Tech

Two things, real quick:

• If you're on a Mac, and you're using Time Machine, and you listen to a lot of music, and you wonder why your backup drive is getting like 300 MB of data every ten minutes, it's because iTunes is updating your music files with the "Play Count" field (see the Wiki article on ID3 for more), and Time Machine is detecting that as a file change and duly syncing it to your drive. That took me a while to figure out.
  
• I need new blog software! I haven't written on here in like five months because I simply cannot stand the interface any more. Uploading media is a pain, sorting entries into multiple categories is problematic, and it's just kind of plain ugly (and I hate going through "themes" or "skins" or whatever the kids are calling them these days). I'm leaning WordPress, but commentary or advice is welcome. (It's a huge bonus if the platform you recommend has a Serendipity importer.)
  

One more note - as I was posting this entry, the trackback script choked and died in Chrome. So I guess that's another reason to switch.

So when they say winter quarter at Rose is hectic? They're not kidding. I just found my first solid chunk of downtime since I came back to school two weeks ago. What have I been up to, you ask?

For starters, the Festivus, Christmas, and New Year's celebrations that occurred over my last break were all most excellent. This year was the fifth consecutive Festivus celebrated within the group, and it was by far the smoothest a Festivus has ever gone. The Airing of Grievances was trouble-free, the introduction of a white elephant gift exchange went smoothly, and our Feats of Strength involved that classic game Set. For Christmas a few days later, hordes of relatives (from both sides of the family) descended on the house for almost an entire week all told. (Most hilarious was our cousin Keith, who's two and just being ridiculous all over the place. He got an iPod Touch for Christmas. He's two.) Lastly, New Year's went well overall, despite some illnesses on part of a couple of the partygoers. Mario Kart is never so hilarious as when played sleep-deprived at 4am. Continue reading "A couple updates"

Snow Leopard, the sixth iteration of Mac OS X, came out today. Being the good little Apple fanboys that we are, Chris and I decided to go get copies as soon as we could, which meant when the Apple Store opened at 9am this morning.

So we drove down to the store, getting there around 9:10 (Chris overslept slightly), and walking in to a very sparsely populated store with no visible employees, except for one sketchy guy who darted into the back as soon as we came in. The doors were unlocked, though, and there were several people inside who were just playing with laptops or waiting at the Genius Bar, and it was one of these people who eventually told us: the store doesn't open until 10.

I was mildly upset. Continue reading "Big Cats, Part VI"

So wow. Summer's gone. I head back to school the morning of the 30th, then dive right in with freshman laptop orientation the 31st and a Learning Center tutor "retreat" (two-hour meeting) on the 2nd. Classes begin the 3rd.

In light of all that, I thought I'd take a moment and recap what my summer was like this year. Continue reading "Summer summary (summery?)"

I finally got around to updating that RAID array that I was talking about all the way back around Christmastime. If you don't feel like reading the entry: twelve drive bays, an eight-drive array totaling 1.5TB, and a new five-drive array totaling 3TB.

Now obviously thirteen drives can't fit in twelve bays. So the old array - the one with more drives but less space - had to go. Before I ripped it out, however, I thought I'd grab some pictures of what the inside of the case looked like. It was pretty bad: I hadn't been bothering with cable ties all that much, and I bought extra-long SATA cables to stretch the length of the case, so stuff was everywhere.

(Very technical talk begins here.) The way the case was laid out, the cables quite literally had to go the entire diagonal length of the front panel. The motherboard was oriented such that the PCI slots, where I had the SATA cards driving the array, were in the upper right corner behind a fan, while the drive bays were in the bottom right through a separator panel or two. The PCI slot fan was also bulky enough to be pressing its grille up against the SATA cables as they came off the cards. I would have liked right-angle connectors, but those cables don't come long enough for this case.

Anyway, after snapping a couple shots I tore out the eight 250GB drives that composed the old array and stacked them neatly on top of the case, then moved all five 1TB drives around to be a bit neater in the case before wiring them back up again. This time I took care to tie up bundles of SATA cables out of the way, so it looks much better. But I was still left with several perfectly usable drives, and I'm not quite sure what to do with them yet. (If you need one, shoot me an email. We'll work something out.)

The best philosophies always come from little throwaway remarks at the end of conversations. (Wait, don't they? That's how it happens on TV...)

The conversation I was having today was in regards to Ubuntu, a popular, user-friendly Linux distribution. They released their latest revision (9.04 Jaunty Jackalope) about a month ago, and a bunch of guys on the hall decided to install it and play around with it. Some were Linux novices; some had a good chunk of experience. Almost everyone, though, wound up installing it once, playing around with it, then (for reasons that vary widely) reinstalling it again.

