James Mason's Blog -or- The Journal of Contemporary Lunacy

*Sniffle* The first Raspberry Pi I bought decided to cark it overnight. It has been running 24/7 for over a year, which is nothing to sneeze at for a sub-$50 computer. Fortunately, I had a couple of spares sitting on my desk so getting back up and going was a matter of minutes.

Went for a short stroll around the suburb and it's like there's an ant plague - and they're aggressive little buggers. Lost count of the number of times they managed to get onto my feet as I walked past and proceeded to start biting. At one point there were so many on the path that stopping to brush a couple off meant that five or six more climbed aboard. Couldn't help but think of this scene from Watamote... ...only without it being due to me dowsing myself in soda beforehand.

I've been resurrecting a Database I wrote about 10 years back (and have been tacking on additions to ever since). I wrote it so long ago that it assumes register_globals = on - so I was faced with either running an old version of PHP just for it or updating it to do things properly (i.e., use superglobals instead). I figured I'd get out my (metaphorical) shovel and at least kludge together something to have it running until I knuckle down an re-write the front-end - which means it's now full of $variable = $_REQUEST['variable'] lines... It's actually been kind of fun going through something I wrote so long ago, full of things I'd never do if I was writing it today and a few things I'd actually forgotten how to implement. Still works!

On August 16th, Debian will celebrate its 20th anniversary - quite an amazing achievement. It has been my distro of choice since around 2001 and I can't see changing to anything else anytime soon. Thanks to all the people involved in putting it all together :)

Decided it was time to upgrade my network storage - moving from 4TB in RAID-0 at the moment to a stand-alone NAS with 6TB in RAID-5 (3x3TB HDDs). The NAS has a lot of nifty extra features, like a UPnP/DLNA server, HTTP, FTP and eSATA on the back. Hopefully get this setup tonight then kickoff the data transfer - which may take a small while ...

Finally got a chance to test out the HP ProCurve Switch I picked up off of eBay recently - it arrived on Monday but, as I was away all week with work, today was the first opportunity to make sure the thing actually worked. Good news is that it worked like a champ and a quick password clear let me into it. Nice thing is that it's default configuration picks up an address via DHCP, so I didn't need to go digging out a null-modem cable to console into it :) The main reason I picked it up was to give myself a crash course in the HP equivalents for all the things I know from the Cisco side of the fence. There's a neat little list here that summarizes most of the common commands - very handy!

Yeah, I'm reading through Scott Pilgrim for the nth time. If only I could find another GN I enjoyed even half as much...