Gizmodo had a blurb on the new Western Digital 500GB HD which they carried from the Inqurier. Both sites gave a big meh to the what WD calles thier WhisperDrive technology, not because it doesn’t work (it’s not out yet, so no one knows if it works), but because they don’t see the need for trading a bit of performance for less sound…

Gizmodo:

Not sure how much you need such a quiet drive, but most people I know would rather have the speed.

The Inqurier:

I’ll take the speed, and put the NAS box in the closet.

Personally, I hope these drives really are quieter. Sure I could care less about the noise of the drives in the closet, but something really needs to be done about the local HD on the Motorola DVR in my bedroom, I’ve been woken up by that thing spinning up to record. Hard drives are in a lot more places then just the server closet.

Aside from the fact that I read this as Harry Potter’s Relay Computer, Harry Porter’s Relay Computer is a pretty sweet hack.

I think I found what’s causing these mysterious “updates”. Gallery2 embedds the session id in the short url of images if no cookie is found. Well since Bloglines and the Planet Ars Lounge (and Feedburner as I found out), don’t store cookies, the session id is there, and since the session id changes each time, the post is marked as updated. Or at least that’s my theory. Luckily gallery2 handles this for the common search engines by looking for identifying strings in the User-Agent and if it matches a known search engine the session id is not included (this is so the search engines don’t index a bunch of pages with session id’s in them). I’ve added the User-Agent values for Bloglines and Planet Ars Lounge and we’ll see what happens.

Sorry for spamming your aggregators while I was working this out, and I hope I’ve licked it.