Grand Prix: The Killer Years

Grand Prix: The Killer Years

If you are in to motorsport you MUST WATCH THIS VIDEO. It is a 1 hour documentary on safety, or the lack of it, during the mid 60's to mid 70's Grand Prix era. Some unbelievably good footage, interspersed with some unbelievably sad footage - particularly the last scene. 

It is very easy to forget how dangerous motorsport can be, especially in today's world of safety first, carbon composites and CAD engineering techniques. But all this started in the late sixties when Sir Jackie Stewart started his crusade.

It's also nice to be reminded that the Nurburgring Nordschleife has 186 corners and that the cars used to get airborne 16 times a lap. Wish I could have seen it with my own eyes...

Watch the video here.

Pile Up!

Pile Up!

I have seen some weird stuff in motorsport. But this??

How embarrasing

How embarrasing

Really. I've been an event manager. This is either staged, or they got a new tech guy in for the next show.

To Tablet or not??

To Tablet or not??

Been a while since blogging and it is not because I have nothing to say. Actually I have a few things that I want to write about, but for various reasons can not. But having a conversation with @richiesroom did give me a moment to think...

Part of what I can't talk about yet involves me getting a tablet. I want one because I will need to get emails quickly on the road since I will be working from a car. I will also need to do some work online, but don't really need anything powerful for that. And want is the key word here. I reality I guess I don't NEED a tablet, but it would be useful :)

The question that always come to the front of my mind when thinking about this is why we do have so many devices? I have always tried to live with as few devices as possible. That's why I've had a smart phone years before Apple made them cool with the iPhone. I don't understand the need to have a phone, an MP3 player, an e-reader, an digital camera. Why can't we have one device to do everything? My life is organised in my phone. I read my books on my phone. I listen to music on my phone. I check the weather on my phone. I even make phone calls on my phone. But I don't do emails on my phone and I don't surf the web on my phone.

And this is where the tablet comes in. It 's big enough to make it useful for reading emails and surfing the web. It's small enough to use in the car and fast enough to be instant on. The only problem I foresee is it becoming my tool of choice.

My phone runs the risk of becoming only a phone.

Fixed - stuttery playback from WHS

Fixed - stuttery playback from WHS

Finally, I fixed it! The home server has been doing funny things recently, more specifically, the streaming side of things has been rat shit. Hi def MKVs were the worse – basically unwatchable - but even low def AVI shows where annoying to watch too.

I tried a heap of things:

• Scan disk drive pool
• Defrag drive pool
• Improve network efficiency (network is only 100Mb – old technology!)
• Remove network bottle necks
• Search web for similar stories

Nothing seemed to work. However I did trace the problem to what looked like a faulty drive. I had installed a 1Tb drive from a media centre I had built for a client that was giving them problems – stuttery playback as it turned out – and I had installed it in the server to see what it was like – what it the drive or was it their system? 

It turned out it was the drive. I tried to remove the drive using the WHS drive removal (the drive is part of a pool of drives) but that failed. The drive problems were preventing it from being read from correctly which meant WHS couldn’t move the data off that physical drive to another in the pool.

At last I thought fuck it – disconnect the drive and see what happens. At worst I would lose the pool, at best nothing - the system would recover without the drive and I would only lose data specific to that physical drive. 

Turns out the best case scenario won. Woo! #WIN We lost a bit of data that was not duplicated (kids educational DVDs which my wife is none too happy about) and that’s it. WHS detected the drive was not there, re-established the symbolic links to the data that is duplicated and removed the drive from the pool.

Wish I had done that from the start!

Awesome Photo

Awesome Photo

I know it is not cool to make light of other peoples plight. And I am certainly not doing that here. 

I do love nature and the raw power that it can display. Recent cyclones and floods in Australia have fascinated me and I always want to be there as it is happening. But for your viewing pleasure I have come across this amazing photo from the NZ earthquake. It is taken moments after the main quake (near as I can tell) and graphically shows the power that a quake can have.

It is simply a great photo

Photo courtesy of http://www.facebook.com/rebuildchristchurch

Automating a Tipping Competition

Automating a Tipping Competition

Being an F1 fan, I started a small tipping competition last year at work. The basis for the comp is that you tip your top three drivers. You earn what ever points they collect – the person with the highest number of points wins the round, and the person with the most points for the season wins that – which is half the money collected over the year. Nice.

So this year I wanted to automate the tipping process to prevent me getting a rush of emails/sms before each race. I figured there’d have to be a web based solution for this problem, but I had no idea where to start. So I looked a tipping competition scripts for Joomla (a CMS I have just started to play with). Everything was for footy – pick a winner from a choice of two. I needed to be able to pick three people from a list of 24. Nothing came close.

Then a mate suggested a survey. That’s a great idea, I thought to myself. Simply ask a multiple choice question from a drop down box three times. Easy. So I start searching via Google. All the big names in surveys who offer free version don’t allow you to export the results. All I could seem to do was copy them from a webpage. Fuck that – I was trying to make this easy for myself!

And this is where twitter comes in. An astute business called SurveyGizmo is busy trolling tweets for the term ‘survey’. Up comes my question to the twitterverse about how to do what I am wanting to do. Quick as a flash (and I mean with 30 minutes or so) I have a tweet from them saying they can do what I want. So checked it out and its great – it does everything I want!

The power of twitter has proven it self yet again!

And if you are interested you can check out the F1 Tipping comp here: http://eepurl.com/cGp86