Category Archives: Personal

Anatomy of a study

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Someone emailed me to ask me how I organise my study at home. And for no particular reason, I felt on this occasion inclined to share!

The left and middle monitors are attached to the main PC in twinview configuration; the right monitor is attached to the main file server (under the desk). The one keyboard and mouse combination controls them both thanks to Synergy.

Keyboard and mouse are standard issue HP kit, legitimately liberated from work when they disposed of old kit. Nothing fancy or glow-in-the-dark, but it’s comfortable enough for me in the office, so seemed suitable for the home, too.

The Pioneer receiver and Bose speakers are rigged up to the output of my main PC’s sound card. Pretty good sound reproduction results, which is important as this is where I do most of my listening to music.

The conductor’s baton was previously used to conduct the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.   It is kept handy for when my background music needs to be more foreground!

The bottom shelf of the right-hand bookcase should have been labelled “even more opera scores”, but I forgot to do so.

The Kindle replaces almost everything that’s on the shelves… but not the opera scores, funnily enough.

The gramophone player still works. It was purchased for me from somewhere in the Camden Markets, London. It’s apparently a deluxe model, since two doors on its front face open and close, acting as an effective volume control.

Kit’s Coty house is located near Maidstone, England -close to where I was born and lived for most of the first half of my life. The print was my 18th birthday present.

The house is air-conditioned, but in Winter, I prefer having a local source of heat. Hence the additional radiator.

Merry Christmas

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It now being just 1 sleep away from the big day itself, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank both my readers for their continued interest over the past year -and to wish them well for this present Christmas season.

Additionally, I probably won’t be posting much here before the New Year, so I’d like to throw in my best wishes for the New Year now, too.

May your halls be decked, and your holly boughs be always prickly.

Peace, prosperity and modprobes to all.

Just Cruisin’

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When I go on holiday, it’s usually a matter of 10 days walking everywhere, doing everything and catching up on 500 years of history or so in as short a time as is reasonable. Which made this holiday somewhat unusual:

We were up on the eleventh deck, just above the second of the forward lifeboats. The cabin had drawers that would open and close themselves as the ship pitched in the swell. And a carpet that was mysteriously but constantly wet. And then, on the final night, the electric light fittings started pouring water in all directions… a little alarming, but only a little, because by then we didn’t care much! Shoddy, I’d call it, but maybe I’m just being picky.

Don’t get me wrong: bits of the cruise were wonderful:

That’s the Île des Pins (or Isle of Pines) in New Caledonia -a small island in the South Pacific, sitting practically on top of the Tropic of Capricorn. And I took that photo myself (of two complete strangers, I have to say), so if that looks like a tropical paradise to you, that’s really the way it was. Loved it!

But it’s really very difficult to plan to do nothing at all for eight days, and I wouldn’t recommend it to just anyone, particularly. You’ve really got to be a ‘doing nothing’ person by nature, or someone who has truly mastered the art of switching off. Being neither fish nor fowl in that respect, I found the experience a tad tricky.

There are lots of bonuses, though:

Oh, and we had a full lunar eclipse the night we sailed into Noumea -a generous touch on the part of the Heavens, I think!

Anyway, I’m now back in time to consider things like turkeys, cranberry sauce and Christmas pud. And, having truly done sod-all for over a week, I’m re-energised enough to be able to do that and smile for a change!

That time of the year again

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November 22nd is Saint Cecilia’s Day (patron saint of music) and, by lucky happenstance, also the anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Britten -England’s greatest-ever composer.

In times past, no music would have been played today in the Diznix household that wasn’t written by Britten… but this year has been an exception. I confess to some Shostakovich and Vaughan Williams!

Nevertheless: Happy Birthday, Ben.

Alas, poor Romulus

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As time races towards the point where the last bits of my Sydney server room are moved to Seattle, this was one of the more poignant moments: the point where I shut down my OID (Oracle Internet Directory) server, which has been doing faithful names resolution duties for quite a while:

The load averages are nothing to write home about, but that box has been running uninterrupted for 2 years and 17 days. Until now.

Oh -and look. It is possible to use CentOS (4.x) in a production environment!

Snakey!

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This turned up this afternoon:

It’s a red-bellied black snake, which is quite venomous, so neither of us are getting anywhere near it! And it’s stuck in our Wallaby-proof fence. It’s obviously suffered some damage, but let’s hope it will be OK. After a chain of phone calls, there is allegedly a man from the Wildlife Rescue Service on the way… and in the meantime we’ve thrown a towel over it to calm it down some (on advice from WIRES).

