Thanks to a client who paid for consulting for his NSIS installer, I was able to raise the money required to buy BigMomma’s storage upgrade! The upgrade will derive significantly from my original plans, but I believe it will provide reliable and plentiful storage for me for years to come.

The idea is to have redundant RAID 0. Wait a sec, isn’t there no such thing? In the strictest terms, yes. But the storage upgrade will consist of four hard disks, each 400GB, in two RAID 1 arrays, and striped together using LVM. This will enable me to have a supermassive 800GB partition, but because it’s spread across four disks, my chances of losing anything upon a drive failure are nearly zero. I can have up to TWO drive failures (on different RAID channels) and still not experience any data loss. The catch is that if two drives on the same channel fail, I’m screwed - but if I get a drive failure I will make it a point to have the drive replaced as soon as possible.

Upon performing the upgrade I will also make some other changes - the most prominent one being a migration to CentOS 5. Obviously I’m burned out for cash now so shelling out three figure amounts for RHEL isn’t an option.

On a different note, the Enano project is going to start using Mercurial as a source control manager. It seems to be working pretty well in my initial tests and I got a repository set up here. My repository is set up so that Nighthawk will always use the Enano core version in the repository, but the Nighthawk-specific plugins and modifications are kept in the document root. Thank the Lord for symlinks!

This is a paper I wrote as a short essay for school, but I wanted to post it here because it’s something that a lot of us have been wondering about.

Is there life out there? For centuries, man has pondered this deep question. The thought of another species on a distant star or planet is entrancing and, quite honestly, mind-boggling. However, we need to understand one down-to-earth truth, and that is that there is probably not life out there.

As a creationist, I believe that all life was designed by God, and that us as humans were created in His image. What does that mean? It means that God has the ability to think and reason, and that we also have those abilities. God created us to be like Him. It’s fairly obvious that while humans are biologically similar to other species, our mental abilities far surpass those of any other creature on earth. Take the creature that is biologically and mentally most similar to us humans – the great ape. They live in families and have designated leaders – but have we ever observed them holding an election? Of course not! They live by instinct. At the beginning of the Bible, we are told about God’s creation of the earth, with that plot finishing with the creation of humans. After that, the entire rest of the Bible deals with how humans have interacted with God, with very few exceptions. It should be strikingly obvious that we are not just another animal.

We, as humans, are God’s flagship creation – His best, most incredible work. Therefore, is it likely that there is another life form that is just as or more intelligent than we are, either on this planet or elsewhere? Absolutely not. No creator will make an exact duplicate of his best work – it should be one of a kind, rarer than anything else that person has ever made. I would say that it is entirely possible that simpler life forms, namely bacteria and other single-celled organisms, could possibly exist on other planets such as the one recently discovered, especially since God seems to have a reputation for leaving little surprises for us to discover (think of electricity as an example). But based on what I believe to be true about God and His creations, the only possible conclusion is that there is no intelligent life on any planet except this earth, and we are that species.