Lawrence "The Dreamer" Chen's Blog

....after upgrading the other harddrive in my main desktop. I finally got around to doing it. Sure was a pain being without my main computer. All the things I wanted to do online (and offline), but couldn't. Sure, some of the (online) things I could've done from other computers (and some I did)...but there were things that were unique to this one.

This should be it for upgrades this this computer until I finally break down and get a new one....whether it'll be the latest and greatest with Windows 7 or I finally make the switch to a Mac (or perhaps Linux will be mainstream?)....who knows.

Meanwhile, it looks like I'm in the market for a new watch already.

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I was all in a rush last week to upgrade the other drive in my primary desktop. Partly because the plan was to use the old drive as the backup drive of my other computer. Guess, I'll just have to go without backups for a while longer.

I had resorted to ordering the drive from Amazon.com instead of my usual source TigerDirect.com, because I wanted to know that it was going to show up for certain on a certain day before the weekend.

And, it appeared as desired on Friday. But, first Saturday I was volunteering my Amateur Radio skills to do communications at a SAG for the Yellow Brick Road Race. And, I was way too tired to take on a project like this when I got home. Being up early and being kept up by a yapping dog downstairs was part of the reason. Also being nice than expected and standing in the sun near the end probably didn't help either. But, it was cool. Though it has me thinking that maybe I'll continue to hold out for the Yaesu VX-8R, instead of wimping out and getting the VX-7R. Probably do so by deferring the upgrade of my mobile phone until next year. (likely to be a decision between Google Android or a Blackberry...choice of carrier might be as solidly decided as well either.)

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Today after lunch, I popped into the K-State Computer Store....and walked out with an Iomega Ultramax 1TB External Harddrive - dual interface (USB 2.0 & FW400). Sticker price was $205, but it rang up as $199 + Tax.

As soon as I got home from work, I set it up and went to backing up my system using it.

Haven't worked out how to get the other machine backing up....since the old external drives are USB 2.0 only, and the old computer only has FW400 (and USB1.1). But, the SATA enclosure I got for upgrading the internal drives on this computer is also dual interface. So, I suppose if I step up the upgrade of the 250G internal drive to a 500G...the old 250G drive can be backup to my old machine.

Meanwhile, as Ohio Linux Fest looms closer and closer...I decided it was time to upgrade Firefox on my ASUS Eee PC 901. I was kind of annoying that 3.0.3 came out so soon after 3.0.2, but hopefully enough time has passed now that it is safe to upgrade the 3.0.1 to 3.0.3. I think the only thing left is tweak Thunderbird to access a few more email accounts. And, I should be ready to hit the road using it. Think I'll leave the work laptop home this trip. But, I'll probably bring it along for LISA...since I'll probably have to do work during it.

Wonder how the Thunderbird on the EeePC updates.....

I'm about to take the plunge on buying an external 1TB drive....I had been eyeballing one on and off for some time.

I currently use a pair of 300GB drives (Maxtor OneTouch II's) to do backups of my main (XP) PC. And, I have one that does backups of my other Windows (2000) PC.

But, recently I ran out of space during a backup....which shouldn't be that surprising, since I had recently upgraded the primary drive from 120GB to 400GB. Total raw capacity 650GB. Initially, the plan was the 1TB drive would supplement my backup capacity. Especially since I plan to upgrade the other drive at some point (250GB to 500GB).

Though the backup was running slower than usual, apparently the drive came up in legacy USB mode after the last power outage....so the backup was estimated to take a week or so, instead of the over 8 hours that it had grown to (normally the full runs once every 6 weeks, on Tuesdays while I'm at work....but often it continues to run well into the evening when I get home now)...the incrementals run around 2am and haven't gotten in my way. Though they also only run on weekdays, since they would conflict with tape backups, though I haven't run one in a long time....haven't taken the plunge on getting another pulled drive off of eBay.... Don't know when or if I'll revisit this.

Anyways...I reset the drives (unplugged/replugged) and then they started flying along again....I did notice that one of the drives seemed noisier than the other....and then during the backup, it made some really horrible sounds. So, I guess that drive is failing. Kind of unexpected.

I'm planning that the 1TB drive will support Firewire (the OneTouch II's used to, but I had to change their enclosures....and got USB only ones), hopefully it'll be more reliable. I suspect the USB issue is because not everything I have connected by USB draws power from USB...and some aren't on UPS. ... So switching back to Firewire will hopefully keep things running fast by separating things, if for no other reason....

