The storage dilemma

 Technical  7 Responses »
Jan 302010
 

I have somewhat of a storage dilemma at the moment, and I’m not quite sure which direction to take. Having gone through a pile of external drives over the years, I’m getting tired of individual drives and – just as importantly – wanting to have critical data mirrored wherever possible. So I’m looking for tips and suggestions. I’ve got some ideas, and I’ll run through them to give you some idea.

I’ve currently got, thanks to a recent 2TB drive failure, only about 9TB of space now on my Mac Pro, including both internal and external drives. It’s really my main storage point, and I want to consolidate as many external drives as possible into one unit.

Here’s some of the ideas I’ve had so far:

  1. Buy a Mac Pro RAID card and implement at least a 3 x 2TB RAID-5 unit, to give me 4TB of protected space. Problems with this option include: 3-drive RAID-5 is always inefficient, and I don’t want my boot drive included in the RAID set.; reviews on the Apple Store website universally praise the RAID card for SAS drives, but seem to be fairly divided between love and loathing on the use of it with SATA drives. That doesn’t give me a lot of confidence. Chance of me doing this – 10% or less, I’d imagine. The card alone would cost well over a grand, not to mention the drive costs.
  2. Buy a Drobo 4-drive unit and connect via FW800. Much cheaper option, but then limited permanently to about 70MB/s for anything I whack on that drive. It seems you can still get the 4-bay Drobo for around $600 AU, then you pay for the drives on top, of course. Thankfully with it, I can start with smaller drives and bung in bigger drives over time – almost like splitting it into CapEx and OpEx. (The RAID card is more just outright CapEx).
  3. Buy a Drobo 5-drive unit and connect it with eSATA. Definitely much faster, but then I’d need to also buy an eSATA card for the Mac Pro. I’ve always intended to do that, but with the 5-drive Drobo over $1000 Australian, the costs will stack up in short order. (I’m imagining a “decent” lower-end eSATA card will cost me in the order for $200 AU.) There’s the drives on top of that too. Advantages are speed, obviously.
  4. Buy a 4-drive NAS. I was almost starting to lean towards this, but then I saw a forum talking about say, the WD Sharestorage unit, and how it was only licensed for 3 users. Apparently the StorageTek BlackArmor is licensed for 20, but my first comment on this is: WTF? Why should I have to pay on a home storage unit to connect additional users or computers to it? That definitely played a significant factor in making me less interested in NAS. Also the prices are still fairly high – BlackArmor in AU for just 2TB to start with is still over $1200; the Western Digital is around the $900 for a 4-drive model, or if you go for the 4-drive model with only 2 bays occupied, it’s less, but you don’t get the extra trays for the additional drives. Again, WTF?
  5. Buy an 8-drive Drobo. OK, so this is getting to the high end of what I want to spend (and then jumping over it by quite a bit), but it’s about the highest amount I can consider. These seem to be around $2300 for the bare bones unit in Australia, which means it would cost the most – but it would also be the most flexible, offering iSCSI options as well.
  6. Give up in disgust and keep on using 1, 1.5 and 2TB external drives, a mix of USB and FW800. I really don’t want to do this, but all the different options are quite frankly driving me nuts. I’d also like a solution that isn’t “all or nothing” on the first purchase, since that makes it a lot more challenging that just adding to over time. The biggest reason I don’t want to do this is that I’d like to get to a point where most of my personal storage is protected from individual drive failure.

I should add – I’m a data hoarder. I have email going back nigh on 10 years, I have files from my very first PC still floating around, and I only delete when I’m absolutely, positively certain that I’m never going to need the file(s) again. And if later I do, it slows down my deletion decision making process even further. I prefer to keep my data online and searchable instead of offline and inaccessible, so some archiving solutions aren’t an option I’ll consider.

So what are your thoughts? What have you used, what would you not touch with a 10 foot barge pole, and what would you swear by?

