Bit of a bad day today overall. First off I had a mouse in my lounge, looks like the cat brought it in alive or it came as a free gift with my new sofa’s! My cat Clio was completely useless and tried to run out the back door, ended up hiding on top of the cabinet the mouse ran under. My folks’ cat Bubbles was almost as useless as she just sat there looking at it.

So my old WD2500AAKS boot drive died on my main PC the other week, not bad as its about 5 years old. I ordered a replacement WD5000AAKS – basically a Western Digital Caviar Blue 500Gb, the same drive but twice the size. I didn’t bother to fit the new drive until today as I thought I might as well install the new Fedora 13. It turns out the drive is a duffer too – and before you say its a bad controller/cable, I swapped both of them too, and the two drives have different issues.

I just went to rsync my desktop in the UK with the backup drive from France and got the command backwards, so ended up with the old UK files overwriting the new France files on the backup drive! Luckily I correctly rsync’ed my $HOME directory first, so its only downloads and backups that got nuked. I can live without them for a week. My VM’s and work/office stuff are fine.

I installed Ubuntu 10.04 on Dad’s new PC he got for his birthday. I was up until 2am as the ISO’s had to be redone at the last minute so downloads didn’t start until about 9pm, then I had to screw around with fdisk to deal with the Advanced Format Drive problem with the new type of hard disk. It has 4kb sectors but to get around some stupid WinXP bug the manufacturers make it report 512byte sectors, which dramatically slows the drive under Linux.

I was thinking that I have my fileserver on 24/7 and a 2.6GHz Pentium Dual Core is a bit overkill, so I decided to look at what distributed projects were going on these days. I used to run the United Devices screensaver a few years back, as well as some SETI on my old Pentium III-500 laptop and Bovine RC5 challenge on my StrongARM RiscPC’s. I found the World Community Grid Help Conquer Cancer project uses the Linux-friendly BOINC program, so set my E5300 fileserver to work, and also my freshly overclocked and watercooled Core i5-750.