Jack's Blog

Today was an interesting day in world history, to say the least. And while I’m not a U.S. citizen, I do have a few things to say on the subject. First and foremost, thank the heavens all the people that are U.S. citizens did vote the way they did.

What the U.S. needs right now, just like Australia needed last year, was a breath of very fresh air. I don’t think another republican in the white house would have done the country any good. They needed to get rid of George W. Bush. When I got home from work today and checked all my RSS feeds, I was surprised to see the drawer of the Ctrl+Alt+Del web comic (of which I am a fan) make this statement: “It is so wonderful to finally feel optimistic about the future of our country again.” What struck me about this comment was that while I was in the car on the way home, listening to the radio, they were interviewing several people from the U.S.A. And a few of them said exactly the same thing. So it might be that being optimistic is more important that actually doing well (because the US is certainly not doing so right now).

It’s also nice to see that the guy who made president, Barack Obama, is pretty much unlike every other American president for a while: reasonably young, enthusiastic, an extremely good speaker, and most importantly, Black. This will shake up a few people’s worlds, and that can only be a good thing.

John McCain is a decent enough bloke, don’t get me wrong. He just made a few errors of judgement, namely, Sarah Palin. I don’t think she would have made a very good vice-president… at all. Even more worrying is that I have heard reports she might be left the reigns of the republican party in the future. God help America.

Upon request, here is some more information on how my file server is coming along. Last week I ordered a a Seagate 1TB HDD (of the latest revision, released a short time ago). It would have been preferable to buy all eight at once, but I lacked the money to buy them all at once, and I need the file server to be up and running.

The choice of brand of hard drives was difficult. Because of differences in platter density (and thus overall size), you can’t mix and match brands. Being the stupidly pedantic person I am, it’s not something I would have done anyway. I first considered Seagate, but the adventures (read: complete data loss) that a few other people at work have had with Seagate 1TB hard drives somewhat put me off. Western Digital was also an option, mostly because they have lower power requirements. This means two things: lower heat (and thus less noise), and a lower overall power requirement. For a server that is going to be on most (if not all) of the time, both these factors are quite important to consider. In the end though, I went with Seagate. I’ve never had any problems with them in my past, and I am hoping that they have fixed their problems with faulty control boards.

Only having one hard drives to begin with means I can’t begin with a RAID 5 array. I currently have my controller set to use my single drive as a JBOD disk. This obviously isn’t optimal, as my RAID controller will have to do an online upgrade of the RAID array. Apparently, this is in the feature set, so I thought I’d take advantage of it. I’ll let you know how it goes. I paid enough for it (Highpoint RocketRaid 2320 for ~$360AUD) that I trust it.

At this stage, it was time to configure my (non-) RAID array, FTP, and Samba. Configuring FTP was fine, the RAID array was tolerable (involved recompiling kernel with a few patches, etc), but Samba was a complete pain in the rear end. In the end, then, I went with Windows Vista Business. I was erring on buying a copy before to use on the server, and problems with Samba and so on just drove me over the edge.

This also allowed me to go back to my original RAID setup. After switching the cables over, I created a RAID 0 (fast stripe) on my JMicron controller for the two 80GB drives. This gives me an extremely fast Vista installation to 160GB of space. After installing the Highpoint management software, I then had my file server up and running, to a degree.

Final configuration involved installing AVG, setting up remote desktop (so I can administer changes from my laptop without having to attach a screen), installing Service Pack 1 for Vista, and disabling a few unnecessary services that slow down network transfer speeds (see this guide). After all that, I now have a decent, centralised place to store all my data. The only complaint is the noise produced by my gigabit switch (of course I had to buy a fan-cooled model).

Pictures coming soon (when I can be bothered finding a working camera).

Well, yesterday sucked. Not only did I have a cold (which I still have), but two of my computers died: ‘Europa’, my main laptop; and ‘halley’, my spare machine and OS testbed.

