Monthly Archive for March, 2008

Canon weenies

Published on Monday, March 31, 2008

I took some pho­tos of the Blue Dawn Studios staff yes­ter­day. Will write more about it later. Need sleep. Here’s a pic for now.

Click on the pic see the 1024px ver­sion. Click here for the 3000px version.

16 days

Published on Sunday, March 30, 2008


16 days un­til I move to Shanghai. I’m still not sure what to pack and what to leave be­hind. Should I bring my printer? It’s sort of big. I’ve de­cided to leave be­hind my mon­i­tor. Hope I don’t re­gret that later.

My cam­era gear will have to go with the checked lug­gage be­cause I have to carry other more frag­ile items (lap­tops and hard disks). I re­ally, re­ally, re­ally hope noth­ing breaks.

And no, I’m not gonna go watch the Olympics! People keep ask­ing me that. Maybe a lit­tle bit on TV (or maybe not), but def­i­nitely not in per­son. It’s gonna be in Beijing, and I’ll be mov­ing to Shanghai. Shanghai is a good dis­tance away from Beijing.

Hillary isn’t a robot

Published on Tuesday, March 25, 2008

A robot’s mem­ory wouldn’t be screwed up like this.

YouTube Preview Image

Read about it here:

By the end of the day, Clinton was mak­ing a joke of her or­deal: “I made a mis­take. That hap­pens. It proves I’m hu­man, which, you know, for some peo­ple is a revelation.”

It also proves she’s a woman. Har har just kid­ding. Sort of.

Found the video through phuckdrifting.com/photos-of-the-day, a web­site that should be avoided by those with vir­gin ears.

Update: Maybe she wasn’t ly­ing? Check out this video.

Kuomintang is back!

Published on Saturday, March 22, 2008

Kuomintang’s Ma Ying-​​jeou wins Taiwan’s pres­i­den­tial elec­tion! From The Washington Post:

The de­ci­sive votes sig­naled the end of an eight-​​year pe­riod in which many Taiwanese seemed to be swept up by Chen’s pu­gna­cious na­tion­al­ism and em­pha­sis on Taiwanese self-​​identity. His re­lent­less cam­paign­ing — and the ten­sion it caused in China and the United States — cre­ated a sense of fa­tigue among Taiwan’s 23 mil­lion in­hab­i­tants, an­a­lysts here said, and gave Ma an op­por­tu­nity to ride to vic­tory on his mes­sage of cool prag­ma­tism to­ward China and re­newed fo­cus on the slip­ping economy.

Ma, from a main­land im­mi­grant fam­ily ac­tive in the Nationalist Party, won 58 per­cent of the vote, ac­cord­ing to an of­fi­cial count by the Central Electoral Commission. Frank Hsieh, the can­di­date of Chen’s Democratic Progressive Party, won 42 per­cent. With the Nationalists scor­ing an equally lop­sided vic­tory in leg­isla­tive elec­tions Jan. 12, Ma will have an un­usu­ally clear man­date and an un­chal­lenged grip on power when he takes office.

By the way, I like how Ma Ying-jeou’s name can be trans­lated as “Horse English Nine”.

(Photo credit: Vincent Yu — AP)

Multi-​​bay eSATA enclosure

Published on Thursday, March 20, 2008


SATA con­nec­tors in­side the AMS Venus T5

As I men­tioned be­fore (here and here), I got an eSATA 5-​​bay ex­ter­nal hard drive en­clo­sure to re­place my ex­ist­ing FireWire en­clo­sures, and to house a backup. It’s called an AMS Venus T5 DS-​​2350S, a name that means noth­ing to me, but it’s rel­a­tively cheap and the re­views for it on Newegg are pretty good – mostly 4 out of 5.

I went from this mess:

to this box just slightly big­ger than a 2-​​slice toaster:

It comes with every­thing, ex­cept an eSATA ExpressCard for lap­tops. For desk­tops it comes with a 2-​​port eSATA PCI-​​E controller.


hard disk tray


screws in­cluded *


lever to help move disk into SATA connectors

I don’t know what the in­cluded Windows soft­ware is for, but on a Mac, you just set up the disks the same way you set up any disk through Disk Utility. To make RAID or JBOD sets, go into the RAID menu. There you can choose to cre­ate a Mirrored RAID Set (RAID 1), Striped RAID Set (RAID 0), or Concatenated Disk Set (JBOD).


