Harddisk woes

I'm currently debugging a problem with SATA harddrives in a NAS and there is a certain series of SAMSUNG drives that have a nasty data corruption problem. In short, it means that you have to run a DOS(!) program to upgrade your harddisk firmware! The amount of workarounds and kludges to get this running on my main PC (with a rather picky BIOS) is really staggering.

Radiation

These are old pictures from when we visited the AKR2 reactor at the university of Dresden in March 2009.

eBay and PayPal suck

tl;dr: Today I tried to pay via PayPal for the first time in my life, it’s broken and sucks really hard.

In principle there should be the possibility to pay “via paypal” using only your bankaccount or credit card, but if you try to, you find out that the system is completely broken.

First, it only reloaded endlessly when trying to switch from eBay to the paypal-page in the Opera Browser.

Then, using the Idiot’s Browser™, I finally was able to pay using my bank-acocunt. Or so I thought. Every attempt I made, using the bank-account or two credit cards was greeted with a different uninformative error message, and yes, I triple-checked everything and there was no typo involved (especially in the AMEX case).

It completely eludes me how such a horribly idiotic system could rise to be a major payment processor.

<end of rant>