June 23, 2010, 9:34 PM — If you've been waiting for an account on Google Voice (what was once called "Central Station") you, my friend, need wait no longer ... Google has just announced that is now open to the public.
Should you, for some unfathomable reason, not be familiar with Google Voice let me give you the skinny: GV provides you with a telephone number, for free no less, which Google claims is yours forever, and then throws in a heap of cool features.
You can configure your GV number to route incoming calls to one or more of your phones and, if you like, do so only at certain times and or for certain callers or groups of callers. You can also customize greetings for individuals and groups, screen voicemail, record calls, conference multiple incoming callers, and make free outgoing national calls. Google also offers low cost international calling as well.
You really should check it out. I now give everyone my GV number so that if I, for some reason, change phone numbers or add a new number to my collection of phone services (which currently includes a Vonage account, two cell phones and a Gizmo account) I can still be contacted. Way cool.
So, this week I've been spring cleaning. My house? Nah. My storage? As the French would have it, "mais oui!"
I currently have about 7TB here at the Gearhead Secret Underground Bunker and I know I have what could be described as significantly unoptimized storage.
My big problem is not fragmentation. For this, I have relied on Raxco PerfectDisk on my servers and workstations, and my SAN is based on the Synology RackStation and DiskStation products I reviewed at the end of last year.
Synology devices use the ext3 filesystem which, according to Linux System Administrators Guide: Chapter 5, Using Disks and Other Storage Media, keeps "fragmentation at a minimum by keeping all blocks in a file close together, even if they can't be stored in consecutive sectors. Some filesystems, like ext3, effectively allocate the free block that is nearest to other blocks in a file. Therefore it is not necessary to worry about fragmentation in a Linux system."
