Andreas Wacker

google gaming became a 24/7 operation

Apple’s market share continues to grow

cheap solar panels?

That would indeed be nice.

Adib Frickes latestword installation is showing at Realace GmbH in Berlin right now. It is hard to judge the work of a friend. I like this room. There was relatively little time between opening day and commision. And it seems, that the work is great, as it always has been. There is a certain directness. Other works, that in the making for months or even years are perfect. But by missing perfection amplifies the initial impact of the work. It might become easier approachable by the unintiated. And, with Adibs work, we all are just that.

I am running a 9505 16 port 3ware card with 12 Western Digital 300 GB drives. In /var/log/messages I found

Nov 4 10:48:53 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0023): Sector repair completed:port=11, LBA=0x23268EDA.
Nov 4 10:50:19 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0023): Sector repair completed:port=11, LBA=0x21D88B0F.
Nov 4 10:51:27 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0023): Sector repair completed:port=11, LBA=0x1E71DB4A.
Nov 4 10:51:33 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0023): Sector repair completed:port=11, LBA=0x23289645.
Nov 4 11:02:03 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0023): Sector repair completed:port=11, LBA=0x2111C31E.
Nov 4 11:06:00 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0023): Sector repair completed:port=11, LBA=0x2219A8F3.
Nov 4 11:08:52 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0023): Sector repair completed:port=11, LBA=0x1437A499.
Nov 4 11:09:05 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0023): Sector repair completed:port=11, LBA=0x23455701.
Nov 4 11:09:10 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0023): Sector repair completed:port=11, LBA=0x23455749.
Nov 4 11:10:02 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0023): Sector repair completed:port=11, LBA=0x241F28D3.
Nov 4 11:11:54 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0023): Sector repair completed:port=11, LBA=0x20B6CCC9.
Nov 4 11:12:13 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0023): Sector repair completed:port=11, LBA=0x22277DFD.
Nov 4 11:12:13 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0023): Sector repair completed:port=11, LBA=0x22277D80.
Nov 4 11:12:13 her2 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: ERROR (0x04:0x0002): Degraded unit:unit=0, port=11.


in tw_cli the drive on port 11 got reported as failed:

p11 DEVICE-ERROR u0 298.09 GB 625142448 WD-WCAPD3118453


I tried to test the drive via

/usr/sbin/smartctl -t long -d 3ware,11 /dev/twa0
/usr/sbin/smartctl -t offline -d 3ware,11 /dev/twa0
/usr/sbin/smartctl -t conveyance -d 3ware,11 /dev/twa0
/usr/sbin/smartctl -t short -d 3ware,11 /dev/twa0


But

/usr/sbin/smartctl -a -d 3ware,11 /dev/twa0


did not show many good signs:

SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error
# 1 Short offline Completed: read failure 90% 6702 396331771
# 2 Conveyance offline Completed: read failure 90% 6702 396331771
# 3 Extended offline Completed: read failure 90% 6695 396331771
# 4 Extended offline Completed: read failure 90% 6695 396331771
# 5 Extended offline Completed: read failure 90% 6694 396331773
# 6 Extended offline Completed: read failure 70% 6684 99434677


Values like Multi_Zone_Error_Rate and Offline_Uncorrectable as well as Current_Pending_Sector promised nothing good.

In tw_cli I then removed the drive in question from the unit:

maint remove c0 p11


The smarctl tests still failed right away. I rescaned the drives in tw_cli:

maint rescan c0


The failed drive was found, and soon after the 3ware controller grabbed it automatically and started the rebuild.

It did so sucessfully. The Current_Pending_Sector value decreased back to 0, and the drive array seems to be functioning
normal right now.

During one of those pesky spurious rebuilds happening on both 9550SX-16ML controllers that I am aware
of the drive failed again. This time with an ECC-ERROR . Not enough of a failure it seems that the rebuild would have
failed. A

maint rescan c0

in tw_cli after the rebuild had finished cleared this error. It’s noteworthy that the spurious rebuild performance came to a grinding
slowdown after the ECC-ERROR.

When I replaced the failed drive things went back to normal and the system has been fine ever since.

Call me crazy, but I think that the story of JH Schön could make a great movie. In the right hands. But I am so much out of touch that it might have come out last spring and friends of mine have worked on it.

Callwave and EVDO are certainly my best technological friends: Getting of a plane, in the hotel room, there would be an ethernet, but why bother? EVDO works. Even here. Then there is a voicemail from somebody that called while I was on the plane. The automatic transrcipt gives me an idea, the company that called shows up, and best of all, all those call back numbers are transrcibed right there. If the iPhone could maybe read a phone number with it’s camera and then dial it, we would be in good shape.

Lot’s of blog rave about thiscomputer animation right now.

I think it is horrible. Smetana is easy to abuse and misunderstand. Dragging Fallingwater into this is just horrible. The first couple of seconds of this Quicktime from hell are nice enough. Although the font choice and especially the animated glow should have been a clear sign of trouble. Fallingwater is one of the more important things that have been made in the last century. Seing it disolved to death is pure horror. The tasteless low point was certainly the eschereseque pan away from that mirror ball.

