DancingSamurai.ca

My old machine is an Asus A8N SLI Deluxe, and I’m trying to set it up as a media centre PC down in my media room. I picked up a few 1-TB drives to create a RAID-5 array (my old 500MB x 4 in RAID-5 is full, if you can believe it), and thought that would be perfect since the mobo has onboard RAID-5 Using a SiI 3114 chipset.

Unfortunately, when I used all four drives in a RAID array, it seemed that the maximum supported size seemed to be 746 GB (yes, smaller than a single drive!!). That isn’t very useful. Three drives gave the correct size, but that’s wasting a lot of space.

Usually, BIOS updates fix these little glitches; unfortunately, this being an old motherboard, ASUS hadn’t updated the BIOS much in several years. I was running the latest 1805 bios already, but that included the very old 5.1.36 BIOS for the Silicon Image 3114 RAID controller – they were up to 5.5 now! (5.4.03 for embedded controllers)

Google again comes to my aid – an updated BIOS for the A8N SLI Deluxe including the latest RAID drivers!. Somebody at the nvidia forums had used the Award Bios Editor to include those drivers. Perfect!  (Local copy of the latest & most up to date BIOS: 1805_SI3114_5403_NVRAID_560.zip)

Now, to copy over my 1.5 TB of data…

I use Zenphoto for my gallery, which uses the Flowplayer plugin (as one option) for playing videos (flv & mp4).

I just noticed this, but the out-of-the box settings for the above do not preserve the aspect ratio of videos (i.e. they are stretched to fit the player, or the screen in full screen mode). And there is no option to change this setting in zenphoto. (They have a dropdown for the aspect ratio of the THUMBNAIL – how useless is that?). So I did some hacking of the code, and now it works great!

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I updated to the new version of the Prosumer Theme for WordPress. So now it looks a little slicker, has some cool CSS menus in the top bar or something, and the Gravatar images work.

I also took out my Twitter feed from the sidebar, I think it was slowing down my page loads…

Just updated WordPress to 2.8.1 and Zenphoto to 1.2.5. Have to play around with the latter in my Picture/Video Gallery and see if it’s actually faster (I blame the slow speed on DreamHost – but it was one of the reasons I stopped using Gallery).

Well I had a few minutes today so I finally got around to looking at what’s wrong with my C310. For the last few years I’ve had to underclock the processor or the CPU temperature would go abouve 100 degrees C and funny stuff would start happening. Even running at half speed (~ 1000MHz), the CPU would idle at 80-90 degrees. Seems a bit hot.

I bought a new Toshiba last year, but I missed my old computer (hey, at least it’s running XP instead of that crappy Vista!) so I thought I’d give repairing it a whirl.

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A little follow-up to my previous post on OSCAR; first off I’m not sure if I mentioned it in a subsequent post or not but I had to re-install it after my liveblogging adventure using a ‘release’ snapshot (I used the December release instead of the November release in David Daley’s OSCAR How-To… but the CVS snapshot was unstable).

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I just came across Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP). Since I’ve been meaning to add this functionality to my site for a while, and it looked easy to set up… voila! Maybe it will increase my traffic. Or something. :)

The ‘relatedness’ is a little whacky, maybe because I don’t tag / keyword my posts properly, but it does at least make some ‘interesting’ connections… :)

Enjoy! I may tweak the settings a bit, to see if it can make things more… relevant. (Wonder what it’ll link to this page?)

Well, i wish I’d found this site that explains How To Install OSCAR CMS on Ubuntu 2 days ago (before spending aforementioned time on tinkering with OSCAR myself, with little success.) Here is a locally saved copy of the file: oscar-installation-guide

Well, here goes… I’m going to try installing it on a Virtual Machine (again, my primary goal is to use it as billing software for my out-of-clinic billings). And maybe I can convince my office to use it (as AbelMed, that we are using now, is painful. The more I use it, the more I dislike it).

It’s 14:50. How quickly can I (who has never done this before) get a working EMR set up? Check back here… hopefully soon… :)

If I’m really adventurous, I may post the VM image here for people to play with!

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