I came across this report on Gizmodo today. The story is about one of those new robotic lawnmowers being recalled, detailed in the following excerpt:

Apparently, one of the owners lifted the mower from the ground while it was still on and “suffered minor lacerations from the moving blade.” Yet another case of stupid humans trying to win the Darwin Award. Fortunately for him, nothing serious happened, but the US CPSC and the company have decided to recall models LB2000, LB2100, LB3000, and LB3200 because “the cutting blades continue to rotate when the mower is lifted from the ground and the spacing on the side of the lawn mower could allow room for a consumer’s foot to go beyond the shield and be struck by the blade” which “pose a serious laceration hazard to stupid lawn bozos consumers.”

Now…I’m all for product safety, but this is just plain stupid. Anyone who is moronic enough to grab and lift a running lawnmower, robotic or otherwise, and not expect to get hurt, deserves exactly what they get. I’ve been equally stupid at times: burning myself by grabbing the metal of a hot pan fresh from the stove while intent on removing its handle springs to mind. But I don’t expect the manufacturer of said pot to recall it because I am a fricking idiot.

But apparently, in our modern moron-coddling idiocracy, protecting us from our own increasing stupidity is an absolute necessity. I really feel sorry for the manufacturer of the lawn mowing robot. They shouldn’t feel compelled to recall something for behaving reasonably. Now, if the robot spun its blade up to 5,000 RPM and spat it out at the person picking it up… that might warrant a recall.

Our washer died about a week ago. It was a Maytag Neptune frontload purchased in late 2000, so its failure was more or less inevitable. The point of failure was in the control panel: the washer locking mechanism blew out, which caused a cascade failure in the control board. Repair would have been $600-$800.

I shouldn’t really complain- we got over 7 and a half years of service out of a washer renowned for its high failure rate and defects (the problems in the product family showed up after we bought it). But to me seven years isn’t exactly a stellar record for a “top of the line” washer. Live and learn: great/well respected brands can die ignoble deaths at times.

In any case, we only pondered the repair versus replace question for about 5 seconds. Irene and I were in almost immediate agreement- we wanted to replace the washer and, since we weren’t terribly fond of the Maytag dryer, we wanted to get the pair. I did a little research, and then we went to Trail Appliances to make our final decision. We settled on the LG SteamWasher and its dryer companion. Irene convinced me to get a colour- the pair are navy blue.

I was a bit torn between the LG and the Miele washer/dryer. The Miele are probably better quality, but they looked… clunky. Not exactly high-tech, and I hate to admit it, but the tech sells me more often than it should. LG has a good reliability and service reputation, and was about $800 cheaper for the pair (Miele is about $3500). For that price, the Miele lacked steam cleaning and was a slightly smaller capacity. Mind you, Miele is pretty much the only washer/dryer manufacturer that builds and tests their gear with an expectation of 25 years of use- most of the other manufacturers target 10 years. We looked at the Bosch as well: we have been really happy with our Bosch dishwasher, but the clothes washer control panels take up some of the “folding space” we like to use on the top of the machine.

They were just delivered an hour ago or so, and I’ve already almost finished running through the first load of laundry in the washer. It is quieter than the Neptune (except for the 1300 RPM spin cycle, which is rather noisy- this would probably not be apparent if the washer were situated on a concrete floor in the basement), and I like the little drawer that slides out for loading detergent and bleach. The “I’m done” alert is a nice little tone instead of the horrendous buzzing sound that most older washers seem to favour. The controls are completely electronic- no manual “clockwork” knobs which, in my experience, are the first part of a washer to die. And the LCD display tells me handy things like how long it estimates it will take until completion… based on load size/weight and cycle choices.

So far, though, the biggest “feature” is the glass door- watching the clothing spin around is fascinating. I remember this from laundromats when I was a kid, and forgot how mesmerizing it can be.

I would love to have a no-compromise wireless network in my home. In this imaginary scenario, I would be able to put a computer anywhere in the house, even carry one out onto the patio, and get something approaching gigabit Ethernet speeds. Heck, I’d even be happy with half that: 300 Mbps… or even a really reliable true 100 Mbps link- that would be nice.

Unfortunately, after about a decade of living with wireless, I can say that surprisingly little actual progress has been made. Using wireless still means giving up network performance…

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I like experimenting with my computers and network gear. It is even fun sometimes when things don’t work properly at first, so long as I can work out a solution.

But even my patience with technology has its limits. Late last year, for example, I more or less “gave up” (at least for the time being) on Vista and Windows, and switched to using a Macintosh as my primary machine. What has me on the warpath now? My network… and specifically my Linksys/Cisco gear, and even more specifically my Linksys RV016 router/switch.

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I’m pretty happy with my Macbook Pro. But on the day I bought it, I started planning upgrades: I’m a geek, after all.

The first thing on my list- upgrade from the default 2 GB to 4 GB of RAM. That was done about a week after I bought the machine. Second on my list: a larger and faster hard drive. 120 GB of storage on a 5400 RPM drive is nice, but 240 GB at 7200 RPM… that would be just the ticket.

