The Diary

My photos from a trip inside the Mer Du Glace.

The entrance

Translucent ice

Refracted light

Solid glacier ice

A melted hole

The glacier at this point is covered in a layer of rock

Looking up the Mer Du Glace

One of the walks we went on started from Le Tour and went over the Aiguillette des Possettes after a brief wander into Switzerland. The weather was excellent, being neither too hot nor too cold, clear and sunny all day. The terrain was fairly easy to walk over too. Here’s today’s selection from a much larger set.

The summit

Mont Blanc through the trees

A cairn

The Swiss border

Mont Blanc from Le Tour

Mont Blanc

Snagged from the Telegraph…

A helicopter searching the slopes of Mont-Blanc has been unable to trace the climbers - five Austrian and three Swiss – who were swept away by the avalanche at 3am on Sunday on western Europe’s highest peak.

The climbers were scaling the Mont-Blanc du Tacul - one of the peaks in the range - in perfect weather conditions, but were suddenly subjected to what one mountain guide described as “a scene from the apocalypse”

Read the rest of this entry »

Since I have taken a lot of photos, I’m going to be spending the next few days picking out the best and displaying them here.

To begin, here are photos from my cable car trip up the Aiguille Du Midi

The lower viewing platform

The summit of the Aiguille Du Midi

Hanging Icicles

Looking down towards Chamonix

The Aiguille Du Midi cablecar station

Vertigo

After spending all night and day shuffling data off old hard drives onto my new terabyte drive, everything is complete. Some of the drives in my server were really slow and it’s only because it was attached to my network that I never noticed. My main video drive, for example, was managing a whole 2 megabytes per second. It took ages to empty that!

After removing the five old drives and the ATA controller card the machine draws 100w of power. I have left the kill-a-watt plugged in permanently and will watch it out of mild interest. Strangely the UPS draws 50w with no load.

With all my data moved across I have 583GB of space free. This should do me for a few years if I remember to clean up and periodically delete accumulated junk.

For those of you who are interested, have some stats:

Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1      121601   976760001   83  Linux

Attached devices:
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
  Vendor: ATA      Model: MAXTOR STM310003 Rev: MX15
  Type:   Direct-Access                    ANSI SCSI revision: 05

/dev/sda1:
 Timing cached reads:   578 MB in  2.00 seconds = 288.34 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  226 MB in  3.01 seconds =  74.98 MB/sec

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3              14G  2.0G   12G  15% /
varrun                221M  300K  220M   1% /var/run
varlock               221M     0  221M   0% /var/lock
procbususb            221M  120K  221M   1% /proc/bus/usb
udev                  221M  120K  221M   1% /dev
devshm                221M     0  221M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda1              99M   32M   63M  34% /boot
/dev/hdb1              58G   39G   19G  69% /data
/dev/hdc1              38G   12G   26G  32% /data/pub/pictures
/dev/hdd1              74G   54G   16G  78% /data/pub/audio
/dev/sda1             113G   57G   51G  53% /data/backups
/dev/sdb1             147G  131G  8.3G  95% /data/pub/video
/dev/sdc1             917G   17G  854G   2% /mnt

See the tiddly hard disks that are mostly full in that list? They’re all going to be removed and replaced with that nice, shiny 1TB drive. Rather than having six drives in my computer chewing away at my electricity bill, there will be two - a PATA boot drive and the SATA data drive.

Copying the data across takes quite a long time though.

Look what was waiting for me when I came home…

The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey

At my parents’ house now. Tired and off to bed.

I’m currently sat on the bank of the lake, watching the fountain spew water into the sky. It’s hot and sunny and really quite pleasant. The free city-wide wifi helps too, as does my dad’s Asus Eee PC, my N810 fails to connect to the network at all.

The plane is in a few hours.

This is nuts. We go home tomorrow, back to merry old Englandshire in an EasyJet flying toothpaste tube/cattle transporter. Our flight leaves at 4pm, but air travel tradition dictates we arrive two hours early for check in (a thirty second process, naturally). To make things even more tedious, our bus from Chamonix leaves at 7am - yes, in order to arrive ready for the flight that leaves at 4pm, I have to leave at 7 in the morning. And naturally that means waking up at 6am.

And some people actually go travelling for fun.