I had been planning to get a DROBO at some point to be the backup...though it is hard to justify the cost of getting a DROBO just for this type of storage, when I also have a crunch to add storage of other sorts. And, I also have plans to play around with other ways of adding storage....

Meanwhile, I discovered that backups had stopped working some time ago on my other Windows (2000) PC. It spat a disk error when I tried to run one by hand. I tried reformatting the OneTouch II drive, but the format failed. So, I guess that drive is toast. And, I'll be in the market to buy another drive for it.....since that old box only does Firewire. It did have USB (1.1) ports...but some time ago, the port seem to have gotten zapped....because they don't work anymore. The machine has 3 other 300GB drives connected to it for storage. But the OneTouch only backs up system files. The rest is primarily DVArchive storage. And, I'll probably never get around to watching those shows....

The other important archived files are also stored on my (Ubuntu 8.04LTS Server) Linux box (which is doing RAID1. I plan to hang more SATA drives off of it, and see what RAID 5 is like....someday. Would also like to try Port-Multiplying).

So, I guess I'm in the market for 2 Firewire drives.....though the OneTouch II 300GB that was on here was overkill already....so don't know what I'm going to do. This may involve some thought and some juggling.....

Once again, after some thought yesterday, I decided that I'm going to pass on getting a new Windows XP computer. Even though I was eyeballing something based around a Phenom X4 based system. And, my old XP machine is almost 5 years old....and new systems are getting scarce.

What I'm now thinking about is getting both a Mac Mini (for my Home Theater, though this may change or get dropped...depending on my mood, etc.) and an iMac (for the bedroom). What I'll then do is get VMWare Fusion for the iMac, should the need for a newer Windows environment arise. The only question is the timing of the iMac, and the thought of getting an iPod touch. (which cuts into my plan to get a VX8R?)

Anyways...I decided that if I'm going to keep the old XP machine, I should stop procrastinating on upgrading the drives in it. I had seen warnings that the primary drive was going to fail, and had purchased Acronis Easy Migrate a while back with the plan of upgrading this drive. It is only a 120GB drive. I could of gotten larger, but I didn't think I would need all that space at the time. Though I had since added a secondary drive of 250GB, and even that one is getting kind of full.

So, I was about to make a note to myself to buy a 500GB drive, when it occured to me that I had pulled a 400GB drive from the post-icepocalypse Gateway (Core 2 Quad) machine I had gotten. It came with Vista, but I had no interest in running Vista. It was purchased to replace my Linux server, though I resurrected that server....so its just an Ubuntu play box. Though I was hoping for PM support to do raid on it. But, I haven't taken the plunge to see if it'll work for that....so its just a fast BOINC engine at the moment....and some file storage.

Anyways, I decided to upgrade the primary drive in TARDIS using the 400GB drive. I went and got the USB/Firewire/eSATA to SATA/IDE enclosure that I had purchased and set aside for this purpose and set out to try running Acronis Migrate Easy.

Hooked it up using Firewire first....strange, my computer seems to have gotten too quiet. Seems the firewire interface is disabling my sound. But, when I went to 'migrate'...it wouldn't. It failed quickly on the reboot, and various other forms of failure. I figured maybe there was a problem with it being on Firewire. So, I switched to USB.

That didn't help. It was reboot and then fail, and then reboot back to before. I slipped other activities in during the process, and eventually it was late...so I called it a night.

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Of course, I'm talking about my Ubuntu server (well, maybe not obvious....except that I'm not known for doing upgrades).

I had debated waiting for Hardy Heron's release before building this Linux server. Except that I had bought the box back in December, and delaying was preventing was delaying all that BOINC work that I've been doing.

There's other stuff I want to or have thought of doing with this server, but don't know where I actually stand on doing those sorts of things. If I had it to do over again, I don't think I would've gotten this box (it was knee-jerk response to replacing a dead server, which I was later able to resurrect...negating the ordeal of recreating things). OTOH, I probably would've continued on with buying something else....and I'm not sure if I would've been that happy with that purchase. Of course, it has delayed that purchase....and it may become too late to get it. Though perhaps Windows XP will continue to still be available after June 30th, and I'll make that one last upgrade in that department.

Anyways...other than taking much longer than expected to upgrade....either the upgrade servers are still badly hammered, or Cox is throttling me. Cox seems to be sluggish in general today. The download speed was dismal. And, then hidden in the terminal you don't see my default, it was asking if I wanted to proceed with the upgrade after everything had been downloaded.

