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Speaking of Dell… I had a hard disk crash in one of our 2600’s yesterday. Actually, I just discovered it yesterday. For some reason I was not alerted to the problem so I’ll have to look in to that later. The drive really failed a couple days ago. It was late in the afternoon, but I decided to call it in anyways. The server was critical to operations, and it was better to get things moving on the support end. Leaving a RAID 5 Array in degraded mode is never a good idea. I called up and got a guy named Carlos who spoke good English and was technically knowledgeable. Cool! He asked if I had reseated the drive. I told him that I had not because different vendors have different policies about that. He asked me to try and manually rebuild the drive, which immediately failed. He then had me reseat the drive, which immediately failed. I thought we were in good shape for replacement… but no. “It could be the backplane of something… maybe the controller”, he said.

Now for me, there was a simple solution. Send both. I don’t really care if the problem cannot be pin pointed. They can do that in their labs with test equipment if they really want to know. I just want my drive fixed.

I offered to look into the logs to see if there was an event there, and sure enough, there was. Luckily it turned the call around, and he offered to send me a replacement drive. Considering it was 5 pm, and the weather was hideous, I could not see them making it that evening. He assured me they would, and I went home for dinner.

I was quite shocked to get a call about 7:30 telling me that the courier had arrived. I drove into the office, pulled the failed drive out of the server and opened the box. Uh… what the hell? They sent me a bare drive. Servers use hot swap rails and cages for their drives. This means I have to swap the rails from one drive to the other… except for a small problem… the new drive is BIGGER than the old, and does not fit properly.

After staring at the drive for a few moments… I notice that there is a bright orange sticker on the side of the drive shipping box… “REFERBISHED” You have got to be kidding me. They sent me a USED drive for a server?!?! That has already FAILED for someone!!! Perfect. After applying much more pressure than I was comfortable with, I got the rails to accept the replacement drive. I was afraid it would not fit in the server, but it slid in fine. I then sat and watched with trepidation as the server attempted to rebuild the array with the new drive.
It took about 2 and a half hours, but the rebuild completed, and the array is now back online. I’m not sure what to do at this point. We are virtually guaranteed a double drive failure in this array in the future.

So… My new iPod is on the way. I have been watching the repair site, and was suprised to see that Apple was actually manufacturing me a new iPod. Cool. Dell could learn a lot from this.

Well. My iPod looks as though it lost it’s battery. Not so good. It’s almost exactly 60 days old. Luckily I’m within warentee. We’ll see how the process goes. A box is on the way for warentee service.

I’ll start this off with some background. I have owned three iPods. I bought the first of the first gen when they came out. I was still happy with it when my wife go it in the divorce. The battery was still working well after almost three years of use. The nthen got a shuffle and then a second gen mini a few months back. The shuffle was great, but it did not have an internal clock…

The mini has been a really nice gadget. The battery life has been great, the screen is wonderful, the size is acceptable. Then something happened. I still don’t really understand what. On tuesday, the unit stopped “charging”. I don’t know how else to describe it. I left the thing plugged in all night, but it never showed a complete charge. The next morning, I started listening, and got a low battery error. I plugged it back in, worrying that my battery might have died. It still never showed a complete charge. The next day, I took it and reset it after it shut down. The battery indicator showed empty, but then slowly started to fill, and then actually got up to almost 70%. After a few hours of playback, it again showed the low battery error. I reset it again, and am still listening to it without charging tonight, four days later. The battery has showed empty for at least the last six hours of play time. I fugure I’ll plug it in to charge after it will no longer boot.

It almost looks like there is a history function that got confused. I do have a charging dock in my car that it gets dropped into regularly. I’ll be in touch.

While I have been absolutely drowned in jargon at Veritas:Vision this week… I think this takes the cake:

lithium tantalate (LiTaO3) pyroelectric crystal

So… your in Crystal, working with a database that decided it would be a GREAT idea to store all integer values as hex strings… Just use a hex conversion command right? Oh wait… there isn’t one… CRAP.

You can now rest easy knowing I have created a flexible conversion script in crystal syntax with no external modules. Just substitue your field for conversion in the top declaration. This script takes for granted that the field is flagged with 0x in the front. If you want to convert raw hex strings, then set line 3 to local stringvar hex_val:=hex_val.


Local stringvar hex_in :={your field to be converted};
if len(hex_in)>0 then
Local stringvar hex_val :=right(hex_in,len(hex_in)-2);
Local NumberVar strLen := Length (hex_val);
Local NumberVar i;
Local NumberVar result;
For i := 0 To strLen-1 Do
(
select (mid (hex_val,i+1,1))
case "a" : result := result+10*(16 ^ (len(hex_val)-(i+1)))
case "b" : result := result+11*(16 ^ (len(hex_val)-(i+1)))
case "c" : result := result+12*(16 ^ (len(hex_val)-(i+1)))
case "d" : result := result+13*(16 ^ (len(hex_val)-(i+1)))
case "e" : result := result+14*(16 ^ (len(hex_val)-(i+1)))
case "f" : result := result+15*(16 ^ (len(hex_val)-(i+1)))
default : result := result+val(mid (hex_val,i+1,1))*(16 ^ (len(hex_val)-(i+1)))
);
result;


Wow… My crazy jargon of the day… pseudomorphic heterojunction bipolar transistor

Fiona Apple saga shows Sony’s core dilemma | The Register

Some stories are painful to read. This is one of them, but probably not for the reasons you think.

While it has been tested for eighteen months, it still is not ready for prime time. After installing it on a clean 2003 server at work, the server was nolonger bootable. Uninstallation failed as well. The machine locks up during boot, right after the splash screen shows.

So… You have been warned.

I’ve been in withdrawl for quite a few months now since the divorce. You might wonder what from. My Tivo of course. I went back and forth a few times on buying a new one, but finally decided to go the home brew route this time. After lots of thought and debate, I decided to give the snapstream beyond tv stuff a try. It started out bad. The machine I wanted to use had a graphics card that was too old (no directx 9), and the software simply would not allow me to use it. I could record, but not view. I then went ahead and built a machine from scrap that met the software’s needs. It took about two days of work, but I got everything working pretty good. I had to dig on the internet for drivers and stuff, and the IR blaster codes took me almost a week to get right.

Now that everything is up and running, I’m pretty happy. The interface is clean enough to use, and the features are similar to a real tivo. There are some notable missing goodies like tuner state persistance while going to the main menu. If you pause a show, go to the menu to schedule a recording for a show you just saw a comercial for… then you not only lose your place in your show, but the stupid tuner will retune your channel to what ever you were looking at in the guide.

On the plus side, there are some wonderful additions like webstreaming and copying your shows to your laptop for viewing on the road. You can also burn the video files right to a dvd.

I would not recommend this product for the casual computer user.