Personal

Drive failed in my White MacBook, upgrading to 500GB

The drive failed today. Clicking sound on booting it. I pulled the drive and mounted it on my iMac which has the excellent ThermalTake BlacX external USB drive enclosure. Luckily, I seem to be able to use the Disk Utility to create a disk image of the failed drive. I know, I don't understand but I have an image now. I bought a new WD Scorpio Blue 500Gb drive in Best Buy for 107 bucks tax included. I then inserted the new 500GB drive in the iMac using the BlacX and then used disk utility to create a single partition 500Gb drive on it. I'm using superduper right now to copy and expand the image file I made earlier to the new drive and then it should be boot up in the MacBook.

SuperDuper is paying for itself pretty easily at this point. My favorite disk utility. But, I did notice something I can't explain yet. I initially backed up the old drive using superduper and created a sparse bundle but I was unable to select this as the image to copy to the new drive. This is why I then used disk utility to make an image again. I'm not sure how useful a sparse bundle image is for this kind of work but it doesn't look useful at all after this experience.

The new drive is installed in the macbook now and everything seems fine. So, the sequence was to use disk utility on the iMac to make a disk image for the 'failed' drive on the main disk. Then superduper copied the disk image to the 500GB new drive and it's working.

Deleting large numbers of files from Amazon s3

I was using jungledisk to backup my home machine. I was backing up about a million files or about 120Gb. I was getting expensive and I just bought a Drobo instead. The problem now is I'm paying 80 bucks a month for that backup data and Amazon offers no easy way to delete it.

I tried using s3fox (a firefox plugin) but this is way out of its league. I next tried s3cmd which works. I did a 's3cmd ls' first to get the buckets and then a 's3cmd rb -r -f bucketname' which deletes the bucket and all nested buckets/files.

It's just SLOW. JungleDisk makes about 8 files on s3 for each file. There is one for the file contents, another for mtime, another for ctime and so on. I stopped this after a day and then started an EC2 instance. I then uploaded s3cmd to that and did it from there. Much faster (10x at least). No network latency slowing it down and now a day and a half later, the buckets are finally gone.

Amazon, give us a way to easily remove buckets!

MacBook Pro hard drive fails

I'd been getting time machine errors which when I looked at the backupd messages in the console were showing as bad blocks when copying files to the time machine backup drive. These have been happening for a couple of weeks now. I finally downloaded a SMART utility yesterday which checks the drive health and it marked it as FAILING. Not good.

I went to www.ifixit.com and they have a guide for replacing the hard drive in a macbook pro. I bought a 320GB Seagate SATA drive for 140 bucks at Best Buy and got the T6 and #00 screw drivers at the local Ace hardware. I followed the directions on www.ifixit.com and about 30 minutes later the drive was replaced. It wasn't that difficult, just follow the steps and be careful.

I'm just restoring the drive now using superduper and then I should be good to go.

External drive failed, not worth fixing

I use a 320GB WD external USB drive at home to time machine backup my iMac. The drive failed a month ago and today was time to fix it. I went to Best Buy looking for a new bigger internal SATA drive to put in the enclosure but they were all pretty expensive. I ended up buying yet another external drive, 750GB again from WD for 140 bucks. There was an IoMega 1TB drive for 180 but the extra 250 wasnt worth 40 bucks to me.

What is beginning to suck here is that it's just not worth reusing these enclosures. The external drives are cheaper than an internal drive now.

First using iPhone typepad app

Just downloaded the typepad iPhone blogging application and am hence trying it out. I'm finding I can type pretty fast with one finger and quite accurately using the corrective typing that the iPhone does. Not bad, I can't see myself doing war and peace on this but short entries would be do fine.

Upgraded home iMac to 4GB for 130 bucks

My family was complaining the iMac was slow so I figured it was time tp bump up RAM. I bought it with 1Gb mainly because of Apples high RAM prices. I bought 4GB (2GB x 2 DDR2 553) SODIMMs from Crucial on the web for 110 bucks plus 20 bucks overnight shipping. Putting them in was pretty easy. Place the iMac screen down on a gentle surface (don't scratch the screen). From now on, I'm looking at my iMac on a table screen down and I have the bottom of the iMac closest to me.
Then with a cross screw driver, remove the panel on the bottom of the iMac. My iMac has two slots there. Each slot has a plastic tab to help removing the DIMMs. One of my slots (the right one) had a DIMM in it (1Gb). I removed that and then noticed the position of the DIMM so I could put the new DIMMs in the same way. There is a slot on one side of the DIMM by its electrical connectors and on my iMAc that slot needs to go on the left when you push the DIMM in the unit. Pushing them in was easy enough and then switch it on and voila 4Gb of ram. I'm keeping the old DIMM just in case.

Hopefully, the complaints will stop now :)

Moving up to eclipse ganymede

I decided to move from Eclipse 3.3 to ganymede today. It's almost GA now and it was a handy way to get the database support by downloading the JavaEE package. This comes in handy as I'm testing/working on the upcoming WebSphere eXtreme Scale database integration which is about to ship.

