Category Archives: miscellaneous

Harddisk woes

I was busy programming a few days ago when the machine froze for a few seconds, followed by an error message from the Intel Matrix RAID controller than one of the harddisks in my RAID1 (mirrored) pair had failed. Damn. This is the second time this has happened on this machine in the 2.5 years I have had it. I don’t seem to have much luck with harddisks. It might not be coincidence that it happened on one of the hottest days of the year. I removed the defective disk and put in an identical spare I had bought for such an eventually and rebuilt the RAID1 pair from the surviving harddisk. I felt quite pleased with myself.

A  couple of days later the same error message appeared. The new disk had apparently failed. Double damn. I rebooted a couple of times. No joy. It seems unlikely that an unused disk would fail within 48 hours, perhaps it is the RAID controller? I updated to the latest Intel Matrix RAID driver and swapped the two disks around. It still wouldn’t recognize the newly added harddisk, so it seems the new disk really is defective. I swapped the working disk with the harddisk that had failed a couple of days ago. The ‘failed’ harddisk booted OK! Something strange going on here.

I could probably send the failed disk back to Seagate, but I am simply not prepared to risk my sensitive data to save myself £50. I tried to order another identical harddisk but, inevitably, the identical model isn’t available 2.5 years later. The disks are:

SEAGATE BARRACUDA 7200.10 ST3500630AS 500GB 7200RPM 16MB SATA-300 3.5"

Apparently the .10 is the generation number (thanks to Dennis on the ASP forums for that).

I am currently running the machine on the one good harddisk, being very conscientious about my backups. I am undecided what to do next.

  1. Order a 7200.12 disk and see what happens when I plug it in.
  2. Replace the RAID controller. I believe the Intel Matrix RAID controller is firmware on a chip on the motherboard, so replacing it doesn’t sound like much fun. And it isn’t clear that it is the cause of the problem.
  3. Buy a new PC. This one is only 2.5 years old and it means stumping up a load of cash and all the hassle of moving everything over. I would rather wait until Windows 7 is released before I buy consider buying a new machine (I am thinking about getting someone like overclockers.co.uk to build me a lean, mean, 64-bit, compiling machine).

Option 1 sounds like the easiest and cheapest options. Any other ideas? Is it safe to pair a 7200.10 and a 7200.12 of the same size for RAID1?

Aren’t captchas supposed to be human readable?

I have been having increasing problems reading the captchas that now permeate everything we do on the web. I realise they are supposed to be hard for bots to read, but it is rather defeating the point if humans can’t read them either. Here are two particularly impressive specimens from twitter.com yesterday:

twitter capcha

twitter captcha

In each case my tired old eyes can just about make out what the first word says, but I haven’t a clue what the second word is. Do you? The above might be slightly lower resolutions than the originals, but not much. Try some more.

In any case, captchas don’t seem to work that well. Most can be cracked by image recognition software and those that can’t can always be beaten by crowdsourcing and free porn. I guess the last hope for captchas is that masturbation really does makes you go blind.

WithoutAFather.com

withoutafatherWithoutAFather.com is a website aimed at is a website aimed at helping teens who are growing up without a father. It provides them with advice and online mentoring on various subjects, including work and business. I think it is a very worthy cause, so I am giving it a mention here.

You can sign up as a mentor to provide advice online. Currently there are only two mentors with a software background. You might need to be able to speak ‘text’ if you sign up though.

You can read more about this project in this interview with founder Sam Berns at the FollowSteph blog.

What do you buy a programmer for Christmas?

Easy, a T-shirt. Programmers love T-shirts.

It juuuuust so happens that I have created some T-shirt designs for software developers. Even better, all the commission will be split equally between two very worthy charities: jaipurfoot.org and sightsavers.org.

designs

sightsaversSightsavers works to alleviate sight problems around the world. Last year Sightsavers and their partners treated more than 23 million people for potentially blinding conditions and restored sight to over 244,000 people. Sightsavers is charity particularly close to my own heart, as I have suffered from eye problems myself. My vision without specs is very poor (-8 dioptres). A few years ago I suffered a detached retina due to a martial arts injury and ended up having emergency cryosurgery on both eyes. The possibilty of losing vision in one eye, let alone both eyes, was a frightening prospect. And yet it only costs:

  • $0.10 to protect someone from river blindness for a year.
  • $10 to pay for eyelid surgery for trachoma.
  • $35 for an adult cataract operation.

jaipurfootI first heard of this charity while watching a TV program Paul Merton in India. This organization pioneered the “Jaipur foot” (also known as the “Jaipur leg”) – an effective and easy-to-fit prosthetic lower limb that can be produced for a little as $30 and is provided for free by the charity. The prosthetic was first developed in the 1960s by an orthopedic surgeon and a sculptor. Since then the charity has provided over 300,000 limbs in 22 countries. In the television program a young boy arrived at the clinic hopping on one leg and left running on two, beaming. It was moving to watch. You can read more in this Time magazine article.

