At long last, I’ve finally got around to updating the version of WordPress that I’m running. It turns out that I can easily update it from the DreamHost control panel, but I found a rather nifty little method that uses Subversion to keep everything up to date.
Along with version 2 comes built in support for widgets, so I’ve finally been able to put up a nice little widget containing my Google Reader starred items. Yay!
Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population
Another interesting little thing that I found, published this month, the paper outlines several conditions that are often perceived to be the cause of hard disk failure and, using the data that they have gathered from the hard disk in their server farms, have compiled some interesting statistics. It is, though, a technical paper – so not suited to everyone’s tastes, but it is quite a quick read.
Unfortunately, they don’t release the data about which manufacturers and models have the highest rates of failure, although it does refer in several instances to one hard disk manufacturer – for example: “When examining our population, we find that seek errors are widespread within drives of one manufacturer only…”[p. 9] It would be nice to know which this is, so they can be avoided; still, perhaps that is the very reason for why they did not publish the name.
I’m a self-confessed Google lover; I have my google homepage, my gmail, my google calendar, and various other bits and bobs. Thus, it should come as no surprise that when I found a funky new application in their labs about a month ago, I signed right up.
Google Reader is a web-based feed aggregator. It’s still in beta, so there are a few bugs here and there, but by and large it’s quite a nifty little piece of software. Interface-wise, it looks rather like GMail, RSS items are listed rather like e-mails would be, and you have the ability to apply your own tags to the news items. The feeds themselves act like folders, and can be sorted in their own folder hierarchy.
A nice little feature of Google Reader, though, is that you can mark items that you particularly like as “shared”, and these shared items can then be viewed by other people, with the link, or can be displayed on your own website.
On the subject of bugs, the only one that causes me any real annoyance is that, occasionally, one item, or several contiguous items from a feed will be duplicated. Now and then, a little red bubble will appear top centre saying “Oops there’s been an error”, but nothing obvious happens; once in a while the interface will just refuse to load, but this is always fixed by a refresh.