Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Shower. Weight training: reverse incline crunch. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Weight training: shoulder press. Installed Skype at work. Student computing committee meeting. Staff meeting. Late lunch at desk: turkey sandwich with fat free cheddar, Triscuit crackers, dried tropical fruit, rice cakes. Helped Carol with a laptop emergency: the MacBook had a black screen, was still powered on, but would not respond to keyboard or mouse input. I did a cold restart and all was fine, but of course it was not clear to others how to resolve the problem. I have seen this behavior before with OS X computers running Boot Camp but don't know what causes it. Met with Eric to discuss hardware for our forthcoming DAM (digital asset management) server. We estimated that we will have about 300 GB of new digital assets to store per year. We know we need a server that will have plenty of drive space. The tricky questions begin when we consider whether we should have fault tolerant RAID and how to back up the data offsite. The DAM software we decided upon is called ResourceSpace by Montala. So far we are thinking a Ubuntu tower server with 1 terabyte of drive space to start out. We couldn't think of anything very good for the offsite storage solution. Online backup will be too expensive, and this data won't be changing very much—only growing. External hard drives are cheaper and hold more data than tapes, but tapes are easier to send offsite and smaller granularity will affect the frequency and method of whatever offsite storage we use. Also, most of the data we'll be working with will already be compressed and will not benefit from further compression. Eric will investigate our options, and I want to look again at Mozy Pro to confirm my suspicions that it will be more expensive. Account closures followup. Began setting up my new Mac Pro. I installed my RAM upgrade, but when I next turned it on the Mac did not detect it—it still says 1 GB and I don't know why. Joined OS X to the campus domain using the document that Erik W provided—no problems. LGBT viz work: finished posters batch 2 and handed off to Kevin and Christina. Dinner at home by myself: Healthy Choice Cafe Steamers Creamy Dill Salmon frozen dinner. I am planning to go with Chris and Nate to The Pacific Pinball Expo on Sunday, October 7 then to Great America on Sunday, October 14. If you're interested in either and want to join us, please send me e-mail. I forgot to mention that Patrick sent me this on Sunday: "I thought maybe I'd find you online, but you must be at Folsom. I'm leaving for another five days. This is the beginning of the week-long national holiday, so I'm going with Mr. Lee and Miss Xiao to Guansu Province in the west to a city called Tianshui, where Daoism was born. I'll probably be there til at least Friday night your time. I told my mom already not to worry, but I'm sure she'll worry anyway. I'll try to get a blog posting up before I leave today, but I might not have a chance. I put up the photos, though. I love you! Have a good week!" LGBT viz work. Weight training: reverse incline crunch. Changed frankfarm.org to be Class B compliant in regards to no-www.org. The site suggests a way of using Apache URL rewriting rules, but I implemented mine by inserting some simple code into my PHP templates:
<?
if ( $_SERVER[ 'HTTP_HOST' ] != 'frankfarm.org' ) {
    header( 'Location: https://frankfarm.org' . $_SERVER[ 'REQUEST_URI' ] );
}
?>