New Toys

I've also ordered myself a second Freerunner.  This was a bit less of a budgeted expense, but I have no real shortage of money at the moment (thanks to not drinking regularly).  I realised that the reason for my recent lack of productivity wasn't time as such, rather the faff involved with switching into a very unstable environment for development then having to go back to a usable setup at the end of a "session".  Developing in "sessions" like this seems to be a nice way to avoid getting anything done at all - I had the same problem at the start of my DRM work when we changed to Linux 2.6.29 from 2.6.24.  It's much better to be able to work in a semi-continuous stream as time allows.

There's another reason for this purchase though.  I'm affected strongly by the infamous Freerunner buzz problem in Germany, whereas I didn't notice it back in the UK.  I was going to send my FR in to get both the buzz and #1024 (standby time) fixes done, but I've decided instead just to buy a new one with both fixes already.  Then I'll use the new one day-to-day while my current one becomes a development platform, installed with all the latest and most unstable software I can find, so that I can stomp on the nastiest bugs with some degree of comfort.

And there's one more new toy:  A 32TB RAID6 array with 4 optical fibre channel connections for storing and analysing our data on at work.  All my analyses just went from being I/O limited to being firmly CPU bound..