entropicaccess dot net

I just made public the first version of a bridge between Moodle (a course management system) and WeBWorK (a [mathematical] homework delivery system): http://www2.truman.edu/~pas577/wwmoodle/

This past summer I worked for an honest to goodness company, and as part of that I wrote a bit of code. I think I’ll be posting some of it here shortly.

I’ve mentioned my troubles with the HPT372A (Rocket RAID 1520) before, and since then I’ve done a little more exploring. I found that HighPoint does have BIOS upgrades available for the card, one of which claims to fix a problem very much like what I was having. However, after applying this update, I consistently got kernel panics, using the newest kernel for RHEL (well, really CentOS in my case, but they’re essentially identical): 2.6.9-11.EL. In short, I’ve given this up as a lost cause.

I just pushed some stuff relating to a C++ class I wrote for a small project. Essentially, it’s an abstract class for dealing with configuration files. You extend it to handle the specifics of a given config file’s expectations, but the annyoing stuff is done for you.

Check it out

Last spring I bought an HPT372A based SATA/RAID card for rillanon (one of my boxen). As I recall, it’s the RocketRAID 1520, though I’m not positive. At the time I was using an early 2.6 series Linux kernel, and everything worked just fine. The fact that the card isn’t a true hardware RAID dealie was annoying, but some tinkering with plain old Linux software RAID and everything was working. At some point, I ended up using the 2.6.4 vanilla kernel, and it was good. I then tried to upgrade past that, and all hell broke loose. I ended up getting all sorts of crap from the second disc in the array, namely problems with DMA interrupts. I finally sat down and really started playing with it, trying to figure out how to patch things up. In the end, I disabled “Use PCI DMA by default when available,” and everything works. Obviously, this isn’t an optimal solution, and when I have time I’ll do more playing around with it, and look into the changes between 2.6.4 and now and try to build a good fix for the HPT36X/37X chipset support.

In light of the new release of Wordpress, I’ve redone this site. It’s actually a quite nice package, just enough in all the right places.

Welcome to entropicaccess dot net. People who have been here before may notice a lack of content. Suffice to say, my old host deleted my site. Not for any egregious offense, mind you. It was simply because their staffers don’t know how to read. I clearly said “Do not delete my entropicaccess.net account!” And they said, “OK. clikety-click. All done!” I’d almost think they were BOFHing it, except I don’t think most of them are smart enough. Anyway, the site is back. I did, however, lose a lot of content. Most of it was crap, but some of it had some sentimental value. This is what I get for not making backups, recently. Any way, I may as well continue moving in.