Rabbit
Shadow 4, Telephone Nil.

Strange Fruit
One of the trees in our yard is a Medlar tree, which is of European descent. It's hardy, attractive and frost tolerant. Despite our tree having been planted less than a year ago, it's provided us with a good harvest of fruit for its size, despite the dry summer. To add to the tree's praises, it's one of the few fruits which are in season during winter, with the fruit just reaching the ripe stage now. Despite all this, medlar fruit are rarely available commercially.

Having had my first experience with this fruit recently, it's not surprising to see why. the fruit are about half the size of my thumb. While still immature, they're hard, orange-to-red, and taste something between pear and apple. However, while the immature fruit are nice, they're only slightly less hard than granite. The "mature" fruit are quite a different experience. One day, your lovely reddish fruit will have turned both the colour and consistancy of rotten apple. This fermentation caused by natural yeasts transforms the hard, inedible fruit into a sweet, soft, squishy delicacy. It tastes something akin to unsweetened apple sauce.

Picking and transporting the immature fruit would be a breeze, but convincing the public that something which has self-fermented is good to eat is another matter. Eating my first medlar was quite a leap of faith, all my previous experiences in puting brown squishy fruit into my mouth have been bad.

I'm looking forward to next winter, when I'm sure we'll have a larger crop and will be able to share this unique experience with more friends.

Pasta
Purchased an inexpensive pasta-maker and have been eating freshly made pasta for probably two-thirds of all meals since. Making pasta is quite simple, doesn't take much time, and tastes fantastic. Mind you, using five eggs per 500g of flour makes me happy that we've got chickens, although with the short days they've dropped to laying only 3-4 eggs/day.

The pasta-maker, while having a lifetime guarantee, has already broken the clamp which is used to affix it to the table-top. With a molded-plastic handle, I'm not at all surprised that it didn't last long. I'll be returning to the shop in the next few days along with receipt, guarantee, and poorly made clamp in hand.

The joys of hardware
I've been hearing an odd sound in the office the last couple of days. At first I thought it was the scanner, but it continued to persist after the scanner had been turned off.

This morning, Jacinta remarked that she could distinctly smell the odour of frying silicon. That filled me with dread, having already had two power supplies and a hard-drive die in our main server over the last few years.

It ended up the problem was a CPU fan that was on the verge of dying. The smell was caused by dust that had burnt on the heat-sink after the fan had stopped working. An easy enough job of swapping in a new CPU/fan. The old CPU works, but I don't have a replacement fan for it, and don't really have a use for it otherwise.

The resurrection
After almost of month of calling data recovery houses, searching on ebay, negotiating with second hand merchants from overseas, and general waiting for the post, my replacement drive arrived today.

Popped the new drive into my machine, formatted it, ran a few tests. Yup, it works.

Pulled it out, swapped the dead controller on my old drive with the controller from the new drive. Plugged it in, booted, ran fdisk. Oh my goodness, the partition table in intact. I'm so lucky.

Mount the drive. Wow, the superblock is still intact. Read the data from the drive. That's all there too.

Managed to recover every single file on the toasted drive. Very very very happy Paul. Cost, about $AU100 vs $AU1000 for professional data recovery.

Moral of the story: Keep backups of your junk drives. Just because you wouldn't put anything of value on your squid cache drive, doesn't mean that you won't (in a moment of stupidity) decide it's a good place to store your six years worth of mail archives.

Other News
I have a great new way of making money using my computer and the internet! I can work from home, set my own hours, and earn TAX-FREE income. Yes, it really does work!

No, I'm not going to tell you what it is. If everyone was doing it, then I wouldn't be able to make anywhere near as much.

Massive Filesystem Corruption
At about 10am this morning, the power supply on the main server failed. This has happened once before, and to be honest the novelty of fitting a not-quite-the-same power supply into the case was wearing a bit thin. I did it nonetheless, using an old supply from a 386 that had been hanging around just waiting to be made useful again.

With the new power-supply in place, it was discovered that only two of the three disks were responding. Hmm, very odd. Locate faulty disk, remove, check over...

Oh my. Chips on the drive controller aren't supposed to bubble like that, are they? And boy does it smell bad! That's okay, that drive was just /var, and I can live without my log files and proxy cache. After all, that's why I've made backups of the other two disks but not this one.

Except that /var contains the all-important /var/spool/mail, /var/cvs, Debian package information, and some databases. A bit of an ouch there.

It was only later that I discovered that I had my last six years worth of mail also on said hard-drive, since it had more space than the other disks. That was the crushing blow.

As it happens, the blowing power-supply also managed to cause damage to the motherboard/CPU/RAM as well, since init would segfault upon startup. Changing the Mobo/CPU/RAM fixed the problem. I'll be testing sticks of memory to see which ones can be recovered.

Moral of the story, backup everything, even the stuff you don't care about, in case there's some stuff you do care about in there as well.

It looks like the drive's controller is dead, but the platters and mechanism inside are still okay. Tried replacing the controller with a similar model from a drive that has busted insides, but to no avail. It *tries* to spin the drive up and all, but is obviously expecting something else. I think if I can find an identical controller (old-ish Qantum fireball) I should be fine. I'm hoping that one of these professional data recovery joints has a big box of them.