Pile of Dross

as a venting; if I don’t direct my anger, irritation and frustration into some other channel, there’s a very good chance I’ll put my fist through my computer screen. And that wouldn’t be good - its new, shiny and undeserving, and it would just be the modern equivalent of shooting the messenger.

No, my wrath is directed at Nvidia and Microsoft. I bought 2 750GB hard disks with the intention of installing them in my desktop in a RAID-1 (mirrored) configuration, putting them in was a doddle, less hassle than I that it would have been, as it turned out that I did have a Molex-SATA power adaptor, rather than having to venture out into the rain to buy one, Installing them into a mirrored array was, again, easy, a simple text-based interface.
Then I booted Windows.

Oh dear. Its fair to say that I had been lulled into a false sense of security by how easy things had been so far - Windows was about to change all that. Things started off well - assorted popups mentioned Raid devices, then I tried to install the drivers. “Oh no, these aren’t WHQL certified drivers, the ensuing apocalypse would be entirely your fault, should you install and use them” or words to that effect appearred on the screen. “Hummmm, suppose I should update them” I thought and merrily toddled off to Nvidia’s website to download the latest driver - version 15.22. A couple of reboots later and ….. nothing ….. no array, two seperate disks, happily reporting in but no array to be seen of and no sign of those Raid devices previously mentioned. Eyes narrowing suspiscously, I started investigating, attempting to trick it into working by installing Raid devices didn’t work nor did removing the array and re-adding it. Having run out of ideas, I decided to install the downloaded drivers again, just in case something hadn’t work properly the first time, so off I went and reinstalled and the re…

Bo**o***….. nv_i’m_allegedly_critical_and_you’ve_just_removed_me.sys is missing or corrupt windows cannot boot, press r from the window setup disk to repair. Wondering such idle thoughts as “What wazzock writes their uninstall software to allow critical drivers to be uninstalled?” and “Doesn’t windows have backups of these things, why can’t it just use those?”, I reached for my laptop, and my Genuine Windows XP DVD. Having found one site that contained non-working link to the, I found another which said that merely running disable would work. And it did! Windows booted, albeit in low resolution graphics mode , and suddenly found lots of new (old) hardware, like the hard disk it had just booted off of. Eyebrow slightly cocked at that, I proceeded to install the new drivers, and this time windows didn’t fall over. Still no arrays, but at this stage any victory no matter how small felt good. By this time several hours had passed and my mood was getting markedly worse. Playing a (paranoid) hunch I checked Nvidia website again for latest drivers, but this time for US ones rather than International versions. This brought up a completely different (much older) version - 6.68 that was specfically for my motherboard chipset. Working on the hypothesis that Nvidia had ballsed something with the RAID support in the up to date generic driver bundle, I download it and installed it and with bated breath, rebooted….

“The hardware on this system has changed a lot since Windows was validated, it needs to be validated again”

W T F ??!??!!?!

After starting at my monitor to convince myself I wasn’t actually hallucinating, begrudgingly and with forced politeness, I agreed that I would like to validate now. Only to be told that

“Windows Activation couldn’t access the internet.”

“Huh, may be because we’re in some sort of weird half logged in, half not, limbo?” I wondered and quit it and continued logging in, to find that Genuine Advantage Notification really wanted me to know that I had 3 days to validate myself. Grumbing more openly now I double clicked its system tray icon and it fired up Firefox to go the Microsoft Genuine Advantage site

“This won’t end well” I thought, but it asked me to download a plugin, which then allowed me to go to another page which told me that I could find the Validate Windows application in my Start menu. Okay tha……, hang on I’ve gone to a web page and installed a plugin to go to another web page which tells me its on the bl**dy START MENU!!??! Why couldn’t I just go there in the first place? Wishing dark and unspeakably violent fates to befall the Microsoft web developers, I ran the application.

“Windows Activation couldn’t access the internet.”

Oh FFS, but it threw up a Zonealarm alert this time. Yes, you may access the internet.

“Windows Activation couldn’t access the internet.”

Ob sod this, I’m sure I saw a online validation BETA link on one of those web pages. Trying with firefo was not successful - I had to download another plugin, but it complained it couldn’t load images. Internet Explorer , after thanking me for downloading it - you were a sodding windows update I didn’t have much choice in the matter - seem to be *thinking* really hard about the web page, but eventually on the third try did manage to validate my copy of windows.

Breathing a sigh of exasperated relief, I tried to recall what I’d being doing before all this palaver. Reinstalling drivers, right. My finger took me to the Disk Management application, which was only showing one new disk, alarmed but not, by this stage, particularly suprised I clicked on it to see which of the two it was, only to discover (hallelujah) that it was the array, windows had sneakily discovered it without telling me, looking at Device Manager, all the SATA controllers were now showing up as SATA Raid controllers. Success!! At last and it only took 7 hours - 9:15 when the box turned up until 4pm.

