This happens to me as a first hand experience. Our system at work use linear software RAID with mdadm. As we add more drives, we are confronted with the problem of utilizing these drives without downtime. The problem lies with linear software RAID. Software RAID support online growing of RAID5. However, support for linear grow is botchy as best. The reason for this lack of support is (simply) lack of demand. Instead of using linear software RAID or JBOD, I should have used LVM. LVM basically acts like a linear-RAID device. however, with all the extra goodies built-in. Throw in a nice choice of filesystem type (xfs instead of ext3) and you will have a rocking system.
For me, I am stuck with this setup for a while until the new equipments arrive.
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I take some minutes off my time writing my 15-page papers on "The notion of privacy: Comparing US and EU approaches" to rant about Adobe CS3. With Leopard, it is now easy for many people (including me) to run a HFS+ filesystem with case-sensitivity. A filesystem without case-sensitivity is simply a stupid implementation. It is as short-sighted as claiming that 640 kb has ought to be enough for everyone. So, fast forward to the year of 2008, Adobe CS3 still has not have a patch for CS3 that will support filesystem with case-sensitivity. This means that I cannot use Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator and all the other goodess on my Leopard system (which happens to be running HFS+ with case-sensitivity). I honestly think that Adobe should react to this matter and address it promptly before some competing product emerge showing how smart their engineers are.
For those of you who also have this unfortunate situation, google a bit and you will find some quick fix that will allow you to run your beloved installation of CS3 from Tiger on Leopard. If you are not so inclined, then go on and start whining in your little blog.
Anyway, I have to get back to my research paper now.
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UH Law Library
I needed some books on privacy laws of EU and US this week for a paper so I went to UH's Law Library. It was a decently long walk from the main library. The library situated on the left of the main entrance. The sign was clear and the atmosphere was intense. I can almost hear the fans on the back of the machines humming away. Every student there was diligently looking up books, taking notes, writing down ideas, typing up their papers. I didn't see a single person who is playing around with their computer, hack and slash on WoW, or spending their time on Facebook/Myspace. The environment was very professional and everyone seems to have an aura of hard work around them. I felt as if I found my study haven.
I quickly grabbed the book that I need and tried to check it out. The lady in the front desk jokingly asked me: "You are smiling. You are probably not a law student, aren't you?". "No. I am not." I answered with a smile as I walked out of the library. Overall I find UH's Law Library to be much more of a real library than the freshmen-infected main library of UH. I have no problem with freshmen as long as I they start becoming junior and learn a thing or two about public studying manners.
I am planning to come back to UH's Law Library again tomorrow for some other book references. Study nirvana, here I come.
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Social life and endeavor
So far, I have not given those around me the respect that they deserve. My condescendence gives me all the false reasons to water down others' achievements. However, I recently watched Sirena Huang's performance at TED2006. I was inspired and amazed by her brilliant performance. As I read others' comments on TED blog, I come across Sirena's response and felt humble at the girl's remark about her life.
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Quirks of Protoype
As I previously mentioned, I am writing a Rails app that manage Bibtex entries with the ability to import and export BibTex and Endnote files. The program is coming along quite well. It has most of the basic functionality required. Last night, I was writing a helper for Rails that allow user to pick multiple entries (using checkboxes) while navigate between different pages of the listing. In other words, as user paging through 100s of records, he can check the one he likes then perform an action on it (tag, export, ...). While doing this, I lost about 2 hours banging my head against the world trying to figure out why my JS doesn't work. Here is the story, hope that it will help someone.
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sIFR and my site
I spent the last several days trying to get sIFR to work on the headers (post title) on this page and still I have not gotten it to work. I honestly dumb-founded on what can possibly be wrong. I basically copy and paste the code from the sample page here. My thought is that for some reason, the swf file is not loaded correctly (or at all). Hopefully I will be more lucky next time.
The good news is that I have finished 90% of BibSync. It is ready to be released as version 1.0. So far it is simply acting as an online UI to managing your Bibtex bibliography. However, care was taken to make sure both the interface and the control are as intuitive and painless as possible. The future licensing for BibSync is unknown. I hope that I will be able to release it as GPL or some other free licenses despite I was paid to develop this Rails application.
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