I've just spent three hours trying to find an adapter for the drive that I ordered for the Dell server that came in yesterday.

Before I ordered the drive, I asked Dell if the SCSI connection inside the computer was a 68 pin or an 80 pin. They assured me it was an 80 pin, so I ordered an 80 pin drive.

Bozos. It's a 68 pin cable. "Are you sure?" I asked them. "I just looked at our internal documentation, it says 80 pin," he replied.

Here's a little observation. It's not easy to find or purchase SCSI adapters on the net, even if you know what you need. I did find that I could buy them in bulk from scsi-cables.com if I wanted to. I don't.

Hopefully Gary will be able to find the adapter I need and have it shipped here for delivery tomorrow. It's getting late.

Stratfor reported in last night's Global Intelligence Update that Egypt's military, while strong enough to present a threat to Israel's security, has a severe problem with mobilization. Russian and American reports indicate that it would take them six months (6 months!) to be ready for a war.

Stratfor suggests that this gives Israel more latitude in dealing with the ongoing Palestinian Intifada. To quote:

The Egyptian military’s readiness problems provide the Sharon government with extra slack in achieving its security objectives with regard to the Palestinians. With little prospect for an Egyptian military response, Tel Aviv can focus on the West Bank and Gaza and in Lebanon. Israel also can stonewall international efforts to reach an immediate settlement.

Egypt will step up its efforts to bring an end to conflict before it escalates further, seeking to avoid a war it is not prepared to win.

Of course, that doesn't mean Egypt will succeed in their efforts to "bring an end to conflict". Nobody's been able to bring peace to the region yet. I see this escalating, significantly, before it calms down.

Yesterday Duncan posted a message on his Jotter which mentioned that Google was no longer indexing sites hosted by editthispage.com. I thought that was interesting, so I followed his links to Andrea's and David's sites, to learn more.

There was a lot of speculation about what might have happened. Some thought it was because Userland's servers were down the last time Google tried to index them, some thought that Google didn't like Userland and had removed all Userland-hosted sites from their index.

Knowing that Userland has load problems when the indexers start crawling, I thought it more likely that they'd simply

Continued...

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For the moment at least, Userland is allowing Google to index pages on their servers once again. The inktomi robot "Slurp" still isn't welcome, but at least Google is.

Unfortunately, experience tells me that it'll take Google at least a couple of weeks to update their index again.