The biggest drives I could find in the right form factor running at 7200 RPM only provide 200 GB of storage. If I’m going to go through the hassle of installing a new hard drive, 80 GB of additional storage just isn’t adequate- double my current storage is the least I’ll make the effort for. I’m still waiting for such a beast to become available, but Fujitsu has just announced pretty much the drive I’m looking for: up to 320 GB of storage spinning at 7200 RPM in a 2.5″ laptop form factor. It is apparently scheduled for release in June of this year.

Do I really need 320 GB, or even 240 GB, of storage? My answer is that I can expand what I store to fill any disk capacity I find in my possession. I’ll see what kind of price Fujitsu puts on their new drives when they finally ship later this year…

I decided late last year that I was going to take the year off from the computer upgrade process. That doesn’t mean that I planned on absolutely zero upgrades, but that I would defer the “big stuff”. This came after a tremendous amount of hassle and fuss trying to get Vista and my 2006 PC upgrade working to my satisfaction, and after the satisfying experience I had with my MacBook Pro.

But things change… and the upgrade that wasn’t going to happen, did…

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It started innocently enough… ah, crap, that’s how I began that other post.

Okay… here’s the deal. I’m weak. My weakness is gadgets, particularly computers. You know this if you’ve been reading this site for any length of time. It is rare that I make it through a given six month period without doing *something* that involves partly or completely gutting one or more computers.

Of course I’m leading up to the fact that I’m ripping the innards from my PCs once again. This time I can hardly make a cogent excuse for my behavior. My main gaming PC is the subject of my latest reconstruction and, as I noted in that post you’ll find at the link above, it started with a new video card. The ATI 3870 x2 is a great card, by all accounts, but it isn’t working out so well with my AMD 64 x2 processor and Asus M2R32 motherboard.

The first and most “urgent” cause for this uncalled for reconstruction: the new video card didn’t make EverQuest 2 faster. I really think this is an EverQuest 2 problem: everything I’ve read tells me this. Yet I’m upgrading even more of my computer. I told you I didn’t have a good excuse for this… but that doesn’t stop me from proceeding. My theory of the moment is that getting off the AMD platform and onto Intel will remove one potential source of difficulty. Plus moving from a dual core to a quad core configuration can’t hurt, right?

The second reason… my current PC build, which I assembled in October of 2006, has given me difficulty pretty much right from the start. I still can’t put the system into standby mode without a 50/50 chance of utterly and completely corrupting the hard drive. I’ve had strange problems with the system failing periodically to boot. Then yesterday I went to install new Catalyst drivers for my video card, and it crashed on start up forcing me to revert to a previous config.

This isn’t necessarily the fault of the configuration . But Asus more or less stopped updating the drivers for the M2R32 in January of 2007: several of their “latest” drivers for Vista are still dated prior to the official release of Vista. This makes me suspicious that some or even all of the problems I am experiencing are a result of this motherboard being a bit of a “Vista orphan”.

All of this is an excuse to burn up more money and buy more shiny things that go “beep!” I bought a giant heat sink! And a motherboard designed for over-clocking! Wheee!

And yes, I’ll write a more complete article regarding the build I’m assembling once I get the pieces put together…

It started innocently enough. I was considering upgrading to a larger format monitor sometime in the next year or so. I like having lots of video “real estate” and, although my ViewSonic VP201 20″ LCD display has served me well, I am starting to feel crowded.

The display format I’m considering is a 30″ 2560×1600 size, perhaps something like this Samsung. An important consideration is the number and type of video inputs: I want something that can have at least two computers connected and switch between them. So I’m still pondering, and before I can go for the new display I need to do some serious reorganization of my work space at home.

Which leads to today. As I was considering this potential future monitor purchase, I started considering the impact on the rest of my computer. My PC currently supports a 1600×1200 display, and the video card (an ATI X1950XTX) is getting a bit long in the tooth. A 2650×1600 display would mean the video card would be pushing twice as many pixels: over 4 million of them. That has to have an impact on performance and, even if I scale back most games to say 1600×1000 or something, I imagine I’ll notice it. And I’m already getting fussy about the performance of my machine.

The only solution to this problem is, of course, more hardware. I’m not quite ready to build an entirely new PC, but ATI just released a new dual GPU video card, and the price is actually pretty reasonable (under $500). Naturally, I have that very card in my hands at this moment: the Diamond ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2.

I’ll post some data on the card once I’ve done my pre and post upgrade benchmarks. I’m expecting to double my current video performance (d’uh: dual cores = double), but I’m not sure how that will impact my “seat of the pants” perspective of performance in various games. And as for the 30′ monitor…I’m still pondering. I’ll likely end up making the plunge some time later this year, though. The allure of all that space is compelling, and getting the whole “wall of video” thing going on is just too geeky for words.

In my previous post, I mentioned a couple of gotchas regarding my server upgrade and the Linux install thereon. A day later and things have changed again.

