It was not a fun day, with a glitch on a fiber channel link causing corruption in an Exchange database. As a side effect of recovery we've stress tested the SAN a bit. Note this is captured at 12:45am local time (so general activity is lower). Plus we've removed non-essential load to keep performance up, and rebalanced some IO off the 5 SATA volumes back to FC. Apparently the pressure reports need more watching... At least these drives are SATA-II.
A while ago motion-sensor paper towel dispensers were installed, and many people were frustrated as they didn't dispense nearly enough towel to get one's hands dry. People would wait out the delay and get multiple sheets. Apparently enough people complained, because about a week ago the electronic guts were replaced with manual ones. However people pulled towels to the side, resulting in needing to open the thing up to manually re-feed it to acquire towels. The next day, the paper signs pictured to the right appeared. Of course people didn't read it until after they got half a towel and jammed it, so the next day someone added the second part of the note. That was about a week ago. This morning I noticed someone added "That's what she said". The sign was gone after lunch.
This came up when reporting a couple IIS errors on an Exchange server today. I was investigating another problem so haven't looked back at the logs to figure out what actually happened (probably unlikely to be identifiable anyways, but initial guess is NLB related). It's not like this message is uncommon, but it provided a well-timed bit of humor to break up the searching.
Tom Smith: I'm On Firefly. As a side note, some readers may appreciate link 049 (in the upper right corner of that page) as well.
My sister received this in a fortune cookie, and I thought it needed to be shared.
Technology is the art of arranging the world so we do not notice it.
I took a photo trip today, and assembled 985 of the photos into a video (warning - 24MB). This part of the trip was a bit of an experiment based on a recent idea. I initially planned for a shot every 12 seconds. Unfortunately due to using a pot rather than fixed resistors, it not staying on the breadboard on its own, and not wanting to spend the time to tweak it properly while securing it, the time was significantly longer. First discovery is I realized that I need a smaller interval between photos. Five seconds would probably be better, although if the road was more visible, it may not be as bad. Second is the mount needs to be taller — I unfortunately neglected to take the wiper into account. The actual mount could have gone high enough to avoid it, but the means of keeping the camera from rotating could not. I need to devise a new way to keep it from rotating. I have an idea, but the initial 20 minutes and $2 at Home Depot for the camera mounting hardware didn't allow for that. I may have to invest another 20 and $5 now that I know the concept works.
Based on the video, can anyone say where I went? And if so, did you have to step through? Note, enlarging it just makes it seem more jumpy rather than helping - the 720p version is annoying to watch.
I'll be posting a link to another video soon too, that one a bit more fun to watch. I need to get some decent-looking versions that are less than 80MB first though. Video codecs don't deal well with every frame having significant differences, and Quicktime doesn't even seem to really try with nonstandard settings. :(
I stumbled on 31415926535.com, and the first thing I notice is a script called calcPi.js. Curious as to which values were used to calculate π, as the name implies calculation and not a lookup, I investigated further. Turns out it's a list of a lot of numbers, which isn't so unusual. The interesting part is what happens when it goes to pull the next value once the lookup table is exceeded. Rather than finishing or making a call to the server for more data, it simply runs Math.floor(Math.random()*10);. Makes me wonder how much of the included sequence is accurate.
Of course the randomly selecting (and highlighting) "secret" indexes is rather odd too.
I was reading an article about remote control toys being searched at airports, and something near the end stuck out a bit. Specifically, the new scrutiny will not extend to devices that automatically open car doors or to television remote controls
.
My first thought was wondering why someone would bring a television remote control in carry-on luggage? My second thought was these. Does this mean the TSA now encourages pranks in airports?
Saturday I was riding by so stopped into work to see why one of the UPSes said bad battery, and hopefully stop the pages for the weekend. I'm glad I did, because it was also complaining about the internal temperature being over limit, and the bad battery was expanding. The problem battery was immediately apparent when I ran my hand past it, as it was significantly hotter than the other batteries. Unfortunately it expanded too much and won't come out, but luckily comes out far enough to disconnect from the system. I'll maybe post better/more photos once we figure out how to best remove it from the UPS.
On Friday I left my computer running an update when I left for lunch. When I returned, it wouldn't wake. After some poking, I ended up with this flashing cursor. Seems like an interesting failure mode. Unfortunately after attempting various things with no response other than a few beeps in response, I had to resort to the power button.
Copyright ©2000-2008 Jeremy Mooney (jeremy-at-qux-dot-net)
