This has gone from a brief essay to a rant then back to mumble. I gave up proof reading it at the second paragraph of dribble. Proceed with caution.

I've spent 2 and a bit weekends thus far clearing out the // SNIP - it was too long winded and too abstract for using now, maybe later.

To cut to the chase, I've decided that keeping data on CD is no longer viable based on the price and capacity of hard drives today. Part of the reason here is the space is not wasted, it can be reused infinitely without degration in performance. The only down side is when a disk fails you lose a lot more at once. But what would life be without risks. Personally I've had one (hard) disk fail in 10 years and it was 100 times the capacity of the first, thusly in 10 years time I'll expect my 2nd disk failure to be my 2TB drive grin (ignoring cosmic influences and randomness that is). Of course that is assuming 3 year hard drive warrenties and since I'm not buying SCSI 10k RPM drives I'll only be getting the 1 year warrenty, lets take a third of this figure, say 3 years time and a 10th of the capacity (exponential growth curve) 200Gig. Now that sounds reasonable and believeable. Recommendation number 1: Don't buy 200 Gig drives, they have to be dodgy. (Sure this is based on nothing but fiction, but you get that. It's still free advice.) (Interesting titbit of info: the Western Digital SE series of drives still have a 3 year warrenty, so the extra $50 gets you that aswell as the 6Mb of extra cache.)

I think it's interesting that this solution is obvious to many but with floppy disks as the medium. People commonly keep floppy disk images on hard drive because of the unreliability of the floppy disk medium (not to mention the cost or size of them). I'm simply intending to try doing this with stuff that would normally be put on CD's. It makes perfect sense for things like downloads folders which are in constanst states of flux. I used to clean up and burn my downloads folder periodically but haven't in so long. It becomes a futile backup really, if you do ever lose the source, you'll probably redownload some / most of the apps / patches / fixes etc to get newer versions. Based on the rate at which hard drive capacities are increasing and prices falling this solution might become common place in the near future. I'm simply living on the bleeding edge again.

More interesting points to bung in here. It's cheaper now to store stuff on hard drive that it was to store on CD 5 years ago. But it is still cheaper to store stuff on CD now, but only by a factor of 2 to 4 depending on drive and CD prices. Taking the benefits of online storage into account it wins hands down in my book. So I'm building a file server.

In other news, I have a plan. (Apart from returning to coherent sentence structure)

This plan involves a partial rewrite of the code behind this site with 2 goals in mind. 1. To change the backend storage from a custom delimited file format to a full blown XML backend (still file based with the aim of using XML in a database at a later stage). The whole point of doing this is to separate content from presentation and code completely. A database can achieve this aswell, but why use a database for something that isn't updated / viewed that often anyway. grin 1. To make it more suited to PHP 4.2 and up. (This one will be fixed, before it breaks. Considering the code was written well over a year ago (my last major rewrite for templating and back end changes) it's lasted fairly well.) Following this I'm planning on altering the front end so XML is presented to the client relying on the browsers ability to parse and transform XML. IE5+ does this fine, NS6+ does this fine, I haven't tested it on Opera or Konqueror but don't see why it would be missing. Taking this a step further, I could use gzip encoding to make the XML download faster. I'm never happy with how long the site takes to load. Plus I've intended on making the page XHTML compilant but never found a good reason to do so. Turning it into pure XML will acheive that goal automatically and open up other doors in content presentation. The future is now or at least soon.

In other other news

I located the receipt for the hard drive that failed. It's got a good 5 months left on it's 3 year warrenty so I'll be making a trip to IVC sometime following my data recovery attempt. I'm not expecting anything but it will be good for a laugh.

Software update. Window manager of choice is now FluxBox. It's a blackbox fork which kept the key binder and integrated some patches I've used with blackbox for a while (taskbar and mousewheel patches, among other changes). Emule is improving, it's not perfect but it's getting better with each release. Plus it doesn't see the need to hash my files each time it loads unlike edonkey (which is not supposed to do that but does). IRC client on windows is now X-Chat. It's been my GUI IRC client of choice for linux for some time and now I use it on windows, weighing in at under a meg it's all good.

Someone famous once said "Theres no such thing as a free lunch" but frankly, I just don't buy it.

The telephone sanitizer has been through twice since my last post. This says a lot more than you would think about the frequency of my postings. Prepare yourself for this one, it gets rather pointless and vague at times.

The WALAN was good. The first day was a bit passe, but the second day more than made up for it. I even burned some CD's at the lan for the first time in ages. Needless to say the 28gig of Stargate SG1 dvd rips wasn't a complete accident, but the volume wasn't intended.

Before the Lan my ADSL modem was shipped to me via high priority courier, which took around 5 hours to get 30kms to my place of work. I'm sure I could walk 30km's in under 5 hours and the driver had the guts to complain about parking (or more specifically, the lack there of). Of course his effort was totally in vain because telstra hadn't kept up their part of the bargain, no line sync yet. Following the lan, that is Monday afternoon (when I woke up) there was a line sync and the lan continued. I've hardly been home (working long days) and I've managed to pull down 15gig off the glorious WAIX.

The VIA Epia 5000 PC is still caseless and ever so cute. Now it has a $12 network card (which the link light doesn't even work on) in it for the ADSL modem. Doesn't even get warm. If I had a digital camera I'd take photos.

What have I been doing lately. * I finished watching the end of Smallville season 1, season 2 is just coming out now. * I started watching Enterprise season 2 (first 3 episodes to date). * I started watching Star Trek: The Next Generation season 3. * I watched the first episode of Crest of the Stars, not bad. * Work, lots of work. * Clean up at parent's place (detail in next post). * Lots of thinking about stuff, just general stuff. * I've done some leeching, though nothing of the net at large, only waix stuff, mainly TV show episodes that I'm missing. * I recently watched Jurassic Park 3 (now that I got a decent watchable quality rip) and it wasn't as bad as I thought. (Yes I did think based on the previous one it would be total offal, but considering it was directed by someone else it seemed to perform quite well on it's own. I'm not a connoisseur by any means (I don't even have Fight Club on DVD) but I can spot tripe when I see it). * I also watched The Time Machine which I thought was rather interesting in a time travel kinda way. I've also managed to catch up with some old friends from school. Like I've noticed time and time again previously, Perth changes people. I have no doubts it's changed me these past 2 months, I wouldn't know where to being regarding how it has changed me or in what ways, but I know deep down that it has and that's all that matters.

There is a south west free net wireless field day on Sunday. I'm tempted to turn up but due to the distance involved (and my not being bothered (and parents not being home making the trip truely single purpose)) I'm having second thoughts. Though it would be a good opportunity to rid myself of some wireless cards, pcmcia sockets and maybe even a PSX/N64 usb controller or 10 though recent history has shown no one has any bloody money. Never trust anyone about anything when it comes to money, even if they're waving folds at you. I'm just about at the stage of ebaying them since certain people who said they'd buy haven't and I frankly can't wait any longer. I really need the money for them back as there's bigger and better things now. (Can I say coloured lighting and bump mapping...)

QOTD: He's gone to Sydney tomorrow. (Rikki talking about Grant to Jason)