In these gloomy economic times it is easy to forget that there are people much worse off than ourselves. A little money goes a long way with either of these charities. So, how can you help?

Buy a T-shirt

Buy a T-shirt for yourself, your geeky friends, your work colleagues or your employees. Currently there are nine designs available. I have set up separate shops for North America (zazzle.com) and Europe (spreadshirt.net) to cut down on postage costs and shipping times.

North American shop: www.zazzle.com/successfulsoftware (the 12.5% commission included in each T-shirt sale will go to charity)

European shop: successfulsoftware.spreadshirt.net (the £1.50 commission included in each T-shirt sale will go to charity)

Design a T-shirt

Got an idea for a design? Add it in a comment below or email it to me. I will do what I can to turn some of the better ideas into T-shirts. You can supply graphics and/or text. I don’t have the artistic skills to turn your idea into graphics, but someone else might have. All commission from your design will go to charity. But your design must be original – no copyright violations please.

Gimme some link love

If you have a software-related blog or frequent a software-related forum, please link to this post and/or the online shops.

Trivia

My “It works on my machine” machine design predates Jospeh Cooney’s and Jeff Atwood’s by more than 4 years, as proved by this link to the (now sadly defunct) ntk.net ezine. The profits from those T-shirts went to the Jhai foundation – pioneers of bicycle powered Linux. Ironically I can’t sell this design in the European shop due to a bug in the Spreadshirt.net code.

** Update **

These T-shirts are no longer available. Sorry.

Why it is so tough to get into the iPhone App Store

Getting your iPhone app listed in the iPhone App Store is a notoriously arcane, difficult and lengthy process. I think I have found out why.

apple app store

freemasonry symbol
The App Store icon The symbol of Freemasonry (from Flickr)

Visualization

This video shows all commercial air traffic in the world during a 24-hour period. Although the technique used is very simple in principal, it conveys a huge amount of information in a short space of time.

From gdyel2007 at dailymotion via TechTalk Newsletter.

I use various simple visualisation techniques in my table planning software, for example males can be shown in blue and females in pink. This allows the host to check at a glance whether they have a good distribution of genders.

visualization

Could you use colour, shape, size, positioning, motion or other visual cues to better convey information to your users?

Mobile Internet access in New Zealand?

cape reingaI am thinking about a trip to New Zealand with the family (my wife is a Kiwi). As a microISV I need Internet access to keep the business running. I might be able to rent accommodation with broadband or find Internet cafes, but I would like to have mobile Internet access as a back-up. Unfortunately it looks as if my UK mobile Internet provider doesn’t even support roaming in NZ. Even if I swap to another UK provider, roaming costs would probably be prohibitive.

Ideally I would like to just rent a data card in NZ for a month. But a search on Google turned up nothing, apart from one service apparently only available to Australians. My only other thought is to ask one of my wife’s relatives to sign up with vodaphone.co.nz for their ‘no term’ mobile broadband plan, then cancel at the end of the trip. I will probably have to buy a new data card as well, as I doubt my Three Networks Huawei USB modem and SIM would work with Vodaphone NZ.

Any Kiwis reading this? Suggestions would be welcome.

The perils of localization

The sign below is supposed to say “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only” in English and Welsh.

localization

Unfortunately the Welsh version says “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated”.

Read the full story

The realities of software book publishing

Publishers of technical software books and magazines seem to struggling against the relentless onslaught of the Internet, crushed between the twin rocks of rapidly changing technology and free online content. In a recent .NET Rocks! podcast, accomplished technical author Charles Petzold (of Programming Windows fame) discusses the grim commercial realities of writing technical software books in the 21st century. It doesn’t sound good. His recent 3D programming for Windows book took 8 months to write and has sold less than 4,000 copies worldwide. As he gets royalties of around $3 per copy sold (less when sold outside the US), this equates to less than $12,000 for 8 months work. He could have made around $9,000 flipping burgers for minimum wage over the same period[1]. Ouch.

[1] Assuming 40 hours per week.