rami.info

Today I finally finished watching the first two seasons of The O.C. and it was amazing. When I first started watching I went through the first season and the first 20 episodes of The O.C. (total of 47) in a matter of 10 days. I was getting like 4 hours of sleep a day and barely spent time with my wife so I had to cut down. As my wife also got addicted to it, I waited for her till she catches up with me for the rest and was also kinda watching it again with her. Yesterday she finally cought up with me and we watched the final 4 episodes over the past two days. Now as it is finally over I can’t wait till August for the third season but till then I will have to find a new show to pass the time with!

Today around 1am I started to have a new addiction. Not sure if it is really an addiction but I couldn’t stop! My new addiction is The OC. It was my first time watching it eventhough I kept on seeing the torrents on many websites. I was so sleepy by the 3rd episode but just couldn’t stop till probably 5:30am at the end of the 6th episodes. The OC is just amazing I give it 9/10.

Ok I just ended up getting the Philips 109B60 Monitor. The Lacie is just
too expensive and I’m not into design or anything so it’s really not
worth the KD205. The Philips was for KD77 only so that saves me the rest
of the KD205 for a PSP maybe :o) Now so far I like this CRT much better
than the Samsung LCD. At least I can now see COLORS. After calibration
on my Mac mini it just looks awesome but it still doesn’t look as good
under linux nor windows.

Kuwait sucks when it comes to buying electronics. I remember when I was in the states I was able to find whatever I want. Too bad I couldn’t afford it then. Now when I can finally afford getting some of the stuff I want I can never find them. I went for a monitor hunt today as I have a Samsung SyncMaster 172B LCD and I’m not really happy with it. I prefer CRTs much better. I don’t play games or anything but I feel that the CRTs are clearer. I Went to LG, Samsung, Sony, called IOC for Lacie, looked at ZAK’s flyer for the Philips monitors but I couldn’t find anything that is really reasonable. I love Sony mostly and that’s what I had in the states but they have been discontinued here in Kuwait! I don’t like LG much as I heard the colors fade away after a year or so. Not sure about Samsung but I hate this Samsung LCD and want to keep away from Samsung. What I’m left with is either Lacie or Philips. Lacie is KD205 and Philips is KD85 and that’s for 19inch monitors. I have to make a choice tomorrow as I’m so sick of my monitor at home. Would love to have the Lacie but is it really worth it!?!

Two weeks ago I ordered 6 WD 300GB 7200RPM 8MB cache HDD, which
arrived to Kuwait on Wednesday. I wasn’t able to get them on the same
day since they got held in customs. I was able to get them out from
customs on Thursday with the help of nibaq’s instructions and did the
upgrade on the same day. Since I had previously 10 HDD in the machine I
had to add two additional Promise IDE controllers and 6 more Y power
cable splitters. The filesystem of the storage is setup with
lvm2 on top of raid5. The following is the process I did once the
machine was up with the new drives:
1. Since new controllers were added the old raid5 configuration was
invalid and had to fix that with the help of: mdadm -Ebsc partitions
2. Added the new drives to the raidtab and did mkraid /dev/md2 to create
the raid5.
3. To extend the LVM2 I did the following:
pvcreate /dev/md2
vgextend vg /dev/md2
pvscan (get the space I can extend the LVM with)
lvextend -L+1.36T /dev/vg/lv
e2fsck -f /dev/vg/lv
resize2fs /dev/vg/lv

Now the current HDD’s installed are 4x 120GB, 1x 160GB, 1x 200GB,
4×250GB, and 6x 300GB which bringd the total to 3640GB. The current
usable storage area is 2.81TB since some space is lost from using raid5.

For more pictures of kanga check out the gallery.

My Mac mini got a ram upgrade and yes I risked damaging the mini by
doing it my self. It wasn’t as easy as I thought to open using one knife
so I had to use a flat screw driver to help hold one side of the mini
opened while I open the other side. It’s been about 3 weeks now since
the upgrade and I still think that for administrating and programming on
unix based systems it is best to use a linux desktop as it is way more
responsive than my mac mini. Now for graphics and the stuff windows is
used for, I think the mac is way better but this is my opinion so don’t
flame me :o)

For more pictures check out Man Mini’s RAM Upgrade

I haven’t been posting anything for a while now and the reason is as you
can see… THE MESS! Our apartment was so messy and still messy (not as much
as before though). I’ve been trying to sort things out but everything
depends on something else and somethings have to be done by some others
so I can do the things I am supposed to do… Lost yet :o) Now I’m back
for the time being…

We have finally moved! It was just soooo tiring. The last time I moved
was when I came back from the states after 6 years of being there. I
came to kuwait with 31 boxes filled with computers, computer
accessories, electronics, wires, books and clothes. This time it was 30
boxes with just books, computer accessories, wires, clothes, and some
other junk that I really don’t remember what. I carried the computers
and electronics by hand but for the rest I had a company come and carry
them for KD30. I would’ve really died if I had needed to move everything by
myself. Even with all the help I got from the wife and my family I still
went up and down the stairs probably 50 times. Man I really wish I can
afford buying a house NOW so I wouldn’t ever need to move again. The
worst part is I still have a LOT of work to do to settle down even with
the pain I went through this past long weekend.

Ok just got my new Mac mini. It’s awesome… I think… I’m not really
sure what’s so awesome about it as I can hardly use it. I’m new to mac
and it’s like I’m trying to speak a foreign language or something. I
should just run the terminal and stay there since it’s the only place I
know what is kinda going on. BUT it is awesome to just have a mac and
"Think Different" :o) Oh and Mark, I will post pictures tomorrow…
Hopefully…

Update: Here are the pictures

I have been backing up my stuff onto tapes since 2001 but lately I’ve
been so busy that after one of my VXA-1 drives failed 3 weeks ago I just
turned off my backup machine and didn’t try to fix it up until today.
After debuging the problem for more than an hour it turned out that it
was caused from the drive’s external case. I wanted for the longest time
to just take the drives out and install them internally into the
machine’s case and so I finally did that today.