Jory Stone's Place

Dad had new tires put on the van today. The old tires were well worn, one was balding so bad you could see the metal mesh underneath. Another slowly leaked air and had to be aired up everyday before driving anywhere.

I spent most of today outside cleaning Mom's AC and playing with Lily. I didn't plan on playing in the pool but I slipped and fell into the pool, and so since I was already wet I went ahead and played with Lily for a while. Took me quite some time to dry even though it was scorching outside today. I think a have a light sunburn, it doesn't hurt but my skin is visibly red.

In the computer side of things, I setup my local Linux box to act as a caching http proxy using squid. It was very easy to configure and setup and it actually does seem to help. I expect with all four computers using the proxy we should benefit from visiting the same sites.

After setting up the proxy I thought about RAID-5, the Linux box is also our backup server. Every night all our systems do a daily backup via ftp to the Linux box. RAID-5 would make me feel much safer and would actually be very easy to setup.

After googling a little bit I found this interesting article on Tom's Hardware about using Software RAID-5 in Windows XP Pro, http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20041119/.

After reading that I think software RAID is much better than hardware RAID for the recovery aspect, as with hardware if your RAID controller fails you will need to buy another one of the same model if you still can. With software RAID all you need is a system that has enough IDE (or SATA) connections.

The cost of software RAID isn't high either, just the cost of the hard drives. Buying three 160GB hard drives for a total of 320GB of storage in RAID-5 comes out to almost $200.

I compiled a version of the Welcome Back Plugin for XChat for Windows users.

Welcome Back Plugin 0.5 Win32 Build (07/25/2005, 4KB)

Homepage: http://tuxserve.sourceforge.net/wb.php

Wow, I haven't written a blog entry for quite sometime.

I've been busy looking for my own car and working to have enough money to actually pay for the car

I recently bought a laptop and have been using the wireless lan. I must say a notebook is one of the coolest things I've messed with. Being able to move from room to room without any hassle. Using it in the car it sweet to, of course I only use it when I'm not driving... One thing that amazes me is hot the laptop gets whenever you really start using the cpu. I don't know how it compares to other laptops, but it gets hot enough that it actually burns my bare legs. You have to wear some jeans to keep your legs intact while doing heavy processing. Light processing like surfing the internet, listening to mp3s, chatting, and compiling doesn't heat it up very much so those tasks work very well on it. However I'm afraid to do any video encoding for fear that it would melt itself. Continue reading "Long time no see"