crazyscot

On TV: *the governor of the Bank of England waffles on about the financial crisis*

rustica: So what he's saying is that for some time now we haven't known how bad things are, how deep and complicated this securitisation mess was, or how we might get out of it? That we've just been blundering around in the dark trying not to fall into the big hole in the middle of the room? Who are these people in charge of our money? What does that make us?!

crazyscot: Fools, parted from our money.

rustica: *bursts out laughing* That's the most accurate and succinct description I've heard of the entire crisis!

In honour of the upcoming World IPv6 day this week, I've set up IPv6 on my shiny new VPS and sent test mail to it from another ip6 site (chiark). It might even see some real mail this week as I move services onto it.

I know the new numbering space is mind-bogglingly vast, but even so it does seem a little bit profligate to have been allocated a /64 (that's a standard allocation of 2⁶⁴ addresses - the square root of the size of the entire IPv6 space) and have just a single host rattling around in it...

It's just a shame there seem to be no consumer devices that support ipv6 yet. Still, there is a fair chance that I'll be able to get 6to4 going and ceremonially tunnel my way to test-ipv6 and Loops Of Zen (that latter link won't work, btw, unless you are IPv6-enabled).

My desktop has an Intel Core2 Duo of 2007 vintage, with an Intel DG965SS motherboard. For the past four years it has had 2Gb of main memory, which largely served me well. Today I finally got round to upgrading it; having checked what it would take I reckoned I would get one 2Gb stick for each of the two spare slots, seeing as they're only £24 each at WOC.

So I booted back to my desktop and it was great; things were much faster. But then I noticed that the memory usage meter only showed me as having 3.2Gb available.

"Huh?" quoth I. 3.2G is a well-known issue if you're running a 32-bit kernel which doesn't have PAE enabled (i.e. is limited to 4G; you lose the top 800M or so of the address space to motherboard and OS internals), or indeed if you're running 32-bit Windows. But on a 64-bit machine running a 64-bit kernel? Surely not.

Well, in amidst the noise of bootup log there was this wonderful(?!) line:

WARNING: BIOS bug: CPU MTRRs don't cover all of memory, losing 2752MB of RAM.

My first thought was Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot. and my second, Ouch.

Googling suggested that I should look for BIOS updates, but that a number of people have been bitten by this sort of motherboard issue and not been able to get it fixed. I looked at the latest version on intel.com; the release notes were not very clear, but did provide a hint that something in this department had been fixed, so I was optimistic and went ahead with the upgrade. They're slightly scary if you're not running off a UPS, but nevertheless the power held.

And now it works - Linux can see all six gigs - and I am giving them an exercise. I could have done without that!

Apropos AV, this priceless gem came up on cam.misc today:
Original message

This, ladies, gents and other gentlebeings, is a good demonstration of why, if you must apply brute force and ignorance to a discarded hard drive to ensure your data is unreadable, WEAR EYE PROTECTION. (Before you ask, yes I was.)

This is (was) a laptop hard drive of 2004 vintage; the platters turned out to be extremely fragile, much more so than the desktop drives I've previously mangled. This is what happened when I applied not very much force to try and prise it off the spindle; the second one let go almost explosively when I gripped it firmly in a pair of pliers.

Oh well; job done, at least! Now, excuse me while I go sweep up the fragments...

Anybody interested in an invite to http://careers.stackoverflow.com/ (programming jobs)? I've got five to pass on. Feel free to message me if you'd rather not comment in public.

crazyscot: You've just crashed my decision-making centres. Hang on a second while I think about that.

naranek: Quote, close-bracket semicolon; drop table salary_requirements!

crazyscot: *collapses helpless with laughter*

naranek: Hey, I had to try. :-)

If you thought the words were a bit tl;dr:

• My highlights of NZ (well, my favourite photos from the trip)
  
• All my (posted) photos from NZ (big hierarchical collection; 160 in total)
  
• Hong Kong
  

At long last, I've finished sifting and posting my photos and diary entries (and one silly video from HK).

• index on LJ
  
• index on DW

Signs the jet lag is bad: You can't sleep, so decide spontaneously to get up for a random cycle despite it being early morning on a Sunday.