Annoying enough when doing 'sudo apt-get upgrade', even more so here....because I wasn't expecting that I had to wait and interact (with a hidden screen) in the upgrade. Later there were dialogs that popped up on stuff that wanted input, mainly to decide if stuff I had configured in Gutsy could be unconfigured in the resulting upgrade to Hardy. Umm, I configured those services so that I could use them....

Finally it was done....it took forever to boot while it did fs checks on /home and /MMCVideo, but then everything looked fine.

Well, not totally. lm-sensors was changed, so I had to reconfigure that, and I'm not sure but the core temperatures seem to be higher now. The default is FireFox 3.0 beta....and all my extensions and themes got disabled. I've been avoiding upgrading to FireFox 3.0 on my other machines for this reason. Though people say that the new version is faster, and the memory leak is fixed, and some of the hanging/crashing problems on Mac OS X seem to be gone. But, I want it to work the way I've customized it....

So, I changed my shortcut to launch firefox-2 instead and reverted things.

Now other than network lag, which I hope will clear up on its own....the only main thing that doesn't seem to work in the update is vmware. Which probably just means I need to rebuild the kernel stuff again (or see if there's some hardy specific details to making that work). Not really a big deal though, since I never got around to running anything in vmware. It was on my list of things to try, but now I need more disk on this box.

I heard 8.04 was going to have support for PM SATA, wonder if that's true and if the PCIe PM SATA card that is in the box will now work, etc.

While looking over my credit card spending, I noticed that the current balance out of line....some where significantly higher than expected, others were significantly lower.

I then noticed that some claimed to have had an opening balance of (~88k)....I never ran any of my cards that high (not did I have that kind of credit limit on any individual card).

Conclusion...archiving part of my MSMoney file was a mistake. Since MSMoney Plus pegs the CPU and is unresponsive for 30 minutes when first starting was resolved by using remove all bills repair. I decided that the only choice was to restore to a backup before I did the archive and repair and reenter data.

Fortunately, it has only been a few days since I upgraded. So I closed MSMoney, copied the pre-upgrade MSMoney file back...and reran the upgrade on it. I then waited the 30 minutes of unresponsive MSMoney Plus, and performed the repair.

I then reentered all the new transactions, downloaded statements (had to figure out how to redo that for some of the accounts), and then reentered all my bills....or most of them.

Time to go to sleep....

I checked the TiVo HD, and it was only recording a suggestion (that I wasn't interested in). So I canceled it.

I then setup the external drive. Found a spot on the UPS to plug in the odd shaped wart that prevented me to plugging it into my power strip. And found a spot where the tall drive would fit on my stand (couldn't find any answer on whether it would work in a horizontal orientation)....silly drive...its not a book. The 500GB My Book cheaper (and the local computer store had some).

I then pulled the plug on the TiVo HD. Hooked up the eSATA cable. And, powered up the TiVo again.

It came up...but didn't seem to see the storage. After surfing the menus a bit, I remembered that there was a selection in the settings menu for external devices. So, I went there and set up the drive. It rebooted again and did the setup....

Now I can have up to 86 hours of HD.

This time coming out, I got a message saying that it finally detected storage and asked if I wanted to set it up (again). I deleted the message, and headed into work.

I fiddled with it a bit more...even with both the master and terminal in the livingroom....I couldn't get the terminal to work from either of the jacks by the computer....and further away...the speed test was poor.

Come to think of it, I use powerline speakers for my rear surrounds...at least they work...though that might be why I can't get powerline networking to function. There might be other powerline network technologies that will co-exist, but the speakers are more important and wireless is acceptable.

Plus I already see myself getting better units down the road. Wonder where I would put them, and if it would be 'bad' if I had DROBO's on both....other than a serious lack of cash for all the tech stuff I want to get this year.

I was debating whether to buy the My DVR Expander from TiVo or Best Buy.

For some reason I thought there was an advantage to getting it from TiVo....perhaps I had some vague recollection of reading that Best Buy's price was higher. But, I saw that it was the same price. And, there's the iGive factor

As I was looking at my shopping cart for my checkout options, it occurred to me that I should've gotten RewardZone certificates. Apparently you have to check the site regularly to see when they are automatically issued to you, but they had apparently issued $35 worth of certificates to me on February 25th.

So, I went and completed the order using all the certificates.