theboywonder.co.uk

Losing my main hard drive to a mechanical fault recently (and having to pay lots of money to have it professionally recovered) was the final push needed to shell out some cash and get myself setup with a RAID configuration to protect all my data.

Having decided on RAID 6 and knowing that I wanted upto 8 drives to be protected I did some reading around and went for the Adaptec 3805 unified serial (SAS/SATA) RAID controller.

Originally I had planned on kitting myself out with six 1.5TB Seagate drives (ST31500341AS), and although these weren’t in the compatibility list for the controller I had hoped they’d be ok. Luckily I checked with Adaptec and received this suprisingly detailed reply:

The new 1.5 TB drives from Seagate are currently under compatibility testing with several of our controllers, but currently are classified as unsupported. Until this testing is complete, we cannot recommend the use of these drives with any of our current controllers. The drive’s firmware appears to be incompatible with many of our controllers and in many cases, although the drives are detected, the array may not be able to be created properly or there can be behavioral issues with these drives. At this point, we woul recommend using drives listed in the compatibility report for this controller at: http://www.adaptec.com/NR/rdonlyres/154B1035-A97E-4E5B-9558-68E597C7E7E6/0/20081_ARCSASCompatibilityReport_030708_3x05_3085.pdf

So at the time of writing, unfortunately the Seagate ST31500341AS drives are not compatible with Adaptec 3805 RAID controllers. I think I’ll have to fill my case up with 1TB Samsung spinpoints instead…

Michael Arrington of techcrunch.com has written (updated) a very handy article listing some excellent Web 2.0 companies you should get to grips with. I can’t say I use all of them but I do use a fair few (Flickr, Gmail, Netvibes, Digg, WordPress, Skype, Youtube), and I love them. I dare say I’ll be signing up for a few more, and hopefully with the increased convergence of web services, 2007 will see people adopting and contributing to sites such as netvibes more frequently.

Firstly, complete credit to tijs for the original plugin, allowing you to display your recent tracks on your wordpress blog. I wanted a weekly artists option, and noticed some other people were after the same, so I modified a few parts and decided to make it available :)

You can download it here: lastfm_artists.phps

Installing:

1. Save the file, and change .phps to .php
2. Upload to your plugins folder.
3. Call the weekly_artists function (as explained in the plugin) somewhere in your template (for example, sidebar.php).

Hope this helps some people! :)