TommyDom

Nobody Understands Debt

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 20:55:40 -0500

The obsession with deficit reduction is wrongheaded and ill-informed.

That’s the tag line on this Op-Ed article…I am not in favor of borrowing all the time, but where we are demands some special intervention that is referenced here. Macro Economics dictates a clearer view.

Applied finishing touches on the Jeep's sound system today...

Sat, 01 Jan 2011 16:16:28 -0500

I installed a Bluetooth unit today to support hands free operation of the cell phone while I’m out and about. Now I’m legal in MD, DE (law in effect today), and DC (don’t get downtown that much, but…) and if VA’s Governor signs the bill, I’ll be good come July 1, 2011.

The Bluetooth unit supports the phone with all the cool Android speech based tools for search and controlling functions working well and also audio streaming. So, now I can stream installed mp3’s from my phone over the car stereo as well as playing Pandora via the Internet.

With that addition, I think I’m done (for a while, at least). The system includes the following:

JVC AHD39 head unit, with XM Radio and Bluetooth
Alpine PDX-5
Polk Audio MM521 speakers in the roll-bar
Polk Audio MM461P speakers up front
Kicker CVT65 Sub in the center console

Rooted my cell phone today...

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 18:01:47 -0500

With Android having a lineage from the Linux operating system, I found familiar ground when opening up a terminal emulator on my phone. Standard BASH implementation for the shell, and typical late day UNIX implementation. I say “late day” because my first touch of UNIX, pun intended, was System III Version 7 running on a Motorola 68000 based system from a company called Wicat. I spent a lot of time analyzing System V implementations and working or portability guidelines. I was in the deep caverns of UNIX back in the day. My latest adventures have been brief implementations of Ubuntu on machines down in the man cave. Nothing serious of late, though.

Ever since I taught myself C [actually by teaching myself B using the B compiler on the Honeywell GCOS mainframe], I’ve been a UNIX hack. I still go on to the UNIX machines at work, and did so last week to write an awk script to set up a Autosys JIL I needed to delete a bunch of jobs I inherited when the development string test environment was transferred to me for stewardship. I still have synapse’s firing because the stuff worked. :)

So now that I have root on the phone, I can use a few tools out there that control the CPU speed, allowing for over-clocking and under-clocking. Under-clocking for battery savings, over-clocking for, well, you know, just for the hell of it. I might even try and see if I can create an app, and “sell it for free” on the Android market… We shall see.

New T-Mobile G2

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 21:55:00 -0500

So, I’ve got a new phone… I was contemplating an Android phone for a number of months now as I wathched the popularity of the operating platform get more press and literally accelrate the market saturation with lots of phones, and unfortunately versions of the operating system. Its interesting that each of the carriers decide that they want to tweak the operating system and its utilities to do certain functions, with their own fingerprints on it. I’ve seen that for many years on the UNIX operating system. Each vendor had their own changes. I did an analysis of UNIX system compliance to standards, in particular System V, with Sun Solaris, HP-UX, and Data General. This was back in the early 90’s, by the way. Solaris was OK, however the kernel was of SunOS origin, HP had System V on the outside and Berkeley System Division (BSD) on the inside - and a kernel that was all custom. Data General was just about pure System V - complied using GNU C. So, with Android having a Linux kernel at its heart, and a real open systems development environment backing it, you get lots of flavors beyond the stock operating system.

So, I ditched the old iPhone 3G and decided to purchase a T-Mobile G2 which is a pure Android implementation with only a couple of T-Mobile apps added in for account access and carrier support. The stock unit has an 8GB mini-SD card which is where I store my MP3’s (drag and drop from my Win 7/QNAP NAS setup) and a 5 mega pixel camera. It sports the T-Mobile version of “4G” but that has limited geographical coverage.

All in all, a very solid phone so far. More later. :)

nationalgeographicdaily: Milky Way in the DesertPhoto: Babak A....

Sat, 22 May 2010 16:16:37 -0400

nationalgeographicdaily:

Milky Way in the Desert
Photo: Babak A. Tafreshi

The plane of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, seems to cascade over sandstone hills in a long-exposure nighttime shot taken earlier this month in Algeria’s Tassili n’Ajjer National Park, in the heart of the Sahara. The bright “star” at left is the gas giant planet Jupiter. A UN World Heritage site, Tassili n’Ajjer is famous for its caves filled with thousands of drawings and engravings that date as far back as 6000 B.C. Photographer Babak Tafreshi writes on The World At Night (TWAN) astrophotography website that “prehistoric skygazers surely witnessed a similar sky.”

Wilco (The Exit Interview) - Arts Desk - Washington City Paper

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 20:49:15 -0400

Wilco (The Exit Interview) - Arts Desk - Washington City Paper:

Twas’ a great show…

Contact…. I had not done much with this before - QR Code...

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 19:03:00 -0500

Contact….

I had not done much with this before - QR Code technology, that is. This is my VCard, and includes my name, address, email address, etc. There are iPhone apps that will scan these in and decode the data represented within. Cool.

RAID on my ICH10R

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:41:25 -0500

So, over the last 2 weeks, I’ve had a drive drop out of my 3 drive RAID5 configuration. Twice it was the same drive, and once on a different one. A real pain in the butt as the rebuild takes over 24 hours. I’ve done a lot of reading on the chipset support and wonder what the problem is…

I’ve used the WD TLER utility to change the timeout before reporting a problem from nothing (standard desktop configuration) to a read/write of 7 seconds each [I did this about a month ago] but these last failures came up with that setting. Tom’s Hardware articles have a number of good posts on this subject. But they all point to using a default of 7 seconds, which is supposed to mirror the RAID-ready drives Western Digital puts out. I ran across another post where someone put the read and write timeouts to 60 seconds each. The WD materials online talk about 2.5 minute repair cycles as being something to expect, so I decided to up the timing a bit. Currently I’m running at 15 seconds for both read and write. I’m hoping this will make things more stable.

So, I’m currently running three 750GB Black drives in RAID 5 all at the 15 second TLER setting.

We shall see…

But I’m throwing something else into the mix, and QNAP TS-859. Should be showing up on Friday. I decided to buy a dedicated NAS because I’ve read that the more sophisticated OS (like LINUX) and the file systems that are supported, allow for a more managed RAID solution. The QNAP TS-x59 series are new, using the dual core ATOM 1.66Ghz CPUs and with their dual GigE ports, support almost 100MBs of data transfer. The NAS also supports iSCSI, which I’m going to try. The iSCSI portion will be my data disks, with my OS disks residing in the main machine.

And I did splurge the other day - I bought two 60GB OCZ SSD drives. These really scream [my Windows Experience is 7.4, and the new bottleneck is the CPU and Memory, each at 7.4]. I have the two SSD in RAID0, will take two WD 640GB Black for the iSCSI using RAID0, and backup all of that the NAS which will have a bunch of WD 750GB Black drives set up with RAID5.

Once I get tired of the NAS stuff - not sure that will be anytime soon [take a look at the specs here: http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=146] I’m thinking I’m going to get to doing some LAN network stuff… I’ve designed networks in the past, but always given the work of setting them up to someone else. I may go for something that supports link aggregation 802.3ad and VLANs to truly segment the network traffic between Internet access and a separate VLAN for the computer <-> NAS.

WD Black 750GB

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 22:59:37 -0500

WD Black 750GB:

nosounds:

so what do you get from spending an extra ten bucks on a hard drive? well with wester digital, it is an increased cache (which doesn’t really have any real-world effect), two motor mounts for the read/write head, and two microprocessors instead of one. In the long run, performance is only slightly increased, but the drive will last longer, as it is better constructed. There is also a 5 year warranty as opposed to 3, meaning WD knows that this drive is built to last.

So, I have to agree here… I’ve been filling out my machine with WD Black drives. However, I’ve had to rebuild my RAID 5 array twice this weekend - different drives, both the 750GB variety. I’ve done all of the WDTLER changes to make the system hold off for 7 seconds until it declares a degraded condition. The only thing I haven’t tried is turning off the last of the power saving features via BIOS - C3 setting. I don’t know if the mini-sleep mode that is put into play has anything to do with it. Either way, the Intel motherboard RAID facilities seem to be not as robust as dedicated HW for the job… It why I may be buying a Synology DS1010+ for the RAID based data.