b.cognosco

Brent Ashley and I have been looking forward to some notes from OSCOM2. As noted earlier, Brent is doing some interesting stuff with OpenSource CMS and making inroads to BigCo. We're both interested in seeing how the OpenSource solutions are maturing and what trends are emerging in the marketplace.

James Robertson has been keeping track of OSCOM2 developments and points to a variety of news and notes:

Happenings at OSCOM2.
It sounds like there were some interesting things happening at the Second Open Source Content Management Conference (OSCOM2). Several reports have been published on Content-Wire:

Tom Weiss writes his first impressions from the conference,
he then goes on to report on day 1
and finally day 2 of the conference.
(Open-source CMSs are the topic of an upcoming article of mine, titled Ten reasons to consider an open-source CMS, which will be released in the next couple of months.)
More interest from OSCOM2.
The Open Source CMS conference (OSCOM2) has generated quite a bit of interest in the media, which is encouraging. Shelley Doll interviews two of the leading open-source advocates on their thoughts about content management systems. To quote:

I've been on the analyst conference calls, and open source just isn't on the radar at all. Why? Instead of complaining about a Roswell-like conspiracy, we need to change the equation ourselves. The benefits we bring to content management customers are important, and we need to deliver the message.
[ Source: Column Two]

Homeland Security Is Your Friend

11:33:23 AM

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Hmm, I wonder if there are any Arab names that resemble "Frazier".

No-fly blacklist snares political activists
Friday, September 27, 2002 SFGate.com
Alan Gathright, Chronicle Staff Writer
A federal "No Fly" list, intended to keep terrorists from boarding planes, is snaring peace activists at San Francisco International and other U. S. airports, triggering complaints that civil liberties are being trampled.
[...]One detainment forced a group of 20 Wisconsin anti- war activists to miss their flight, delaying their trip to meet with congressional representatives by a day. That case and others are raising questions about the criteria federal authorities use to place people on the list -- and whether people who exercise their constitutional right to dissent are being lumped together with terrorists.
[...]Federal law enforcement officials deny targeting dissidents. They suggested that the activists were stopped not because their names are on the list, but because their names resemble those of suspected criminals or terrorists. [...]

The Never-Ending Hard Drive Story

11:22:46 AM

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I feel like one of the late Sam Kinnison's stand-up acts -- "It never ends! It never ends!" (If you've seen Kinnison, you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, it's too sick to repeat.)

This damn hard drive thing. When the first drive failed I managed to save all the data. I had a RAID 0 (striped) array configured on my desktop machine. Following the advice of IBM tech support I did a low-level format of the drive, letting it remap around the bad sectors. Then I put it back in the computer but I reconfigured the array to be a RAID 1 (mirror) and restored all the data.

When the drive failed again (three days later) I just yanked it out and, feeling all smart and pleased with myself, went waddling off to Staples to pickup another. I decided to buy a 60GB Maxtor since it was only $100, and Promise tech support had said I could swap any drive into the array for temporary usage as long as it was of equal or greater capacity and equal rotational speed.

They were right. It worked just fine. And had the added effect of convincing me I was a real geek, and had outsmarted the computer.

Before I could get the first IBM drive back from RMA, the second IBM drive croaked. But this time I was ready. I promptly tooled off to OfficeDepot and picked up a second 60GB Maxtor drive, confident in my new-found geekiness, and sure that I would just setup a nice, 60GB mirror RAID and be done with it.

I should have known. I'm no more a geek than Mother Theresa was one of Hef's girls. And the Digital Goddess hath taken great pleasure in pushing the Cosmic Smite Button putting me in my place.

The first Maxtor drive -- the one I used as a backup to the original 30GB RAID 1 array -- is now brain-damaged. It has no clue it's a 60GB drive. No matter what I do -- format, fdisk/MBR, use the Maxtor utility for restoring Sector 0, etc. -- the damn thing thinks it's just 30GB.

I can't put the two supposedly identical 60GB drives into their own array because one thinks it's only 30GB!

I have no idea how to fix this. I was able to create a 57GB non-DOS partition on the drive, despite the fact that fdisk tells me the drive's maximum capacity is 32GB. But the Promise RAID controller only recognizes (like fdisk) the 32GB space. WTF?!

How do I get past this stupid drive amnesia?