Tim's blog - Tech

Tech blurbs

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 11:32:10 -0400

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.

A couple updates

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:58:40 -0500

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.
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Big Cats, Part VI

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 22:01:34 -0400

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.
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Summer summary (summery?)

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 22:56:22 -0400

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.
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I'm a little embarrassed

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:44:43 -0400

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.

The media server before the array upgrade.

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.

The old array in place.

(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.

Drives of the old array, pulled from the server.

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.)

I have a new philosophy

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Fri, 15 May 2009 13:42:41 -0400

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.
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And in the category of "Things You Should Not Buy"

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 23:44:17 -0400

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.
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Shameless advertising

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 14:08:30 -0500

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.

Happy Holidays

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 15:28:55 -0500

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.
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Twitter and RAID

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 13:38:07 -0500

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.
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Of storage

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:46:01 -0500

Edit: I had to disable comments to this entry to cut down on blogspam. If anyone knows of a good spam filtering configuration/plugin for Serendipity, please let me know via email.

# df -H /dev/md/0 Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/md/0 1.6T 1.5T 13G 100% /media

So... I deal in large files. Large files. In large quantities. And now I'm out of room. For those large files.

Let me back up. The above is a console readout of the disk usage of my media server's main array. Quite basically, I have a terabyte and a half (1500GB) of storage at my disposal. Of that 1.5TB, 13GB (less than one percent) remains free. Due to the various rounding and measurement quirks inherent to storage space, the readout isn't quite logical or sensible, but the "Avail" column is very real, and very scary. Normally this isn't that big of a problem - just get more storage, right? Not exactly.

The way I have the server set up right now is in a mode called RAID6. (You can get the full details, including pretty pictures, at the wiki.) Very basically, it takes eight 250GB drives, puts them all together, and uses two for backup in such a way that any two hard drives can die in this server, and all the data will still be recoverable. The trouble with this setup is that I can only add more 250GB drives to it. I have space for four more hard drives available in this server. My options are therefore:
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Mmmm... hot chocolate

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 12:56:34 -0500

I'm drinking a delicious mug of hot chocolate (from Mom's homemade mix, no less - yummy) right now, and do you know why? Because I'm done with my Logic Design project, that's why.

The final project in this class is different every quarter, but it always involves implementing some kind of digital system at a level that's just barely above the hardware. What you wind up doing is allocating individual registers for memory, connecting them, writing a finite state machine, that kind of thing. It's a pain and you have to be very analytical about it and it always winds up taking way longer than you expect.

This quarter's project was to design and create a system that would track the finishing positions and times of four racecars down a pinewood derby track. In pinewood derby, the cars are powered by nothing more than gravity - their time depends entirely on how the car's shaped. The final project is hooked up to sensors at the gate at the top of the track and sensors at the bottom of the track in the finishing position for each of the four lanes, and we have to figure out how to take those inputs and turn them into a scrolling display of lane numbers, positions, and times. It was a kind of cool project - but then the prof made it a bunch more interesting.
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New app, website updates

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 12:56:51 -0400

I'm proud to announce today the release of Echo, an implementation of ping for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Echo marks the culmination of more than a month of development, revision, and testing.

Now I'm done talking like a press release.

In all seriousness, I was kind of slow out of the gate with Echo - while the idea was (and still is) a solid one, there were about ten other implementations out before mine. I think, however, that mine beats most if not all of the existing apps. I've seen their screenshots and functionality, and some of them are just weird - I mean, ping using an information view flow? Seriously? - so Echo should still be the ping du jour for a large chunk of the target market. Let's hope.

Echo also prompted me to get some serious updates done on the apps section of my website, and while a lot of them are not immediately visible, I did take a few minutes to clean up the look-and-feel of the site a bit. Especially let me know what you think of the gradient background for the content box, and if there's an easy way to specify a screen-height content column that adjusts automatically with window size or screen resolution using CSS. And obviously go buy Echo if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch. (Please.)

Almost there

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:47:47 -0400

Swatches is now, in theory, available for sale in the iTunes store. In practice, you may or may not be able to find it - I'm still awaiting the contract approval for selling apps, as opposed to just giving them away free, and I'm not sure what the exact procedure is at this point.

Those of you that purchased this app: what features do you want to see in the next version? I'm thinking about implementing the following:

Movable views, including the ability to see the textbox as you type
More color palettes (maybe Pantone?)
The ability to save specific colors

Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Development corollaries

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:58:49 -0400

I uploaded my first app, Swatches, to the iTunes App Store today. It won't become available for awhile - the people over at Apple have to review it first. And, pardon my French, but the procedure for uploading the thing was a bitch. I won't say more, partly because I hate to complain overmuch and partly because I'm not sure about how restrictive that contract was that I signed. I'd hate to lose revenue just for whining about Apple on a blog. (Obligatory statement: Apple is awesome.)

Anyway, I found during the process that I have to create a web site for my apps. You can see it as it's under construction. If you have any suggestions, let me know - I'm making it mostly with iWeb, but I have enough HTML-fu under my belt to mess with the generated code a bit.

Pun intended.

Edit: OK, scratch that. iWeb is truly terrible. I'd forgotten how much I hate point-and-click web design. I did it by hand, like always.