Weddings!
Two very good friends were married this weekend, and jarich was the matron of honour. A good time was had by all, and I put my geek toys to good use by burning CDs with 300+ photographs for the couple and their family at the end of the day.

One amusing part of the ceremony was when the celebrant asked the groom to vow that he would be a loving and faithful wife.

New Flags
Have written new flags for Chile, Scotland, Switzerland, and Texas.

Peep
I've installed peep, and I must admit, it's rather cool.

Now a variety of different birds chirp away when we see web-traffic, and the species of bird depends upon what website is being viewed. Frogs croak when we see bounced mail, birds warble when legitimate mail is received, and doves coo when we receive spam.

As the CPU load increases the faint tinkling of a brook increases into the roar of a river, the sound of crickets is used to indicate the strength of inbound traffic, and the sighing of the wind for outbound traffic.

A goose can be heard in the distance in the case of changed disk SMART reporting, and a rooster crows (quite noticably!) in the case of a more serious error.

The surprising thing is, this isn't distracting. It instead forms a nice calming background of sounds. In fact, it's much more disturbing when I don't hear anything. It certainly makes a nice change to the background of whirring fans.

Writing new clients for peep also provides to be quite straightforward, although the documentation on many of the options could certainly be improved. I also tweaked the server's code in a few places, so it no longer wired-in that it binds to all interfaces on a machine, or broadcasts its presence.

One thing that I do need are more sounds. I may go looking for them should I ever find myself with a spare moment.

After some pain, and many hours, the new box is happily chugging away. I took advantage of the downtime not only to upgrade the motherboard, but also the CPU and RAM, and also moving from a 2.4.18 kernel to 2.6.7.

One thing that was immediately obvious is that the 2.6.7 kernel is fast. The speed at which the machine started when I loaded the new kernel was almost jaw-dropping. However probably the most plasing thing is the speed of the hard-drives.

I'm watching our RAID rebuild itself at a swift 28M/second, which is a 650% the speed at which it used to run. At least I hope it's rebuilding -- it could be going really fast because it's just pulling sectors off the disks and throwing them into the bit-bucket.

Some things in the upgrade didn't work quite as well. The onboard gigabit ethernet does come with Linux drivers, but they cause a kernel panic whenever they're unloaded, or when the interface is brought down. That's not something I'm going to put anywhre near a production machine.

The onboard 'firmware' RAID also came with Linux drivers (iteraid), which didn't seem to have made it onto the CD, but could be downloaded from the manufacturers website. These are GPLed, and give access to the firmware RAID arrays as emulated SCSI drives.

At least, that's what they do for everyone else. I spent more time than I care to admit tweaking, loading, unloading, and reading the source-code for these drivers trying to get them working. They detect the hardware fine. They cheerfully report the drives or arrays I have connected. They just don't do anything more. I haven't yet got the 2.6.x drivers running yet. As such, of the four PATA channels in the machine, I can only use two. Very frustrating.

At least I can use the on-board sound. Maybe I'll get peep running after all.

If you're making a motherboard, and you're going to provide onboard IDE RAID, that's great, even if the product isn't fantastic. However, should the user specify that they would just prefer to have some IDE channels, please do so in a standard fashion.

I shouldn't be up at 3am building kernel modules for something that should work out of the box.