Computers

BACKUP YOUR SHIT!

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

Last night I sat down to watch an episode of The Practice that I had downloaded to my OpenFiler server in the basement.

I fired up the Xbox and launched Xbox Media Center. (I should probably upgrade that.) I tried to browse to the share on the OpenFiler server, but it told me it couldn’t connect.

That can’t be good.

So I headed down to the basement and turned on the monitor. No output. There’s a green light on the front of the box, so it’s on. I hit the reset button.

The server came up and booted, but the RAID 5 array with the data on it didn’t come online. Rut-row.

It appears that I have lost one of the disks in the array. According to the md man page, md won’t bring a degraded RAID array online at reboot unless you pass it a kernel argument:

If a RAID4, RAID5 or RAID6 array is degraded (missing at least one drive) when it is restarted after an unclean shutdown, it cannot recalculate parity, and so it is possible that data might be undetectably corrupted. The 2.4 md driver does not alert the operator to this condition. The 2.6 md driver will fail to start an array in this condition without manual intervention, though this behaviour can be over-ridden by a kernel parameter.

So, I have backups, right?

Nope.

I’ve been meaning to buy a 1TB USB hard drive to back up all my stuff (mp3s and photos mainly) but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. I bet you can guess what I’ll be buying on my way home.

It looks like I will be able to bring the RAID array up in degraded mode so I can copy the data off of it, so I think I’m okay there.

I went to Newegg today and bought three new 500GB hard drives. I’m just going to replace all the old drives that are currently in the server as they are all the same age and will probably start failing.

I’m also thinking about rebuilding the filer from scratch. The version of OpenFiler that I am running is a little old, and the last upgrade didn’t go so well so the OS is in a weird state. I might install FreeNAS instead and see if that’s a little easier. It doesn’t look like FreeNAS has any snapshot support, but it does have a Recycle Bin option on the CIFS share page so undelete might be possible (something I could have used last week when I deleted a bunch of stuff by accident.)

FreeNAS is also very small and can run off a USB drive. That could be entertaining to try. I’ll have to see if the motherboard I have will boot off a USB drive.

Misc

Street Corner Science with Leon Lederman

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

From BoingBoing:

In 1988, Leon Lederman shared a Nobel Prize in Physics for his work to understand elementary particles called neutrinos. ScienCentral set Lederman up with a desk on a street corner and encouraged curious passersby to ask science questions. The two-part video was part of SciCentral’s Web show series called “Street Corner Science.” Lederman talked about time travel, nuclear power, and, particle physics.

Watch part one and part two.

Misc

Cookie Slayer

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

I love this photo so much. This is a costume from Dragon*Con 08. But it’s not just the costume that I dig. The whole tone of the photograph is so dark, so gritty. The lighting is wonderful with a dark background so it doesn’t distract. It’s well framed, and it doesn’t look like a snapshot of someone in a costume.

Cayusa, this is a fabulous photo.

There is another photo of a full view of this wonderful costume on Dot D’s Flickr page.

Politics

Barbara Boxer says John McCain is a Fighter

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

Barbara Boxer says John McCain is a fighter:

Last night at the Republican National Convention, John McCain used the word “fight” more than 40 times in his speech.

In the 16 years that we have served together in the Senate, I have seen John McCain fight.

I have seen him fight against raising the federal minimum wage 14 times.

I have seen him fight against making sure that women earn equal pay for equal work.

I have seen him fight against a women’s right to choose so consistently that he received a zero percent vote rating from pro-choice organizations.

I have seen him fight against helping families gain access to birth control.

I have seen him fight against Social Security, even going so far as to call its current funding system “an absolute disgrace.”

And I saw him fight against the new GI Bill of Rights until it became politically untenable for him to do so.

John McCain voted with President Bush 95 percent of the time in 2007 and 100 percent of the time in 2008 — that’s no maverick.

