When I was in Std. 8 many centuries ago, I swore on my own grave that I would never touch a computer since I hated it. Somewhere during that year I started breaking that promise and became more and more involved with computers. Today I realized I am back at that day - the day I swore I'll never touch a computer...

There are too many reasons to mention them all. Let me discuss a typical day - today.

I just bought a new Apple Cinema 23" display for my brand new MacBook Pro 15.4" notebook. I eagerly unpacked them and connected them up. I almost fried my eyes with the 23" LCD panel - its brightness was just way too high. So I adjusted it to its lowest setting. Lo and behold - at the lowest setting it is as bright as my MacBook Pro at its highest setting. For any other environment than a public office building with a bright window behind you, that is just too bright to work comfortably with. And I have 4 dead pixels. So I spent R11,000 on a display that is too bright to be usable for extended periods and has 4 dead pixels. Fine - I can live with that... For now.

It seems M$ is in trouble... They do not have money to buy enough RAM for their servers... Look:

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Please see this blog why the forums had been decommissioned.

Today I have decommissioned three of my web portals. The common factor? All three sites were forums using phpbb's PHP based free forum software. Why?

Because I got tired and pissed off having to constantly update the software due to security holes. Every couple of weeks I saw a red warning message in the version area of the software - informing me of YASH (Yet Another Software Hole).

Some people might believe that is a Good Thing - software automatically informing you about new updates. In general that is nice, however in this case I would have felt much better if there had been no holes - or at least more realistically a hole a year. Take OpenBSD - their clame to fame is

I had a huge problem. Since I am an avid photographer, I started building up a huge library of photos. I do not like archiving photos and delete them from my main library, since I like to have them all available for display.

The problem is that my library started pushing 200GB. It grows by about 100GB each year. I already have two 400GB HDD's in my G5 (RAID1), but with the OS and other applications I was running out of disk space. Since bigger hard drives are not readily available, I had to look for some form of external storage. I'll explain in this blog what my options were and why I dediced to build my own RAID array.

The easy way out would be to purchase a LaCie RAID system, but that would have put me back about R32,000. It can only provide 1.5TB of disk space (if using 500GB drives in RAID5). Furthermore, the speed is limited by the Firewire 800 interface (although fast, with large RAID5 arrays on SATA it is possible to go well over 100MB/s). Another option would have been the Apple XServe RAID. But that costs R60,000 for 750MB RAID5. Yeah it is massively scalable up to insane capacities, but it is just too expensive (and noisy). So I decided to look into building my own RAID array. Why? Because I already had a nice desktop Pentium 4 3.2GHz machine with 2GiB RAM. Since the case can only handle 4 hard drives, and ventilation sucked I decided to replace it too. Fortunately my power supply is rated at 500W - keeping many hard drives spinning requires lots of power.