It’s my third day using twm window manager at home. Nice. Allmost as good as Afterstep. While playing with configuration, dotfiles.com website proved to be very useful.
Category: Technology
I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.
KDE 3.1 released
KDE 3.1 released today! I did try one of the CVS snapshots earlier, so I have the idea of how nice it is.
The rumour said that in order to enable Win-key bindings in KDE one needs to change keyboard type from pc101 to pc104. Needs checking though.
Random bits
Lots of Vim.org during the first half of the day. Tested out most of the cool scripts and plugins. Checked out few colorscemes. In general, colors, IMHO, are better from the default installation, but perl compiler settings, calendar plugin, man and info plugins, ‘complete’ion options with the proper dictionary, and few other things came very handy.
Lots of meetings during the second half of the day and it seems that I will get a better set of working hours (finally!).
Chesters bar with few old-time friends, lots of beer and buffalo wings… Few tequillas to close the mess. :) Not a bad day at all.
LVM
Testing out the LVM (Logical Volume Management) on Linux (using Red Hat Linux 8.0). Installed and configured as a charm in less then 30 minutes. Not bad for the first try. We’ll see how that 240 GBytes disk (made of two 120 GBytes) will perform.
Ultrium
Spent most of the day educating myself about Ultrium tape drive technology and HP solutions which utilize it. Looks pretty nice. Ultrium technology is defenetely something I want to get my hands on (and I probably will within the next month or two). No cleaning (generally, apart from special cases), large capacity (100 GBytes native), good transfer rate (15-20 MBytes/second native), almost hardware tape verification (if I got it right), implementations from multiple vendors, open tape format, and few other nice things.
Something nice that I have been looking over from HP was a tape library module with 60 slots, with up to 4 Ultrium tape drives. Each module like this has 2 mail slots, which can be used to move tapes around other connected modules (up to 4 in this case). Good price offer. Expandable. Flexible, with good capacities (24 TBytes native, 240 slots, 16 drives). Touch screen control panel, SCSI, supported by all major operating systems. What else could a backup admin ask for?