Everything was going quite well up until dinner. I had a working GCC cross-compiler (if you don’t know what that is, don’t bother caring), I had my operating system kernel compiling with no errors, and I had some music playing. All was well. Just before dinner, I noticed that when I played Time by Pink Floyd, it was actually playing an ABBA song. ‘No worries’, I thought. I’d seen this before, and a chkdsk had fixed it. I decided to run a chkdsk before bed that night. So I went to dinner.

I came back into the room after dinner, and found my laptop at the Vista bootup screen, asking me to choose whether to resume a normal boot, or run the memory diagnostic. ‘No worries’, I thought again. Obviously, one of my applications had managed to crash the Vista kernel. Not a difficult task. So I told it to resume booting normally. It didn’t. I powered it off, and then back on again. It still didn’t. My heart sank.

So I got out my trusty Vista installation DVD. I was hoping to repair the Vista process to the point where it would allow me to get into safe mode, and find out what was going on. No such luck. The DVD wouldn’t boot. I don’t know much about Vista’s internal boot process, but I suspect it was around either the time it went to protected (32 bit) mode, or into a non-VGA graphics mode. This was bad. I tried a Windows XP CD, and that didn’t work properly either. I don’t know what the problem is, but it’s serious. On Monday I am going to try and send it back to the manufacturer.

At this point, I was frustrated beyond anything. Now, I don’t only have a laptop. As an avid computer hardware collector, I had another working machine. It was my old server and before that, my main PC. Last night, it had Ubuntu server on it (my ISP has a Ubuntu mirror). So I quickly booted it up. At this stage, all I wanted was to get on the Internet (and more specifically, MSN). Unfortunately, Ubuntu doesn’t have a kde-base package (or at least, not one that I could remember the name of). So I sat there for 40 minutes waiting for it to download and install all the KDE packages (including games, useless admin tools and half of TeX Live). When it had finished downloading, I ran ’startx’ (which should, in my opinion, work). It didn’t. None of a number of other commands (xdm, kdm, kde, etc) worked either. Massive Ubuntu failure.

So I tried a Windows XP installation CD over the spare machine. That wouldn’t boot up either. It hung at the point where it loads the Windows components. I tried it with only one hard drive plugged. That didn’t work either. Now came my silliest moment. In anger, I took out the XP CD, and turned off the machine to try and get Ubuntu working again. Unfortunately, I began plugging in the hard drives onto which Ubuntu is installed before the machine had finished turning off. *ZZAP*. And then it didn’t work anymore. I suspect it’s only the power supply that’s dead… but still. Massive human failure.

So now, I have two dead machines. One should be easy to fix (buy new PSU, install fresh Ubuntu desktop, go on MSN). My laptop… well… I think my data has survived, maybe. I’ll let the manufacturer find out. I hate fixing laptops.

I’m currently in the process of building myself a new home file server, to act as a storage medium for my MP3 music collection, my father’s business document backups, as well as to do compiles of software projects I’m working on.

For this, I’ve basically taken my old desktop computer (sans high-end graphics card) and place it in an Antec rack-mount case. After adding an expensive RAID card and a few hard drives, I have the hardware ready to go (though I am still contemplating the purchase of a PCI-based ADSL interface card).

Naturally, Debian was the first choice of operating system. Although I toyed with the idea of Windows Vista Business enough to almost go out and buy a copy, I decided:

1. It wasn’t worth the $140 just to have the use of Remote Desktop instead of SSH.
2. In the future, I may also want to use the server as an ADSL gateway, wireless access point, compile box, TeX environment, web server, etc. Vista can’t be made to do any of that easily.

Installing Debian was an interesting experience. I originally had the two 80GB Seagate hard drives installed on the onboard JMicron RAID controller (to run in RAID 1 for extra dependability). I couldn’t find drivers for this chipset that my Debian install disc would like. I then changed to using the JMicron controller in plain IDE-compatibility mode. Debian picked up only one hard drive. I’m still bemused by how this is possible: both the BIOS and a UBCD4Win disc pick up two. I then switched the hard drives and plugged them into the ICH9 controller. Debian picked up both of them, and so far is working fine. Although the ICH9 chip on my motherboard (a GA-P35-DS3) doesn’t support RAID, I’m still fairly happy. Anything I really want to keep will be stored on the RAID set managed by the RocketRAID card.

