I got a nice email today from the fellow at O’Reilly who’s in charge of condensing my article for the print edition. He needs an author bio line to go under the article. Hmm. I’m stumped. Which way to go?

There’s the painfully banal:

John Riney is a technologist and experimenter living in Charleston, SC.

To the desperate:

John Riney is a guy living in Charleston, SC that would like your phone number, if you are modestly hot and don’t hate nerds.

To the incomprehensible:

John Riney owes me 20 bucks.

Dear Interweb, do you have any suggestions?

You may have already have pondered, or may ponder at some point in the future, the answer to the following question: “John, when it comes to file servers, how do you roll?”

Ponder no more; I would like to take this opportunity to definitively state that I roll like this:

Specifically:

• AMD Sempron 2800 on an EpoX 8KDA3J
• 512mb of Crucial DDR400
• Matched pair of Maxtor 200gb, 7200 RPM SATA drives (8mb cache) arranged as hardware RAID 1, 40gb PATA system drive
• Gigantic scary looking Antec case with 400 watt PSU

It’s currently also got the old system drive from Alexandria in it, too. That will disappear once I can move the contents of the 40gb onto the RAID (the 40 used to be the share drive for Alexandria). The Gentoo build on the old system drive was a little confused, but it booted right up. Crazy fast, too.

For the future, I’m hoping to go all-SATA at some point. If I ever build a MythTV box, I’d probably shoot for a terabyte RAID-5 array. But for my current work, 200gb will be just spiffy.

I hope this new knowledge sets your mind at ease.

I need to get my internal development server (running my CVS, MySQL, and some other handy toys) running so I can proceed with Airspace and some other things. It was previously hosted on Alexandria, an old IBM desktop that I bought from ICF when I left. It didn’t have enough storage, though, and no room to add it.

I went to the temple of consumerism and purchased a pair of 200GB SATA drives and a SATA controller. I’m intending to RAID 1 them together for integrity purposes and burn regular CD backups. I have a nice Antec case laying around, so the plan was to put the IBM motherboard and the new drives into that. No joy. The IBM motherboard is gigantically off-spec, with a huge riser card to plug PCI cards into. I tried and it just wouldn’t fit into the Antec.

So who needs a case? I set to bash together the quickest, dirtiest framework to hold all the parts together out of stuff I had laying around. Inspired by ‘s caseless case, I present to you…Redneck 1.

Redneck 1 in production

Redneck 1 with the cooling fan I found out I needed for the drives

Redneck 1′s frame consists of a slab of particle board I had laying around, which I screwed and angle-bracketed into an L-shape. The power supply from the Antec case is held with more angle brackets and zip ties, and the drives are held in place with an old drive cage I found in my junkpile. The motherboard is screwed to standoffs mounted to the bottom plank, and shimmed with bits of cardboard to hold the riser card level.

With hardware this good, what could go wrong?

I didn’t notice until I got it all together that the SATA card doesn’t work worth a crap with the old IBM motherboard. It insists on trying to boot from the (blank) SATA drives and ignores the BIOS’s boot order. Sigh. Redneck 1, you will be missed. Guess I’ll have to get that new motherboard after all.

Who just got his photos posted on the Rilo Kiley fansite? This guy.

A little prep work for a new project…

A Mattel Juicebox, out of the box: (well, mine was gray, but whichever)

Busted open:

Yes, it still works when open (demonstrating its digital-picture-showing capability)

Somehow, contrary to logic, the color shots from the Rilo Kiley show came out dramatically better than the black and whites. I wasn’t quite expecting this – I’ve never shot color at a concert before, but for some reason I kept screwing up the metering and overexposing them. Anyway, these are some keepers from the test scans I had the lab do. I could do better, so I’m probably going to order a film scanner here in a bit. It’d pay for itself in scanning fees in two concerts. I hope I can rescue some of the black and whites with some judicious photoshopping, one in particular, especially; I caught a fantastic pose but blew the exposure. I’m also thinking I could use a light telephoto lens for this kind of work; I can’t fill the frame quite like I want to with my 50mm. Maybe the 85mm 1.8D? (Or, preferably, the 85mm 1.4D, but that’s pricey glass)

Blake Sennett and Jenny Lewis

Blake Sennett, Mike Bloom, and Pierre de Reeder

Jenny Lewis

If anybody’s interested in the Mattel Juicebox, the cheap, Linux-running video player toy mentioned in this Slashdot article, Target on Rivers Avenue has a whole pile of them. 12.48 for the machine, 11.24 for the SD card adapter.