/dev/blog

Turns out that 320GB “cheap investment” saved me from losing a lot of important data, almost a year later I have lost my 250GB Seagate hard drive. Some data is still recoverable, but I can’t rely on faulty hardware and went ahead with badblock’s destructive write-mode test (-w).

Here’s a sample of dmesg, smartd, and badblocks’s output. They are all a pretty good warning signs of the impending hardware failure to come.

$ dmesg
[...]
hdb: task_in_intr: status=0×59 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error }
hdb: task_in_intr: error=0×40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=170135808, high=10, low=2363648, sector=170135808
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
end_request: I/O error, dev hdb, sector 170135808
Buffer I/O error on device hdb, logical block 21266976

$ badblocks -wsv /dev/hdb
Testing with pattern 0xaa: done
Reading and comparing:
178003968
178003969
178003970
178003971
178003972
178003973
178003974
178003975
[...]

Grid.org, best known for their distributed cancer research project, retired last night. I’ve racked up a total of 469,870 points; that’s 2 years, 292 days, 15 hours, 52 minutes, and 30 seconds of idle processing power.

After doing a battery of tests with memtest86+ and mprime, I will be joining Folding@Home later this week. For those who are interested, Wikipedia has a list of distributed computing projects.

My United Devices Stats

Did you know that the Qwerty keyboard layout was designed to slow down your typing speed? It’s intended purpose was to prevent paper jams in typewriters, but in today’s age and technology it can be anti-productive. Starting tonight I will be going “cold turkey” and make a complete switch from Qwerty to Colemak. At one point in time I did experiment with the Dvorak keyboard layout, but I would always switch between the two layouts while programming. One of my biggest pet-peeves have always been the locations of the Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C, and Ctrl+V shortcuts.

Colemak is still a relatively new keyboard layout, the final draft was released on January 1, 2006 but after some research I discovered that Colemak was designed to be a practical alternative, not to just Qwerty, but also intended to surpass Dvorak’s flaws.

About six months ago I read about papmech’s experience with the Colemak keyboard layout and it has been on my mind since. But why so long? I was waiting to make things harder purchase the redeveloped Das Keyboard II, or in German, ‘The Keyboard’. It features blank keys, supreme durability, mechanical gold plated key switches, a layout that is divided over several pressure zones, and most importantly no “Windows” key.

Current typing speed: ~7wpm

100 days, 4 hours, 7 minutes, and 28 seconds.

Ok, lets see how long this server can stay up without a battery backup supply connected to it.

It started off with random ticking, then the head of the drive started scraping the platters which closely resembled the sound of nails scraping on a chalkboard. I rebooted and tossed in Knoppix, booting off of a LiveCD would allow me to read the hard drives in read only and hopefully avoid any further data corruption while fsck’ing it. I quickly discovered that my efforts were futile.

I’ve had several hard drives fail on me in the past, but this is the first time I’ve had one fail on me while I was using it. My 80GB Western Digital hard drive was manufactured November 2001 and luckily only contained my root partitions. Although I have a pretty decent backup strategy, it was only then that I discovered that if my second hard drive, which contained my home directory, had failed I would have lost about five days of work.

I decided that a Fantom Titanium 320GB USB/Firewire external hard drive was a cheap investment. And with 320GB I wouldn’t have to update it anytime soon. My new backup strategy quietly sits under my desk, out of site, out of mind. This way it wont get stepped on or, worst case scenario, unlikely to be discovered in the event someone tries to rob my house.

After connecting the dive, Fedora automatically mounted it as FAT32. Why it was preformatted as FAT32 and not NTFS? I’m not sure but I don’t care as I planed on wiping it out and formatting it with ext3 anyways.

# umount /dev/sda1
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=64K
4883926+0 records in
4883925+0 records out
320072933376 bytes (320 GB) copied, 11148.3 seconds, 28.7 MB/s
# cfdisk /dev/sda
# mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1
Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (8192 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done
# df -Th
/dev/sda1 ext3 294G 191M 279G 1% /media/disk

My old mouse was a Logitech MX500, most likely one of the best mice I have ever used. Good for gaming and general desktop use, but after 4 years (~10 hours a day) I decided on getting a Razer mouse.

I received my new Razer Copperhead “Chaos Green” laser mouse in the mail today. It is *the* high precision gaming mouse I’ve been looking for. Up to 2000dpi (for comparison the Logitech MX500 was 800dpi, you can change the dots per inch on the Copperhead from 400, 800, 1600, to 2000 with the click of a side button), a 1000hz polling rate (~1ms response time), and it’s the first mouse I’ve ever bought that had 32kb of onboard memory.

The coolest part? All of the configurations are stored in the mouse, not the PC. So you could plug the mouse into another PC and still have a custom button layout. Not to mention compatibility with Linux is flawless. But to edit the default profiles you’ll need to install some software and drivers in Windows.

I started up Counter Strike Source to give the mouse a trail. My first round with the Razer Copperhead and I ended up making 7 kills and 1124 damage with 1hp remaining. Insane.

The Razer Copperhead is awesome for sniping

Defusing Bomb

At the same time I purchased a XTracPads Ripper XL cloth gaming pad. At 14″ x 17.75″ it’s huge, about four times larger then my old one. Although I’m keeping the sensitivity on my new mouse at 2000dbi, it only takes about half an inch to get to the other side of the screen. I don’t think I’ll need the extra room.

My old LCD monitor was a 17″ CTX with a 16 millisecond response time. I purchased two of those from Newegg about two years ago and have had them sitting side by side on my desk since, one connected to my server and the other to my work(/gaming)station. Last week I did my nightly hunting around Newegg and discovered that a Black BenQ 20.1″ Widescreen LCD Monitor with digital input and a 8 millisecond response time was on sale. It included a $40 mail in rebate, $15 instant rebate, and free three day shipping (~$20 savings). Going from 17″ to 20″ in size, 16ms to 8ms in response time, 1280×1024 to 1680×1050 in resolution, and 4:3 to 16:9 in screen ratio was a big change I have been looking forward to for some time now. I sent in a postal money order and a week later UPS dropped it off.

Getting my Ubuntu installation to pickup on the new widescreen was not the easiest thing in the world, but far easier then other things I’ve had to do in the past with Linux. All I had to do was set my new HorizSync, VertRefresh, and add the new “1680×1050″ resolutions. It was suggested to me to use a Modeline Generator if I had any problems, but so far there seems to be no reason to. I kept my old 4:3 resolutions just incase if there’s a problem and I need to go back to my old 17″ LCD. Here’s a sample of my xorg.conf:

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier	"Generic Monitor"
	Option		"DPMS"
	HorizSync	31-81
	VertRefresh	56-76
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier	"Default Screen"
	Device		"NVIDIA Corporation NV40 [GeForce 6800 GT]"
	Monitor		"Generic Monitor"
	DefaultDepth	24
	SubSection "Display"
		Depth		1
		Modes		"1680x1050" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Depth		4
		Modes		"1680x1050" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Depth		8
		Modes		"1680x1050" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Depth		15
		Modes		"1680x1050" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Depth		16
		Modes		"1680x1050" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Depth		24
		Modes		"1680x1050" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
	EndSubSection
EndSection

I have been experimenting with a fresh Suse 10.1 install under VMware Workstation and discovered it was a little friendlier excepting my new resolution preference as Yast had a better graphical front end.