I get asked this a lot about people. Most recently when visiting the Fat Cat with Simon and his work mates this week, but often about the other Simon (who's my business partner as well as a long time friend).

The truth is a lot of the people I know I met first online, be it Fidonet (hello Pads, Peter, Simon and several others), Usenet (hello Ox.Net), mailing lists (hello ALUG) or IRC (hello, er, lots of people). I don't think I'm in any way unique here, but it can sometimes be awkward explaining this to people who preconceive internet friendships to be something seedy involving 40 year old fat man and 15 year old naive children. Or at least that's what they seem to be thinking when you say "Oh, we met online".

Let's give some examples.

I met Simon on Fidonet, back when we were both 17 or so. We were in a couple of echoes together and we did netmail a bit. When I came to England for university one of the echoes we were in had a meet up and so I decided to go. I ended up staying at Simon's (making his mother worry a bit; even back in 1997 people thought meeting online was freaky!) and that was the first time I met him. We've kept in good touch ever since and even gone into business together. Is this a lot odder than a chance meeting at a pub or through friends? I don't think so, but some people do.

Or take when I moved to Norwich. I had some friends who could help me load up the van in Harpenden (where I was moving from), but didn't know anyone in Norwich to help unload. I'd already joined the ALUG list, so I thought I'd ask there if anyone was prepared to help in exchange for beer and food afterwards. Adam and Edward Betts both turned up to help, not knowing anything about me. And were very helpful and we got everything unloaded. I still see Adam reasonably often, both online and in person (last night, for example). I haven't really kept in touch with Edward since he left UEA though. :(

There are many more examples like this of people who I see a reasonable amount in real life and yet if you asked me I'd have to admit I first knew online, sometimes for several years before actually physically meeting. And lots of people understand it these days, but please tell me I'm not alone in getting the funny looks sometimes. Please?

After seeing the work Dave had done on Reynard City (site down at present, though I understand it's coming back at some point, honest) it got me thinking. I've been reading a handful of webcomics on an almost daily basis for several years, but never actually paid anything for them. And I probably should. So I've finally thrown some money at Userfriendly and am considering buying some Sinfest merchandise. Jerkcity don't seem to have a donation or merchandise option and to be honest I'm a bit scared about what they'd spend the money on. :)

I've done a minor update and released a newer version of my usblauncher code for the USB missile launcher. You can grab it as usblauncher-0.0.2.tar.gz - it just adds some code to tell the kernel to release the device from the usbhid driver, meaning those with USB keyboard/mice can become armed and dangerous without loss of input functionality.

I've compiled my own kernels for as long as I can remember. I do so for almost any box I use, rather than running distro supplied kernels. I think this dates back to to the days when that was just what you did, but it also ties in with the fact I often want to run the latest and greatest (eg for laptop device hardware support).

One of the things I've always avoided is the initrd. I've never really seen the point; I compile my root device driver into the kernel and thus it all works. I've seen some suggestions that the in kernel RAID array detection code isn't really being maintained and that in the future it'll require userland tools to configure a RAID array, so I've been a bit worried that I'll eventually have to learn about initrds.

In fact, that day came this weekend. My large IDE disk is dying and I decided I needed something to replace it so I could have a proper poke. So I bought a pair of SATA disks and found a cheap Highpoint RocketRaid 1520 (don't buy one of these; I mistakenly thought they were better than the good old SI 3112, but they're not. And if anyone knows of a cheap (sub £30) SATA-II PCI card then let me know. I don't think they exist.)

The RocketRaid is basically just a HPT372A (hpt366 driver in Linux) with software RAID on top. Previously I've ignored such things and just used the normal Linux RAID support, but I thought I'd give this a try with the aid of dmraid. This can read several different ATARAID formats and uses device-mapper to map the drives appropriately to keep Linux happy.

So, I install dmraid and it happily finds the RAID array and configures it all up (though I end up with the wonderfully named /dev/mapper/hpt37x_dabhghbgeg which is a bit unwiedly). All good. Except, of course, that I have to run some userland to get the RAID array up, which means I need an initrd to sort it all out if I want / on it. And I do.

These days I want initramfs rather than initrd (and I needed to remember to set CONFIG_BLK_DEV_INITRD=y in my kernel config as it's needed for initramfs or an initrd). I found the initramfs-tools package and installed it, then had a poke around for info on getting dmraid working with it. Debian bug #367661 discusses such things and I've attached the patch I used from Ubuntu to the bug report.

Then I did, as root, update-initramfs -k 2.6.17.6 -c -v and it magically created a /boot/initrd.img-2.6.17.6. Passed that as the initrd in grub and it all magically works; dmraid fires up from the initramfs, the kernel gets to mount the RAID partition as / (and the other partitions as swap and lvm) and it's all good.

Except the fact one of the disks seems to have been damaged in transit and eBuyer are being slow about issuing an RMA number. Oh, and the fact the RocketRaid sucks and only seems to get 15MB/s or so. Meh. The initramfs stuff is all happy though, and a lot easier than I expected.

Everyone in or near Norwich should ensure they're at The Murderers this Wednesday (19th July) from 8pm for Dave's Reynard City launch party. Yes.