In 2010, I read 44 works of fiction, which is about half as many as I read the previous year. My interest continued to be mostly in the Speculative / Science Fiction genre.  Many of these books were my lucky finds at the Alachua County Friends of the Library book sale or one of the local Gainesville book stores, Book Gallery West and Books, Inc.

My two favorite books from my 2010 reading list were Dragons in the Stars and Dragon Rigger, both by Jeffrey A. Carver and take place in Carver's Star Rigger universe.

I enjoyed Birth of Fire by Jerry Pournelle more than Heinlein's Starship Troopers or Haldeman's Forever War.

Scott Westerfeld is one of my new favorite authors.  After reading The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds, I am eagerly awaiting the next book in the Succession series.

Potentially offensive to some readers, Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming by Roger Zelazny and Robert Sheckley is notable for its entertainment value, poking fun at heaven and hell, demons, and angels, good and evil.

Cuckoo's Egg by C. J. Cherryh is an excellent "master with student in training" kind of story.

Here is the complete list of books that I read during 2010:

Jason Robillard writes that "no shoe has come closer to minimalist perfection" than the Merrell Trail Glove in his review posted at Barefoot Running University.

The full review: http://barefootrunninguniversity.com/2011/01/04/merrell-trail-glove-review/

A shoe like the Vibram FiveFingers without the toe pockets sounds really great to me.

[image source: merrell.com]

Ryan Hall, Josh Cox and Terrence Mahon demonstrate some plyometric exercises that they use to build speed and power:

Artwork by a 6-year-old:

With the upcoming movie release of Tron Legacy, it felt fitting to share this video made by my brother-in-law a few years ago:

I recently gained my first experience with the infamous MegaCli command line configuration utility for LSI-based RAID controllers. This utility apparently also works on re-branded LSI cards from Dell (certain PERC cards) and other vendors.  Our New servers from iXsystems included LSI 9260 MegaRAID adapters. These servers run FreeBSD and LSI makes a binary available for this operating system.  I later noticed that megacli is also in the FreeBSD ports tree, appears to be the same version as what I downloaded from LSI, but I did not test it.  The megacli utility is also available in standard repos for many Linux distributions.

I wanted to verify that the RAID controller would start an automatic rebuild.  I popped out one of the drives and the very loud alarm started screaming.  I waited a little bit and put the drive back in.  The alarm continued and the array did not start rebuilding.  It turns out that the controller has some self-defense against someone mistakenly re-inserting a bad drive so it won't start an automatic rebuild on a drive that was just disconnected and reconnected.  Drives that were previously in an array are marked as "Foreign" if they are reinserted. Replacing a drive with a true spare drive off the shelf triggers an auto-rebuild just fine (unless the adapter's auto-rebuild property has been altered).

I have noticed that the binary I downloaded from the LSI web site is mixed case, whereas the version included in many distrubutions / built from source tends to use all lower-case (megacli).  Be aware of this if you copy/paste commands from below.

So back to the screaming alarm...  

Here is the magic command to silence the alarm: