Common Sense 4 Common People

Are you learning Chinese? You probably need this site!

If you are learning Chinese as a foreign language then you must absolutely put this web site in your arsenal of tools:

It is much much more than an online dictionary. It does both simplified and traditional (which is what I study by virtue of being in Taiwan). It also integrates with Google translate but then breaks down the Chinese word list in a very clever manner so that it is much easier to understand the Chinese phrase. Did I mention it can even play you animations on how to properly write each character?  

Can't live without it!
Enjoy!
Dimitrios Staikos

Intel further delays USB 3.0

Here are some interesting news items:

• http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/is-intel-delaying-usb-30-to-give-light-peak-an-advantage/8493?tag=nl.e539
• http://www.techeye.net/hardware/usb-3-0-the-misery-continues

Intel pushed USB 3.0 chipset integration into 2012.

Why? As we say in Greek, "Who is crying 'miaou miaou' on the roof top?" (a cat of course)... LightPeak of course.

Intel knows too well that USB 3.0 is good enough for most users to delay LightPeak adoption for another several years, so they need to keep it in check.

Have fun!

Dimitrios Staikos

Disk space disappearing mysteriously in Windows?

Oh I feel so happy whenever I solve yet another mystery in the wonderful ways that Windows works :-) So happy that I desperately need to blog about it :-P

Last year I bought a ThinkPad laptop with Windows Vista. Lately I was running out of disk space. It just had an 150GB drive, so I was running low. I bought a new drive and with lots of failed attempts and some magic utility finally managed to restore the original disk with its mystery Lenovo partitions into the new disk and have the laptop actually boot! Then I had an extra partition which I decided (I now I am adventurous...) to mount as a folder on my C: drive. Just to see how that will work.

Then I moved lots and lots of stuff to this mounted-partition and got around 40GB free space in the main partition. Plus another 100GB or so on the mounted partition, I thought I was good.

However... the free disk space of the main partition continued to drop and drop and drop without any apparent explanation. When it reached down to 2GB, I moved some other stuff and got it back to 10GB. Then drop and drop again and today I had only 1.5GB free on the main partition. That was a challenge that simply begged to be tackled!

FireWire Reference Tutorial

The FireWire Reference Tutorial was officially announced a few days ago by the 1394 Trade Association. This is a free guide to help engineers understand FireWire and it teaches FireWire starting from scratch. It assumes no prior knowledge. The tutorial is about 80 pages, so it won't take that much of your time either! Sounds like a good investment to me :-P

Being the author of this tutorial, I am very glad that it has finally reached the public. I hope you enjoy it and that it proves useful to your efforts.

Have Fun!
Dimitrios Staikos

Hail to Redundancy

Today I was literally saved by the bell... or rather saved by my RAID10.

When I bought my latest workstation I decided it would pay off to spare no expense, while trying to stay out of the "Game Machine" zone. One of the things that I decided I should have was hard disk redundancy. Backups and source control are must of course, but if my workstation crashes my problem is not losing the data. My problem is making an identically optimized workstation. I need about a week to do that.

  Just think about it: Reinstall Windows with Service Packs and a gazillion updates, Office with its own updates, Visual Studios and service packs, SDKs, WDKs, .NET frameworks of several versions and SPs, tools, etc, the endless list makes me shiver only to think of it. I have better things to do than looking at progress bars that pretend to be progressing thanks to some nice visuals.

So when time came I did what I thought best. I got an Intel WX58P workstation motherboard with hardware RAID and installed 4 identical 1TB hard disks in RAID10 configuration. In fact I got some "Enterprise Class" hard disk from Western Digital, just to be on the safe side.  

Today was pay-back day. Just 8 months after purchase and one of the disks in the RAID crashed. Here is how it looks like from the Intel Matrix Storage Console (click for details):

It took my hardware provider BARTEK (hail to them too) about 6 hours to come to my office with a replacement disk but it was the horroriest time (if there is such a word) that I've had in months!!! What if the currently not mirrored disk also crashed??? Oh my... I lose everything...