During the install process (and with all these changes of plan), it was great to have one of my Linux-savvy friends, Chris Neugebauer, on hand. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the #debian channel on Freenode. On both the occasions I asked questions, I was just plain ignored. Now, I know they don’t owe me anything, but a simple “Sorry, no idea, you’re on your own” would have been nice.

But apart from that minor downside, both the hardware and software are going really well so far. I’ll probably follow up with another article once I’ve finished further my home network. I still want to buy a few more parts…

I wrote this a couple of years ago, now. It was exam revision time and I had nothing else to do. Although short, it’s still one of the better pieces of descriptive writing I have done (or at least, I think so. My old English teacher would no doubt disagree). Critisism welcome.

I see the door. It’s just up ahead. Walking towards it, I can feel the heat slowly building on my forehead. The moment is near. As I reach for the door handle, my common sense finally kicks in and my hand pulls back, unsure of what to expect on the other side. Read the rest of this entry »

Around the end of the last financial year, I decided it would be a good idea to buy myself a laptop. So I did. I originally wanted a cheap Compaq one, simply because of it’s cheapness. But my local computer shop didn’t have any in stock. So I got an ASUS F3Sg instead. It costs about AUD $1300, and it’s pretty decent. Here’s why. Read the rest of this entry »

A blog is, on its most simplistic level, an outlet for the thoughts of an individual. They can also provide commentary on current social or political events. Blogs are also used to publish new content: podcasts, essays, and art spring to mind. I want my blog to be all these things.

I want it to be readable and usable to everybody: not just the subset of people who actually know me. That’s what Facebook is for. I want to have content that is worth reading, even if it isn’t a regular thing.

You might wonder why I’m saying this. The reason is simple. Without a written goal, there is no motivation to acheive. And with a published goal, there is even more reason. You can all hold me to it. Or at least that is what my teachers from high school said to my classmates and I. Whether it works remains to be seen.

You’ll also notice (or you will once I point it out) that I switched from Drupal back to Wordpress. There is no good reason for this, other than that it was easier to install Wordpress on my new host (SilentFlame) than Drupal was. And I’d just to like to plug SilentFlame a bit: they give their profits to charity, and their service is remarkable. I haven’t had a real chance to judge uptime yet, but so far it’s been fine.

Those of you familiar with UNIX might know the commands du and ls. For those of you familiar with both UNIX and MS Windows, you might know that Windows has no good way of doing either of those two things. Which is why I have resurrected an old programming project of mine, DirLister.

I wrote DirLister early last year, when I came back to Windows from a Linux-based system, and needed a good way to instantly see what files were where. Basically, it writes a list of all the files in a directory (including those in subdirectories) into another file, which you can then scroll through. Although it’s a GUI tool, it does some of the work of the classic UNIX command line tools.

Recently I’ve downloaded BlitzMax, which is a programming language designed for building games with. It does, however, have a GUI module. It’s based upon BlitzBasic, which is a language I’m very familiar with (it was what I first learned to code with). DirLister was originally written in BlitzBasic.

So in an effort to learn the new language’s concepts, I’ve rewritten and expanded the original version. It now has several options, including one to list the file sizes as well as the names. So here, in all it’s glory, is the new version. May you (probably not) find it useful.

DirLister v1.0 | DirLister v1.0 Source Code

Well, yesterday saw the last episode of Gardening Australia ever hosted by the extraordinary man himself, Peter Cundall. I’ve never been much of a gardener myself (I think my last attempt at gardening produced more rocks than vegetables), but I just want to say, in my own little way, thankyou.

Peter Cundall has inspired tens of thousands of people to take up gardening, and to get out and enjoy the outdoors a bit more. He is also, without a doubt, the most consistently enthusiastic individual in Australia. I have never seen him not excited about something.

There’s an interview with Andrew Denton that gives amazing insight into his life… he’s been in both the British and Australian armies, presented television shows for over thirty years, and stood for election for the communist party and then not voted for himself. An odd man to be sure.

I hope the rest of his life is just as fruitful.