What _does_ one do with 1500 hard drives?

A question raised, and answered on tisme's journal with this video.

Great way to start the day

1) Go to google.
2) Type in "find chuck norris" (no quotes)
3) Hit "I'm feeling lucky"
4) Giggle.

(cheers ninox!)

My initial reaction to the new James Bond title announcement

Which is, for those of you not paying attention, "Quantum of Solace"

It's a terrible title, even if Fleming came up with it himself.

Over on instant_fanzine applez demanded that there be an evil genius with a quantum device. To which my response was to demand a scene with the following dialogue:

"Are you alive Mr Bond? Or are you dead? Soon we shall open the box and see! Bwahahahaha!"

Hosting Fun and Games

A few weeks ago I got fed up with the mail service on the ducker.org.uk servers. It was fine 99% of the time, but would occasionally suffer outages, and was frequently quite slow. I'd also had a couple of people mention to me that the spam filtering was over-enthusiastic, and that outgoing mail would end up in the receipient's spam folder more often than they'd like.

A while before that I'd moved the mail store for my own email to Gmail. I'd set up a pop-pull from my email to Gmail, and then IMAP to allow me to read it in Thunderbird (as I find an actual app much easier to use than the website). This worked reasonably well - but was slightly kludgey, and made the email slow, as gmail would only pick up mail from ducker.org.uk a couple of times an hour.

So having the excuse to move the email over to Gmail entirely was great - I could sign up for Google apps for domains, get the support staff at the domain hosts to change my MX records, and I'd have email, calendar, documents, etc. all hosted by Google, while keeping my own domain name, and the ability to fall back on them if Google went bust (not likely, but backup plans are always nice to have).

As it happened, it went entirely without a hitch. I set up the domain basics, created accounts for the various users (in this case, members of my family), then changed over the MX records, and told Google to activate the email settings. Everything switched over within a couple of hours, and I got my family set up painlessly. No complaints at all from anyone so far - and we now have 6Gig of email storage each, rather than the 120MB of storage we used to have between us. I've yet to find any downside at all.

Now, I just need to convince the people on notzen.com to let me do the same...