Not much more to say than this

read
or
watch

The advantage with reading is, that you can do it without stuttering. What a shame that one of the better virals (a bad word in itself most of the time) has such a poor delivery and encoding. Flash still sucks. I hate that stupid stuttering effect. Quicktime used to do that as well. 1999.

“Storage Mojo” is usually pretty scientific, this ‘analysis’ about consumer hard drives is a bit more creative. Counting google hits with BRANDNAME sucks is a bit of a short cut. However, the results seem to come up with a winner. And the margins are definite enough to have some meaning. And with this kind of result I like a creative way of using google.

Nintendo’s market cap is higher than Sony’s by now.

eleven years after ID4
27TB is an impressive number for 1994.

Learned today that a dollar bill has an aspect ratio of 1 to 2.35
In case you shoot scope, or want to know if a crop is really 2.35 or something else.

business cards

lots of ideas it seems.

While I am still waiting for AT&T to activate my 1-800 number that I have ordered 2 weeks ago, others have
other problems

The area code stupity shows what happens when you shoehorn a new concept (cell phones) into an existing system that has conflicting features (area codes). Area codes are for an area. A location. Mobile phones are call mobile, because, well, they can be in different places. This multi billion dollar industry somehow overlooked this basic fact. It was only in 1951 that the current system is in service. Around twenty years ago it became clear that area codes don’t work that well: splits and overlays are hacks to overcome a built in premise. And locality does not matter anymore due to technology. It used to be a big deal if you called somebody ‘long distance’ or not. Not anymore.

yes!

Of course the media will have different topics today.

And then there is
news like this, which will cause ‘debate’. Problem being that the ‘debating’ have no clue what they are talking about. On both sides of the argument. Neither would I. My solution for this is to decide to still be excited about great news that comes form sucessful scienes. We all would not be here without science. Most people forget that, since it seems so ‘natural’ by now. All the technology surrounding us. It certainly is no. No iPhone (shit now I said the word) spuds to be found. Yet.

as /etc/httpd/httpd.conf will tell you in

DocumentRoot “/Library/WebServer/Documents”

the Document Root under OS X is under /Library/WebServer/Documents.

Of course you need to enable the oddly named “Personal Web Sharing”
in the system preferences under network.

Zbig

unrelated:

some random links, let’s call it BlogsNow Digest:

Zfs explained: easy, brief and hands on I will upgrade to Leopard aka OS X 10.5 just for ZFS.

Pi is 3, says the Bible
Some things are so god-damn straight forward, it is hard to fathom that people run around and try to think otherwise. I

phantom cell vibrations

couple of misc links. Curtesy BlogsNow:

Pixelmator is a future Mac Photo edit app, slated to use GPU and cost 59,- they say
drops of liquid aka coffee in milk on steroids
youTube Apple-tv to use h.264 interesting how iPhone vs. Flash will play out. Yesterday we saw already that Apple-TV is not so great

the best code: no code at all I do agree. Having added some 150 lines of code earlier today to interdubs I feel somehow dirty.
It’s official Summer since Nessy is back

Technology can be cruel. Spent hours this morning to figure out how to really get rid of all extra spacing in tables. Of course one has to set


margin: 0;
padding: 0;


But these was still an extra little space that bugged me. Good thing is it to have friends that know more than Google. Adib knew that the magic line would be:


border-collapse : collapse;


And, et voila, it works in FF 1.5 and safari 2.0 under OS X.

It has been a long time since I wanted use Apples mail.app. But it still opened whenever I clicked on one of these mailto: links in a webpage. I googled and found that there is gmailto, which should do the trick, but is broken it seems. I could install it, gmail would open, but not understand the email address I wanted to send to.

Then I found Webmailer. This one works like a charm. It together with the gmail option to send email as andreas@andreaswacker.com make gmail pretty much complete. I am sure it breaks in about 7 minutes, when I rave about it like this.

a quick out of the box article about the apple-TV set top box.
The nice thing is that interdubs already supports iTunes. So my clients can show their clients work in progress via Apple TV. Today.

With four seasons you would think that they are equally long.
Not so:

Winter
88.994 days

Spring
92.758 days

Summer
93.651 days

Autumn
89.842 days

Source: space.com

list of things that improve customer relations
book about linux programming
video about journlists in Iraq
a way to clean up your desk from tech stuff
uncle fester threatens to throw a chair at a pirate

nice images Not sure why it needs the girls in them.

from above

back in the day when electronic games were set in space, since a plain background looked only ‘real’ when it was black

move your cursor - Nero style

nerd humor

the real story

good review for Zodiac

The posters are all over LA. It is kind of weird, not having a credit. But I had enough time to get over that. More important is that it did work: All frames ended up where they should be. Which makes me very happy.

then:
sigh

now:

Amazingly dumb rip off of Simon Robslons “What Barry said” .

At first I thought it was a tongue in cheek homage. It seems though that these kids trying to get away with their blatant, uninspired and unwhelmingly rip off act. How lame. And how emberrassing for the University of Ulm.

David Green asks:

“But will it beachball”

stupid song, nice video: