Blog: 2010-06

WD Hotter than ST

While installing my new home server, I'm running the pair of RAID1-mirrored hard drives outside the case while they undergo heavy writing. The drives are 250GB 5400rpm 2.5" SATA 3.0GB/s drives from different manufacturers (different, to decrease the likelihood that both fail at the same time). Interestingly enough, the Western Digital (Scorpio Blue WD2500BEVT) is running noticeably warmer than the Seagate (Momentus 5400.6 ST9250315AS).

If I were picking a drive for a laptop, this is one good reason to go with the Seagate over the WD.

Racket Statistical Profiler

I used the Racket Statistical Profiler for the first time. I used it on a large Web-based system, rigging it up to add profiling information to the bottom of each generated Web page. This quickly identified a particular small utility function as the main culprit. Optimizing the function sped up the entire page generation process by a factor of 8 in my test case.

Note that DrRacket has some GUI support for profiling, but that seemed better suited to profiling code contained in a single source file rather than throughout a large system of hundreds of source files.

Gxine on Arbitrary USB DVD Drives & /dev/disk/by-id/

I couldn't find this in Google... On GNU/Linux, if you want to use GXine to play a DVD from a USB DVD drive that is not already set up to be /dev/dvd or similar (and if your desktop setup doesn't do this automatically), invoke gxine with the argument of the DVD device pathname prefixed by dvd:.

I'm a big fan of giving pathnames to devices though /dev/disk/by-id/, to help avoid accidents (e.g., accidentally overwriting your system disk) and to save labor of finding a device name. So in this case, I typed the following, and pressed the Tab key to get filename completion on the available USB storage devices.

gxine dvd:/dev/disk/by-id/usb-

On my system, it looks something like:

gxine dvd:/dev/disk/by-id/usb-LITE-ON_DVDRW_LH-20A1H_1234567890ABCDEF-0:0

You need the dvd URI scheme because gxine 0.5.903 does not bother to detect that the raw device is for a DVD drive and infer that you probably mean to play a DVD. Probably because a desktop software suite usually takes care of launching a DVD player when a DVD is inserted.

(This blog entry was brought to you by a DVD that had playback errors on laptop's drive, backup laptop's drive, and Sony PS2, but that finally played on my big reliable external DVD burner. While I was hassling with trying to play a legitimate DVD, movie pirates watched the same video content and had time left over to play pirated video games.)

New Atom-Based Home Server In Progress

The parts for my new specialized server finished arriving this morning. For the price of a cheap plastic off-the-shelf home NAS, I'm getting a (hopefully) higher-quality device, and one that will actually work the way I want it to.

I plugged things together quickly, during a break from consulting work, just to see whether the server would power on.

Curses upon Intel for not aligning their SVGA connector for a conventional ATX backplate, and for apparently cementing the connector's screw posts in place so that I couldn't fudge the misalignment.

I'll post details once either I'm reasonably satisfied with the setup, or the experiment ended in shattered hopes and melted CPUs.

UPDATE: Well, that was quick. The PSU (which came with the high-quality case) baked itself after 30-60 minutes of burn-in testing, while being run in the normal closed-case configuration. Nice electrical fire smell.

Spending Less at the Sub Shop

Even when working from home, where I could and did make my own sandwiches, I would often crave a veggie sub from a sandwich shop. This was good, in that my money helped keep three local family-owned sandwich shops in business. This was also bad, in that my money has long dreamt of remaining my money for more than a few days.

So, to satisfy my veggie sub craving at home, I found that it came down to ingredients and hassle:

• Lettuce -- I very much dislike washing lettuce, and then the lettuce is wet from washing unless I was willing to expend paper towels blotting it dry. I found that Target sells a salad centrifuge for $3 (or spend $20 or more on fancier models elsewhere). Now I take a head of lettuce, rinse the pieces before tossing them into the centrifuge, then spin while adding more water, then spin fairly dry. Then the entire centrifuge goes into the fridge as a storage container so that I just have to grab a handful as needed.

• Mayo -- The vegan-friendly Nasoya fake mayo just wasn't cutting it. I was craving deli mayo. I experimentally bought a small jar of Hellman's (aka Best Foods), and that solved the problem.

• Bread -- Sometimes you just want a sub roll, and sometimes you want a wrap bread. Have them on hand, keep them in the fridge. (And don't buy the Trader Joe's Brown Rice Tortillas, because they shatter as much as they roll.)

• Other perishable ingredients -- Like with lettuce, I tended to let ingredients spoil unused because using them was a hassle. So, I found ingredients, like cucumber and red pepper, for which I could greatly reduce the hassle. Cucumbers and red peppers, for example, just need a rinse and to be tossed into the fridge without a container. On-demand, you pull them out of the fridge, slice off the end into the garbage, slice some onto your sandwich (no dirtying of cutting board required), and then put the remainder back into the fridge. I had already been doing a similar thing with tomatoes, except tomatoes do still go into the little sealable Pyrex containers. An unused half of an avocado will keep up to a day in the fridge -- just cut in half, put the half with the seed into the fridge, and then later pop out the seed and shave off the surface that was exposed.

This is the extent of my bachelor cooking right now. I am sharing it for the benefit of anyone as cooking-challenged as myself.

For more on my relationship with sandwiches, see 2009-05-16, and The Onion mocking me once again, 2009-06-30.

How Not To Pirate

Want to watch a TV series, but Netflix doesn't offer it on-demand, your local video store went out of business, and the Web sites offering episodes for online viewing work passably but look like they might not be legitimate?

If you want to confidently retain your pirate-free status, you can order the boxed DVD set, break the seal so it's no longer new, and maybe rub the discs a bit on the carpet to effect wear equivalent to use.

When you're done watching the series, the boxed set makes a handsome addition to your bookshelf, and you can give or loan it to friends, or even sell it as used, just like a normal legitimate boxed set, which it is.

Just don't tell anyone, or they might think you're a bit off.