Fixed for now

Yesterday morning, babylon4 started randomly crashing.  And crashing, and crashing, and crashing, and crashing, and crashing, at intervals ranging from an hour or longer to as short as five minutes, with no visible connection to load or any specific activity on the machine.  It wasn't logging anything nor creating any evident core dumps.  I tried just about everything I could think of to diagnose the problem, without success, including running the machine through two full passes of memtest86+.  (With zero errors.)  I had a very strong suspicion it was a memory problem, except that I couldn't reproduce it with testing.

Finally, I happened to glance at the monitor in the rack at just the right instant, as the machine was rebooting from its previous crash, and crashed again.  This time, I saw the kernel panic and dump core.

Having previously reorganized the rack so that I could get the cover off and check all the fans, I pulled babylon4 mostly out of the rack with the help of Eldest Daughter Formerly Known As Goose who now wishes to go by the handle Valkyrie (which suits her), and pulled and reseated all of the RAM.  babylon4 has now been up 13 hours and 47 minutes without a problem, so it looks as though reseating solved the problem — fortunately, because I wasn't looking forward to having to replace all the RAM.

That said, I do still need to replace all the RAM at some point.  Right now, the machine has 4GB of RAM (four 1GB DDR266 ECC DIMMs), but it actually has eight memory slots, and would run a lot better with 2GB modules in all eight.  ZFS and SQL databases both like lots of RAM.  There's no budget for it right now, though.

Another iPad++

Seems there's a whole slew of Better-Than-iPad devices around.  I posted recently about the upcoming NotionInk ADAM; now I just discovered that a week ago, TechCrunch reported on the NeoFonie WePad, which will be on sale in German stores before the iPad.  It has a larger and higher-resolution screen than the iPad (11.6" 1366x768 — can you say 768p HD?), a faster processor (1.66GHz Atom N450 vs. 1GHz ARM), the same 64GB maximum total memory, a 1.3 megapixel camera, USB ports, a memory card reader and SIM card slot, supports Flash, runs both Android apps and Adobe AIR apps, multitasks, reads all open eBook standards.  It's a little larger (naturally) and heavier than the iPad (but not by much; it's 45mm longer, 0.3mm wider, 0.4mm thinner, and 120g heavier), and has shorter claimed battery life (6 hours vs. 10), but it supports the WeMagazine e-publishing platform for magazines and newspapers, something no other pad or ebook reader currently does, implying NeoFonie is targeting the Kindle and Nook as much as the iPad.

With its generous-sized HD screen and fast processor, the WePad could very well be the best reader/pad device yet, particularly for watching movies on.

Bad science: The Hollow Earth

Crank alert!

Yo, people.  If there was a hitherto unknown green, verdant landmass at or near the North Pole holding a polar opening 890 miles across into the interior of the hollow earth, we would have seen it from orbit by now.  (Actually, never mind orbit ... intercontinental flights cross the north polar region every day.)

Remember, kids, just because you saw it on the Internet doesn't mean it's true ... and this is a classic example.  This is so crackpot loony it's not even wrong.

On the decline and fall of the classical vampire

There is no reason to get upset because you get to live forever while not being hunted to death by righteous men, having to avoid delicious garlic¹, while also having every girl or boy in a mile radius fall madly in love with you.  That is not the curse of the ages.  That is awesome.

[1]  I assume the author meant "not having to avoid..." here.