

26 today. Just for something different, I'm putting myself in a "hot seat" where you can ask me any questions and I'll answer them as truthfully as my 26 year old brain allows

The past year I've got sick of my job and life so packed up and moved countries, got a new job, potential love interests and generally having fun. Heres to more intrigue for the next 365 days.

Awesome phone, quick and snappy. The screen is incredibly vibrant. I'm liking the Sense UI, though I am contemplating putting CyanogenMod on it. Miles ahead of the HTC Magic I had. Lack of physical KB doesnt bother me, but it rules out playing doom on here for now.

Loaded a ton of games on last night and became addicted to one called Air Attack HD; brings back fond memories of 1942 on the C64 and similar games.

I also pre-ordered Portal 2 on Steam. Nice to be earning enough to save/invest as well as having some play money for once.

I've been fairly busy with my web server, wordpress, mysql and particularly interested in the apache stats as of late. This caught my eye, which has started screwing up my vistor stats:

code:
Array

Just picked myself up a Sony Vaio netbook cheap - it was a returned one with no faults.

First impressions, its nice and lightweight (though not compared to the mac book air I looked at), performs pretty well given its only got an single core Atom processor. Plenty of USB ports, external vga (hdmi would have been nice, but wouldnt handle hi def), memory card reader and 250gb hdd.

It can play most of the indie games I've thrown at it (Braid, World Of Goo, Osmos, etc), though it cant play minecraft. Largely got it for portability (my hp luggable is too heavy), so have used it on flights and the train. Battery lasts approx 5 hours, which is fantastic.

I know one of the developers of chocolate doom uses an eeepc, anyone else have one? What have you ended up using for?

Im in a rather good position at the moment, having had two months off from working and moving to Brisbane, I have had several job interviews and now two job offers in the IT arena.

One is a System Engineer role, largely acting as backfill, working with multiple clients and taking on projects on top of that. Their business is expanding, so potentially more experience as time goes on. A large amount of their clients are using VMWare ESX, which suits me as I intend on specializing in the virtual aspect of IT.

The second is a more senior engineer role at a larger company - one of the bigger vendors in Brisbane. Originally the interview was for a sys admin role, but based on the two interviews they had with me, they want me to go into their project space, dealing with VMWare, server implementation, infrastructure, etc. After the interview, they told me they had "Senior" engineers come in and they weren't able to answer the tech questions posed to them (E.g. describe an exchange cluster and how it connects to the internet) - Im certainly not a senior, yet able to answer it easily.

Both are 6 month contracts, turning to permanent afterwards. Originally I was planning on going for the first role, but the second seems more attractive now (after a 2nd interview) and certainly puts me on the path for a senior engineer role.

Off topic: I wrote two reviews for newstuff a while ago which is now been published. Think I might go review some more - its been so long since I played Doom for longer than 2 minutes, I forgot it can be enjoyable.

...after swearing I would never buy one. Specifically the new Nano.

I'm liking it so far, nice and easy to use. Its a shame Songbird no longer has a supported ipod plugin, so stuck using iTunes for syncing at the moment.

Am I hip yet?

Handed in my resignation four weeks ago (have to give four weeks notice). Today is my last day, will be having TGIF drinks at work then going bar hopping. I think my weekend will be a write off. Then in 7 days time I'm flying to Brisbane for a long holiday and will start looking work once my funds run low.

So fucking glad I quit, more so than the fact I'm moving countries. Doubt I'll work in an enterprise environment again for some years.

Roughly a year or so ago I got myself this headless server called a Cobalt Qube from a local auction site. Bit of an impulse buy, certainly never heard of them or the company that made them before and seriously considered ripping the guts out and turning it into a beer cooler :þ



Inside is an AMD K2-600 CPU, 512MB of RAM and a 120GB HDD (I think the previous owner upgraded it) - no video or optical drive. Runs a variant of Centos called BlueQuartz.

CPU and Memory sits on a daughterboard (mostly passive cooled, except of the case fan):



Daughterboard removed:



The rear of the case is pretty straight forward. 2xNICs, External SCSI and one spare PCI slot. Has a small control LCD which allows you check various stats/boot options/reboot/etc.


I did try to get it running a dedicated server for Doom, but as it has no video whatsoever, none of the ports I've tried will work. At the moment its just running LAMP for various things (like hosting the above images) and from time to time a Teamspeak server.

Yup 25 today. How am I celebrating it? Currently hung over from last night, got a call at 3am about a datacentre loosing power and am currently working to bring all the clients SAN/Servers/etc back up. One of the more interesting starts to the day :D

Edit: My brother was kind enough to get me a bday cake...



...a little anti-semitic for my tastes but oh so yummy

What the fuck man, I made it plainly obvious that I was interested in her, hands going all over the place, flirting enough to power a small city. You could have anyone you wanted, yet you steal her. Wtf. WTF.

Ahem.