 Posted by PMdG at 7:14 pm  Tagged with:

How to report the news

 Entertainment  No Responses »
Jan 292010
 

A brilliant 2 minute piece about how modern day news pieces are done:

 Posted by PMdG at 4:08 pm  Tagged with:

Accounting for negative reaction to the iPad

 Technical  No Responses »
Jan 292010
 

There are two very different sets of detractors to the Apple iPad. The first one is collections of technical people who cite a bunch of features that the iPad lacks as a failure. It doesn’t multitask. It doesn’t run full Mac OS X (or shock horror, Windows, or Linux). It doesn’t have a 32 day non-stop operational battery. The battery isn’t removable. You can’t directly plug in an SD card, or a CF card, or a microSD card, or a Memory Stick. It doesn’t have 3 x USB-3 ports. It doesn’t have 512GB of SSD storage. It doesn’t have …

Well, you get the picture.

There’s one very important thing to consider on this approach: Apple aren’t making the device for die-hard techos. They’re making the device for consumers. There’s a huge feature difference between what every techo would love to see in a device and what the average consumer cares for. Here’s what the average consumer cares about: cost and core functionality. They don’t care if out of the box they can’t hack down to root and do all sorts of “fun” things. (Where “fun” is for very small values approaching zero.) They don’t care if they can’t plug in an external blu-ray player into it and rip media directly onto it.

It’s fair to say that sometimes, techos lose the plot when evaluating the potential for a new device, failing to see that their standard usage scenario doesn’t even come close to what the average user’s standard usage scenario is.

The second category of detractors are the Microsoft Fanboys. Hell, they call people who like Apple products “fanboys” all the time, so why can’t the same be said in return? These are the people who will only seek out negative reviews, not look for any objective review, or if they do, skip the review to the comments section so they can post their own negative comments. Over the last 24 hours I’ve been reminded so much of a scene out of the final episode of the first season of the new Doctor Who. In it, The Doctor confronts the Daleks and says:

You know what they call me in the ancient legends of the Dalek homeworld? The Oncoming Storm. You might have removed all your emotions, but I reckon right down deep in your DNA there’s one little spark left. And that’s fear. Doesn’t it just burn when you face me?

Apple has become the “Oncoming Storm”. And when I see the endlessly vitriolic comments about a new Apple product without an iota of substance to the claims, all I can think is “…and that’s fear. Doesn’t it just burn when you face me?”

Microsoft aren’t dead. They’re not going anywhere any time soon. But they’re tired. They’re lacking vision, energy and the capability to understand the market. Correcting Steve Jobs from the iPad launch, Stephen Fry said:

Apple stands at the intersection of Technology, the Liberal Arts and Commerce.

More than any other company I can think of at the moment, Apple has successfully grasped the need to straddle those three factors.

Over the next few years, I’m going to have to get used to the continuing reactions from the Microsoft Fanboys. They’re scared. Microsoft is scared. Microsoft continually now breaks the cardinal rule of competition – when you’re number 1 in market share, you don’t talk about number 2. They can’t stop talking about Apple – and in doing so, they’re suffering the same reaction as the Daleks in Doctor Who. I’ll say it again:

You know what they call me in the ancient legends of the Dalek homeworld? The Oncoming Storm. You might have removed all your emotions, but I reckon right down deep in your DNA there’s one little spark left. And that’s fear. Doesn’t it just burn when you face me?

 Posted by PMdG at 6:43 am  Tagged with:

Your screen capture does not belong in Microsoft Word

 Technical  No Responses »
Jan 282010
 

I do a heap of support work, and very occasionally I’ll ask someone to email me a screen capture. I say very occasionally because I prefer to look at logs. Screen captures are, quite simply, a last resort when you’re unsure as to what the hell is going on.

I continually fail to see the need to:

  • Take screen capture
  • Paste screen capture into Microsoft Word
  • Email Microsoft Word document

What’s wrong with saving the screen capture as a plain standalone graphics file, then emailing it, or even just pasting the picture directly into the email client?

