Not Necessarily Interesting News

Good: Gift certificate to Fry’s that I used to buy a DVD burner that I’ve wanted for a long time. I wanted it to do backups and such.

Bad: Get it home, install it, and make a backup of my Windows partition that I never use. I was booted into Windows to upgrade the firmware on the drive so I figured I’d do the backup.
Next I boot back into Linux and go to do a backup of that partition. Hmmm. Why can’t I read those files in my home dir? They don’t show up in an ‘ls’ and I can’t ‘rm’ them either. Weird. Reboot for grits and shins. Now it can’t mount that drive and wants a fsck. Ok. Try it. fsck fails weirdly.
After running some tests I find that the drive cratered, minutes before I was gonna back it up. Great, just great.

Other toys I got: Games for my Nintendo DS. Some books. My traditional Eeyore sweatshirt( I now have about 8 of them). A bottle of fine bourbon. And more.

As usual, being the only grandson, my son raked it in. Santa brought him some rollerblades. He also got an authentic military helmet and lots of Marine memorabilia(He wants to be a Marine/SEAL when he grows up). He also got a board game(yes, they still make board games) from us called Ticket to Ride. It’s one of the best games I’ve played in a while. It’s simple enough for my 8 year old but deep enough to keep adults interested. He slaughtered his grandfather and me at it the first time we played. If you like board games, I recommend picking it up.

: Guilty as Sin from the album “Wayward Angel” by Kasey Chambers

Last night I settled down to watch the only network show I watch, C.S.I., and wait for Mando to drop by. About 15 minutes in the TV goes ‘pop’ and all the power disappears. Crap. I wander out to the garage to find the breaker that flipped but couldn’t see any that were tripped. Weird. I walk in to see if it could have been the surge protector behind the TV. Nope. Looks good. Then I hear the lonely beeping of a UPS coming from the computer room. Uh oh. Ok, so it’s definitely a breaker. I go out and flip every one of them off then back on. Still no dice. Shit. Mando drops by around now so we talk for a bit before I attack the breaker box again. I get out the circuit tester to test the breakers themselves. They all check out okay. I finally give up around midnight and decide to call an electrician this morning.
This morning I wake up determined to find the problem. I pulled every outlet that I believed was on the circuit and finally found what you see pictured above. Oops. That explains a lot. I had a spare outlet and replaced it and everything was good. I guess I could have burned down the house under the right condition. We got lucky.
I also found out that that one circuit served my entire computer room _and_ my entertainment center _and_ the Christmas tree. I guess it didn’t like powering 6 or 7 systems + HDTV + Xbox + surround sound + Christmas tree + a couple of lamps at the same time. Hmmm. I guess my New Years project is to rewire the computer room with it’s own upgraded circuit.

sirius proc # dmesg                
PROMLIB: Sun IEEE Boot Prom 3.25.3 2000/06/29 14:12
Linux version 2.4.28-sparc-r1 (root@livecd)
(gcc version 3.3.4 20040623 (Gentoo Linux 3.3.4))
#1 Thu Dec 16 09:39:16 CST 2004
ARCH: SUN4U

sirius proc # cat /proc/cpuinfo  
cpu             : TI UltraSparc IIi (Sabre)
fpu             : UltraSparc IIi integrated FPU

sirius proc # cat /proc/meminfo 
        total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:  cached:
Mem:  526131200 513212416 12918784        0 50577408 376258560
Swap: 511950848        0 511950848
MemTotal:       513800 kB
MemFree:         12616 kB

My Ultra5 is alive! Alive I say!

My wife isn’t so keen on the number of computers I have currently living in my office at home. This is just a pic of the ones I have running. It doesn’t show the pile of parts and such just out of frame or the server in the closet.
For those keeping score(left to right):

• SGI Octane running Irix 6.5
• Sun Sparc Ultra 5 will be running Gentoo once I get to it
• Sun Sparc Ultra 2 Dual CPU running Solaris
• SGI O2 Irix running 6.5
• Apple iBook running OSX
• P3 (under desk, Nana’s computer in for service)
• Athlon 2800 running SuSE/WinME(under desk)

I think it’s a good start.

My iBook lost another logic board. It did the same damn thing this time last year. It’s a known problem to Apple. They replaced it last time free of charge and are doing the same this time. I was assured last time that the new board was a redesigned board and it wouldn’t happen again. Wrong. I did get lucky though, Apple extended coverage for iBooks with this problem and that extended coverage ends on the 18th of this month. Two weeks later and I’d have to pay for it on my dime. I think when I get it back I’ll sell it on eBay and find myself a shiny Powerbook.