Bernard’s Blog

I’ve been watching some of the one billion dollar TV coverage of the Olympics on CNBC.

It looks like this time around the IOC have reduced the number of sports down to just swimming, gymnastics and beach volley ball.  And this Olympics must have the lowest participation ever, with only the USA, China and Russia competing.

You have to feel sorry for the US gymnasts, when they score well it’s due to hard work and great athleticism but when they score badly (or fall) it’s the fault of corrupt judges and the under age opposing teams.

Recently I had a disk start to fail which caused a little panic when I took stock of how much disk storage I have which is not mirrored or otherwise backed up.

My short term solution was to put together a 1.8 terabyte RAID.  I initially built it as a 2.7 TB RAID 5, but after some performance testing and past experience with simultaneous failed disks and RAID 5, I changed to RAID 10.  This gives a good redundancy and performance, although at a reduced capacity of only 1.8 TB.

The performance is amazing.  I get 120 MB/s writing to the array and 100MB/s reading.  Over NFS I get 60 MB/s for both reading and writing.  Most of the local drives I have barely exceed 30 MB/s and the USB connected drives are 20 MB/s or less, so my NFS mounted partitions are faster than the local drives.

One application of this is to store my VMWare guests on the array and export them to host machines using NFS.  This makes it much easier and faster to move a guest from one physical host to another as there is no copying of the guest needed.  Disk performance inside the guest is faster than if the guest was stored on a single local disk.

The cost was also amazing; about 23 cents per GB.  That’s total GB, I’m including the redundancy.  In 1992 I bought a PC with a 115 MB disk that added more than a $1,000 to the total cost of the PC.  That puts the cost of disk storage at roughly $8,600 per GB in 1992, so you can see that storage prices per GB have fallen dramatically.  Of course in 1992 115 MB was a huge amount of disk space but now, 16 years later, 1.8 TB is nothing special!

Continuing the meme from Dork Geek Nerd here’s seven songs that you’d hear in my car or office in no particular order.

1. “Re-make Re-model” - Bryan Ferry. This is a re-recorded version from his solo album “Let’s Stick Together”. The original is great too and you can see the video on You Tube (with Eno at the keyboard!).

2. “I Want You” - Kiss. This is a great song. I’ve known so many soldiers in the Kiss Army and yet somehow I haven’t heard all that much of their music. A greatest hits CD solved that problem, and this was the stand out track.

3. “The Burning Times” - Testament. The most memorable song from an album full of songs that all sound the same.

4. “Electric Dreams” -Giorgio Moroder. Great song from a great soundtrack, but I know the movie just cannot be as good as I remember it.

5. “Depth Charge Ethel” - Grinderman. With new Nick Cave releases I always tend to go back to his previous release and listen to it more. I’ll probably get to Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! when he releases his next album.

6. “Tiger Phone Card” - Dengue Fever. They are a group from LA that sings songs inspired by Cambodian pop music from the 60s. They have a Cambodian lead singer who usually sings in Khmer, but this track is in English.

7. “Love Parasite” - Fad Gadget. This is from his “Under the Flag” album which I have on vinyl LP. I ordered the CD from amazon.com and the shipping cost more than the CD itself!

I just paid $4.259 a gallon for gas. That’s the most I have ever paid and it’s double what it was three years ago when I bought my car. It’s a good thing I only need to commute 12 miles a week and fill up only once a month.

I wonder if it’ll be $8 a gallon in 2011?

Last weekend we had our house painted.

For the kitchen we used ‘Portsmouth Olive’ to match the green in the counter tops.

For the main walls in the living and dining area we used ‘Happy Camper’.

For the living room and dining room walls with windows we used ‘Copper Coast’.

More ‘Happy Camper’. It was to be ‘Star Fire’, but it would have been too much yellow.

In the office we used ‘Star Fire’. We had actually rejected this color for the living area, but we didn’t let the painter know quick enough, so he’d already purchased it. It’s not so bad in the office.

In the master bedroom we went with ‘Pandora’s Purple’ which makes the room nice and dark during the night. It’s darker than it looks in the photos.

In the two guest rooms are ‘Cushy Suede’ and ‘Hidden Ravine’.

‘Cushy Suede’ was to be in the master bedroom, but we hated our original choice of ‘Sail Away’ a very light blue for the guest room. We had the purple picked for an accent wall on the stairs, so we moved it to the master bedroom and put the brown in the guest room. It’s lighter than the photos suggest.

‘Hidden Ravine’ was originally for the office, but I think it’s better in the other guest room. Again it’s lighter that it looks.

We considered painting ourselves but with the nine foot walls it would have been too difficult. The painter had no trouble of course. Two guys did it in about 11 hours over the weekend.