Argh.

 Posted by PMdG at 1:33 pm  Tagged with:

5 Mac Apps that are indispensable to me

 Technical  No Responses »
Jan 272010
 

Here’s my “top 5″ Mac apps that I just consider to be so indispensable that I install them by default when I’m building myself a new system. No hesitation, no questioning, they just get installed while I’m still running the first round of patches:

  1. Growl – A system-wide notification system that allows apps to post transient windows for brief notifications.
  2. Yojimbo – I use it to stay organised, pure and simple.
  3. Grand Perspective – It lets me see where my space is going.
  4. Adium – Best multi-client chat programme I’ve ever used.
  5. OpenTerminal Here – I use Terminal far more than the average Mac user, and go nuts if I don’t have an easy way of opening a terminal in any folder from within Finder. OpenTerminal Here does just that.

Sure there are other key apps I use – Firefox (rarely), ClickToFlash (all the time), etc., but the above 5 are the ones I’d name as my “must haves” whenever I’m using a Mac. For me, it’s all about personal productivity, and that’s what those five apps give me.

[Edit - 2010-09-10]

I’m phasing out use of Yojimbo out of annoyance at the poor synching options. Bare Bones insist on running the sync through iSync, which can’t handle “large” volumes of data (1.5GB). I’m yet to find an alternate solution.

 Posted by PMdG at 9:17 pm  Tagged with: , , , , ,

The funny thing about the Apple Tablet…

 Technical  No Responses »
Jan 272010
 

…is how all the people who either dislike or actively loathe Apple are whipping themselves into an absolute frenzy of denial about the flaws and failures of a product that hasn’t even been released yet. It won’t do this, it won’t do that. It will fail. It sounds eerily like all the pre-iPhone talk.

Folks, check Apple’s financials from yesterday, then come back and give me good reason to believe that Apple haven’t done their homework and are going to fall flat on their faces on this one. I’m not being a fan boy, the odds really are against you.

Let’s discuss the relative merits of the technology after it’s been released and dissected, please.

 Posted by PMdG at 9:50 am  Tagged with: ,

Poison dipped in chocolate in still poison

 Equal Rights, Morality  1 Response »
Jan 262010
 

In my previous post, I mentioned a few reasons why I don’t always feel proud of Australia, and felt that it was important to talk about that on Australia Day. My first point, for the record, was:

I am a second class citizen. This is the 14th year my partner and I have been living together. Yet a newly married couple who have just finished signing their names in some marriage book have more legal rights than the my partner and I. Why? Because my partner and I are of the same sex. We can’t adopt, we can’t marry, we’ve only recently been able to share public health benefits, and there’s a raft of other areas where we are legally discriminated against.

I was surprised to see my little personal blog attract the attention of some intolerant and hateful people. Apparently some folks have little else to do with their time other to shamble around the internet looking for people they are afraid of and making nasty comments towards them.

What it highlighted to me is just how intolerance, fear and vitriol are so often disguised as sweet concern. This often lets bigots and bogans get away with being nasty and spiteful, all while pretending to be nice or altruistic. It’s time though to be blunt: poison dipped in chocolate is still poison.

In particular, I seemed to attract the attention of the Über Bigots known as the Westboro Baptist Church. I also got another little ditty from someone who didn’t list an affiliation, but curiously had the same IP address as the person from the Westboro Baptist Church, leaving me to wonder the link.

Let me be blunt: I don’t think there’s much point in trying to engage with these bigots, which is why I’m not approving their comments. Approving their comments would (based on my current setup) give them carte blanche to post whatever vitriolic diatribes they wanted to, and I’m disinclined to change my comment approval system just to suit them. However, since they wanted to make their points, I’ll post them in their entirety in this entry to prove my point.

