I use rss2maildir.py to read rss feeds, it has a nifty feature whereby if a post is changed, it just gets tacked on to a thread for that post. There are 2 things that really annoy me with rss feeds, though - 1 is the people that don't include the full post in the rss feed, and the other is people that include a comment count in the rss feed.

I don't care how many comments are on the post, dammit. I'd deliberately go follow the post if I did, but having that comment count means that I get another one in the thread for NO REASON, the content of the post hasn't changed, dammit. This means that until that post drops out of the feed, every 30 minutes if the comment count has changed (and so the "content" of the feed changes) I get that post yet again and marked as new in my mailbox. Why does anyone put the comment count in the feed, does anyone really care?! If you want to link to comments from the feed, that's fine, just drop the count from it, and the content of the post wouldn't change, and I'd be happy.

Erm, comments are currently turned off here, until I manage to get round to turning on all the little spam prevention fun... just thought I'd have a whinge, really!

So, I was reading some random mumblings on the interwebs, and the pigeon with USB stick being a quicker method of data transfer in SA than their intertubes... then there was a thread on a mailing list discussing this, and someone mentioned using stacks of microSD cards... so then my brain decided to launch itself orthogonally, as it often does. What we end up with is wondering just how much storage you could fit in to the space a 3.5" drive would normally take - not taking in to account any method of attaching it at this point. So, a 3.5" drive is approx 102mmx147mmx26mm, a microSD card is 11mmx15mmx1mm, so, assuming that we're just lying them side by side, and not optimising the way they're stored at all, you can fit (with space round the sides) 9*9*26 = 2106 microSD cards in the area of a 3.5" drive. Assuming that each of those is 16G that's just shy of 33.7TB of storage!

So, that set me thinking a bit further... I reckon that in that space you could do a 6*6 grid of cards with room for connectors, and just about get it to 10 high...so, that's 360 microSD cards, and probably enough room for some control gear (haven't worked out quite what we'd use for that), I then went in to wondering if we could then create a small embedded system to talk to those 360 microSD cards, if we did that then you could potentially do RAID0 across the "platters" with RAID6 on each platter. Now, to my poor head that meant that there should be 340*16G of available storage, which is 5.44TB... of course, that involves somehow interfacing the 360 microSD cards... I'm thinking that it might be possible with some form of embedded system...

Unfortunately, it appears that to actually build this with consumer components... and without including the interface gear which I haven't even begun to work out yet... we're talking around about £26 per microSD card, so, erm, £9360... but I still think it'd be a really neat project... now, if someone can arrange for me to win the lottery, have lots of spare time, and some more brain power... :)

Oh dear... my brain appears to have ticked further through, and I've realised that with spacing between each microSD card, you could, in theory, easily fit 400 of them upended in the space available. Erm. Of course, this still doesn't answer the "how the hell do you then get them all to talk in any sane manner" question... but I'm sure that will work out in my head sometime...

Holger, Don't be silly!, of course computers are 100% secure, and they'd (of course) use very stringent access methods to the system... you know, something like telnet with a banner saying "please don't hax0r us, we will trace you and sue you" or something ;)

So, in light of Sven's Platform, I think I'll just not bother reading his platform when he does get off his arse and publish it (must get round to finishing off NM, must find time from somewhere).

On the offchance that you're reading this after he actually publishes it, here's what it said (single line): "As protest against my unfair banning from debian mailing lists, i will not publish any platform until the weekend after the end of the ban."

Isn't he clever? Isn't that a fantastic way to process - don't publish your platform (that might actually help your case, if you've got any actually reasonable ideas), just whine (again) about your "unfair" banning. sigh. Somedays I do just wonder about humanity.

Carlos says he's on Debian Planet I think he means Planet Debian. It appear that this is a common mistake, though - maybe people don't know about Debian Planet?

In other news - today is Towel Day... I'm not sure I'm brave enough to carry a towel around all day though.