Category: Computer bits

Computer stuff

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Thank goodness for backups

Murphy’s law strikes again. Go figure. The week the only two people who know anything about the server (I’m one of them) go away is when it dies. And die it did, sometime Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, after everyone had left for the holiday. As near as I can tell, something happened to the root file system. Restored data from backup, and it’s partially OK, but it only boots off the floppy. Seems to be having some bootloader issues on the primary hard drive. Ugh. At least there was no significant data loss. Data was restored from a backup done on Tuesday.

So now there’s a bunch of blogging that I had planned to do while I was away at RSNA that I’ll have to do retroactively. Stay tuned.

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More Blogshares

It seems that to increase the price of your blog in Blogshares, you need to comment on blogs. On a lot of blogs. Blogs that are also in Blogshares. Or have people link to your blog. Blogshares only seems to care what’s on the main index page of the blog, and with comments being transitory things, you need to do a lot of commenting. Which usually means a lot of blog reading. Now, I don’t know about other people, but I work during the day, and have other things to do in the evening so my blog reading is usually a spare time thing. And I generally don’t have much to say about to other bloggers in their comments.

And aside from search engines, I think I might have 2 or 3 regular readers (myself included), so I don’t think too many people are linking to my blog. Not that I care that much.

So I guess my blog will be relegated to Blogshares mediocrity, and my blog valuation will remain at $1000, aside from occasional spikes when I find something interesting enough to comment on.

I guess it’s a good thing there’s no real money involved.

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Blogshares

Hmm, the guy over at Geek Rants bought up all the remaining shares in my blog.

I wonder if this has any significance, other than boosting my blog share price. I wonder what I should do now…issue more shares? Have I been taken over? Oh what to do, what to do…

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Playing with Fedora

Spent some time this morning poking around inside the Fedora box I built on Friday. Overall, I’d say it’s pretty similar to RedHat 9. Some of the software is newer (GCC 3.3.2, Perl 5.8.1 were the first ones I found). Apache and MySQL were a version behind, but since those just came out a couple of weeks ago, not unexpected.

Haven’t really pushed it too hard yet, although since it’s on an old 400 MHz PII, I can only push it so hard. It runs pretty well on the old box I stuffed it into. Web pages were served up pretty quickly. OpenOffice apps took a while to load, but ran fine. Seems stable enough. Now to read through some of the Fedora mailing list archives to see what interesting things people are discussing.

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A new box to play with

Have a new Fedora box to play with. The only machine I could scrounge up to install it on was an old Dell Optiplex GX1, 400 MHz Pentium II with 128 MB and 4 GB hard drive. Not the fastest machine in the world, and probably a little underpowered, but it was the best one I could lay my hands on. Should be enough for me to see how it behaves.

Managed to shoehorn a fairly complete installation, although it only leaves me with about 600 MB of disk space to play in. I’ll have to see about scavenging another hard drive to put into this box.

Installation was pretty simple, and similar to installing Redhat Linux 9. Boot off the CD, select the packages you want and let it go. Installation on this box took about 2 hours to install about 3 GB of stuff. Like I said, not the fastest machine around.

Too late to play with for today, so the fun will have to wait until Monday.