Category Archives: Gear

Posts about hardware, software, or the tech industry itself

.Mac Sync: down for 10 days and counting

I mentioned in my previous post that I have subscribed to .Mac, Apple’s online service for file sharing, email, and so forth.

One of the neat things .Mac can do is automatically synchronize your Mac’s address book, email, and calendar so that you can access it using a web browser on any computer. I was trying to figure out why my MacBook’s address book entries weren’t showing up in the .Mac web interface, and finally read the little notice on the site saying that synchronization was temporarily down.

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A Macintosh a day…

27 years ago, I bought an Apple II+. That was my first computer, and I have many fond memories of its 16 kilobyte wonder.

When the Macintosh came out in 1984, I really wanted one. Unfortunately, it was several thousand dollars too expensive, and I had already committed to spending several thousand dollars on a Unix based machine. Years went by: I bought an IBM compatible machine for business related reasons, and eventually ended up working almost exclusively with various types of non-Apple technology. Many Windows+Intel machines have taken their place in my home, and hundreds more have served their role in my place of work.

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Asus M2R32 motherboard: defective RAID/AHCI?

I mentioned in a previous post here that I picked up some additional hard drives.  The 750 GB drive is running happily in an external eSATA-connected enclosure and is providing backup for my machine.  The other two drives are sitting on a shelf, and will remain there indefinitely.  There is a story behind their banishment from my computer.  It isn’t that there is anything particularly wrong with the drives themselves: I’ve finally concluded that my Asus motherboard has crappy RAID/AHCI support.

I have spent the last couple of days repeatedly building and tearing down my machine.  First I built a RAID 1 array.  Bear in mind that the drives I’m using are good quality Seagate 7200.10 drives: they have full SATA2 support, including Native Command Queuing (NCQ).  The drives they displaced were high-end WD Raptor 1500ADFD drives: arguably, the Raptors are better drives, but I had suspicions that WD drives might be behind my problems putting my system into standby mode in Vista.  I was wrong.

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I may not be smart…

…but you can’t fault my persistence.  I have managed to break my main PC again.  The exact same cause: once again, I decided to try putting my machine in standby after an update.  And once again, when the machine came out of standby, it horrendously corrupted my ATI SATA RAID array (of Western Digital Raptor drives).  Exactly the same steps, exactly the same results.

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iPhone battery- iPod part 2

Apple learned a great deal from the battery complaints that users had about the early iPods.  First, instead of just making it challenging to get at the battery in the iPhone, they have actually soldered it in.  Second, they have announced the battery replacement cost and policy almost concurrent with the release of the phone itself (Apple: iPhone Battery Replacement Plan Details – Gizmodo ).

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Kitten editorializing…

I’ve been working a lot lately, scrambling to catch up with some application programming work.  Part of this is a result of being behind the technological curve in terms of the particular programming environment I’m working in (J2EE/WebSphere/Hibernate/Spring).  Suffice it to say I’ve been working some overtime.

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