I tried to do some reasoning but it wouldn't be of much help. What is the possibility of two enterprise class hard disks crashing withing a 7 hour window? And especially the right two disks! But the one had already crashed, so it's history! Now I had 3 disks... What was the possibility of one crashing, especially the right one crashing? Especially given that another one of the same class and lot had already crashed! It's history of course but it can be indicative of problems in the whole lot... Probabilities were always confusing me...

And poor me, I had strong reasons not to shutdown the machine for 7 hours... Now that I think of it, it was not that wise, I should have shutdown to reduce the probability of an additional crash, but now it's history too...

Anyway the disk was replaced in time, the RAID was restored and now I am a happy blogger telling you how great it feels to have RAID save your ass(ets).

Enjoy!

Dimitrios Staikos

FireWire 1.6 Gbps and 3.2 Gbps announced by DAP Technology!

Last week I told you about the forthcoming news on 1.6 Gbps and 3.2 Gbps FireWire.

Now, here is the official press release from DAP Technology!!!

Have fun!
Dimitris Staikos

FireWire moving forward

Two weeks ago I visited the Vision Show 2009 exhibition in Stuttgart, Germany.

Two very important things happened there with regards to FireWire (IEEE 1394) technology.

1. DAP Technology made a demo of their S1600/S3200 solution. That's 1.6Gbps and 3.2Gbps respectively. It worked fine over 10m standard FireWire cables.
   The demo was semi-public and DAP will make a relevant press release within the next days.
2. Two companies demonstrated their S800-over-Coax cable solutions, using the S800 coax transceivers of Eqcologic.

They are both great news for FireWire, because they show that FireWire is still moving forward.

Have Fun!
Dimitris

The Internet says...

Today I was walking the streets of downtown Stuttgart in Germany and of all things possible, I was looking for a post office. I was given some directions by some friendly local, but I still couldn't find it. So I asked another passerby for assistance.

He didn't know, but he immediately popped out his cell phone and told me "Let me check on the Internet". I don't know why, but I felt that this event transitioned me into a whole new era. Most likely because it was the first time in my life that a completely random passerby would access the Internet in order to offer me the assistance I was looking for.

What amazed me even more was the way he formulated his reply soon after:

"The Internet says it's on Marienstrasse 19".

Have Fun!
Dimitris Staikos

PS: Beware of what the Internet says... The post office wasn't there ;-)

DELAY command implemented as batch file

Hi

I always had a strange fascination about batch files in Windows. I like automation, but for some reason I don't like using an elephant gun (Perl, Powershell) to shoot a mosquito. Plus I like the automation stuff to work on any PC, without having to install anything new. The Windows shell commands look totally crippled, but there is more to it than meets the eye.

Too much power management can kill you

QUIZ
You can tell that something is wrong when:

1. Something that usually takes half an hour is not finished after 5 hours OR
2. Yet another piece of technology is functioning in unintended ways.

A couple of days ago I read a tip about 4 mistakes that can kill VM performance.
#4 was: The default power option of Windows Server 2008 upon installation is set to "Balanced".
Sure as hell it was set to Balanced, so I corrected that one.
But tonight something else happened that was related to power management.
A backup to network folder was taking far too long.
How nice... One more problem to solve...
I check the network utilization and see that it was 100%.
Now that's a bit unusual... Just a bit...
I take a better look and what do I see?
Link Speed 10Mbps!!!!!
Excuse me??? Where did that come from?
To cut a long story short, the Intel network adapters came with a default setting that made them reduce the link speed if the machine is idle. The machine was certainly not idle, but still the link speed was reduced... go figure.
I deactivated the setting and got back my 1Gbps with a healthy 30% utilization and my backup was finished in the next 10 minutes.

That's why I say too much power management will kill you...

Have Fun!
Dimitris Staikos