irrelevancy

After seeing this article on the problem with BIOS/hard drive power management, I decided to check out how my Thinkpad T23 was doing.


$ date ; sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Load_Cycle_Count
Mon Oct 29 00:50:18 CDT 2007
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0012 087 087 000 Old_age Always - 131889
$ █


Yikes. I don’t know what the rating for this hard drive is, but most of the numbers I’ve seen are around 200,000. I’ve only had this PC for a couple months maybe. Even assuming 200 cycles per day, say 60 days, it’s only about 12,000. Ubuntu doesn’t turn on any power management of the disk by default and laptop-mode was never running, so it does whatever the BIOS/HDD is set to do. I’d hate to think that I burned through most of the life of this hard drive just in last couple months or so.

This PC was running XP (I assume) prior to being given to me. It was an easy fix for Linux, following the directions at the link above. How do other operating systems handle disk management? Are newer hard drives less aggressive in their power management?

Since I’m getting all Web 2.0′d up anyway, I found a great use for social bookmarking. I have a Flickr Photo of the Moment widget on my homepage and there’s some great stuff on there. I keep bookmarking favorites, but I have them on at least 4 computers and can never find them again until I get back to that machine. So I signed up for a del.icio.us account to keep better track.

Should be integrated into this blog, but I may have passed out and might currently be drooling on my keyboard.

Wikidiot
noun
someone who spends over an hour trying to figure out how to create a new wiki page (on their own wiki, no less)

I installed a wiki on this site. I have some configuration files and information about PCs or ports or whatever. I always forget and have to keep looking them up or have information in too many other places and I can’t think of a good way to fit it into a blog. I mean, yeah, writing it and publishing it; but it’s too disorganized for my obsessive-compulsive needs.

Also, I guess I just wanted to do it for the sake of doing it. I get a kick out of geeky sysadmin-type stuff. I had a ton of fun in my Linux II class, setting up email and web and DNS servers.

It was very easy to install. Download the tarball, FTP up to the site, and just go to the default page where it pretty much does everything automatically. I had to create a new SQL database and user, but nothing more than I had to do to set up this blog.

I was going to put some stuff in just to see how it all works, but it’s already 3am and it took me forever just to figure out how to create a new page. There was no immediate link, no hints in the special pages, the help pages weren’t clear about how to do it. Finally I just searched Google and you just have to enter something in the search box and if it’s doesn’t already exist, then it will provide a link to create it. Duh. You could also go to a direct link, but I wasn’t familiar with the syntax. As much as I’ve used Wikipedia, I’ve only ever been a reader.

I posted yesterday about Jaiku and privacy concerns, but it was just a thought about Google in general. Then today there was an article on Slashdot (or yesterday, rather, I’m a little behind on my news aggregator) from the New York Times about Jaiku and privacy.

I thought it was interesting, mostly because I didn’t know what Jaiku was supposed to be all about. I do sort of agree with the article. I have privacy concerns from just simply having a cell phone. I hate that people expect me to always have it turned on and on my person. But I don’t quite understand how people get all worked up about it. There are no online services that are compulsory. And there’s an easy rule-of-thumb whenever this sort of thing comes up: if you want to keep something to yourself, don’t put it on the Internet!

Are netizens doomed as we sign up for every hot, new online service?

Minna teased me with a Jaiku invite, as they’re not taking new users due to be acquired by the Almighty Google. Seems like she hasn’t been a user long enough to send out invites or whatever, so I signed up for a Twitter account. Guess they’re pretty similar, but Jaiku seems to support more of a discussion, where Twitter is simply “what I’m doing now” or just a random thought.

Twitter (that word is strangely pleasing to say) has some nice Linux applets, Firefox extensions, support for instant messengers. Also gets picked up by Mugshot, of which I’m not a member, but it seems pretty cool to aggregate all your social web stuff.

So, Twitter has been integrated here for the time being. I’ll try it out.

- – -

An aside: despite privacy concerns, Google continues to grow. My feeling is someone’s going to take over the world someday, at least Google’s stuff actually works. So what if the chip in my head is forever in beta?

I just get concerned about Google. I tend to root for the underdog and I don’t think they count any longer. But I like their minimalist styling and it’s just so damn easy and useful. I use their Google homepage, the unfortunately-named iGoogle; Gmail, Reader, Calendar, Docs, Maps, Earth, etc. Somehow the main search site got blocked from here for a little while (happened while I was downloading some torrents, maybe the IP filter, although it happened to other PCs on this network, too) and it’s like the entire Internet may as well be down. I had to go use Yahoo! search for the first time in, what, 6-7 years or something? Reminded me why Google is so popular, their stuff just works better.