Mac OS X Disk Utility

If you don’t know what RAID is, you can google it or just don’t worry about it. I think most peo­ple won’t ever need it. JBOD on the other hand is sim­ple. It’s Just a Bunch Of Disks that to­gether make one drive. I use two JBOD vol­umes in my setup and use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup one vol­ume to the other.


Carbon Copy Cloner

Why not Drobo?

The Venus T5 took me a to­tal of maybe 15 min­utes to get up and run­ning, and that’s be­cause I’m slow. There’s re­ally noth­ing to it. You screw the trays onto the disks, in­sert the disks, plug in every­thing and for­mat the disks. I sup­pose Drobo saves you a few min­utes since you just in­sert the disks and it does the rest, but Drobo is $500 and this Venus T5 was $210 (price went up since I got it).

Drobo pro­tects your data in case of a disk fail­ure. That’s a good fea­ture only for peo­ple who don’t do back­ups. If you do reg­u­lar back­ups, you’re al­ready pro­tected from disk fail­ure. The price dif­fer­ence be­tween these two en­clo­sures can get you a 1 TB hard disk to backup everything.

And of course, the thing that bog­gles the mind, Drobo uses USB in­ter­face only. I mean, se­ri­ously? The thing holds four hard disks and trans­fers data through USB. USB slow. FireWire fast. eSATA fastest. T5 FTW!

Issues

It’s not per­fect though. Every time I plug in the T5 (sounds like a Terminator name), these an­noy­ing mes­sages pop up:

Disk Insertion (screen­shot)
The disk you in­serted was not read­able by this computer.

Device Removal (screen­shot)
The de­vice you re­moved was not prop­erly put away. Data might have been lost or dam­aged. Blah blah blah.

I just click on Ignore and OK, or let the mes­sages go away by them­selves af­ter a few sec­onds. They seem to be false alarms be­cause the dri­ves show up and work just fine, and I didn’t re­move any devices.

I bet they have to do with my JBOD se­tups. Maybe when I turn on the en­clo­sure, the com­puter sees five disks which aren’t us­able, hence “not read­able”. And then they dis­ap­pear be­cause they’re ac­tu­ally JBOD sets, so the com­puter thinks they were re­moved. Just guess­ing though, I re­ally have no idea.

Another com­plaint I have is that the fans are frikkin loud! They don’t change speeds de­pend­ing on the tem­per­a­ture. There’s just a switch on the back with a low and high set­ting, and they’re loud and louder.

They could have made the low set­ting lower. Even af­ter trans­fer­ing data for hours, the box stays to­tally cool. When it’s sum­mer­time I’m gonna turn the thing around and point the fans my way.


Final thoughts

Honestly I ended up with the T5 be­cause I was con­sid­er­ing get­ting a Drobo, which has been men­tioned in nu­mer­ous promi­nent pho­tog­ra­phy web­sites. Then I started read­ing about prob­lems with Drobo, such as speed, pro­pri­etary file sys­tem, and not ac­cept­ing hard dri­ves that are per­fectly fine. Just look through it’s own fo­rums.

So I went look­ing for an al­ter­na­tive that’s com­pact and uses FireWire. Well it turns out FireWire en­clo­sures are gen­er­ally more ex­pen­sive than eSATA en­clo­sures, so I went with eSATA which is faster anyway.

I’ve only been us­ing the T5 for a cou­ple days but so far so good. I read about peo­ple hav­ing eSATA prob­lems with OS X 10.5 Leopard, even with the lat­est ver­sion 10.5.2, but some­one some­where (discussions.apple.com I be­lieve) men­tioned that there’s only prob­lems when the en­clo­sure uses eSATA plus an­other in­ter­face, like USB. The T5 is eSATA only, and aside from those mes­sages pop­ping up, I haven’t had any problems.

* In the photo of the hard disk with the tray at­tached, I used the round head screws that came with the disk in­stead of the flat head ones that came with the Venus T5. You have to use flat head screws or the disks won’t fit in the enclosure.