Chad Things

Back in 2005, i bought a Buffalo Terastation 1TB NAS (Network Attached Storage). Basically its a backup device – a mini-computer box with 4 harddrives, each 250GB, or 1TB total. Last week one of the drives died after a power outage (we get a lot of outages on san jose ave), and today i fixed it. However, it wasn’t that easy – I spent over 3 hours on it – when it should have taken less than one. So i’m just gonna note a few things so the next guy might have it easier. Now here’s where i’m gonna geek out, so all non-geeks .. move along.

When i first setup the terastion, i did a RAID5 + RAID1 – that means i got a 750GB partition out of my 4 250GB drives. So if any one of the four drives dies, i don’t lose my data. I just pop in a new drive and rebuild. Easy. This worked great for 3 years, never had to replace a drive. Every now and then we’d lose power and when i powered on my terastation, it would take 1-2 days to check the disks before we were good to go.

Last week Terastation would not recover – it would boot up for a minute, do disk check, then turn off (power light was off). However, each of the four drive status lights would stay red, with disk 3 blinking red. After reading the manual, I decided to replace disk 3. I also read the wiki FAQ, so i knew i could replace with any same-size or bigger drive. I did this, spending almost 45 mins opening the terstation up, switching the drive, and putting it back together. Turned it on, and it stayed on. Yay!

So now all i had to do is connect to the web manager interface and “rebuild the raid array”. Once i logged in, it said Raid array 1 error – i clicked it, and I’d get to array 1, and it listed disk 1, 2, 3, 4 .. but the checkbox to disk 3 was greyed out. I spent a while looking through the web pages and decided something might be wrong with my new disk. I turned it off, took the thing apart (only took 15mins this time), pulled out my new disk, and basically connected it to my PC in a external USB drive box. It worked fine. Ugh. Was terastation broken? I tried the old drive, that terastation thought was dead. It also seemed OK by PC standards. Ugh.

After going back in forth and trying different things, it turned out that the new drive had to have the jumper in Cable Select to work. The older 3 western digital drives were not in Cable Select mode. Whatever.

Also, the LED lights on the front don’t always do exactly what the manual or FAQ says. Specifically, i loved this blog on replacing terastation drive, but at the what he says is different than what i saw. Once I clicked ‘Restructure RAID Array’ , the lights were all going nuts and within a minute it went to a page that said “Restructuring has completed successfully” “Checking RAID Array”. At this point my 8 drive lights are blinking red and green – the 3 old ones have solid red status, new one is not lit, and all 4 have blinking green activitiy. Power light is on, diag light is blinking green. On web interface, i clicked on Raid Array 1 and it says it is “Rearing (x.x % Complete)”. I waited a few mins and refreshed page .. percent complete is increasing. It’s working !!! 4 hours later it finished – my setup is as good as it ever was.

I love YouTube, but i wish they supported higher quality – 320×240 just ain’t enuf. Enter vimeo – 640×480 and .. 1280×720 – thats right, full 720p HDTV !!! Here’s a video recorded at 720×480 (480p) and uploaded to youtube (right below), then vimeo (below youtube).

The Old Ones from Chad Norwood on Vimeo.

Or if you want full HD, check out this HD Video – The Art Of Beat Making – make sure you watch it fullscreen size to fully appreciate it.

For the techie, the only constraint is you get 500MB a week – no 10 minute limit. And they give you instructions on how to encode it depending if you want 1280×720 (HD Help) or regular tv quality around 640×480 (imovie help).

Social Networking is hot right now. Myspace is huge, facebook is growing super-mega fast, and even Google is backing open standards with OpenSocial (tho, not perfect).

Tagging is also a somewhat new (few years old). You can tag photos (flickr), tag websites/blogs (digg, del.icio.us, technorati, furl, etc) .. why not tag friends? Specifically, I have different circles of friends, some friends overlap, and would love to be able to group them more effectively than i can today. Examples

• babysitters
• coworkers
• work project A
• work project B
• lunch friends
• church friends
• hiking friends
• drinking buddies
• college friends
• star trek fans
• DJ/dancing crews

One thing to point out is how this compares to the existing concept of groups on social networking sites. Tagging people with “hiking” is promoting MY view of the world – I get to control who i want to talk to when i want to go hiking. In contrast, a hiking group I join is not my view – I don’t have control on that case. It’s more random, usually controlled by the loudest people (loudest meaning more volume of info and higher frequency), and most likely less personal, therefore a different usage paradigm. But the most important difference is that friends tagged with “hiking” are friends first, hiking people second. Social networking groups are groups first, and may or may not contain friends.

Everybody likes to spend time with friends, so why not change the paradigm to make friends come first?

How would it work? Simple – while looking at profiles on a given social network site, there’s always a section that has “add friend” or “marked as friend”. Around there you could add a tag to that person. Then, on your home page, you could have a friend tag cloud or list of friend tags. You pick a tag and it jumps to a dynamicly created page containing summaries of each person you tagged, with the following options:

• email – easier to manage than creating new email lists all the time
• calendar or event planning – requires them all to use the same calendar system so it can find time when all are free .. not easy
• person summaries, including existing tags (with ability to add/delete here, too), latest posts, pictures, status, …. optionally filtering posts/pics by the current tag (oooo.. advanced)

I’m looking at you, google.

