I've just had another seagate drive die on me.

This time it was a 320gb SATA2 one, so pretty new. One of the chips on it died and there was an awesome smell.

We've had so many seagate drives die now it is not funny (2 this week). I've personally had about 5 this year.

Anyway as I've said before do not buy seagate drives, they just don't work.

We've been using Samsung drives, they're cheaper and work better than seagate drives.

Last week we upgraded housefiles to 4x750gb HDDs in Raid 5.

So I have started writing a judging program for Tournament of Minds that will be used in the Sydney East section this year. If everything works out it will be used throughout NSW next year.

So this is what it is starting to look like :)

Right I wrote a small PHP program that manages who has spent what for our house.

It can be download here and requires PHP 5.2 and MySQL 4.1.

Since I have an assignment due next week I thought it would be a good idea to not work on it :)

So in no particular order I am currently doing:

• Working two days a week for BlueArc doing customer support and looking after our firewalls/vpns


• Doing a networking subject at UTS (two subjects to go until I have Bachelor of Science in Information Technology)


• Half day a week maintaining a website for a friend who is currently overseas


• Writing Bluetrait 2


• Continued development of Bluetrait Event Viewer


• Writing an online judging system for Tournament of Minds NSW
  


• Writing an online application that manages money spent in our house (it's also got an iphone version)


• Doing adhoc IT support for Belle Property Hunters Hill

 

Bluetrait Event Viewer 1.8 is now out.

Version 1.8 has updated styling to match WordPress 2.5 and also adds an RSS feed for recent events.

I also got an email from Ozgreg yesterday (one of the developers who writes WPG2) saying that they now use BTEV for debugging and unit testing for their plugin, awesome!

We'll I purchased my first car today!

It is a Honda Accord 1998 V6-L and has only done 25,000km. Cost me $4k.

It has been sitting in a garage for the last two years so it is at the mechanic getting a major service and a timing belt change.

I've noticed that the web server has been running slowly today.

Anyway I think I've found the problem. One of my old blogs sites is currently being spammed. Currently there are 3.3 million comments in the database!

EDIT: Problem fixed:

mysql> delete from comments WHERE id > 556;

Query OK, 3305122 rows affected (2 min 21.45 sec)

EDIT2: The spam has been coming from caravan.ru a Russian ISP (who's logo is very similar to optus' old one...).

I have an iphone on the way. Native Exchange with push email support is going to be awesome.

I'd been having some issues with the wireless in my macbook for the last month or so.

It was only picking up really strong/close wireless access points. I first thought it was a software issue as there have been some issues with mac os and wireless of late.

Anyway I tried Windows XP and was getting the same problem.

So after a lot of playing around I opened up the macbook to make sure that the antennas were connected correctly; they were.

So tonight I tried replacing the airport (wireless) card with another one. The original macbook uses an Atheros 5006X wireless chipset (Mini PCI-E). I used a standard PC Atheros AR5006EG (ar5bxb61 (em100)) card and it worked straight away. The mac thinks it is the same card that was in it before, except that the mac address has changed and that the wireless now works!

So it looks like the airport card was dead, sort of. But I'm happy now my wireless works.

This macbook hasn't been all that reliable. I've had a dead hard drive, replaced the top casing twice, had my battery die and had the wireless die. Saying that 1st gen apple products are known for their issues. I will keep using macs for laptops and PCs for desktops.