JB's Miscellaneous Ramblings

During a normal day at work, I expect to receive audio input from:
iPod, personal cell, work cell (==desk phone), work PC (VOIP is popular here), and personal laptop.
I expect to send audio (speak in to. :) the middle 3 of those, and maybe all of the last 4.

WHY is there no desktop mixing console that deals with the proliferation of devices - more so, that handles both input AND output?

(If I'm wrong, PLEASE let me know.)

(I could deal with a 4-way mixer, if need be.)

(I thought I'd posted about this here before, but going over my last year of posts (<90) seems to show that I haven't.)

This struck me a few days ago. I don't know why it took so long to sink in.

1 fullest-length CD ~= 700MB
10 = 7GB
100 = 70 GB
1000 = 700 GB
2000 = 1.4 TB
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080710-seagate-breaks-terabyte-barrier-with-new-1-5tb-hard-drive.html
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148337
http://www.lse.org/~jailbait/cds.html

$400 (2 drives + raid1 case) = mirror copy of ALL OF MY CDs,
uncompressed.

I love the future, but I still want my flying car!

(Yes, I know the drives format to about 1.3TB, and I know I'm ignoring
various binary vs decimal conversions and lots of rounding, but not all
my cds are full length, and I don't have 2000, anyway, only 1500.)

[Poll #1249826]

Discuss in the comments, of course. :)

If you don't recognize the hardware mentioned in the subject, you don't want to bother looking ( behind the cut )

Thanks for any help you can give.

I'm sitting here, on the Northbound platform of the Baltimore Light Rail's Univ. of Baltimore/Mt. Royal station, waiting for the train to Hunt Valley, using wireless from the Maryland Institute College of Art.

It makes the annoying (and kinda warm) wait for the train less, well, annoying.

Here it is now.

Might as well ask here, too.

Taken from a conversation on IRC (not #e) today. Most of this is me, with 2 other voices jumping in.

Does anyone see a downside to this idea?

JB
= = =
So, I've got this question about data center rack layout... We've got racks with 2 circuits in them (10 outlets on one, 9 on the other (after you take out outlet for the rack fan). We've got stacks of machines with dual (redundant) power supplies. Most of the machines are powered with a Y-cable going to both power supplies.

Can you see where this is going? ...

Is there any reason any of you can think of to NOT connect each Y power cable to 2 different machines, and then to make sure that each machine is powered off of 2 different circuits? That way - by my figuring - you'd have to both lose a power supply AND lose the opposite circuit for a machine to go down.

(I also have this thought that there might be some advantage to hooking the 1st power to machines A and B, the 2nd to B and C, the 3rd to C and D and so on, to the limit of the Y to reach back to A... But I'm not near so certain about that.)

someone else> usually have machines with pairs of PSUs connected to disparate power sources

Right. The Y cables (long Dell's standard choice which you had to deselect while ordering) give you HW redundancy but leave you at the mercy of your power source.

As well, as we have 2 racks, 38 outlets and 22 dual-power-supplied machines, we kinda HAVE to go with Y power.
(and something like 1/3 to 1/2 of the racks are still empty...)

So if I go with my concept, we can hook up 22 machines to 22 outlets and STILL have each of them powered off of multiple PDUs.

I don't see the lose, but I've never thought of this before.

2nd Someone> if you have remote power controllers, there is a new issue ;)

Remote power is one of the reasons to do the ab/bc/cd/da thing. I could turn off any 2 to get a machine cycled.

Anyone in MetroBoston - ESPECIALLY either who can come to MIT tonight or who is coming to our openhouse tomorrow - have a degausser/bulk tape eraser I can borrow? I've got this stack of DATs that need to zero'd.

If you do, could I borrow it for a day or 2? (If you're not going to be at either place, let me know where you are and when I can come by to pick it up...)

Thanks!

http://www.ernestcline.com/spokenword/npa.htm

(Thanks to xeger)

To check out: are there any encrypted file systems for both mac and linux...

So, thanks to modern technology, I get to listen to music.

My mac at home has many mp3s on it. It has an Airport card in it. It's also running SlimServer. Having punched a hole in the home firewall for it, I'm able to stream music from home to my desktop. Yay.

But wait, it gets better.

Due to the vagueries of A) the home wireless, B) the cable-modem connection, C) the MP3 players on my desktop machine (running Linux (FC4)) - which seem to be bad at rebuffering after network congestion - I'm actually using VMWare Workstation to run {shudder} WinXP so I can run iTunes.

Yay, geekitude.

So, at work the mail server is a {shudder} exchange box. (It's fronted by a pair of linux boxes for stripping attachments, running Spam Assassin, and so on, but they deliver to the exchange box and that can't (won't) be changed.

Luckily, exchange supports IMAP/IMAPS so I (and the few other linux destop users) don't have to rely on VMWare and LookOut.

However, I want to read my mail in mutt. Mutt is good. I like mutt. IMAP is probably a good thing and I want to try sticking with it for a while - thus, I don't want to grab my mail with fetchmail and bring it locally to a given single machine.

But given the combination of Mutt, IMAP and Exchange, I have yet to figure out how to run the moral equivalent of procmail on my incoming mail stream.

So far, the best solution I've come up with is to keep a copy of Thunderbird (or Evolution, except that that's prone to freezing/crashing) running on my machine at work having it handle the mail filtering and then do my actual reading with mutt. While more or less functional, this is a bogus solution.

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks!

Currently, I've got running under screen:
Mutt (Mail)
Elinks (Web browser)
irssi (irc client)
pork (AIM client - which can also do irc, but I haven't been using it long enough to feel like trying to move all of my IRC stuff over to it.)

Don't drop the NetApp on your foot,
You may or may not break it.
That's not in the instruction book,
Your day, you will not make it.
The co-lo folks will look at you as hop 'round and cry "Boo Hoo!"
Don't drop the NetApp on your foot.

And mind your manners, as circumstances may require,
And never set the cat on fire.