Tomorrow is Daylight Savings. Remember 'Spring forward, fall back'? That's right - tomorrow we move it forward, no matter how odd that may seem. It's October, but it's spring.

At least the Australian government hasn't been mucking with and tweaking DST as it did before the 2000 Olympics. The software engineers need time to code in the changes - I think that a lot of the world now has Sydney time right.

Well that would be anybody using the Olsen timezone databases. I know personally about thirty web services which just give you a choice of 'GMT+10' - and these are all going to be wrong tomorrow. On the bright side, I really don't care if they get it wrong. I'm not using any of them for anything globally time sensitive. It always makes my head hurt trying to figure out how many hours I'm going to be away from GMT with all the conversions and tweaks in effect. I suppose it'll probably be GMT+11. One hour forward. But wait, we'll then be one hour closer to Greenwhich, England as the earth spins. Not further from it. So maybe it's GMT+9. Silicon Valley will be... Uh, I give up. It's in negative GMT and the time is going back. So is it forward or backward? I'll have to figure it out on paper to work out the difference between LA (where this server is) and Sydney (close enough to where I am).  

But this will also give a good test of my own daylight savings and timezone functions (which use Olsen tables). The U.S. is going one hour back and we're going one hour forward. I might be poring over the code tomorrow if something gets askew.  

I'm a bit tired of searching the web for this every time I install a new Linux box; which is every few weeks these days - but apparently not often enough to get it stuck in my brain. 

To disable the annoying 10 minute Linux automatic screen blanking, use:

/usr/sbin/setterm -blank 0

Stick it in /etc/rc.local on Debian, or in /etc/init.d/rc.local if that doesn't exist.

I've got both a 5.25 and 3.5 floppy drive on my Linux box at home. I bought the 5.25 drive in the mid-80s as part of my first 'clone kit' (cheap IBM-style PC built completely from components made in Asia). Today I finally unplugged it, even though it still works just fine. I can't even recall the last time I actually used it. I believe I made a Linux emergency boot disk back in 2002, but that was on the 3.5 drive.

I tossed all my old 5.25 disks prior to moving overseas. After much more than ten years in non-controlled temp/humidity environments, there wasn't any 'critical data' left to speak of. Ditto for the 3.5's.

So I've got no disks left to read, and 720kbytes is pathetic and slow storage in 2007.  If you need a copy of something, just flash it to a USB stick.

It certainly wasn't my first floppy drive (that distinction would go to an old 8 inch CP/M drive which I never used because it was obsolete before I ever finished writing the assembly language driver code); - but it's the longest surviving piece of computer hardware I've got at the moment.  Seems a shame to let it go, however what's the point of keeping it running?

This data too shall pass.