Today my beautiful new 24″ monitor arrived. Thanks, Mr. Fedex!! I ordered the Samsung 245T after doing a bunch of research (xbitlabs, trusted reviews, cnet). Specifically, its the best 1920×1200 24″ flat-screen out there under $1000. Besides awesome screen quality (my, what a wide color gamut you have), it has tons of inputs (DVI, HDMI, VGA, S-Video, RCA, Component), USB Hub, and PIP (picture-in-picture). Its also quite popular – constantly out of stock everywhere as soon as stock arrives (pricegrabber). I ended up paying about $700 for it. Yeah, i’m a geek.

I haven’t had cable or satellite since 2003 – over 4 years. Just a DVD player and computer connected to my TV. And i think its great – easier and better suited to my lifestyle. Everybody knows how to rent a DVD from the local video store or get’em in the mail from Netflix, so today i’m just gonna discuss watching from your computer (I connect my macbook pro to my HDTV and watch it on that).

So what to watch? Well, some people really like Tivo to get shows – it saves stuff for you as it comes on TV, makes it easy to skip passed commercials, etc. I prefer to download an entire season of a TV show at once, like LOST, Heroes Season 1, or my favorite, The Wire. But sometimes you need more recent shows, like The Colbert Report.  You can also get classic movies like caddyshack or browse the latest comedies or latest action movies.

Note – the system is not perfect – if something is not popular, its hard to download. Thats why i always tell people to sort the results by number of seeders (people sharing), and only download ones that are easy to get (like 10 seeders minimum, 50+ seeders is best).

On the techie side, you’re just downloading a small torrent file from the links above, which just tells your torrent client where to get the rest of the data. Kinda like google search results tells your browser (firefox) where to get the thing you’re looking for. Once you have the torrent file, you wait anywhere from a day (new movies are popular) to over a week (Heroes season 1 is 4 GB) while your torrent client does all the downloading. What torrent client should you get? I like Azureus for Windows and Transmission for Mac OS X.

Mininova is the most popular site to get torrent files, but there are other torrent sites.

Disclaimer: Don’t download any movies you don’t already own – thats illegal.

I love wordpress.com, but I’m finally ready to move on. They are a free site, and i’m glad i started off blogging with them, but now its time to run my own site.

Welcome to ChadNorwood.com. I have much more control here over themes, plugins, stats, among other things. For now, i’ve picked a basic theme to get the ball rolling, ya know, get the new URLs up and running. Expect it to look a little different over the coming weeks.

Just gonna share some geekiness in this blog – short and sweet.

First, how to make your own custom ringtones (tested with several verizon phones)

1. Download Audacity (Windows or Mac) and Lame mp3 codec. This lets you cut a 10 second selection sample from your favorite mp3.
2. Download and install Lame mp3 codec (copy to wherever audacity is).
3. Drag your favorite mp3/wav file to Audacity and make a selection that will be your ringtone. Best if its between 3 and 20 secs.
4. File – Export Selection as MP3. First time it will ask you where Lame mp3 codec is, tell it. Then Give ringtone a name, save to disk.
5. For Verizon – Email it as attachment to <your_10digit_cellphone_number>@vzwpix.com. For example, 4151234567@vzwpix.com
6. Done.

iPhoto – merging multiple iPhoto libraries for free. I couldn’t agree more with this dude.

Google Analytics – been out for about a year, but i just started using it. You basically add some javascript code to the end of every html page you want to track, and google does an amazing job of showing you stats and other useful info. Really. And its great to manage different domains, or setup multiple profiles within a domain. Once again, google is way better than anything else thats ever tried to do this. Sux that i can’t do it on wordpress.com .

Oh, and not a geek thing, but give some love to my friend otto – he needs it and deserves it.

I have several domains hosted out of my apt, meaning the computer that controls samo.org (among others) sits in my apartment. Now that i’m moving, i decided to look into hosting these domains somewhere else a bit more reliable (although it was fun to walk fritz and shayna thru a reboot from Thailand).

Here’s what i’m looking for

• cheap monthly (less than $10/month)
• virtual hosting (2+ domains)
• linux/BSD/Unix
• PHP access
• ssh access (csh, cron, .htaccess, php.ini, etc)
• web stats (access to apache log files)
• decent disk space and bandwidth (?)

I’m happy to see that shared hosting (one machine serving many domains and many customers) is pretty cheap ($5-$10/month). This is in comparison to dedicated hosting, where a customer gets their own machine – for high bandwidth and/or highly customizable stuff. I used to think i needed that, but now i don’t. First I tried to find current reviews of web hosting, starting with GoDaddy, since that’s where i have some domains registered. Basically they are one of the cheapest around, but there are many on the net that complain about their customer support. After a bit of digging, i found some decent review sites and decided to do it right.

