Yay. After finally getting in and having my hernia operation, I’m back out and recovering. I have to say that with all the bad things you hear about the public hospital system etc in the media, I couldn’t have been happier with the way I was treated and the quality of treatment I received while at the Northern Hospital.

Niel was my anaesthesiologist - and he was great. He was upfront with everything - which helped out my nerves a lot as this is the first time I’d ever been in hospital for an operation. The nurses were great, everyone was friendly and it was all done before I could really get scared.

There was a few interesting things… The gas that they give you in the operating room to knock you out seems to have a sweet smell - and I remember being very nervous thinking that the gas isn’t working - and that’s the last I remember before waking up. The second funny thing was that I had to be given 29mg of morphine in the post-op area to get rid of the pain. Apparently that’s a lot for anyone to be given - and the nurses were really shocked that I didn’t throw up or feel nausea afterwards.

All in all, I’m feeling much better and progressing well on the road to recovery. Thanks to all that sent me emails wishing me well etc - it all helps :)

There must be something magical about today. First we have an article on how to measure the speed of light with a microwave, now we have a blender vs an iPhone.

I’m really enjoying these waaaay too much…

Ok, so if you haven’t figured this out already, I really like microwaves and other RF emitting devices. What I never thought of before however is how to measure the speed of light using a microwave.

Mr Hood (a friendly English physics teacher) shows us exactly how to do this in this article. Certainly a case of thinking outside the box :)

Linux has a lovely software raid feature set with a ton of options and levels for just about any situation, however one thing that most people use it for is data retention when your hard disk does die (not if, when). With the new tools that are around these days, a lot of the documentation is out of date on how to check RAID arrays - and one of the worst things in the world is when you figure “it doesn’t matter that drive died”, whack in another clean disk and SURPRISE! you have another faulty disk!

So, how do you minimise the impact of failures?

1. Look at the smart tools. Take note of their values and get the drives to self-test on a regular basis

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smartctl --smart=on --offlineauto=on --saveauto=on /dev/hda

2. Scrub your RAID array on a semi-regular basis. This forces the array to verify your array and make sure everything is ok.

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echo check > /sys/block/md0/md/sync_action

3. Keep another backup. If your data is important, don’t rely on just a RAID array. Think about if the machine dies. Say a power supply dies and takes out your hard disks, your RAID is now useless. Invest in a good quality tape drive and have a regular backup schedule.

Nothing is 100% foolproof, but with a bit of thought before a failure can save you hours, sometimes days of stress and headaches. The server that this site is hosted on recently had a RAID1 fail. Most data was recoverable, however the system required 2 new HDDs. A nightly rsync run from this machine to another offsite system took the recovery time to 2 hours + data copying time. Very little was lost (I think we lost maybe 5 mailing list messages from the archives).

Oh, and if you need to repair your RAID array at any time, try using:

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echo repair > /sys/block/md0/md/sync_action

Airservices Australia have recently published another batch of updates in line with the release cycle for the Aerodrome, Apron and Procedure IAL Charts. I’m running my batch scripts on these as we speak and the new PDFs will be available here shortly.