DancingSamurai.ca

So I’ve been noticing that windows is really slow on my netbook (even on my Toshiba A300), and so has my wife. It is quite frustrating that I could probably check my e-mail faster 20 years ago (boot time to open the application, etc). Sure, it was text based, but the functionality was there!
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My old machine is an Asus A8N SLI Deluxe, and I’m trying to set it up as a media centre PC down in my media room. I picked up a few 1-TB drives to create a RAID-5 array (my old 500MB x 4 in RAID-5 is full, if you can believe it), and thought that would be perfect since the mobo has onboard RAID-5 Using a SiI 3114 chipset.

Unfortunately, when I used all four drives in a RAID array, it seemed that the maximum supported size seemed to be 746 GB (yes, smaller than a single drive!!). That isn’t very useful. Three drives gave the correct size, but that’s wasting a lot of space.

Usually, BIOS updates fix these little glitches; unfortunately, this being an old motherboard, ASUS hadn’t updated the BIOS much in several years. I was running the latest 1805 bios already, but that included the very old 5.1.36 BIOS for the Silicon Image 3114 RAID controller – they were up to 5.5 now! (5.4.03 for embedded controllers)

Google again comes to my aid – an updated BIOS for the A8N SLI Deluxe including the latest RAID drivers!. Somebody at the nvidia forums had used the Award Bios Editor to include those drivers. Perfect!  (Local copy of the latest & most up to date BIOS: 1805_SI3114_5403_NVRAID_560.zip)

Now, to copy over my 1.5 TB of data…

As I wrote before, the hospital I work at has a firewall and they’re getting more and more particular about what traffic they let through. Since I am on call quite a bit, and often have to stay in the hospital for hours, and I have my laptop, so occasionally I like to get my youtube fix in. Or my World of Warcraft fix. Or whatever.

By default their firewall doesn’t let any of that traffic through. For some web sites, using a proxy like I described a few years ago works quite well – but for other applications, it doesn’t work at all.

Never fear! It’s actually pretty easy to circumvent as long as you have access to an unfiltered connection (your home Internet connection, for example). I’ve written out the basic steps below more for my own reference, if someone wants a step-by-step HOWTO contact me and I can flesh it out a bit.

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A little googling found this laptop repair site to help me get it fixed. What did we do before the internet?

Try to fix it ourselves, then take it in for a $100 repair, I guess…

Well, I’m taking a bit of a break from catching up on the mounds of paperwork from my practice. My son is busily banging his toys on the floor beside me… for the moment managing to forget his erupting teeth (thankfully!!).

I’m going to have to lower the mattress in his crib – he’s making attempts to pull himself upright even as I speak, and although not yet successful, it’s only a matter of time… bless his adventurous little heart!!

Anyway, here are a couple of updates from the web:

• Via BoingBoing: A hilarious chart illustrating one of the problems with the movie industry – the product you pay for is far inferior to the product you can get for free. Obviously, people want the better product, even if it is illegal:
• School in the states gives their students laptops, but doesn’t tell them that they can turn the webcams on at any time. Even when said laptop is at home. In their bedroom. 1984, anyone? (But they only use this feature if the laptop has been stolen. Honest!)
• BoingBoing has a page for ‘Games to Get‘ – a list of their recommended games. Most are small, indie titles that are quite interesting, that you would otherwise never hear about. Check it out!
• CHIP and PIN – used in Europe for a while and being pushed in North America – is totally flawed (at least, the European implementation). What good is relying on the PIN & chip on the card for verification when you can trick the device into thinking it’s checked everything without actually checking? (via Schneier and BoingBoing)

And that’s about all for now… OK, back to work!!

So I haven’t been blogging much. Even when I ‘blog’ it tends to be links to other cool stuff on the internet… but y’know, I’m busy with work… my wife… my son… etc. So… c’est la vie!!

Had a very laid back birthday. Some yummy dinner, and cheesecake. Mmm….

Otherwise, what caught my eye? Well:

• Liquid Glass. Comes as a spray-on can. Apparently, it’s very very awesome.
• Very, very interesting documentary: “digital nation” on PBS. See it online here. (via BoingBoing) (Anyone have a downloadable link?)
• Kids’ Lingerie? Boy, Disney’s expanding their market to child porn, I guess…

And finally, an interesting article on how computing is moving away from being open-ended and tinkerable. This hit home – I have fond memories of playing around with BASIC on our old PC XT computer, and making all kinds of programs. If you can’t do this sort of thing on newer computers, a lot of the mystery & allure that gets kids to really explore and learn computers will be gone – and we’ll be breeding a generation of nothing but lusers.

When DVD Jon was arrested after breaking the CSS encryption algorithm, he was charged with “unauthorized computer trespassing.” That led his lawyers to ask the obvious question, “On whose computer did he trespass?” The prosecutor’s answer: “his own.”

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Once upon a time, Apple made the machines that made me who I am. I became who I am by tinkering. Now it seems they’re doing everything in their power to stop my kids from finding that sense of wonder. Apple has declared war on the tinkerers of the world. With every software update, the previous generation of “jailbreaks” stop working, and people have to find new ways to break into their own computers.

Well, I’ve finally gotten around to trying to backup all my important (and not so important files) offsite. Here I’ll give a rundown of the sync products I tried and some issues I ran into…

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Well I was sick the last few days, and looking for some way to pass the time (yes, I suppose the stack of medical journals would have been one way…).

Anyway, I decided to sort through some e-books I had downloaded from Project Gutenberg, and try to find a good reader for them – both on the PC and my Windows Mobile Smartphone. I’d been down this road before and found Microsoft Reader to be OK, once I converted stuff to .lit format… but that conversion was a bit tricky. Seems the plug-in to do it isn’t compatible with Office 2007.

So I stumbled upon Mobipocker Reader, which I’d heard about before but never tried – and the companion Mobipocket Creator.

They’re actually pretty easy to use, will automatically convert from most formats. For those it won’t convert, I tried out Stanza – which is quite popular for Mac & iPhone apparently. The only hiccup I had was that if I converted directly to mobi format in Stanza, the resulting file would crash the reader on my phone. So, convert to text first, then use MobiCreator to convert to mobi format, and voila!  The advantage is I can add a cover art image this way, too.