2007 — 10 May: Good news, bad news
As I said only yesterday (migawd, was it only yesterday?) in between trivial matters like a visit to see Christa's surgeon at lunchtime, it's time to hook up the "Slug" and attach the two Western Digital "My Book" 320 GB external hard drives. The picture demonstrates the miniature nature of this ensemble, though it cannot show you how quiet it is. (Those are "normal" size paperbacks partly visible at the top.) The little device in the middle is the LinkSys "Slug"1 embedded Linux system running on a descendant of the original Acorn RISC chip, faster than my 1996 RiscPC StrongARM. It's flanked by the two USB2 drives.
In other news, Christa needs some (hopefully minor) surgery to repair the hernia she has developed following last year's more major surgery. This is scheduled for about six weeks time unless things go (as it were) pear-shaped between now and then. What was that about a sea of troubles?
Oh yes, the drives! They are both (finally, after several hours of fumbling) successfully formatted to ext3, and both visible to the XP Pro system, but not yet showing up on the iMac. And I've yet to try the XP Home and the Ubuntu, too. Further investigation will now have to wait for a night's sleep; the first decent one in several weeks, I hope!
I also found B&Q to be far better equipped with network cable accoutrements (like, say, lengths in excess of 5m) than the PCWorld at Hedge End. Curious!
24/7? Don't make me laugh!
I thought these online banks were supposed to be at my service, day and night, 365 days a year, whenever it was convenient? Tell that to the Alliance & Leicester which claims to be undergoing some maintenance and hopes I am not unduly inconvenienced. Definitely time for bed.
Good news, bad news (take 2)
The good news is that one of the network drives (the one on the left, as it happens) now has all my music MP3s on it (some 21,990 files occupying [some might say "sprawling over"] 86.8GB after a copying process of about four hours. But the bad news is I don't seem to have any way of seeing the space still available on an ext3 drive under XP Pro as interrogated via the oh-so-sophisticated "My Network Places" interface. I'm receptive to clues. Staying on my networked theme, a quick trip into Bevois Valley (for Her to visit Aldi, of course) allowed me to pop into Maplin and pick up a 25m reel of Ethernet cable to run downstairs to the Roku Network music player. Yes, I am going non-wireless! Until convinced otherwise, at least.
Blasts from the past
Was it London's Café Royale of which it was said if you sit there long enough, everyone who is anyone can be seen walking past? Well, for Chandlers Ford, the same obviously can be applied to Waitrose. Greetings, therefore, to a svelte-looking Geoff Robinson (though I cannot fully condone what appeared to be his choice2 of newspaper). Oh, and happy birthday, Judy Smythson! (Wife of a LEO pioneer.)
What is it with Firefox on OS X? Crash and burn, taking the whole iMac with it yet again. And I'd been going to say how much I enjoyed the three latest PC v Mac ads, too. Back to Safari then.