Ow

I woke up today with a pounding headache which has yet to ease off.  I have no idea what's causing it, but I'm applying tea.

The return of Django ... er, Dahlgren

databeast pointed me at this article about the US Navy's Dahlgren Surface Weapons Center demonstrating an 8-megajoule railgun.  It'll be interesting to see whether, and how, they've solved the problem of rail erosion -- and for military history buffs, it'll be an interesting "blast from the past" if, fifteen years from now, US Navy ships are once again putting to sea fitted with Dahlgren guns.

I swear I did not front-load the music.

It never rains but it pours

Bah.

The older of babylon5's mirrored 18.2GB SCSI boot disks has been throwing SMART errors warning of slow spindle start.  I have two new 18.2GB Hitachi Ultrastars here, one of which was slated to replace the third disk, which is where I was working on a Gentoo install but which got killed last year when we still didn't have the power issues here sorted out.  (The other was slated to replace the failed boot disk in llioness.)  So, I figured, OK, let's do some disk replacement.  I can swap one of these in to replace the failing boot disk, put the other in as a new Gentoo filesystem disk, and deal separately with replacing the boot disk in llioness.

So I start checking the SCSI subsystem, and it appears babylon5's last remaining¹ CDROM has also failed.  (So, it appears, has the Zip drive, but that's OK; I can't remember the last time I used it.)  I'm probably going to have all kinds of trouble finding a new SCSI CDROM drive, let alone a CD/DVD writer.  Which probably means I'm going to have to re-enable babylon5's IDE controller, something I really don't have much desire to do.

I say again, Bah.

What I may do to solve this is order an SATA DVD writer² to replace the IDE one in vorlon, and transfer the NEC IDE DVD writer from vorlon (where it has always been problematic with regard to copy protection; there's some games I've never been able to get to work with it³) to babylon5.  With just one IDE device in the machine, it shouldn't be too horrible.

[1]  At one time, babylon5 had three CDROM drives.  This was redundant most of the time, and probably excessive, but made for much faster ripping of multiple CDs, an operation which was — and remains — I/O bound, even on a fast CDROM drive.  (I can typically extract CDDA at 9x-12x, and VBR encode it using LAME at 20x-24x.)

[2]  LiteOn makes one which can be had for $30.99 from NewEgg, though it's listed as out of stock; NewEgg has another for $35.99 in stock, or a Samsung with LightScribe for $46.99 that's been very well reviewed — reviews seem to agree it's the best on the market right now — and supports EVERYTHING, but it's apparently out of stock almost everywhere too.  Bah, again.

[3]  What I want to know is, how come a $40 game usually requires that the game be able to see the physical CD present in the drive in order to run, but a $1000 office suite doesn't?  My theory is that $40 games are bought by individual users whom Microsoft and others can tell to bend over and take it, while $1000 office suites are mostly bought by large corporate customers whom the software publishers actually have to listen to when they complain.

Bah, humbug!

I would just like to take a moment to observe again that I HATE, HATE, HATE traditional PC four-pin Molex power connectors.

More explicitly, hot-swappable devices aren't, when you inadvertently fumble the power connector because the pins on the infernal Molex aren't properly shielded and can make connection when not properly aligned yet.

However, now the Plextor CDROM drive is back on the bus again.  Maybe the now-disconnected Zip drive¹ (which I removed while the machine was powered down) was malfing badly enough to knock it off the bus (which wouldn't surprise me, SCSI on the Zip has always been unreliable — not least its internal termination, which is utterly worthless).

[1]  No, I wasn't trying to hot-swap the Zip out.  I was hot-swapping a replacement disk in, and would have been fine if I hadn't fumbled the infernal Molex.