Computers: September 2004 Archives

So, I am glad that Ranchero Software finally released NetNewsWire 2.0, even if it is only a beta. I bought 1.0.8 about a month after I started blogging, and I was starting to get a little unhappy with it, because the software appeared to be stagnating. But I bought a copy so that I could encourage further development! But, my purchase has paid off, because 2.0 is awesome. It finally supports Atom feeds, which means that I can finally have Chris' blog polled from NetNewsWire. It has a new swanky tabbed interface for viewing HTML articles right in NetNewsWire (which is vastly superior to popping open new Safari windows). Plus, it seems like it is faster at going out and polling for new articles, which is quite welcome.

Those are the new features that have immediately jumped out at me. Well, there is one more thing -- I had numerous beefs with the built in blog editor, but I used it for posting to my blog anyway. In NetNewsWire 2.0, Ranchero has gone ahead and put this feature out of its misery, and removed it from the product. But am I mad?!? Heck no, because they have gone ahead and rolled out a dedicated blogging client, MarsEdit. I've been using it for the last several days, and so far I am pretty happy with it. It is already won me over with how easy it is to paste URLs (much faster than in the old client).

If you have a mac, I definitely recommend checking these two applications out.

-Andy.

After doing some research on the 'net, I found that Fujitsu offers a 5 year warranty on their enterprise SCSI drives, which is pretty amazing. The drive in redefine that is failing was manufactured in March of 2000, so it is 4.5 years old. So, I called up Fujitsu today, to see what I could do about getting my drive repaired under warranty. The first piece of information that the nice Fujitsu woman asked me for was the model number of the drive. I give it to her (noticing that it ended in the letters "DL" as I said it), and upon hearing this, she immediately went into the song and dance -- "Did this come with a Dell computer?". To which I replied that it did, and she of course told me that I had to deal with Dell directly.

It seems that one of the ways in which Dell gets a discount on parts is to negotiate a lesser warranty with the manufacturer. They then turn around to me, the customer, and sell me an entire computer with a 1 year warranty, that I would need to pay to extend, even though if I were to buy the parts myself, individual ones may have longer warranties.

On a lark, I contacted Dell (I saw "on a lark" because I knew that my computer has long since been out of Dell's warranty), and the Dell representative told me that my computer was in fact out of warranty, and that I could look into buying a replacement part from Dell if I wanted.

I'm not really pissed off about any of this, I just find it interesting. It is also another case for building my own computer that I hadn't really considered before.

Another interesting thing that I learned when researching my soon-to-be-completely-dead disk is that while Fujitsu warrants the non-OEM version of the drive for 5 years, they go on to say that it was only designed to last for 5 years. Basically, after 5 years, any additional mileage that you get out of it is due to your own personal good fortune. I find that to be interesting for an enterprise-class device, which can oftentimes be in service for far longer than initially planned. It also makes me suspect of 10,000 RPM (and higher) drives. My gut tells me that the higher rotational speed of the platters hampers drive longevity. The 7,200 RPM IBM drive that I am using now as a backup was manufactured in September of 1998, and has been in continual operation since I have owned it, until June of this year. I think that IBM really knew how to make disks, once upon a time...

All of that being said, I am still running off of the suspect Fujitsu drive. Since fixing the bad sector, it seems to be performing okay. I beat it to hell today upgrading a whole bunch of ports, and I haven't seen any more SCSI errors. I think it is just a matter of time, however...

-Andy.

So, I did a bad sector check in the SCSI BIOS (Adaptec's SCSI chipsets are awesome), and the check found one bad sector on the 9Gb Fujitsu disk, which I told it to remap. The machine seems to be fine now, but bad sectors are indicative of pending drive failure. So, I'm going to have to come up with a long-term solution to this problem. For the time being, I have resurrected my old 4.5Gb IBM U2W SCSI disk, and slapped that in redefine. I've setup a cron that rsync's the relevant bits from the 9Gb disk over to the 4.5Gb, so I can boot off of that in an emergency. But I think that going forward, I need to come up with some sort of RAID solution, so that this machine can drop a disk, and I can wait until the weekend in order to deal with it.

But this caps a "bad computer day" for me. Not only did redefine have some issues, but towards the end of my work day today, a server that I was working on went south. A co-worker was doing a package install at the time, and we suspect that the package had something like "rm -rf $INSTALL_LOC/" in a post-install script. Of course, if the "$INSTALL_LOC" variable is null, then the shell will translate that command to "rm -rf /", which on any UNIX box (and Solaris in particular) is quite a bad thing to do.

sigh

-Andy.

