The recent troubles I had with my tape robot fall into the category magic: weird resets/lockups/recycles of the device in the Sun 411 case, which took out heffalump a few times as reported earlier. So I switched it to a spare scsi bus (always mount a scratch monkey...), same behaviour but sans lockup of the box. Next thing was to test it on a different system: I dug out my trusty AHA-1460 PCMCIA scsi controller and blasted the robot with data. Same lousy behaviour. Finally I decided that the only thing that I had changed recently was the case. So I moved the robot back into the (noisy) lynx case, without having much hope for the thing, and....it works.

The only lame explanation that I have is that the 411's PSU is rated at 1.7A on the primary side (dunno secondary), while the tape robot wants 0.7A for the tape and up to 2.0A for the robot. (Not that the problems were in any way associated with the robot moving; that worked fine and lockups were never experienced with the robot moving. Still I have no better "explanation". It works, that's currently good enough for me.)

Less magic but still good news is that the debian MyMess -> Sarge upgrades I did today on the lapdog and the work desktop were mostly harmless and a good excuse for cleaning up unused software on the go. I suppose after Sarge is now frozen it's time to eat my own dogfood. This dogfood tastes good.

Not good news is the weather recently: it all sucks, big time. Rarely a day in the last couple of weeks when it doesn't either drizzle or rain or blow gale-force winds. I WANT TO FLY. I NEED TO FLY. bugger.

Related to lack of flying, my problems re licence levels and flying in .at are also confirmed. We'll see if I manage to get the required Oz license in time but I'm not very optimistic. Ah well, I'll go hiking with Cornelia then.

The next semester starts on Monday. I'm so thrilled.

Spent the last few days fixing up years of gut-wrenchingly bad HTML excrements spattered across the website for the Canungra Cup competition (as usual I didn't say "no" fast enough and am now hosting/caring for/maintaining the thing...geeks are suckers). That hurt so bad, even after various runs through tidy and friends...quite some curses and beer later (my homebrew batch has worked out and is starting to get drinkable) most of the pages are standards-compliant and looking at the source doesn't immediately introduce projective vomiting anymore (like the MS shite "let's make a gratuitous table here to produce some indentation, and let's put all the font settings everywhere" did).