Hard Drive Failures

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Hard DriveI’ve noticed something … in recent memory, I have not suffered one single hard drive failure.

I’ve only suffered multiple hard drive failures … all my drive failures seem to happen in batches.

Last weekend the refurbished Seagate hard drive in my laptop (Rohan) started generating errors. About the same time, the main drive in Gondor started to flake out.

My laptop had been recently backed up with ghost, so getting it restored , to a spare 100gb hard drive I had, wasn’t a problem. I did struggle a bit because there was a Linux partition on the replacement drive … that Ghost didn’t know how to delete.

The drive in Gondor was a bit more problematical … although Linux was reporting problems with the drive, the Dell hard drive diagnostics reported problems with the drive, when I ran Spinrite over it, no problems were reported.

I decided to let the drive sit and see if the problems came back.

Obviously they did … this time, however, when I ran Spinrite on the drive it found a bad cluster. Luckily it was able to recover the cluster. After Spinrite was done, I copied the old drive to a new 300gb drive. Now I just have to get Dell to send me a new drive. Not sure what I’m going to do with a spare 80gb SATA drive.

Of course, all these hard drive problems got me to thinking … why the heck don’t operating systems raise serious alerts when a drive failure is detected?

On Windows XP, the drive problem was silently being logged to the “System Event Log”. I think it should have popped up a warning message telling me that something was wrong.

On Linux, the drive problems were also being logged to syslog … but if you aren’t actively monitoring the systems logs, it’s easy to miss something like that. I’m going to investigate some system monitoring software (something like Nagios) to keep an eye on problems of this nature.

Candidates by Server?

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Have you ever wondered if Open Source software could be a factor in the success or failure of a political candidate?

Douglas Karr has an interesting political analysis on his blog … Which candidates are running which servers.

Here’s a quick breakdown …

  • Democrats: 90% are running open source operating systems (Mostly Linux, however Barak Obama is running FreeBSD, but that is just fine with me) . Hillary Clinton being the only democrat to be running Microsoft.
  • Republicans: 69% are running Windows Server 2003.

Very interesting analysis … and it pretty much breaks down the way I would expect, and hope, it would.

Camera Bags

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Over the years, I’ve owned a number of camera bags … some better than others. I thought I would take a few minutes and give you a rundown on the camera bags I’ve seen and what I thought of them.

The first bag I had was a Tamrac 515 … it’s a nice little bag that can comfortably hold a single camera with a longish lens. Nothing more than a 300mm zoom though. It’s got a pocket in the front to hold film or filters. It also has a see thru pocket in the top for other accessories. This bag worked quite well for me when I only had a single lens and not a lot of accessories.

After I started purchasing more lenses, filters, and other accessories that I needed to carry with me, I figured a new bag was in order. I looked at a number of bags, but decided that the Tamrac Explorer was a good choice. This bag has partitions to hold a SLR camera body with a short lens, plus spaces on the sides for other lenses and accessories. It also has a nice zip open top cover for easy access. The front pocket has space for filters, memory cards, and such.

Once I started getting even more accessories, I found that the Explorer wasn’t quite big enough. Time to find another bag.

My first thought was to get a backpack style camera bag … something that could hold a lot of accessories. I gave the Tamrac Expedition a try. While this bag certainly has a lot of space available, I found it cumbersome to use. There was no really easy & quick way to get to the camera without unslinging it from your back and unzipping it. I was worried that items in the bag were going to fall out (which is obviously not good for things like lenses).

Since I only had the Expedition two weeks, I decided to return and try something else. When the sales person handling the return asked why, I explained what I didn’t like about the Expedition. He recommend I try one of the new Tamrac Velocity bags. Plenty of space, easy to carry, and easy to access items inside.

I haven’t had a chance to use the Velocity much yet … but I think it’s got good potential.

Thanks for the notice

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camera_1.jpgA few months ago the Village of Hoffman Estates sent us a letter informing us that they would be reconstructing our street.Last week, Ginny and I went out of town … we left on Wednesday (June 13th) evening and got back yesterday (the 17th) . As we drove home from the airport, we noticed that our street had the first layer of pavement scrapped off. I figured they had started the reconstruction.

As I was going though the mail that Pat (our pet sitter) had brought in, we found a letter from the village indicating that the reconstruction of our street was going to start on the 15th. I figure that the letter had been delivered on Wednesday … which means they were giving us a whole two days notice before commencing the reconstruction. Not a whole lot of notice.

So, for the next 4 to 6 weeks, we won’t have the use of our driveway … and have to park on the streets near our house. For me that isn’t a major deal, as I usually get home before most people … I’ll be able to find a good parking spot. For Ginny, however, it will be a pain … because she doesn’t get home till much later … she’ll have more of a problem finding a reasonable spot.

