Jeff’s Austin Blues

My laptop has been getting occasional disk errors when doing backups lately.  This is not good! I don’t really want to have to buy a new laptop.  However, an old memory finally surfaced.

Several years ago, I upgraded the hard drive on a desktop.  It was bigger, faster, and required the new 80 wire cables.  However, it kept throwing “Media Check Failed” errors.  I googled, asked questions, pulled my hair.  Finally someone enlightened me, media checks are checksums on blocks of data transferred from the disk controller.  Failing media checks are usually caused by bad cables.  Replacing the $10 UDMA-100 cable with a $40 one from a major manufacturer solved the problem.

I finally noticed that the current setup is throwing media check failed errors.  The backup disk is an external USB hard drive.  It is plugged into a USB hub.  And it is fast, faster than the built-in hard drive!  Just maybe, the USB hub is fine for mice and printers, but maybe, just maybe, marginal with a very fast hard drive.

For the past week, I’ve plugged the hard drive directly into the laptop and there have been no errors.  It looks like I’ve found the bad guy, even disguised in new clothes

My electric toothbrush and the flashcard (jMemorize, very nice) program I am using to learn Spanish both have timers. The toothbrush has a builtin 2 minute timer with beeps every 30 seconds to switch quadrants. I knew 2 minutes suggestion for effective brushing and thought I was fairly close; turns out not to be the case. jMemorize has a selectable lesson size either by time or by number of cards. Two 17 minute sessions works better for me.

Both have a problem handling interruptions, e.g. the phone rings or my wife asks me a questions.  If you are creating a program or device with a timer, have a way to pause it.  Only hermits have the luxury or reality of no interruptions, for the rest of us, most things need to be interruptable.

I’m noticing a convergence between the tools and widgets I’m using for system status monitoring and for software testing. There are red/yellow/green backgrounds for specific components, RDD strip charts to track status over time, hierarchies of sub-systems/components, etc. I wonder how much I can leverage the tools and expertise on one side to improve the other.

I am preparing for a talk at the Lone Star Ruby Conference on Ruby and Rails on NetBeans, a IDE written in Java.  It’s only ten minutes long and so a bit of a squeeze.  With practice and dropping all the “You knows…” and such I can shorten it, but I still have a 20 minute talk.  Listening to a podcast last night by the Common Craft folk, I was reminded that it is more about what you leave out than what you leave in.  It was reinforced this morning by a video on the Guardian’s site on New Orleans and Hurricane Gustave.  There is no voice over, just the sound of the wind and pictures of trees, sofas, and people being pushed about by the wind.  The last third is President Bush boarding a plane.  Again no voice over, just the whine of an idling jet.  Powerful.

Two blog entries muse on what works in the marketplace and why Linux isn’t making huge inroads: Matt Asay on
The Linux desktop, Macs, and barking dogs and Seth Godin on The intangibles.  My experience agrees, cool sells, in spades.  Linux’s promoters, advocates, etc. are bucking a strong headwind in the anti-business and RTFM attitude.  Volunteers rarely have the time, patience, etc. to build an maintain the kind of relationship Seth talks about.  The cool Matt talks about may be easier to push, but Seth’s approach has the better payoff.

The last few months I’ve been writing a Web application in Ruby on Rails.  At first I used the view source function of the browser when things didn’t display like I expected.  But as I’ve used more AJAX, this doesn’t work, it displays the page as originally sent, not the current contents with the changes to various sections.

Firebug is an add-on for Firefox that makes debugging easy again.  Or at least easier.  It displays the page content hierarchy with collapse/expand buttons, shows the HTTP dialog with  the Web server, etc.  Very useful.  If you write Web apps, like looking at how a Web site does something, etc., Firebug is wonderful.