Rantings of a Lunatic

Once again I have neglected the duties of a webmaster and failed to post for a while. But I have a good reason this time, I promise. Its called AustinHighSchoolFootball.com, and it has absorbed so much of my time recently. I “developed” the site in 10 days off a PSD file for design and a set of broken APIs, which I think is a pretty good feat. My peers in another market did about the same thing, though theirs is a little more developed in 3 months with multiple people working on it, and I did my part alone. Oh, and its not even the job I was hired for, so I have plenty of other things I am having to keep track of at the same time.
Also, Kelly is fully out of her apartment, and we are both moved into the house completely. Well, we are here and so is all of our stuff, we still have a bit of “moving in” to do. The couch we bought won’t be delivered until next weekend, which will help to push us to the completely moved in state. Moving out of the apartment was a few days of hard work, and lots of cat allergies, until I got smart on the last day and got myself a toxic dust respirator. Once I put that on, I could breathe easily, which was amazing. Also its pretty cool looking, and I will hopefully be able to turn it into a great Halloween costume. I don’t want to give it away, but I will say that I am thinking post-apocalyptic, and also, I am hopping that I can find a good place to wear the costume.
In other news, I am realizing that the single Mythbox is not quite enough now that I am in a house. So, I am planning a few upgrades to it. Also, I have digital cable, which allows me quite a few QAM encoded stations that I can’t tune to right now, so I would like to add a new tuner or two to the server. In preparing for that, I am adding a RAID setup to it, and have gotten myself a 3Ware card for the raid, and am considering a multi-array setup, using a 2 disk mirror for the system drive, a second 2 disk stripe set for captures, and a 4 disk RAID-5 array for data-storage. This RAID-5 array will end up being the main storage for my Myth network, and will also house my long-term file storage and my Subversion repositories. I am also thinking more and more about centralizing my tuners to the server, and running disk-less tuner-less front-ends in the living room and bedroom. Although, I may decide that this is becoming too demanding on the network in the server and relocate a tuner to the living room, but that remains to be seen. Which brings me to another issue that I need to look into, which is my network throughput. I have Gig-E through most of my equipment, but my router is only 100B-T, and I think that is why I am seeing my LAN speeds limited to 4.5MB/s. Although it could be that I am writing to USB2.0 HDs, and internal laptop drives, but I am not sure, and I know that I need to spend some time looking into it.
And yet one more goal is to get the garage cleaned out and start building a work-bench in there. I have at least one etching that I want to get back to working on, and I was just told about a Day of the Dead themed art show for some-time in October, which is an appealing concept to me.
Well, thats enough ranting for today, I will post more soon hopefully.

*Update: I was moving a second folder from a different drive inside my MythServer to the same USB2.0 disk on my laptop, and I realized speeds up to 13.6MB/s, which means that the problem earlier might have been in the drive setup rather than the network. I got the higher speed from a SATA-150 drive and MP3 files, mostly around 4-5MB each. I was getting the slower speeds on a PATA drive, pulling across files between 650MB and 1.4GB. This leads me to believe that I do not have DMA correctly enabled, but I will wait to look into it until I am setting up the Arrays, as the card is in the mail, and I have the drives for the first half of the card.