Daily Movement

Disks are cheap enough now that we can have an affordable(*) personal terabyte sized store.

Other parts arrive separately, but these 250GB drives from western digital were a good deal at $96 each. However, I am now hearing that there’s a long standing WD firmware problem causing random writes to time out, and these cheap drives are “recertified”, i.e. returns, so I’m hoping these don’t have the bad firmware…

(*) as affordable as a 40MB winchester was a few years back…

More detail here…

Hoping to find a KVM (keyboard video mouse) switch that can deal with DVI-I video (not difficult) and USB keyboard and mouse switching (more difficult), but this is what I find instead:

A review of Aten 2 and 4 port switches CS1762 and CS1764 at Tom’s hardware.

Posting and comments that Belkin F1DD102U have connectivity problems and Aten switches duplicate characters

People seem to conclude that purchasing another DVI-I LCD monitor is the better alternative in the short term than getting a $150 flakey switch + $50 cabling.

Here’s a mini review:

Google Desktop

Pros:

• same google web interface you’re used to

Cons:

• doesn’t index old thunderbird email unless you view the message or unless it was recently delivered.
• index files are larger than copernic

Copernic

Pros:

• They’ve been doing desktop search as long as google has been doing web search

Cons:

• ? not a well known brand name?

Google might want to buy copernic – i’m sure they’ve been offered already.

Here’s an index building comparison:

Copernic uses 333MB and google desktop uses 304MB. If you compare indexed documents, copernic consumes about 7kb per document vs. 11kb for google. But more importantly, copernic can handle more document types out of the box.

Copernic:

Google:

Here it is. It is used to convert this typo web site between one database and the other. Usage:

  % ./mysql-to-sqlite.rb

However, since sqlite3 implementation in Ruby Rails doesn’t support schema migration, I will be writing a sqlite to mysql convertor shortly…