Not the first time I’ve been bitten by this — tip of the day: if your computer is connected to the powerline by a power brick thingy with an on/off button … make sure it’s not easy to hit it accidentally. Especially not multiple times.

I’ve got a server here with a “Promise FastTrack ATA100 IDE RAID controller” … Yay 2 extra IDE ports with semisoftware RAID. Not all too useful in a 1U box with 2 drives, unless you’re into that semisoftware bios-windows RAID crap. So… don’t connect anything to it, and all is well, right? Not exactly. When you do that, all you get on boot is a message saying it didn’t detect any disks, hasn’t configured any RAID sets, and asks you to press CTRL-F to enter it’s BIOS or Esc to continue booting. Phew, okay, that’s fine, let’s just wait like 10 seconds and see if it continues booting. Nope, not after an hour either. Why the *bleep* do you have to press Esc to continue booting … especially in a server! Even if you have a disk connected but haven’t configured a RAID set it will stand there waiting for your Esc. (note: configuring a single-drive RAID0 array does the trick there). Add to that there was no option in the BIOS to turn off the controller… So I dug out the PDF manual from Gigabyte.com.tw and found the jumper to turn it off.

But how irritating is this?! I have a Tyan board that also has that controller on board (but with a BIOS option to turn it off) and it does the same thing if you don’t shut it up… Retarded if you ask me… 😐

In the middle of a cleaning session… a big appartment takes a lot of work to get cleaned up :s

Yesterday we went to Fnac, because of the “Buy 4 books, get the cheapest one for free” action. We didn’t actually find 4 books to buy, so we still saved. I bought Dan Brown (author of the Da Vinci Code)’s new book: The Delta Deception (in Dutch however), and Diana bought “Head first Java” published by O’Reilly (about the only publishing house I buy computer books from). She decided yesterday she wants to learn programming, and after some comparisons of programming languages, Java was the outcome.

We’re 2 chapters far now, just reaching into OO. The book is pretty well-written, not boring like most books are (e.g. the book we used to learn Java at Rega), so that’s especially good for her, as she doesn’t really like learning from books. I’m there with her and together we wrote her first little programs in Eclipse. I don’t know how much she remembers of it the day after, but I will try to help her until she can do what she really wants to do with her programs 🙂