Ugh, so the WordPress built-in gallery content type seems broken again. I’m not sure it’s worth bothering about. If i fix it locally, it’ll just break again on some future update.

We used to have a lot of physical devices on our network^*. Servers, firewalls, file-shares, staging servers, development machines… all sitting on the network with their hard drives endlessly spinning, spinning, spinning!

System administrators are fond of referring to platter-based hard drives as “spinning rust,” partly as a reference to the ferro-magnetic iron crystals that store the actual data, but also to remind us that it’s always decaying and corroding. Over time, drives start generating errors or becoming unreliable. When we had physical devices that exhibited issues, we’d yank the hard drive and replace it. Over the years, we’d accumulated a pile of a dozen or more drives that were unreliable or bad but still contained data.

The data is not especially sensitive, but there could be stuff that could be abused or belongs to other parties. There may well be meeting notes, source code, sample data files, or there could be cached passwords or other credentials. It’s not worth just hoping it’d be OK to release to the world. So it’s a chore to render this data unreadable.

Pulling apart spinning platter hard disks is humbling. These are incredible little devices, with incredibly precise machining and elegant engineering. Going through a pile that spans a decade, you can actually see the improvements in technology: new vibration damping systems, different head-parking strategies, traps for dust, and more. I see these parts, and am inspired by the craftsmanship that goes into them.

So in the spirit of admiration, I offer these (hopefully unreadable) holiday memories.

^* Now, of course, we have few physical devices but all those same services are implemented on “the cloud.” This means that someone else has physical devices somewhere, with their hard drives (or SSDs) endlessly spinning, spinning, spinning (or trimming, trimming, trimming).