Lessons learnt:

• Software sucks
• In 75 minutes, you can write a 1000 word blog post, and fully cook a lamb joint, but only format 70% of a 750GB Raid 1 array
• Software sucks

CERN Document Server: Record#1103616: CCRC08 - View from Sites

Comedy starts about 17:20, and lasts for about 10 minutes IIRC when I scuttle back to my chair. At least you can’t see me. Still, I can now say I’ve stood on the same stage as Nobel prize winners and given a presentation in the main CERN auditorium - as two of my managers told me later on.

My hot water heater is fine now, someone can round to look at it.

[Alright I'm playing with MarsEdit to see what its like as a blog posting tool.]

So I think my iBook may be having hardware issues, Leopard installs dumped out at various points. After reboots its had difficulty finding the airport and the sound device from time to time, and I’m pretty sure that some of the sizes reported by files are wrong (Anyone else’s /Library/iTunes/iTunes Plug-ins/Quartz Composer Visualiser.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Quart Composer Visualizer ~150GB in size?).

My XBox 360 has been locking up on occasion.

And my hot water tank appears to have sprung a leak.

Bah.

• It won’t do automated backups if the power cord isn’t plugged in or the disk isn’t mounted
• Its picky about mount points, so if you’ve switched from wired to wireless (or vice versa) with out unmounting, check that the backup disk is mounted in the expected directory under /Volumes
• sudo lsof -p gives some idea of what its actually poking at
• backupd-helper can be run from a terminal to force a backup now if your Time Machine dock icon doesn’t seem to do anything

Oh and complete unrelated (because I’m not using the unsupported network backup feature, not at all, whatever gave you that idea) netatalk on debian doesn’t work with Leopard, as Leopard is picky about the authentication.

Just had a jarring UI experience with removing a prefpane for an installed application. You need to ctrl-click on the thing to bring up a link to remove the prefpane. Why the heck aren’t these things draggable to the Trashcan? That’s the default metaphor for “I’m done with this now” for Applications, disk images, cds, ipods, network connections and files - why not prefpanes. Bah.

Crikey, its been a while.

I’m sitting here waiting for my preload of Half-Life Episode 2 and Portal to complete. (BTW as I’ve been a sucker and bought the Orange box, that means I’ll shortly have HL2 and HL2 Episode 1 codes to give away, so if anyone want them let me know). I’ve managed to wangle my way onto a workshop in Edinburgh in Mid November. In other sort of work stuff, my boss has said that he doesn’t mind me getting an Apple as a work laptop, which is great except what do I do with this iBook? And do I wait for Leopard?

As my iBook isn’t owned by work, I’m slightly leery about connecting it to work systems - so when at work I connect through the public wireless network and I don’t use VPN either. Which means that I’ve got a growing collection of ssh tunnels to get to the internal pages I need to see. Up until now I’d never gone much further than that, but with my resolution to use Textmate more there was an obvious direction - mounting my work unix account home directory on my Mac using FUSE and sshfs, which is shockingly easy - download some packages from the macfuse page, restart, configure and its done.

Though I have discovered why Apple is adding widescreen displays to everything - it so that there’s enough room for all the little menu items - when Firefox is the active application there’s only room for 1 more icon and that’s only because I turned off displaying the bluetooth status.

When I first got my iBook I bought a license for TextMate shortly afterwards. however it has always been somewhat under used - until now. Doing the digital equivalent of searching for loose change down the back of the sofa, I found a 15ukp gift certificate from Amazon that had been caught by SpamAssassin, so I put it towards a copy of TextMate Power Editing for the Mac.

Now one of the cool features of TextMate is that it installs an InputManager that allows you to open the text in editable text areas in other applications in TextMate for editing, however this only really work with Cocoa applications - native Mac OS X applications typically - so it works in Safari but not Firefox (Though Safari might be out of luck in the near future if the rumours turn out to be true). As I prefer Firefox to Safari, the next question to ask is there a Cocoa version of Firefox that would work? Well yes there is, 2 actually - Camino and the alpha release of Firefox 3; however neither worked properly for me.

So, thwarted in that angle of attack, the next avenue to explore is “Is it possible to simulate this behaviour in Firefox”, and indeed it is : Mozex is an addon for firefox that allows you to use external programs for various actions in Firefox - editing text areas being one, simply enter the path to the TextMate command line binary and set a key combination.

I’ve also added the GetBundle and the MediaWiki bundles to TextMate - the first to make it easier to add the second.

At the forge,
originally uploaded by drossy.

My brother married his fiance Caity last week - the ceremony was on Thursday, reception on Saturday, with some poor undeserving sod getting the best man duties (anyone keen to see the transcript of the speech from my index cards will be disappointed to learn that they were pressed into service to write down drinks orders and I don’t have the full set anymore). The speech itself seemed to go down okay, but I was conscious of going a touch too fast - obviously I’d not had enough alcohol to relax me. Still Colin referred to it as ‘cheeky’ so it obviously hit near the right note.

I’ve uploaded some photos to my flickr account. Some of them didn’t come out as well as I’d hoped - they’re rather blurry; which I’m going to attribute to the cold, wet windy conditions after the ceremony.