Wyzardry.net

I did some reading about OpenID today, after hearing that AOL is now providing OpenID service for all its members. It’s a distributed single-sign-on system, similar in principle to Windows Live ID but not centrally controlled by any single entity.

Back in early November I built a new computer. It’s a moderately high-end computer — 2 gigabytes of RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 processor — but its most distinguishing feature is its storage subsystem: three 750GB hard drives. My plan was to make a RAID-5 array out of these drives, for about 1.5 terabytes of usable storage space and protection against drive failure. I figure this should be enough storage space for me for the next 4 or 5 years.

My plan was also to encrypt the RAID array using Linux‘s “dm-crypt” feature, as I’ve already been doing on my laptop for over a year. I think a 1.5TB encrypted RAID-5 array — which I can then subdivide into logical volumes with LVM — is pretty cool.

Unfortunately, after I’d put everything together and installed the operating system (which itself required jumping through some hoops), I found that I had a problem: frequent, severe filesystem corruption anytime lots of disk activity was occurring. And Debian‘s “aptitude” package-management tool would frequently print garbled text when I launched it. And one of the hard drives had logged an I/O communication failure in its SMART log.

Uh-oh.

After riding in a car for about ten hours today, I’m now at Smugglers’ Notch, Vermont for a week-long ski vacation. It was unseasonably warm last week and only started getting cold a day or two ago, so it remains to be seen how good the skiing will actually be.

Everyone in my family has a laptop, though, and Jaclyn has a DDR pad. So we have with us, on our vacation getaway, six computers and a Playstation.

We are such a geek family. :-)

Well, I went ahead and made this site live. No more stupid placeholder “coming soon” page.

I don’t really consider this site “finished”, but I’ve basically decided that Drupal will just be a holdover until I can write something better. I plan to investigate TurboGears, Ruby on Rails, and CakePHP in my quest to write something better, though I might end up just implementing something custom using mod_python using the lessons learned from those three.

But for now, at least I have a site with a working blog.

After living with my parents for two years following my graduation from college, I now have an apartment of my own. Yay!

It’s nice to be living on my own again. Living with parents and siblings is nice for having family around, and it’s a great way to save money, but after awhile one starts to lose the sense of independence that one had gained while away at college. I think two years was a good balance.

I’m sitting here playing with Drupal. Drupal is pretty cool. Mature, relatively easy to use, and has lots of useful add-in modules available. It’s not perfect, but it’s good.

The problem is, I’m not really sure exactly what I want this site to do.

Having more or less settled on Drupal as the tool for building my website, it’s time to actually go ahead and build it. This item is the first thing created in this installation; much more development will follow before the site goes live.

At the moment, the site is running on a separate subdomain so that the main “www.wyzardry.net” site can continue showing its placeholder page. Once it’s ready, I'll move the site over there so it’s live.