Pile of Dross

Hmm, just had my first two comment spams. My technique of not advertising this blog anywhere has obviously failed. Security through obscurity never works.

17,000 files sitting on the tape,
17,000 files sitting on the tape,
and if the tape should accidentally snap…
There’ll be 0 files sitting on the tape.

*Sigh*
Reliable storage = oxymoron

60,000 files sitting on the RAID 5 array,
60,000 files sitting on the RAID 5 array,
And if 2 hard disks should accidently fail….
There’ll be no files sitting on the RAID 5 Array.

Last night, in a fit of insomnia , I created an account at Last.fm. In the cold, clear but slightly rain spattered, light of day. I’m not sure I’ll use it that much - mostly I listen to my ipod which gets connected to a computer whenever I buy a new album - i.e. very infrequently. I have setup an itunes server on one of my linux systems, shockingly easy it was with mt-daapd, but still don’t tend to have music playing that often. We shall see.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Grid searches for avian flu cure

Shock! Grid actually useful! So that’s what that BioMed Data Challenge was all about. With all of the focus on the Large Hadron Collider experiments, its easy to forget about the small VOs (Virtual Organisations) that are actually doing real science on the LCG grid, rather than just gearing up for 2007/8

My office desktop has Office 2000 installed, which has autosave enabled - entirely sensible precaution give the proclivity of MS software to spontaneously die. However, it has one extremely aggravating feature - it asks me if I wish to save documents that I’ve opened to read. They’re marked read-only in the damn titlebar, I’ve made no explicit changes to it, so why the f*** does it pop up a bl**dy dialogue box 5 minutes later and every 5 minutes hence, asking me if I want to save it??? And after I’ve randomly pressed some button to just make it go away, because its broken my concentration, it comes back and moans that it can’t save it in its original location, so could I please give it a new location to save it, the document I have altered, and probably don’t care about any more. Aaaarrggh. Make it stop. Please.