Let’s start with the first message, from one Edna Jane Prewitt (ejp@hotmail.com), who wrote the following grammatically incorrect hate message:

Your an evil sinner and god will see you in hell

Since I’m an atheist (which may even be more horrifying to someone who makes the above statement), any talk of me ending up in hell seems pointless. I subscribe to death being death. When I’m dead, that’s it. My last gasp will see my consciousness extinguished, and I’m OK with that. I don’t need to fret about an afterlife to live a happy life. OK, so there’s not much sweetness in Edna’s little diatribe – it’s more outright spite. However, it does serve to prove how bigots expect that sitting under an umbrella of assumed rightfulness allows them to say whatever they want.

However, Edna was shortly followed thereafter by the charming Shirley Phelps-Roper (shirleyroper@hotmail.com), and plugging the abominable god hates fags website, who offered this “sweet” advice:

Dear Sinner,
I will pray for your soul, please repent and save your soul.
God doesn’t love fags.
Love Shirley

You can see that Shirley likes to disguise bigoted vitriol with sweetness and candy. Shirley obviously has a very checkered history – from the Wikipedia article linked above:

She is currently on the list of individuals banned from entering the United Kingdom for “fostering extremism or hatred”

There’s a tradition of allowing “religious” groups such as the Westboro Baptists getting away with whatever they want to say on the grounds of freedom of religious speech or just freedom of speech. I don’t subscribe to freedom of hate speech. I certainly don’t want anyone as twisted as a member of the Westboro Baptist Church to assume they have the right to “pray for my soul”. Based on the litany of evil conducted by that organisation, it’s at best a case of the pot calling the kettle black. (Since I don’t consider myself sinful for my sexual orientation, I’d suggest it’s more akin to a serial rapist and killer offering to pray for me because he discovered I was a habitual jaywalker.)

I will not allow unfettered hate speech on my own blog, but I will, as and when I see fit, choose to mock bigots who espouse such values.

 Posted by PMdG at 4:11 pm  Tagged with: , , , ,

Why I'm not proud to be an Australian today

 Equal Rights, Morality  2 Responses »
Jan 262010
 

January 26 is Australia Day. It’s meant to be a day of national celebration and pride, and sure, we’ve got a lot to celebrate. But I think there’s not enough time spent during Australia Day reflecting what’s wrong with the nation, and what we need to fix. So today, rather than talking about proud I am to be an Australian, I’m going to talk about the things that are quite the opposite. In no particular order, here we go:

  1. I am a second class citizen. This is the 14th year my partner and I have been living together. Yet a newly married couple who have just finished signing their names in some marriage book have more legal rights than the my partner and I. Why? Because my partner and I are of the same sex. We can’t adopt, we can’t marry, we’ve only recently been able to share public health benefits, and there’s a raft of other areas where we are legally discriminated against.
  2. Notwithstanding the apology to the stolen generations issued a while ago, Australia’s history is rife with disgusting treatment of the original Aboriginal population. Too little has been done to correct the gross injustices of the past.
  3. Bogans and bigots seem to increasingly run the country. The biggest downside of democracy is that you are left with situations where those who shout the loudest rule. This leads to vile, vitriolic shock jocks on the radio and pandering demagogues having way too much control. This leads to situations where people are branded “illegal immigrants” and locked up in detention centres for years at a time, driving them slowly insane. It leads to personal freedoms being stripped away under the pretense of “security”, where the security is just for show and the population is still as exposed as ever. It leads to celebrities being excused for just about any bad behavior because “it must be difficult to be in the spot light all the time” and “anyone who dislikes them must have tall poppy syndrome”. (Hint: If you deliberately drive innocent people to hysterics on radio for the “fun” of laughing at someone who is genuinely distressed, or you tie a young girl to a lie detector – even with parental approval – and ask her about her sex life, you shouldn’t be excused.)  It leads to … well, you see where I’m going here.
  4. We have a government intent on censorship. The minister for menacing the population (aka the “Communications Minister”) Stephen Conroy, waves about the “child pedophilia” banner as an excuse to conduct mass censorship of the internet, despite the fact that such sites apparently make up a tiny fraction of the leaked banned site list. If the government actually gave a damn about what it claims to in this exercise, it would instead focus on smacking the hell out of advertisers, fashion designers, etc., who for the last decade have been intent on the vile practice of encouraging kids to dress and act like tramps before they even understand what they’re doing.
  5. The country as a whole is obsessed with sport to the exclusion of practically anything else. There’s no pride in focusing so exclusively on sport that we forget all the other endeavors that have made our country great – the humanitarian workers, the scientists, the diplomats and the academics. Yet sport remains such a central focus to the country that it just continues to increase the Boganosity levels.