We do have two real fighters for change in this election — their names are Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Politics

Republicans vs. Democrats – A Study in Contrasts

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

Jason Rosenhouse over at ScienceBlogs has crafted a marvelous post about the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats.

It makes me weep.

It has become a cliche of modern political life that Republicans “play the game” so much better than Democrats. This is code for saying that Democrats have pesky things like souls and consciences that make it impossible for them to stand in front of audiences and tell bald-faced lies about their opponents.

Surely you noticed that there was almost nothing in the way of personal attacks during the entirety of the Democratic convention. Why do you suppose that is? Do you think that Democratic strategists just aren’t aware that negative campaigning, especially at the national level, is nearly always effective? Or do you think it’s because they find it genuinely distasteful to attack people with the requisite ferocity? That when given the opportunity to address a large fraction of the country they prefer to point to the policy failures of their opponents and to explain what they would do differently given the chance?

Ever wonder why there is no liberal equivalent to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck? It’s because normal, mentally healthy people are incapable of the sorts of things that they do. Most people are not capable of sustaining the anger and dishonesty required to engage in hours a day of sustained attack. Most people care at least a little bit about getting their facts straight before holding forth on television or radio. Only brain-dead fanatics are capable of that sort of extreme simple-mindedness. To find that on the left you have to shoot right past liberal into the realms of the extreme left-wing, where you will not find anyone with either an ounce of power, or an ounce of loyalty to the Democratic party. The crazy right-wing is fanatically loyal to the Republican party. The extreme left votes for Nader and gives lectures about how there is only the Republicrat party.

The Republicans think nothing of pitting one part of the country against another. John Kerry was from Massachussetts. As far as Republicans were concerned, that was a legitimate issue against him. The Northeast is a shadowy place full of people of shady values, the sort who don’t put their country first and sneer at people who do. They are perfectly happy to use a major American city (that would be San Francisco) as a bogeyman for scaring people into line. Can you imagine any Democrat, regardless of the electoral map, talking about Kansas or Oklahoma in such terms?

There is much, much more.

The republicans in the comments are trying their hardest to refute this, but they are not getting much traction.

Hobbies

Fixing Up the Sky Jump Machine

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

Some friends of mine gave me a 1974 vintage Gottlieb Sky Jump pinball game a while ago. It was in pretty rough shape. I believe it spent quite a few years in someones lake cabin with little maintenance.

When I first got it I cleaned the play field and replaced all the rubber. Otherwise I just left it as it was. It played, but it had some issues.

Yesterday I spent a few hours on it. This is the list of what I did:

  • The ball counter mechanism would always give you 6 balls, even when it was set to 3 ball mode, but you couldn’t play the 6th one. The ball in play lights didn’t work either. It turns out the ball counter mechanism was mis-adjusted. This also fixed the “match” at the end of the game. Fixed.
  • The 10X multiplier lights weren’t working at all. It turns out that the set screws that hold the advance wheel to the shaft were loose so it wasn’t turning. Fixed.
  • The credit wheel was only advancing and never subtracting games played. This didn’t really affect the play, but the free game “knock” was disabled because the credits were always full. This was due to someone (maybe me) bending the wrong contacts together for free play. Bending the correct contacts allows both free play and the credit wheel to work. Fixed.
  • The game instruction and replay score cards were dirty and torn. So I made up some new ones and printed them out. They look great. Fixed.
  • I also cleaned and waxed the playfield again and replaced a bunch of the lights.

There are still some light sockets that are not working all the time (dirty contacts) and one flipper is sticky.

I’m going to order some more lights and a flipper rebuild kit from The Pinball Resource and try and get all the lights working all the time. Also, the tilt switch is missing the weight, so the game doesn’t tilt. Some people might think this is a feature, but I think having it tiltable makes the game more challenging.

The head is also broken and will take some major work to repair. This will probably wait for quite a while as it doesn’t affect the play at all.

I’ll try and take some photos and put them up soon.

That game is a lot more challenging with only three balls!