For what it’s worth … the image above is actually a live capture from my webcam.

How to make Steve shriek

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My friend Steve showed me this picture today … at first I thought it was simply a ugly phone wiring job that he found at clients site.

Wiring

Turns out it’s actually an ETHERNET connection … that’s currently carrying a gigabit signal. Apparently it’s been working fine for the past 5 years.

When Steve saw it … he shrieked out loud.

Suffice it to say, Steve is going to replace that ‘connection’ with proper CAT6 next week.

Cicada

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For those of you who aren’t aware … the 17 year Cicada are out again.

Here’s what they look like … lovely, aren’t they?

cicada.jpg

Oh, it gets better … they are very well known for the amount of noise that they make … care to listen?

Download link

The sound is their mating call … not sure what the attraction is, but I guess the lady Cicada’s like it.

The picture and sound were both recorded at the Morton Arboretum .

ADT Does it Again

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I blew the entire morning waiting for an ADT contractor to come out and replace the wireless backup for our alarm system.

Seems that the cellular provider that ADT uses for the wireless backup is dropping support for analog devices. As a result, anyone who has an analog wireless backup for their alarm system needs to get the system upgraded to digital.

About 3 weeks ago I scheduled the upgrade for today between 8am and 12 noon. I made sure not to schedule anything for that day.

This morning I wake up early (earlier than my normal saturday roust, anyways) and get ready (emptied out the pantry where the transmitter is) and waited … and waited … and waited some more.

About 20 minutes after noon I called ADT to see what the problem was. I got transfered to a supervisor who was trying to get a hold of the contractor. She said she would call me back as soon as she found out what was going on.

About 15 minutes later she did call back (which was kind of shocking in itself) and informed me that the contractor had been overbooked for the upgrades … and wouldn’t be able to get to our house that day. We would have to reschedule. Problem is, the next available appointment wasn’t until mid-September.

She did offer a $20 discount on the upgrade cost … which I took. I also explained that this is the 2nd time that ADT had missed an appointment. She countered that the last time it was indeed ADT that had missed the appointment but this time it was a contractor. Obviously, from my perspective, there’s no difference.

Due to scheduling problems, the wireless transmitter won’t get upgraded until early October.

I’m getting a little annoyed at ADT.

Where is my Super Suit?

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Ok, talk about a panic.

A few weeks ago I attend the System i Innovation Award banquet at the COMMON conference.

This was a formal affair, suit and tie, but all my suits were pretty old … since I don’t wear them to work (only once or twice a year), there hasn’t been a driving need to get a new one.

So off to Nordstroms Ginny and I go … we find a really nice charcoal wool suit that requires minimal tailoring.

Fast forward to the COMMON conference … because I’m only going for the awards banquet … I wasn’t able to get MKS to pay for me to attend. I did a bit of wheeling & dealing, arranged to room with my friend Aaron (who is a vendor) , and paid my own airfare (Ginny was able to find me a pretty reasonable rate).

When I arrived at the hotel, I found Aarons room and dropped my stuff off … including hanging my suit up in the closet. A little while later, a friend of mine told me that he was in a suite at the hotel … and had an entire room available that he wasn’t using. He asked if I wanted to stay in that room instead. Obviously I said yes. He gave me the key and I went back to Aarons room to get my stuff (including my suit).

Fast forward again to Monday evening … about an hour before the awards banquet. I’m getting ready, pull out my suit … only to find my suit pants missing.

The first thing that flashed in my head was that I had forgotten my pants at home. I called Ginny to see if she could check the closet (not that she could do anything about it at that point). She wasn’t home. I tried calling Aaron, who would be on the expo floor, to see if he knew if they were still in the closet of his room. I got his voice-mail.

As a last ditch effort, I called Marty (who is a co-worker at MKS, and also on the expo floor) to see if he could go and ask Aaron to call me. I got a text message from Aaron saying that he couldn’t leave the expo, but I could come over and get a spare key.

I sprinted over to the expo (luckily it wasn’t far) and got the key … then ran back to Aaron’s room and checked his closet … THANKFULLY the pants were still in the closet. I had taken the pants off the hanger the jacket was on so they could hang separately.

I then ran back to my room and finished getting ready … took me a bit of time to cool down, but I was once again presentable … and the rest of the evening was a success (although I didn’t win the award 🙁 ).

Obama & Copyright

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As a believer in free content, I salute Senator Obama for his request to license the democratic debates under the Creative Commons (Attribution) license.

I am a strong believer in the importance of copyright, especially in a digital age. But there is no reason that this particular class of content needs the protection. We have incentive enough to debate. The networks have incentive enough to broadcast those debates. Rather than restricting the product of those debates, we should instead make sure that our democracy and citizens have the chance to benefit from them in all the ways that technology makes possible.

– Obama’s Letter to Howard Dean

Bravo.