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This site contains various pieces of writing across my various interests, and spanning several years. You can fork this site on github if you wish.
In our particular scenario, our mobile training server occasionally forgets about its hard-drive entirely, independent of operating system. It's the good old 'lost interrupt' message, and when it happens, not even the BIOS can find the missing drive.
We replaced the hard-drive but the problem continues. Remaining suspects are the cable and the IDE controller. We've swapped the drive to both a new controller and a new cable, hoping that will make it stable. We really want it to be stable, as we're running a course tomorrow and a dozen people will be using it, and wanting the hard-drive to remaining available while they do so.
Close inspection of the removed cable reveals a small nick on one part, so I'm hoping it's just the cable. Dying IDE controller means we get to replace the motherboard, and this is a rather non-standard motherboard in a rather non-standard case.
A huge thumbs up goes to eps2eps (and it's sibling, ps2ps). What's that, you say? Utilities to convert postscript into postscript? Why, I can do that using cat, and I bet it runs faster.
Sure, it does run faster, but ps2ps has the advantage of stripping out huge amounts of cruft left by the creating program, and leaving a functionally equivalent, but much smaller and simpler file. How small and simple? It takes a 130k file and reduces it down to 10k. That makes it much easier for the next step, which is to open it up in vim and hack the postscript directly.
No, it's not that bad, really. You grab the image in gimp and using the colour-grabbing tool to find what ghastly shades things have been translated to, and then look up a "good copy" (rendered png or some such) to see what the colours are supposed to be. Search and replace on these RGB triplets, and viola, it looks fantastic, loads into all your favourite tools and programs, and doesn't require Adobe Illustrator with Pantone extensions, or whatever bothersome thing was used to create the original.
Actually, not everything is an RGB triplet. Sometimes there are just Red/Non-Red duplets (don't ask me why), but provided that you understand that postscript is a stack-based language (where function calls come after their arguments), then it's all okay. If you don't realise it's stack based, well, you're probably screwed from the beginning.
Because the old Nokia has an infra-red port, which the oh-so-fashionable Motorola is notably missing. And given the choice between a phone which can talk to my Palm, and a phone that sounds like a slot machine paying out when it rings, I'll take the first any day.
Sure enough, within an hour of the new "old" phone arriving, I could dial in to my main server, establish a PPP connection, and fire up an ssh client to the host of my choice. Likewise, I can transfer vcards back and forth between palm and phone, rather than having to tediously enter them by hand.
Shame it doesn't play mp3s, or have a java virtual machine. I really miss that old phone.
Investment/Retirement
The whole process of min-maxing my finances is proving to be a very difficult task. I can continue working steadily for the next 8-9 years, with an incredibly stable and dull savings plan, and then live a life of luxury thereafter. That's not bad, but 9 years is a long way away.
I can work one year on, two years off. That gives me lots more free time now, but the "one year on" will be difficult. Work flows most easily when you're already too busy to take more. Switching from holiday mode to business mode is difficult when it comes to catching clients.
I can work steadily, but do something more creative with investments. This is tricky, because it's not something I'm experienced in, and past performance is not indicative of future growth. We could sink funds into buying numerous houses, trying to ride tax-effective capital gains, but that's more risky, and risk sucks. This is an area which I'll need to investigate further.
With our current savings plan, we'll have our house entirely paid off this year, and complete financial independence by 2012. By complete financial independence, I mean that with a very conservative investment plan, we'll have enough income to last us indefinitely, even if we double our current outgoings. Most people would consider reaching this goal by the tender age of 35 quite an achievement. I would tend to agree.
However, I'm both impatient and lazy (with a bit of hubris mixed in), and don't want to wait until I'm 35 before retiring. I'd like to retire sooner. The good news for me, is that I can.
The complete financial independence plan allows for personal immortality. Since income is greater than or equal to expenditure, this plan sustains itself indefinitely. However, I'm not immortal, so I can actually retire with a lower level of assets and still live comfortably to the end of my days.
Unfortunately my back-of-the-envelope calculations show that the difference required in assets may only shave 1-2 years off my expected retirement age. That's a good start, but not as great as I would hope.
I still have more research to perform, and a few tricks which I may consider using. With luck, I may be able to shave a little more time off the final figure.
I think the glowing red eyes and the shiny black coat is an indication your rabbit may be evil. I'm not sure what faintly glowing blue eyes mean.
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