Geeky Stuff

I was fiddling with work's Canon Rebel XTi camera, and noticed that when I hold it up to my face, the display showing current settings blanks automatically. At first I thought it was an automatic timeout, then I pulled the camera away from my face and the display turned on again! Once again, held it up to my face, display turned off.

Whoah! I found there's a little sensor that detects the presence of your face, and turns off the display when you hold it up to your face to take a photo. The sensor is just over the display and is probably capacitative, like the trackpad on most modern laptops.

I love well-thought-out interface design like this. It solves what would otherwise be a problem (glaring display just under your eyes when shooting) in a completely non-intrusive manner.

I even posted a video of this, because it's so neat.

I just want to remind everyone out there who runs any sort of server or has important data that RAID is *NEVER* a substitute for proper backups.

RAID is only meant to improve reliability and uptime. In other words, a hard drive can fail and be replaced without bringing the system down. It will NOT protect against things like:

- Double disk failures (it happens! More often than you think.)
- Power surges frying the system
- User error (rm -rf * .tmp Aaww D'OH!!)
- and much more.

If you don't have a proper offline backup that is completely SEPARATE from your server, RAID or not, your data's days are numbered. It isn't a question of "if", but rather, "when".

DO NOT TRUST RAID TO KEEP YOUR DATA SAFE. ADOPT A PROPER BACKUP STRATEGY.

The time to do this, if you haven't, is yesterday. I'm serious.

Anyway, end rant. I just needed to remind everyone because I saw it happen yet again.

My boss and I walked into one of our server rooms to look at a modem that was not working. This room also contains some machines used and maintained by the database group; we try not to touch their machines and let them take care of them.

As we walk in we hear a faint muffled sound, as if someone were speaking. It sounded vaguely like a telephone intercept message, so we figured maybe someone connected a telephone in the room and it was off hook.

As we tracked down the source of the problem, we found it. It was a newish machine which was sitting nestled among a bunch of older machines on the database group's rack.

I pressed my ear to it, and it was saying, repeatedly:

"Your keyboard and mouse may have a problem."

Nevermind that there was no keyboard and mouse even attached to the system; it was being used as a server. I went to talk to one of the database group managers and showed her the machine. She was as boggled as I was, and talked to her tech staff to come shut it up.

So yep, computers have talking BIOSes now. And they sound just like Jane Barbe.

We just upgraded our mail server at work from a dual processor Xeon (netburst, aka crap) 2.4GHz with 4GB of RAM to an eight-core Xeon (Core architecture, so about twice as much per core, per clock) 2.4GHz with 16GB of RAM.

It's a bit* faster now.

* - HOLY FUCK IT'S LIKE A BAT OUT OF HELL DOING WARP 9!!!!!!

Except for my bookmarks, I've created a fresh new Firefox profile. This is the first time I do this in years, having carried the same profile from Windows to Linux to MacPPC to MacIntel and so on.

Already the browser feels faster and a couple niggling issues I have been having are gone.

So if Firefox is giving you weird woes, it might be time for a fresh profile. Not to mention, clearing out all your cookies is good for privacy; all those websites that have been tracking you will suddenly no longer know it's you. ;)

I took one of those online quiz memes; I'm used to them asking for my E-mail address (upon which I give them a throwaway one) but the latest one actually asked for my *street address!*

Is anyone really stupid enough to put their real information in there? Heck, the bottom of the page says that you agree to let them share the information with third parties, which means you're likely to get inundated with spam and junk snailmail.

I put in a fake address, and it said to please enter my real address, as if it somehow knew. So I submitted the form again with the same fake address and that time it went through. I suspect they may be trying trick people into entering their real address the second time to get their meme result.

It reminds me of this, actually. :)

Of course I'm not posting a link to the meme since they're obviously a shady company and I don't want to promote them, but the animal I'm most like is the jaguar. At least they got the feline part right!

Today at work I had further confirmation that "standard" is not necessarily standard. We purchased a few rack mount servers recently, and also a rack to place them in. Today it was time to assemble the rack and test the rack mount kits in it to ensure everything would fit before deployment date.

Arrrgh. Even though it's a standards-compliant rack, Dell's rack rails wouldn't fit into the rack as it was. The rack has two parallel rows of square holes at each leg, instead of having only one as Dell assumes. This means that Dell's "clever" rack-mount kit, which can be adapted to either square-hole or round-hole rails, can't be inserted.

I had to take a big-ass pair of pliers, and bend the inner row of square-holes out of the way to install the rails.

This is why I like to test fit and finish for everything before the downtime window. Dealing with this crap when you're pressed for time is NOT fun!

(click to embiggen)

If you are running Mac OS X Leopard, hit cmd-space, then type in an algebraic equation, for instance:

( 2000.00 * 0.04 ) / 365

Watch as it evaluates it for you right there. You can even use scientific functions like sin, cos, tan, and so on.

Ever see this dialog when trying to return to a search results page?

Arrrgh. This is especially irritating when it's a search results page that took a long time to load, on a slow server.

Why can't they add a "View cached version anyway" button so that you can see the page as it was before you navigated away from it? Sure, you can open new tabs from the search results page instead of just clicking the links, but by the time you see this dialog it's a bit too late to decide to do this.