Either the fence or the snake’s going to pay dearly… hopefully, it’ll be the fence!

Update: The snake was successfully extricated, defecating over everyone in the process, and is now going home with the lady from Wires (who’s got bravery in spades!) for a couple of days. If all goes well, it comes back for release after that. Photos when I can get them off the camera!

Long time no see!

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It’s been a long time between posts. The reasons for this are many and various, so I’ll just list the main ones.

  • I blew up the computer. Actually, I blew up two of them. The first was simply a mishap: I now know that SATA header sockets will detatch themselves from a motherboard really easily if you tug just a bit harder than you ought. The motherboard then sparks spectacularly and makes a weird burning smell when you try to push it back on and plug it in. Bye-bye Intel i7, I hardly knew ye. The second remains an honest-to-goodness mystery: I changed the graphics card in The Other Half’s PC and it thereafter simply refused to power on. Switching back to the original graphics card, same thing. Switching to onboard graphics, nada. In fact, this remains the only “it just died, honest” computer I’ve ever been responsible for. Farewell, then, trusty Quad Core.

Fortunately, work was throwing out a couple of old PCs, so I’m now the not-so-proud user of a 2007-vintage Core 2 Duo, and TOH is the somewhat-disgruntled user of a 2006-vintage Pentium D.

One good thing to come out of this, however, is that it has (almost) cured me of tinkering with PCs. They get installed and sit there, untouched but mostly functional, from now on.

  • I have been manic at work, moving all our databases from their long-time Sydney home to a new datacenter in Seattle. After instance uptimes of 420+ days, it was surprisingly emotional to have to issue the ‘shutdown immediate’ command, let me tell you! There have been evenings that have turned into mornings without me noticing, and afternoons that have stretched long into the night. Even when things have not been quite so hectic, my mind’s been focussed on the next move.
  • The reason why work has been disposing of old PCs and moving all its databases to Seattle is that it was bought out by a competitor back in May and I get made redundant on December 1st, once the move to Seattle is complete. Impending redundancy has done nothing to make me feel inclined to blog, I regret to say: quite the opposite. With the departure date now getting extremely close, I guess that mood is lifting a bit… but I am not particularly looking forward to the post-Christmas job-hunting.

So that’s mostly why I’ve been ‘off air’ of late. Normal service may shortly be resumed, I hope.

In the meantime, Fedora 16 has just been released and it’s time to get my download started and to give it a whirl. So maybe a bit of tinkering is still allowed…

Get Stuffed, Officeworks!

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I had occasion to purchase a new router and a couple of USB network cards from Officeworks in North Sydney a couple of days ago. Total cost: around $285. Not an insignificant purchase -and not exactly small in the ‘bulky packaging’ stakes, either, with each component coming in its own giant cardboard box. Carrying the things around loose was not an option -but neither was being given a carrier bag for the purpose, for at Officeworks, you are told at the checkout that you can “purchase a carrier bag for 20c if you like”.

Having no other practical means of transporting the goods, I reluctantly made the bag purchase, but I emailed them as soon as I could:

Your stupid policy of not providing carrier bags unless you charge an extra 20 cents (on top of the $285 I’d just spent) has lost you a customer for the last time. It’s green tokenism, and very annoying. Change that policy or, slowly, go bust. Your choice.

I wasn’t honestly expecting an answer to that, but today one came in… and a more egregious example of “corporate double-think-speak” I find it hard to imagine:

Dear Howard,

Thankyou for your feedback.

At Officeworks we also care strongly about the environment. As result of our commitment to the environment Officeworks has introduced many changes to the way we do business. Where we used butcher paper as packaging within our cartons (for customer deliveries), we now use air bags that are made from recycled plastic that can be recycled with other plastic waste. The air bags use less energy to produce and are more easily disposed of. In each of our Retail Stores we also now sell a recyclable plastic bag made from natural corn starch & soy inks, which are 100% biodegradable. Customers are also able to purchase a blue “enviro” multi use bag, proceeds of each bag sold are donated to the Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC) to establish a private nature reserve in one of Australia’s last great natural areas – the remote Gulf of Carpentaria in Northern Australia. We recently introduced “Planet Ark” printer/copier cartridge recycling in all our Retail stores and a pickup service for our Phone/Online Business customers in capital cities. At Officeworks we are continually looking at ways we can work with the Australian community in reducing our impact on the environment.

