We bought a brand new branded computer. It came from a reputed brand vendor (or also called a system integrator). We would expect it to come with brand new components. One of them was a branded hard disk. The hard disk died. That’s nothing too unusual. Hard disks are one of the most likely components to fail because it is a mechanical part. However, we were in for a surprise when we removed the failed hard disk to do a replacement.
One of my servers died recently. A few days prior to that, there was something very odd with its clock, which was stuck between 03:14:31 and 03:14:35. Then on its last day, it suffered a kernel panic. After a hardware power cycle, the server never came back up. It’s like it suffered a heart attack, and CPR and defribillation failed to resuscitate it.
Well, my fingers were itchy, and I wanted to test something out. Something that carried a small but inherent risk of mucking up. I was careful, no less, to make sure there would be no mistakes, no typos. In fact, I wrote a “rollback” script to undo the changes after a timed delay, just as a precaution. So, even if the changes mucked up the system, the changes would be automatically rolled back anyway. Then, how about testing this rollback script too? Ah, that’s where it screwed up. Something else was broken, and the rollback script got stuck, and it disconnected my server from the net.
And so in the dead of the night, I had to make a trip down to the colo data centre to fix my server. The security guard was delighted to have some company. I wasn’t. Well at least not in the wee hours of a Monday morning. He was in the mood to chat, and I tried my best to be polite.
[photopress:20071005535.jpg,thumb,pp_image]A computer science student saw this, and asked if it was a mainframe computer. I was almost going to burst out laughing, but managed to hold myself together. I’m sure most of you know it is not a computer at all. This 1.7m high contraption is an isolation transformer. At least you should be able to tell it is some kind of a transformer, right?
I just thought to myself that, my goodness, our students don’t even know how a mainframe computer looks like? Not even seen anything from photos or pictures? Mainframe computers are no doubt getting quite rare these days, so it is not surprising that few people have actually seen the real thing with their own eyes. But I’d imagine at least a computer science student would have some impression from pictures in books or on the Internet. (Check Google images for some impressions.) The last mainframe at my workplace, an IBM 3090, was decommissioned and removed before year 2000 (I think).
I think we had 11 oysters each, from The Line restaurant at Shangri-la Hotel. It's a big buffet with plenty of food.
Lunch at Lerk Thai some weekends ago.
