Solar cell revolution.

A 12 year old in Oregon has developed a 3D solar cell that he believes uses 500 times more light than a standard 2D cell and 9 times as much light as a standard 3D cell. 12. I was pretty damned bright when I was 12, but I sure as hell didn't do anything as cool as this with it.

Solaris 10 restore

Here's one that surprised me quite a bit. I had a server that was toast and had to burn it down and rebuild it. The first restore I did wasn't set up right, but I didn't know that at the time. When the server eventually came up, it seemed to work just fine. It's an all in one server so it does apache, coldfusion, mysql, dns, sendmail, and some other apps. All of those appeared to be functioning correctly, so I went on to work on other stuff that was switched as part of the disaster recovery plan. Then I went to check something on the production server and found that in the local zone running the webserver and most of the rest of the stuff, I was missing some pretty seriously important and low level commands from the OS. Things like vi, touch, uptime, and a bunch of others. Baffling. Most baffling for me was how it was running at all with so many low level OS bits missing.

Turns out with netbackup I needed to check "overwrite files" and "rename hard links" but not the softlinks. The hard links hadn't been checked the first time through, so it didn't restore any of the hard link files. Or at least, thats the nearest explanation I can come up with, because checking that and redoing the restore (which was a nightmare in its own right that I'll write up later) seems to have fixed everything just fine.