Yep, it looks like my replacement Toshiba laptop hard disk from February is failing. It’s doing the same song and dance. It’s making some rather disturbing noises. I suspect within two weeks, like the previous hard disk, this one will simply stop spinning up. No disk I/O errors, yet, but they’ll be soon to come. I have already contacted Toshiba’s RMA department. I hope my replacement is still under warranty.

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To those of you who can’t be bothered to use one of the two sets of stairs in my building, one of which running the length of the building and unmistakable by a blind person, — you know who you are — stop adding to the rising cost of healthcare in this country. Good grief, it’s only a three story building. The stairs aren’t going to kill you… or maybe they will.

I finally found a reason to mess with Perl’s sprintf for pretty reports. The result is easy to display output for the contents of the England to Murmansk convoy for 1941 to mid 1942. I only have about two dozen convoys left to research.

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Of late I have been working on a campaign file processor in Perl so I can redefine the convoys in Silent Hunter 3 to be far more realistic in composition. With the tool essentially finished, I have begun research into convoys during War War II.

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Apparently it’s hardware death week. So far, my speakers are acting up, my MS optical mouse is refusing random right clicks, and my 512MB DDR fails consistently under memtest86 on test 5, the last pattern.

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After some more testing, I found Luma fails to use the attributes that Mozilla Thunderbird’s AB feature expects. So, stuff like a person’s address, which is visible to Luma when I browse my LDAP tree, is not visible to me under Thunderbird or SquirrelMail’s ldapquery plugin.

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