Webhostingsitesreviews does a good job evaluating the company and their offerings – their top linux sites were BlueHost 95%, StartLogic 95%, IX Web Hosting 92%, HostMonster 92%, HostGator 87%, Yahoo 87%, and last place GoDaddy 83%. I also liked Hosting Review’s top 10 table with links to their verbose reviews. YourWebHosting also lists a top 10 with BlueHost at the top, followed by IX, GoDaddy, Dot5, StartLogic. Top 5 Hosts picked Hostmonster, Lunarpages, Bluehost, Startlogic, and Hostgator. Ahh, those names sound familiar – I think i see some patterns. Good.

I also found a few sites that seem… off. Perhaps paid placements? Hostsearch allows people to review sites, which is nice to get user issues, but they are not as thorough as webhostingsitereviews. Hostsearch’s top picks are (in order) Webstrike (402 reviews), WebHostingBuzz (258 reviews), eBoundHost (43 reviews), Galaxyvisions (22 reviews), HostForWeb (259 reviews). Web Hosting picked these as their tops: Globat, Poweb, HostRocket, GoDaddy .. and none of them seemed like a good deal.

Anyway, on with the Round-Up – My Summary below. Most of the top ones were about the same, altho I noticed a few things i wanted that not everyone has, like SSH access and access to log files (i like to ssh and tail logs while troubleshooting).

And the winner is … Hostmonster, everything i need for $6/month.

Notes – doteasy.com only had 1GB storage and 20GB/month xfer for $7/month plan. Yahoo was equally lame.

Don’t ever ever get a gift card for Tigerdirect.com – trust me. I worked for yahoo, got a free gift certificate at giftcertificates.com, which i used to buy $250 gift cards at Tiger direct. Bad move. All i wanted to do was buy stuff from their site using the gift cards –

1. I ended up having to call them 5 times, totaling about 3 hours, longest call was over an hour (this really sucked)
2. I got passed around from customer service to credit card payment and back and on hold and talked to supervisors and on hold and … dropped entirely, 3 of 5 times. Each time they liked to tell me how their internal operations work (hello, do i care?), and it varied depending on who i talk to.
3. Web site is great, but does not work with gift card system. During checkout, It incorrectly reports the amount available on gift cards
4. If you use less than the full amount of a gift card, they have to mail you another gift card for the difference (why not email? or better yet, just change the amount on the gift card to whats left? not rocket science)
5. They have at least 2 different types of gift card numbers, and one of the problems i had was that both could not be applied to one
   order – at least the supervisor acknowledged this as not great and made it work for me.  well, i hope he made it work – not shipped yet.

Seriously, guys, how much money do you waste on customer service? Perhaps gift cards are not that popular, and its not worth the time to make the system functional, relying on supervisors to fix it? I thought about calling Carl Fiorentino, TigerDirect’s president, at home in Miami, like Fred Wise did, but haven’t. I think i got it sorted – we’ll see if my package arrives after burningman.

I can’t tell you how excited and happy I am now that i got my laptop fixed. My macbook pro, which died in India, was resurrected by the good kids at Apple. I’ve been waiting to get this laptop fixed since i got back – and it finally arrived thursday after 11 days of separation anxiety. Hurray. Now i’m loading it up with software, mp3s, and videos.

Here’s a little more on fixing a broken macbook pro. First lemme tell you its condition – it was in my bag, well padded, but the bag fell off the roof of a SUV going 30 mph. Ouch. Surprisingly, it did boot up – the screen was mostly cracked (nice fractals) but the upper left corner of the screen i could see the mouse and the little blue apple. The harddrive worked (wow), the keyboard sorta worked, but the sides of the titanium casing had ripples in it, making the ports questionable. I took it to the apple store for an estimate – he quoted $1,000 for tier 4 damage – meaning they would replace all parts needed to get it back to normal. He said a 3rd party could fix it cheaper – maybe – and mentioned techrestore. I talked to those guys, but they wanted $500 for just a screen fix – and wouldn’t give me an upperbound – like, the most it would cost for a new screen, new case, new ports, new drive, etc. So i just decided to let apple do it. Apparently the first apple guy was incorrect on the price – Apple ended up charging me about $1,300 ($1,140 tier 4, $100 labor, $96 tax) – more than a brand new windows laptop. Of course, this IS a macbook pro. Ooooooo…. But i gotta say, i think they replaced EVERYTHING. It’s like i have a whole new computer. Feels so nice and purty. I’m soo happy. I love being a Geek.

Oh, and before i took it in, i wanted to salvage my harddrive data – mostly pics – because apple likes to erase everything. My ports wouldn’t work, so i had to remove my drive and put in a external harddrive enclosure, and mount it to another computer. Removing the drive was a bit of work, but a success, thanks to the macworld macbook pro hard drive upgrade guide (say that 10 times fast).  After doing this, i decided i could do it again, replacing the new 100GB drive with a 250GB hardrive (only $200). I also ordered another 1GB of RAM ($50), which will arrive next week. Woop!

So yeah, like i said, this stuff makes me happy, so i know i’m a geek. And i love it.