These guys weren't unhappy with how Ubuntu was working on their laptops. Quite the opposite: they were pleasantly surprised at its speed, its reliability, its compatibility, and its usability. (Got any more -abilities? I'm sure they apply somehow.) They just needed a restart. One wanted to clean up his disk, which was still dual-hosting Windows and Ubuntu, and the repartitioning process required he reinstall. Another wanted to get the install procedure just right, and hadn't quite done it how he liked the first time. Continue reading "I have a new philosophy"

I have spent the last two hours wrestling with what can only be described as ignorance made electronic, as I attempted to install a new CPU heatsink and fan into a client's computer. The beastly device, which claims to be "universal" and "whisper quiet," is nothing less than exasperation and unpleasantness waiting to happen.

The specific device in question is the RocketFish Universal CPU Cooler (RF-UCPUCF). This thing is so hard to install, it starts being difficult before you even open it. I had to brandish multiple knives and cut the packaging (that crazy vicious plastic that will cut your fingers off) into no fewer than four chunks before extracting the cooler. Continue reading "And in the category of "Things You Should Not Buy""

Have you ever heard of Foxmarks? It's one of those useful little things called Firefox add-ons, and what it does is very simple. It synchronizes your bookmarks across computers.

This may sound like a trivial concept, but if you have (and regularly use) more than one computer, you'll understand just how useful this can be. Sample scenario: you're a college student in class with a school-issued laptop, and your professor recommends a specific web page for looking up facts about differential equations. You bookmark the page, but when you go to do your homework later on your MacBook Pro or your desktop you brought with you to college because you're a computer science major, you can't find the page again, because it's not bookmarked on those machines. You have to dig your laptop out of your backpack, boot it up, look up the bookmark, grab the URL, manually type it into Firefox on another computer, and bookmark it again. And repeat that process for every computer you feel like using.

OK, something very similar to this may have happened to me recently. And it may have been a Linux kernel autotesting suite installation guide I was bookmarking rather than a DE page. But I was in DE at the time. That part is true.

Anyway, Foxmarks gets rid of all that. It's free to use, and they provide the server space, so all you do is sign up and start syncing. For privacy advocates (like myself), there's an option to use your own FTP server (which you can set up using nothing more than a Windows XP desktop and a Linksys router, but that's for another time). Foxmarks even syncs across your stored passwords, so saved logins like to your email will be preserved across machines. Go give it a try.

Another holiday season has come and (almost) gone, and I thought it'd be nice to take a few minutes to look back on my week and see what went on.

Christmas was obviously the dominating event of the past few days. Among the big gifts I got were a terabyte hard drive (for the RAID array - more on that in a minute) and a nice new office chair to replace the one I have at school. Rose provided a batch of chairs in all the dorms, but they are pitiful excuses for seating apparati, especially considering the amount of homework and coding that is intended to go on in them. So my parents got me a big new padded black leather executive wheeled chair that I can take with me, and I put it together yesterday and tested it out. It's not quite an Aeron, but it's good.

Another big chunk of my time has been spent working on a new iPhone app. I won't say exactly what it is, but it's a big departure from my previous utilitarian apps, and I think it should be a fairly big hit. I will say that it's an adaptation of a preexisting game, and that it involves pretty much every feature of the device I could get my hands on (accelerometer, orientation sensor, sound facilities, and multi-touch capabilities, to name a few). Regrettably, it's still a ways away from being done. Although most of the functionality is there, a huge amount of polish has yet to be applied. In a few days, I'll hunker down with Photoshop, GarageBand, and Audacity and see what I can accomplish. demonic laughter

Back to the RAID. You may recall that I promised a big, in-detail look at the array around Christmas. This is that entry. Be warned. Continue reading "Happy Holidays"

First off, a quick note about my new Twitter. It exists, it's published, and it's actually me. I know that some people decry Twitter and that entire segment of the social-networking community as a waste of time, or as an attack of vapid narcissism, and that's OK; I do sometimes have time to waste, or attacks of vapid narcissism But, before I get too roundly flamed, let me just say that it's an experiment. I'm not sure I'm keeping the account, and I'm not sure I'll use it with the regularity it expects (or perhaps demands). Twitter, as a service, seems to me like a very, very trimmed-down version of a blog (so-called "microblogging") plus text messaging, and it has some potential. Whether or not it appeals to me remains to be seen.

OK, disclaimer's done - flame away.

As for the RAID mentioned in the entry's title, I managed to score two 1TB hard drives (Samsung, SATA-II, 32MB cache, 3.0Gb/s) at Fry's on Black Friday, and I dropped them into the media server last Saturday. They're sitting in a fully-degraded RAID6, meaning they currently offer 2TB of space (the full capacity) but no protection against drive failure. This worries me somewhat, as there's an unsettling vibrating noise emanating from somewhere within that server, but all the diagnostics say the drives check out, so maybe I just forgot to tighten a screw somewhere. Continue reading "Twitter and RAID"