I currently test using MacOS on my macbook pro. I have DB2 8.2 fp16 running in a VMWare Windows xp machine. I use this as my database and I do everything else in MacOS using the Mac Java 1.6 implementation with the IBM ORB installed in it.

I was hanging the occasion out of memory in eclipse europa and I modified eclipse.ini to help with that. It also crashed occasionally when looking up types or resources. I'm hoping ganymede will help with that. I'm running ganymede with a 768MB heap.

I try to do single JVM development by starting up extreme scale so that everything goes into a single JVM. Obviously, this won't test replication but it's very useful for debugging the application logic. I'm typically using eXtreme Scale with the latest Spring 2.5 (I use Spring to new up plugins and wire my application). I'm had the spring support improved in the next version by exploiting spring namespace xml config and added in support for specialised scopes useful for eXtreme Scale applications. I run it in a J2SE mode without an application server because this gets me the fastest turnaround/edit-debug cycle.

MacBook Pro on plane problems and solutions

I just flew back from Tokyo and tried to use my 17" MacBook Pro on the plane. Northwest has normal 110V outlets rather than the 12V connector on most planes. It looked to be overloaded and the little LED light on the power connector flickered for about a minute. During this time, the Mac kept switching between charging and not charging until the power was cut off from the plug by the plane it seems, some kind of fuse. I then decided to just charge the Mac and use it off battery. It will charge while it's off on the plane. Then I tried taking out the battery which solves the problem. Now, I can use it on the plane with no issues at all.

This all makes sense when you see Apples 12V adapter for the Mac. It only powers the Mac and wont charge the battery. It looks like there simply isn't enough current from a plane outlet to charge a modern notebook while it's on. So, at least now I know. I had similar issues with my Thinkpad R61 and external power supplies also but never thought of removing the battery.

Viewing my flight info on my iPhone

I've been struggling for a way to see my flight information on my iPhone. I book all my travel through an IBM partner and they send a confirmation email with an attached PDF with flights, hotels, car etc. But, this doesn't help me as it doesn't go in my calendar.

Tripit.com is a clever way around this problem. Basically, make a tripit account, forward the confirmation email from the travel company to planit@tripit.com and then they parse it and pick out the information and put it in their calendar. This is useful but doesn't solve my problem, the iPhone. Next though, they publish the calendar using an ICS feed which I can subscribe to in Apples iCal on my mac. iCal can check daily and update my calendar which is then synced to the iPhone. So, it's a big of a run around but in the end now I just forward my confirmation emails and in a couple of minutes, it's on the iPhone.

The shame is that the iPhone while being this amazing internet device is still tethered for stuff like this. Why can't it get this stuff itself, it has an internet connection. RSS feeds for blogs/podcasts/TV shows all require a PC/Mac also.

Anyhow, TripIt looks a cool service, I'm sure someone will buy em and in the meanwhile, it solves my problem pretty easily.

Finally bought a 16GB iPhone with review

I bought a 16GB iPhone a couple of weeks ago and am very happy with it. On WiFi browsing is very very good. My old Blackberry pearl seems pathetic compared to it in this regard. The interface works as well as everyone says and watching video podcasts and TV shows is better than the iPod Classic I had. I think the UI on the classic is better than the iPhone for looking at video especially. Shows, podcasts and movies are all lumped together in one menu which is a pain compared with the seperate menus for each type on the classic. If I only had a couple of items then it's not an issue but I usually have 7-8GB of video on it from various podcast/show sources and it's a pain to look through the lists.

Headphones

The built in head phones are pretty bad. The Shures I bought are way better but I lost the mic and button included on the builtin ones. The button is especially handy as a single click answers and hangs up as well as pause/resumes playing music. A double click skips to the next song. I bought a Monster iSonicTalk yesterday and this solves that issue in that it provides a lapel mic and a button. Your head phones plugin through an adapter. The shures have a thick cable and one of the clips on the Monster cable broke off because of this. Shure needs to make an integrated system. I also looked at Shures mic solution but the mic is down by my navel and it won't work with a coat over unlike the Monster system.

Capacity

16GB was a must for me as I have a lot of music and carry tv shows and video podcasts with me. I had around 35GB of content almost always on my iPod Classic and I've pared that down to around 12GB right now for iPhone. Mostly by only syncing 3 unwatched episodes and limiting music to top rated and surprise titles.

Cases/protection

I really liked the silicon case I had for my classic and couldn't find something similar for the iPhone. I bought a Gelaskin for it and that protects the screen and rear panel from scratching using their glue less 3M film. I have a leather belt cradle also for carrying it on my belt rather than in my pocket. The included charger is very nice and works as a bed time stand. The combination of the built in speakers (this is huge) and the deskside charger makes a clock/radio unit unnecessary for me. No, it's not amazing quality but it's good enough. The sleep timer is nice for going to sleep listening to music and the builtin speaker lets me use it as an alarm clock in the morning.

Summary

My current plan is to use this till the 3G iPhone comes out and then buy that one and give this to my wife and then switch from tMobile to ATT at that point.
Anyway, despite the crappy video menu stuff, the builtin speaker, timer, desktop charger and wifi browser makes it an awesome upgrade iPod wise and phone wise it's just ok (no corporate email for now).