The bogan response to all this would be “If you don’t like it, you can move somewhere else”. Well, guess what: I was born here, I’m not moving to another country, I want my country to be fixed.

So that’s why I’m not proud to be an Australian today, on Australia day.

 Posted by PMdG at 7:34 am  Tagged with:

Tetsuya's

 Entertainment, Life  No Responses »
Jan 252010
 

On Saturday night I was lucky enough to dine at Tetsuya’s, one of Australia’s finest restaurants, and one which is consistently in the top 10 restaurants in the world.

Any superlative I use would be insufficient; suffice it to say that it was utterly sublime and utterly worth the cost. If you treat yourself to only one thing this year, treat yourself to Tetsuya’s, and make sure you do it with the wine.

Here’s the menu we experienced, as well as what the food looked like (in most instances). I really regret not taking photos of the jellies that we got with coffee at the end of the night! There was a divine white-tea jelly that was probably a 1cm cube that tasted like I’d just drank the most divine cup of intense flavoured tea!

Tetsuya's Dishes

Tetsuya's Menu (23 January 2010)

 Posted by PMdG at 5:40 pm  Tagged with:

No surprise there: Australian telcos overcharge for SMS

 Morality, Telcos  No Responses »
Jan 242010
 

The SMH online has an article titled “Consumers being ‘abused’ by text message price rort“.

It could perhaps be said that the only truly remarkable thing about the article is that it might take someone by surprise. Australian Telcos are renown for gouging and sucking consumers dry in comparison to other countries. A few key quotes from the article include:

While the cost of mobile phone calls has declined in the past five years, the standard flat rate for a text message at Telstra and Optus has remained unchanged at 25 cents. At Vodafone, a text is 28 cents.

Comparing to the exorbitantly high prices for mobile data, SMS still comes out as the king of the rorts:

The 25 cent cost of a text, for 160 bytes, means Optus and Telstra effectively charge $1560 per megabyte. If comparing with a $30 internet plan with a download limit of 10 gigabytes, the charge per megabyte is 0.3 cents, including free email.

Then by comparison, you’ve got:

SMS Global resells text services at between 5 and 10 cents a message – for both local and international texts. The standard price for an international text at the major mobile services providers is 50 cents.

Finally, we’re “reassured” that:

Australia’s three mobile network carriers Telstra, Optus and Vodafone argue they are not charging 25 to 28 cents a text since most Australians sign up to a cap plan, whereby the user gets a certain number of calls and texts a month for a set amount of money.

Vodafone Australia spokesman Greg Spears said the company’s $49 cap plan, for example, provided customers with $350 credit a month.

”If a customer used their entire $350 worth of credit exclusively for texts, that customer could send 1250 texts per month – so each text has actually cost less than 4 cents.”

However, that’s not really reassuring. The Australian Telcos have such a deliberately brain bending approach to caps and price plans that it’s like being told a $3000 car service was “cheap” because the service was thrown in for free after marking up the parts 2000%.

 Posted by PMdG at 4:10 pm  Tagged with: ,
 Older Entries
© 2012 unsane Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha