When I returned from travel during Christmas, I found my old workstation vindaloo was not responding and would not boot. I believe either the board or the power supply died. Since I replaced vindaloo with tuna for workstation duties, vindaloo has been serving as a “media box” hooked up to the TV and serving files. To replace vindaloo, I bought some drives from Newegg which would add a new RAID-5 to tuna and then an Asus Vintage barebones and Intel Celeron to replace vindaloo’s TV display duties. I was able to reuse existing parts for everything else.

The new system is called mackerel, and I’ve named tuna’s new RAID array “albacore”. Shortly after getting this working, I decided to replace the very loud drive in kipper with one of the old drives taken from vindaloo. This didn’t go so well. It seems the old drive in kipper (and perhaps other things as well) was in worse shape than I thought. Instead, I took an old dual Celeron system I was given some time ago and turned that into a replacement for kipper (router and other duties). This new system is called “anchovy”. Now the network looks like this:

• anchovy.isomerica.net
  Role: router, server
  Network: Gigabit Ethernet
  CPU: Dual Celeron 450MHz
  Memory: 256MB
• mackerel.isomerica.net
  Role: set top box, server
  Network: Gigabit Ethernet
  CPU: Intel Celeron D
  Memory: 512MB
• tuna.isomerica.net
  Role: Dan’s workstation
  Network: Gigabit Ethernet
  CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core
  Memory: 2.5GB
• juniper.isomerica.net
  Role: Abby’s Workstation
  Network: Gigabit Ethernet
  CPU: AMD Athlon XP
  Memory: 1GB
• crow.isomerica.net
  Role: Dan’s Laptop
  Network: Fast Ethernet
  CPU: Intel Pentium M
  Memory: 512MB
• mayflower.isomerica.net
  Role: Abby’s laptop
  Network: Fast Ethernet
  CPU: Intel Pentium M
  Memory: 512MB
• wap.isomerica.net
  Role: Wireless Access Point
  Network: Fast Ethernet
  CPU: Broadcom BCM947XX
  Memory: 32MB

I have some other machines which are currently out of order, such as vindaloo, an SGI, vega (Sun SparcStation), and a PIII/Celeron someone gave me. A full network!

The computer language Python uses indentation to mark blocks of code. Any indentation level is supported, but problems can arise when tabs and spaces are mixed. Well, earlier today I managed to do just that on a script of mine. I edited it using two different sets of vim settings and got a mixed indentation file. Solution? I wrote another script to convert tabs into spaces and vice versa. It seems to work decently well. If you discover any bugs, please drop a comment or send an email! Download fixindent.py

So, we’ve received our grades:

• CS671 Programming Languages: A
• CS520 Assembly Language and Machine Organization: A
• PHIL447 Computer Power and Human Reasoning: A-
• MATH531 Mathematical Proof: B+

Overall I am very pleased. I could probably have gotten an A in my Philosophy class if I’d studied a bit harder on the final, but I am happy I spent that time studying for my math final instead. I was right to not worry about the CS520 final, which was quite difficult. I did quite bad on one of my math tests earlier in the semester, basically made some mistakes, wasted time in the process, and then lost my cool. The final was a joy - everything fit into place. I’m sure I must have done well on the final given my final grade, which I am proud of.