Harry Metcalfe

Does social networking give you cancer?

To clear up recent confusion, we offer the following as a public service:

www.doessocialnetworkinggiveyoucancer.com

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When RAID arrays go bang

Harry gets sad.

One of the drives in my RAID5 array seems to have comitted hara kiri. Just as I was making my morning tea, its death screams beeped forth from the hall — not very honorable — and on reboot, the RAID BIOS screen throws up a horrid red “Broken array” message.

Since the whole server is a bit shagged anyway, I think I’m going to decomission it and move to mirrored 1.5Tb drives. This will give a bit of extra capacity as well as using less power than my current 4-drives-plus-raid-card configuration. I can bump Ubuntu up from 7.10 to the 9.04 beta as well.

So — with drives ordered and an external USB caddy on the way for backing everything up — I shall find out about setting up drive mirroring in software under Ubuntu. Wish me luck!

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Introspection, courtesy of last.fm

One of the best things about the web is the way it tells you stuff you may not have noticed. My last.fm page is rather instructive. Apparently, this is what I’ve been listening to for the last 7 days:

Which looks about right. They’re all great musicians.

Incidentally: last.fm is great. I’m a latecomer but a convert nonetheless. Compared to this, the radio is a pretty crap way to discover new music.

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Guess what burns 4 million tonnes of stuff per second?

The sun. Well, it’s not really burning I suppose. Still, it’s an incredible number: and ever-so-slightly worrying, in a totally irrational kind of way.

This and more from a fascinating episode of Horizon, which you can view until the silly DRM kills it, here. (Hat tip to Simon)

Certainly the most amusing thing in the programme was the predictions, following the vein of a long standing joke: that fusion power is always 50 years away. At the end of the show, they had all the contributors give their estimate for when fusion power will finally happen. They averaged out at 23 years, so I guess we should update the joke.

That is, unless we started telling the joke in 1982, in which case it becomes a meta-joke, which would be pretty cool in itself…

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