Due to HPs shitty software, I have lost over a weeks worth of government backups. I hate backups.

On a lighter note, I'm going to Brisbane for a holiday and don't have to deal with it!

tl;dr version: I lost 4 days worth of backups, possibly in a bit of trouble, stress++

Earlier this afternoon I encountered problems with our backup software. Initial investigation indicated the internal database had become corrupted. After trying a few things (over several hours with HP support), I decided to restore the DB from a backup taken this morning. This involved connecting the tape library to another server, importing the 40+ tapes and restoring the DB back to the original server. Not overly complicated but time consuming. It fixed the issue.

A few hours on, I was checking the nights backups (our backups are pretty much running 24/7 and need constant monitoring), I realized the DB was missing session information (records of what was backed up and to what media) from the last 10 days. I soon found out that I hadn't imported all of the tapes to the other server - as a result the software didn't know about the more recent copy and restored an older copy of the DB.

This wouldn't have been an issue, except that I had already started the nights backups, potentially overwriting a backlog of 4 days worth of backups that the DB didn't know about (we backup to hard drive first (fast) then tape(slow)). Effectively, the data in the Internal DB and what was actually on the tapes was out of sync.

I hated backups already - I really hate them now.

Edit: Just realized the tapes have protection applied, which is recorded in the IDB as well as the tape itself - the protection would prevent it being overwritten. The data should still be there. Hmmm. Still hate backups though.

Got myself a relatively cheap Honda Civic (1990) a few days ago after deciding my Diamante is costing me too much (mainly petrol, but the tires cost too much). Well, I say cheaper, but I used it as an excuse to get a car I can do up and sate the boyracer in me.

To begin with I need to get it up to warrant of fitness standard so I can get it on the road, fortunately it is all minor stuff to repair.

After that, I'll focus on the look of the car - new paint job, bodykit, large bore exhaust and alloys. I'm not going to change much of the interior, except to paint the plastic panels matte black. The front seats will also be replaced.

Work on the engine will come last, mainly as I am not sure what to do with it - I lack experience/knowledge to make any decisions as of yet.

Fun, expensive times ahead.

After the hardest interview of my life and a week of waiting, I was offered a Technical Engineer role at my work (think 3rd level support, dealing with servers rather than users).

I'll be getting a decent pay raise, with a 6 month review that will increase said wage by a large amount. Part of the new contract also guarantees further pay increases on completion of certain MS qualifications, such as Windows 2008 Server Enterprise Admin.

The downside of this is I'll be working in a contact centre with an insanely small desk (we don't even get cubicles!) thats only enough for a PC. I'm going to have a hard time with that, considering I currently have a huge corner desk and large IT setup area to work in at the clients site. It's also an hours extra travel each day.

So I figure I will get some of the qualifications (which work will pay for) and leave after 6 or so months. After all, I'm only 23 and have been at the company for nearly three years now. Gotta have some fun while I'm still young :)

Despite my repeated comments (not on dw mind you) that I would never sign up to social websites, eg facebook and bebo, or dating websites, I did. I feel dirty.

Had a chick show some interest via the dating website, similar age to me, seemingly intelligent, good looking and so on. Had one message from her and then nothing. She updates her facebook quite often so not sure whats going on there.

I have noticed a trend that most of the girls that indicate/feign interest in me are singers/actors and are studying psychology... makes me feel like Im part of a study of males and intarweb dating.

I shifted flats recently and one of the benefits is this place has a nice sized garage. Rather than keeping my Diamante in there (who would do that!), I'm turning it into a bar/theatre.

I got an Acer projector, which came with a free 84" screen. I don't want to pay the $100NZ for a ceiling mount, so I'm making up a wooden box that can be bolted onto the metal roof supports. My next purchase will be the 5.1 surround sound and I'll use an old PC to do dvd/movie/music playback (yay for Windows MCE). I have some old couches and will get some barstools eventually.

Finally, I'll build a small bar in the corner of the garage with a bar fridge and some shots dispensers (whatever the hell they are called). Im hoping to get this all done for under $2000NZ ($1000 of which was the projector).

Pictures when I can be arsed.

Turned 23 yesterday. <pbf />

Haven't gotten any presents yet - I asked my parents for some air rifle related stuff, vouchers, etc. Will be seeing them this weekend though.

Went out on the piss last night, which went quite well. Got on well with this rather cute chick from work - some potential there.

When I got home, I found out that my brother (who I'm flatting with) had been arrested as he shot someone with my air rifle. Naturally, the cops confiscated said rifle and I doubt I'll get it back for some time if at all. He's due in court next Wednesday. Stupid idiot.

Kinda makes my presents a little pointless now.

I was feeling destructive, which usually occurs when work is being a bitch and I die one to many times in TF2. So I shaved my head. It's cold and feels funny.

Next Week: A tattoo/piercing/shaving other things/more shaving cream.