I hope that I have been of assistance and please let me know if I can be of further help.

I suppose you could feel warm and cosy at the thought of my 20c bag purchase going to help the Gulf of Carpentaria… but personally, I’d just like to get my fairly expensive purchases home from the shop in one piece without being gouged for a charitable donation I’ve not freely chosen to make for myself.

Anyway, my reply:

Dear Shane:

Your email doesn’t help at all, and I think you have found some new dictionary definition of the word “assistance” with which I was previously unfamiliar. You’re spouting green-y marketing twaddle when what I want is actual, practical assistance in transporting purchased goods from the shop.

When I pay $300 for a pile of electronic devices that all come in their own bulky packages, a carrier bag is a *necessity*, and to be charged 20c for the privilege of getting one is *insulting*. You can donate what you like to whatever greeny charities you like, but don’t inconvenience me while you’re doing it.

The equation is really very simple: keep spouting this sort of marketing feel-good rubbish, or retain me as a customer (by *giving* me a carrier bag when the value of my purchase warrants it). I fear you have chosen unwisely. (And I get to shop elsewhere as a result).

HJR

Or, in the pithier words of this blog post’s title: Get Stuffed, Officeworks! And since they’re owned by Wesfarmers, who also owns Coles and Harris Technology (to name but two), that’s quite a few shops I shall be avoiding at all costs in the future.

(It’s not that I’m anti-green. I just hate tokenism. In this case, the D-Link USB Nano network adapter measures about 3.5cm long -about 1¼ inches. It comes, however, in a box 21cms long, complete with multi-lingual warranty booklets, plastic inserts and plastic shrinkwrap. Plus a full-sized driver CD (with paper-and-plastic sleeve) that consists of just 56MB of actual content. With products packaged so extravagantly, Officeworks is just targeting the wrong people with its ‘no carrier bags unless you cough up the dosh’ policy, as far as I’m concerned.)

Just a suggestion: Don’t buy a Shuttle!

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As I mentioned a while ago, I bought myself a new Shuttle XPC SH67H3. In fact, I bought two of them; one with an i5 and 8GB RAM, the other with an i7 and 16GB.

I would like to tell you what a joy both have been since purchase, but I’ve only had the i5 in the house for about 3 days all up and the i7 keeps crashing on me as I write this, so I can’t really. In fact, the i5 has spent all but 6 days since purchase back at the place I bought it from, because it malfunctions so spectacularly.

Temperatures are good (coretemp shows 32°C idle, going up to about 62°C when under full load from Prime 95). Memory passed 24 hours of Memtest+ runs. The hard disk passed its Seatools tests with flying colours, too. Nevertheless, three days after it was first installed with Windows 7 x64, the thing suddenly decided to reboot. Fair enough, I suppose: it’s Windows, after all. Only you don’t generally expect the hard disk to go missing from the list of devices displayed by the BIOS, and for the machine to boot up to a ‘no boot device found’ message, I think!

Switch it off, wait ten minutes, switch it back on… BIOS suddenly re-discovers the hard disk and Windows boots normally. Two days later, however, the same thing: a reboot that causes the drive to disappear from BIOS. A simple switch off and on doesn’t allow the disk to be re-recognised, but a switch off-wait-20-minutes-switch on does.

After a fresh Windows install, same thing happened 11 hours later. At which point, it got taken to my offices (nearer the supplier). I spent a day re-installing Windows a third time… and waited and waited and thought, ‘Bummer, must be something about my power supply at home’ when Bingo! Three and half-days later, the thing Blue Screened with an error about iastor.sys. No reboots this time, and no missing disks from BIOS, but regular blue screens with assorted stop messages indicating various types of hardware failure or driver error. Back to the shop it went.

Meanwhile, I congratulated myself that the i7 shuttle had behaved itself perfectly. Maybe because it used a Western Digital disk whereas the i5 had used a Seagate one? Who knows… at least mine was stable!

Until 8 days after it was first installed, when it simply decided to switch itself off. No error messages in the Windows event viewer; no warnings; nothing really… just one minute it’s all fine, the next the power dies and the thing no longer functions. At least I could switch it straight back on: the BIOS wasn’t forgetting about the existence of a hard disk, so Windows came back without drama. But then it happened again. And again. And again. So I wiped Windows and put Fedora 15 on. And then it happened again. Four times, actually.

