Just wanted to throw up a post saying that I got my Buffalo WHR-G125 flashed with version 1.17-ND of the Tomato Firmware. The whole tftp bit was necessary, but it turns out it’s not nearly as scary as I thought it might be.

The filename for the firmware I flashed was Tomato_1_17_ND.7z. You’ll wanna make sure you get the “ND” version (New Drivers) if you’re flashing a WHR-G125.

As cited on MacRumors and a bunch of other places:

Denny Strigl, Verizon’s chief operating officer, decided to pass on the iPhone deal and says he has no regrets: “Time will tell” if he made the right call, he says.

Also:

Given Apple’s cultlike following, however, Verizon isn’t taking any chances. Strigl says Verizon is already working with a manufacturer — he declines to say which one — on an answer to the iPhone. “We do have a very good response in the mill,” he says. “You’ll see that from us in the late summer.”

In my opinion, what Denny Strigl missed the boat on, is that there is an extremely good chance that there is no answer to the iPhone.

Just like there is no answer to Mac OS X. It either is Mac OS X, or it’s not. Just like there is no answer to the iPod. It’s an iPod or nothing – and it sure as heck isn’t a Zune. As far as my money goes, I’m going to say that the only thing time will tell for Strigl is how bad a decision they really made.

It’s been a long time since the last time I installed and used Ubuntu, but with another shiny newish version out, 6.10 or whatever it is, I wanted to give it another go. Of course, I’m afraid of hard disk crashes (as should you be), so the first thing I do is set up a software RAID. I’ll go with a RAID-1 (Mirror) so we’re protected in the event that one of the disks decides to up and die.

The last time I did this was for Ubuntu 5.10 (don’t ask me what nifty nickname that version had) – but it looks like a few things (not many) have changed. In 6.10 (AKA Edgy Eft) the Disks Manager is gone, but you can still use the Device Manager to figure out what disks you want to use to create your RAID. I still have two of these 160GB SATA Seagate drives that I’ll use for the sake of this example. Here’s a screen shot of the Device Manager, I’ve browsed to the first of the disks I’m planning on using, and you can see that it’s /dev/sda (screenshot, top right).

This screenshot also shows that my drives contain the Backup volume – I’m nuking this volume to create this RAID.

Now we open up the terminal, and get going. My drives are /dev/sda and /dev/sdb, so the first step is to use cfdisk to partition them:

daniel@ubuntu:~$ sudo cfdisk /dev/sda
daniel@ubuntu:~$ sudo cfdisk /dev/sdb

Running cfdisk opens a cursor based application that you need to use to create the partitions. I deleted all existing partitions, and then created a Primary partition that took up the entire disk. Then I set the Type to FD which is Linux Raid Autodetect.

Next we load the RAID module for RAID-1 (Mirror):

daniel@ubuntu:~$ sudo modprobe raid1

After this, I opened up Device Manager again to see what the partitions had been called that we created on our disks. One of my partitions is /dev/sda1 and the other is /dev/sdb2. You can check out the screen shot below to see what I was looking at:

You can also notice from this screen that the Backup volume has indeed been nuked, and now we simply have Volume (linux_raid_member).

The next thing I want to do is run mdadm, but in my install of Ubuntu 6.10 it doesn’t exist, so we’ll install it:

daniel@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get install mdadm

That will spit out a bunch of stuff and eventually you should get the message:

* Starting RAID monitoring service mdadm —monitor                      [ ok ]

Alright, now let’s run mdadm to create the RAID:

daniel@ubuntu:~$ sudo mdadm —create 
/dev/md0 —level=1 —raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1

For me, I was prompted to confirm that I wanted to continue to create the array, because it looked like my disks were already a part of an array. I just pressed ‘y’ and carried on.

At this point, the RAID is being constructed, it’s not yet completed, even though you’ve been dumped back to the terminal. We can view the progress of the resyncing like so:

daniel@ubuntu:~$ sudo cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]md0 : active raid1 sdb1[1] sda1[0]
      156288256 blocks [2/2] [UU]
      [>....................]  resync =  2.4% 
(3886336/156288256) finish=52.6min speed=48201K/secunused devices: <none>
daniel@ubuntu:~$

So in 52.6 minutes we should be good to go. Now is your queue to grab me a Caramel Macchiato from Starbucks…Triple Grande, please.

