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Wednesday, 8 May 2002

Does anyone have experience installing ATAPI drives in 3.5" half-height FireWire enclosures? A generous acquaintance donated (er, "long-term loan"ed) me a 4 GB Travan ATAPI tape drive to replace my dead Sony SDT-5200 pseudo-DDS-2 drive. But it doesn't fit very well in my G4: I had to install it upside down and its use precludes my simultaneously connecting an IDE cable to the factory installed CD-RW drive. I have a choice of:
  • hacking up the inside of the case so the drive will fit right-side up (the bay is designed to accommodate a Zip drive, which has its IDE and power connectors on the opposide side)
  • trying to somehow fit a FireWire/ATAPI bridge board into one of the external SCSI enclosures I have (the space above the tape drive you see in the picture at right is empty)
  • installing the tape drive in an external FireWire case, which is still a lot cheaper than buying a new internal tape drive.
This enclosure looks like the faceplate comes off, which might make it work, but the Web page doesn't mention any compatibility with non-hard drives.

Suggestions appreciated on how to achieve this goal; I just had a hard drive failure and the thought of not being backed up scares me. I wish I could afford a real tape drive right now.

* 11:15 PM | Radio
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You can always count on finals week as a fertile ground for uiuc.test posting. This exchange cracked me up:

Erik Newman wrote:
> 
> john marriott inflicted upon usenet the following:
> > Just let me know when, I have a super soaker 2500 that hasn't gotten
> > much use lately.  I'll fill it with anti-herpes spray.  Failing that,
> > some sort of acid.
> 
> Trust me on this one.  Spraying sorority girls with a Super Soaker is
> good for a $105 disorderly conduct fine in the city of Champaign.
 
and you forwarded poor mary to abuse!?!

* 10:41 AM | Radio
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A number of my friends who host with csoft.net have been complaining about the service recently. It's definitely, er, cheap. This morning I read they cut off Les Orchard's 0xDECAFBAD.

I use pair.com as my Web host and could not be happier. The cost is quite a bit higher than that of csoft.net, though, and I've heard sporadic complaints about their shared MySQL servers (which I do not use).

The upshot of all this is that for the best reliability, I still need to move this weblog onto my own site. Some day when I have more than 15 minutes to spare, perhaps. In the meantime, I've still got 94% of my 40 MB free.

* 10:20 AM | Radio
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Now I've made the changes below, form submission (clicking the 'Delete' button) also results in a new window opening. Need to fix somehow, hopefully in an elegant fashion. I wonder if CSS will work?

* 8:02 AM | Radio
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A great tip: I use Radio's News Aggregator and always open links in new windows (or new tabs), so the aggregator page remains visible. Sometimes I forget to Command-click a link, and end up replacing the aggregator page without intending to.

The post I linked to doesn't describe exactly how to modify Radio's templates, so here's one way to do it:

  1. In the www folder, insert as the first line of system/pages/news.txt:

    #meta “<BASE TARGET='_blank'>”

  2. Then, in #template.txt, add after the <head> tag:

    <% metaTags () %>

That's all! Now your News Aggregator will always open links in new windows, without you having to remember to click with the middle mouse button or while holding down modifier keys.

* 5:56 AM | Radio
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