One thing I thought I had fixed: the network autonegotiate problem. I found network performance was once again sucking royally today, and I tried to re-create the circumstances that permitted good network performance the other day. Unfortunately, no luck: disabling autonegotiate on the Cisco RV016 hub and on the NIC didn’t seem to solve anything. One possibility is that I have to disable autonegotiate on both, then reboot both. However, I’m also observing hundreds of errors in the following form

sky2 eth0: rx error, status 0×2940002 length 660

The sky2 kernel driver apparently has known problems with the Marvell 88E8056 Network Interface card and similar Marvell products. One comment in the linked thread that leapt out at me:

The sky2 module is a pile of steaming dung.

Perhaps that is a bit harsh, but…there seems to be a problem here, and what I’m seeing could be related.

Update: I added a small Gigabit ethernet/wireless 802.11n router to my network, hanging it off my RV016 as an access point. I hooked my webserver to it, and suddenly the rx errors in the servers log files stopped. I then moved the other machines on my network with Gigabit-capable NICs to the little router (a DLink DIR-655), and all of the port packet errors associated with them on the RV016 seemed to vanish. That is… the number of packet errors on the port via which the DLink is attaching is significantly less than the aggregate total of the packet errors on the ports the PCs were originally attached to.

The implication… well, I’d speculate (and this is nothing but an educated guess) that the RV016 isn’t happy dealing with the Marvell 1000/100/10 Mbps NICs, but the DLink has no problem with the same NIC. Side benefit: I can now transfer files between my Gigabit ethernet machines at up to 20 MB/s (200 Mbps): at least on initial testing. Handy

One thing I thought wasn’t going to be fixed: the problem with vncserver/tightvnc and keyboard mapping. There was a response on the thread I linked to yesterday that provides a link to a package of updated files someone thoughtfully and kindly assembled. I installed them and voila: the keyboard mapping problem is gone, and I can remotely control my server. Many thanks to AndrewL733 for creating the fix, and site admin awilliamson for hosting the download!

I seem to have reversed the forces of entropy! The new server is basically operational, and this blog is now being served by fresh, clean hardware. I’ll post something detailing the innards of the new box this upcoming weekend.

Interesting gotchas from the install

• always pay close attention to disk space when migrating / backing up old servers: I spent several hours trying to fix a problem that was nothing more than my old server running out of disk
• Linux drivers still have problems with network autonegotiate: Or maybe it’s Cisco/Linksys with the problem? For about a decade now, twisted pair Ethernet hubs and NICs have often failed horribly when trying to agree on 100 versus 10 Mbps, and particularly on full versus half duplex. I noticed my file transfers between my two Linux boxes were very slow (on the order of 60 KB/s). I checked my Cisco hub status monitor and, surprise of surprises, both Linux boxes had negotiated themselves a half duplex connection. I changed their configuration to forced 100 Mb/s full duplex, and suddenly I was getting upwards of 6 MB/s of encrypted transfer
• Linux GUI software is sometimes better than the command line: Examples include:
• • installing OS packages/software components- in the GUI, you get a nice list showing what you have installed already and can search component descriptions visually
  • sftp: the command line sftp must use horrible default settings- I was barely able to get to 1 MB/s using it between two computers on a 100 Mbps LAN (the maximum on a 100 Mbps network would be around 9-10 MB/s); the GUI based FileZilla, on the other hand, happily pushed bits at about 6 MB/s
  • USB file system mounts: plug a drive in to the computer, and the GUI autodetects it and pops up to tell you it is mounting it and it just works: basically, just like Windows and OSX

  I am leaving the GUI (KDE) running on this box; now if I could only get the remote desktop (tightvnc) to work without corrupting the keyboard input, I’d be set

• sometimes it is best to give up: One of the things that didn’t work quite right was my install of vncserver/tightvnc. This software allows me to remotely connect to my Linux box with a graphical interface: I use it around the house (not over the Internet) when I’d rather not go and sit in front of the server. Unfortunately, the current install with Mandriva only works until you try to actually use it: at that point, you encounter two problems
• • the vnc session fails with a fatal “fixed font not found” error. I fixed this by installing the XFS package, but it took me several hours to figure out
  • at this point I was able to open a session and see it on my other computer. Unfortunately, anything I typed came out garbled: E.G.: typing “l” would seemingly send an “r” character

  I banged my head against the wall for hours trying to get this fixed, then read this post. Apparently, this “bad character mapping with Mandriva’s tightvnc implementation” problem has existed for months…

• Avhai/ZeroConf/Bonjour are cool: I decided to set up the new server so I could get at its filesystems using my Mac. to that end, I configured Avhai. To get this to work, I followed some guides referred to by this guy. The short story: install and config netatalk, then install (if necessary: it was already installed in my Mandriva build) Avhai for the afp service you just added. Avahi and its friends are really just advertisers: they aren’t “services” in and of themselves, but the let other machines on your network know what is available. For the record, my file share services are blocked by my firewall: sorry Once complete, the services offered by my Linux box show up on the Mac: file shares, terminal services, and potentially other things. I also noticed that the network performance of AFP seems better than SMB. Note that this is purely a seat-of-the-pants observation

There will likely be a few more brief outages over the next couple of weeks as I finish up installing things and tuning the configuration a bit.