It looks like redefine's (the server that hosts this blog) SCSI disk is failing. This machine has a 9Gb U160 10k RPM SCSI drive as its primary boot and root partitions, and a 160Gb IDE disk serving as /home. I was messing around from work today, trying to update my ports collection, and the machine has been acting strange. A hit from the dmesg command shows a lot of messages like this:

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< Dump Card State Ends >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
(da0:ahc0:0:0:0): SCB 0x6b - timed out
sg[0] - Addr 0xb184000 : Length 4096
sg[1] - Addr 0x7f85000 : Length 4096
sg[2] - Addr 0xd546000 : Length 4096
sg[3] - Addr 0xf127000 : Length 4096
(da0:ahc0:0:0:0): Queuing a BDR SCB
(da0:ahc0:0:0:0): Bus Device Reset Message Sent
ahc0: Timedout SCBs already complete. Interrupts may not be functioning.
(da0:ahc0:0:0:0): no longer in timeout, status = 34b
ahc0: Bus Device Reset on A:0. 5 SCBs aborted

Dang. Everybody who has data on this box should officially back it up, starting now.

-Andy.

So, Mark noticed on Friday that the spammers have found redefine, and as a result, several of our blogs have been "crapflooded" -- i.e., the comments to our posts were filled with spam. Rushabh suggested that I install MT-Blacklist, which I did today before going into the city. So far, it has been useful in de-spamming my blog (deleting comments in the MT user interface is painful), but the jury is still out. The problem with any sort of blacklist is that you have to keep the definition file updated (which doesn't appear to be easy to automate), you can get false-positives, and the spammers can always be "one step ahead". Ultimately, I think that I may either just disable comments, or move to a forced-registration system, like what Carl is using now.

-Andy.

Every time I go to Chris's house, and see him using his Tivo, I want one. But every time, I find some reason (or 3) why Tivo just isn't right for me. Well, I was just at Chris's place at the end of July (for an entire week), and so he really had me on this whole Tivo thing. And then, last month, Tivo started offering some rebate thingy, which made it even more compelling.

But still, I resisted. I was going to write a long blog post about why I resisted, but instead, I'm going to write about the solution.

I have thought about just building my own Tivo-like device before, but I didn't think the end result would work well enough for me (I am a demanding TV user). But when I was up in Seattle, Fredrik told me that he built himself a MythTV box, and that it was working great. So, he totally sold me on it.

I've spent the last couple of nights surfing up PC hardware, because I don't really having anything suitable for integrating into my entertainment center. This whole project has kindof morphed into me buying a Cube PC, because I have always thought those things are cool. I would have bought one years ago, but I got into the whole Apple thing instead. Unfortunately, to assemble the Cube PC that I want would cost about $1k (when all is said and done). That is a little bit much for me to spend, considering I'm still not 100% sure that this is all going to work.

So, I decided to just go ahead and buy the cornerstone of the PVR, the TV capture card, and see if I could get it all working in my old dual Pentium-III 500Mhz machine. The card of choice amongst the Linux crowd is Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250. I saw over on Gizmodo that Circuit City is selling the thing with some massive rebates, so today I pulled the trigger on that. I had to go up to Hayward in order to pick the darn thing up, which was okay, because I got to throw Mike a bone.

So far, I have managed to install the card on my Windows XP partition, and in less than an hour, have it at a point where I could watch "The Daily Show". Over the long weekend, I will be installing Linux, and seeing if I can produce a workable prototype. I'll try it out for a few weeks, and if it seems like the whole thing is going to work, then I'll buy some sort of entertainment PC. This will also buy me some more time, so I can find the exact PC that I want.

It is gonna be great.

-Andy.

I am playing around with some new software that I downloaded, instead of going to bed (I have a cold -- I really should sleep). The software is called "Photon" by Daikini software. Photon purports to be some sort of application that makes it easy to post pictures from iPhoto onto a blog. The documentation on their website is non-existent, so it took me awhile to figure out how it works. After several test posts, however, it looks like I got it working.

The biggest drawback to this system is that while you can export a single photo from iPhoto to the blog, then you end up with an entry like the one that I just made. There is no text that surrounds the photo, to give it more description. I know that Carl very rarely writes verbiage to accompany his photos, but I'm not Carl. The second major drawback is that I like for the thumbnail of the image to itself be a hyper-link, which takes the reader to the larger version of the image. It doesn't look like Photon supports this method of doing things.

So, I'm not sure if I'm going to pay the $10 or not. I'll have to play around with it more, I guess.

So, about the picture? There really isn't any story -- on my last day in Seattle, I was hanging with Justin and Sarah, and transitioned to hanging with Rushabh, Kristen, and Ted. I didn't have too much time before I head to head to the airport, so I suggested that we check out the University of Washington campus. It happened to really work out, since Kristen is a student there, she was deputized as a tour-guide for our group. I can't remember which building that is, but the picture looked good, so I posted it.

-Andy.