17 June 2002
Work
Last week, one of the servers died because one of the sticks of memory died. After pulling it out, the system booted fine. It would have been a lot easier to test if I didn't have to open it up to plug a floppy drive in. I now have Memtest86 in the GRUB boot menu. Was pretty easy to set up:
cp memtest.bin /boot grubby --add-kernel="/boot/memtest.bin" --title="Memtest86"
This is the second stick of DDR memory we have had that died; probably due to overheating. As the server has 5 IDE ribbon cables, I might look at getting rounded cables which Jaycar is stocking these days.
GNOME
The release candidate for GNOME is out. It is looking very nice, and will be a great release. Still working towards a 2.0 release of PyGTK and gnome-python. I did a bit of work on gnome-vfs bindings (there are a number of annoying inconsistencies in the API, but overall it is a nice library), and jrb has been trying to implement a full widget in python (and reporting bugs for things that prevent him from doing so).
Beer
The honey ale I brewed turned out very nice. The first bottle I tried (two weeks after bottling) was a bit sour, but subsequent bottles have improved a lot.