The supplier, happily, has now been able to see the first Shuttle crash and blue screen (but it took five and half days to happen, and he was about to give up!), so at least he now knows I’m not making any of this up. Having originally suggested he thought it might have something to do with SATA power management, he now says he thinks it’s something to do with the RAM and that “Memory incompatibility is just normal, some memory just does not work with some systems”. So who knows?

I’ve meanwhile found a thread in which someone describes my symptoms almost exactly, and for which suggested solutions range from (a) buy a new power supply; (b) increase voltage on the RAM and (c) downgrade your BIOS because the latest one from Shuttle is buggy and can’t do Intel turbo mode properly.

Can I suggest an option (d) there? Don’t buy a Shuttle in the first place??!

If the thing had worked as advertised on the tin, I probably wouldn’t suggest that; but to buy two of them, neither of which can stay stable for longer than about 4 days, means I now have zero confidence in the product. Minor issues, like their noise levels (it’s not high as such, but you tend to place them up on a desk, so that their fans are much more at ear-level than a normal mid-tower would be. So they sound quite loud) wouldn’t have bothered me in themselves. Now, they just combine with their jelly-like instability to annoy the heck out of me.

If I could get a refund, I would (but the supplier seems to think it’s OK for him to fiddle with them long enough by way of a ‘repair’). I’m not sure at what point I just let loose the lawyers and point out that he’s sold me a defective product that’s not fit for purpose. I’ll give him another fortnight, I guess (and that’s just to sort out the i5… I have to go through the whole thing again with the i7 as a separate exercise afterwards!)

I will say in passing that the supplier has been helpful and honest throughout, and the build quality of what they shipped me was superb (as it always is with them). It’s just unlucky that they happened, through no real fault of their own, to sell me a steaming pile of poo instead of a functioning computer. Twice.

Caveat emptor, I suppose. Or, in plain English: don’t buy a Shuttle, if you know what’s good for you.

New PC

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I was a little heavy-handed a month or two ago when swapping some of my hard disks around. It is a little known fact, but nevertheless true, that if you rip the SATA socket off your motherboard, it has a tendency to (a) spark, fizz and behave slightly alarmingly; and (b) fail to work at all thereafter.

As a result of my clumsiness, I’ve been running everything on a Core 2 Duo, circa 2006. I beefed it up with 8GB of RAM -and it’s been surprisingly useful. But ripping a Blu-Ray on it takes something like 28 hours! Time to replace it with something a bit nippier, therefore. Here’s what I’m getting:

I’m getting four sticks of the RAM, 16GB in all, so I finally have room to breathe when I’m running multiple virtual machines.

It’s because I do a lot of virtualisation and not much over-clocking, too, that I’ve opted for the i7 2600 CPU, rather than the i7 2600K. The ‘K’ chip overclocks a lot more, but it doesn’t have support for Intel VT-D extensions (“Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O). (Neither does any of the current crop of desktop virtualization products, so I suppose the issue’s moot, but that might change and my CPU will be ready for it if it does!)

The hard disk is really irrelevant: I’ll be booting off my existing solid state one and I’ve got 12TB of disk space available of the network, so I don’t really care what goes in the Shuttle case: the Western Digital 1TB happens to provide a useful amount of ‘local’ storage whilst remaining the cheapest currently-available hard disk from my particular supplier (AusPC).

The Other Half got the same Shuttle case not so long ago (although only with an i5 CPU) and it’s pretty good: it’s not a silent PC at all, but the noise is fairly minimal. It looks quite slick, so having it ‘on show’ to visitors is not out of the question. It’s best feature, as far as I’m concerned, is that it can sit unobtrusively on the desktop: that means it’s not close to the floor, which in a house with a couple of cats, has a tendency to attract dust and fibres like crazy! Last time I cleaned the PC innards, it was positively revolting: maybe not quite as bad as this, but close! I’ll be really pleased if a higher, off-ground placing means this PC doesn’t clog up so much!!

I haven’t decided on an operating system yet: it could be Scientific Linux 6.1, or I might just go with Windows 7. I suspect the requirement for Blu-Ray processing means the latter will get the nod in the end.

Anyway, the order went in today and I should be picking it all up, built and tested, on Friday. I am looking forward to it!