Once the RAID is finished doing the resync, we need to create a file system on that bad boy. I’m going to use ext3, but you can go ahead and use whatever strikes your fancy.

daniel@ubuntu:~$ sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/md0

And voila! Once that’s finished, we should have a nice shiny file system that’s all RAIDified. Before we can actually do anything with it, we first need to mount it. I’m going to mount mine at /backup, but again, you can mount it however or wherever you see fit.

daniel@ubuntu:~$ sudo mkdir /backup
daniel@ubuntu:~$ sudo mount /dev/md0 /backup

Now with any luck, we should have 160GB of RAID goodness mounted at /backup, let’s check to see what we’ve got:

daniel@ubuntu:~$ df -k /dev/md0

I would love to paste the result of the above command here, but the stupid terminal is not copying my selected text to the clipboard, but trust me when I say it tells us we have a nice ~160GB file system mounted at /backup.

Since we don’t want to have to remount the file system every time we reboot, we can add an entry to /etc/fstab to get it to mount at boot. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a Linux ninja by any stretch of the imagination, but if you read the man page for fstab and take a look at what’s in your current file, I’m confident you’ll easily be able to get it to mount the way you’d like. For me, I basically copied the line from my boot disk and changed /dev/hdc to /dev/md0 and also changed the last column (pass) from 1 to 2.

/dev/md0  /backup  ext3  defaults,errors=remount-ro  0  2

There you are, a newly updated entry on how to set up a nice software RAID in Edgy Eft (Ubuntu 6.10). Enjoy.

The nice thing about writing a little ‘signup’ application for a class that your wife teaches is that you have full control over the hijacking of that application any time you feel like it. See figure one:

Fortunately for me I didn’t get shot down, and we got some Gold Class seats at VivoCity.

Today, unfortunately, is not turning out nearly as good as yesterday. My mac is seriously on the fritz exhibiting the following completely random and seemingly unrelated ‘features’.

1. Adium can not connect to any of the IM protocols I have configured including Yahoo, MSN, AIM and GTalk.
2. Microsoft Word opens all files as Read-Only so if I want to modify them I have to “Save As…” first.
3. Although CPU usage is completely normal, the entire systemm locks up at random, and I can barely switch between applications or type at a normal speed.
4. My Airport signal strength indicator is in a “permanent off” state. My laptop is 100% convinced that my Airport is turned off, but I’m connected wirelessly to my network as I post this.
5. DNS is completely screwed. I have to hit Shift-Reload sometimes 3, 4 or 5 times to get a page to show up in FireFox or Safari because it can’t seem to resolve random hosts. (This could partially, maybe, explain the Adium behavior.)
6. Random applications terminate as soon as I start them. Yesterday it was Remote Desktop Connection. I would start it up to connect to a Windows box, and it would terminate before I could do anything. Today it’s photoDrop droplets that are crapping out.
7. Mail.app won’t download any of my Mail (potentially also could be related to network issues, I suppose).
8. Often when I start an application (say, TextMate or iPhoto for example) – I can’t click on any of the menu items in the menu bar. They’re locked. Which means I’m limited to only being able to use the functionality of the app that I remember via keyboard shortcuts, until it magically decides at some point in the future (20 minutes, 40 minutes – it’s all a great guessing game) when it decides it will permit me to now click on said menu items.

As I’m typing this, SuperDuper! has just finished backing up all my user files, and Mr. Laptop is now going to receive a full enema. I sure hope that this isn’t a hardware problem, or I’ll be severely unimpressed. At least the thing is under warranty. But if Apple is going to take my laptop for a week while they try to figure out what’s going wrong – I might have switched to Ubuntu by the time they give it back to me.

If you thought Steve’s demo of Multi-Touch on the iPhone was impressive, you need to see this TED talk from Jeff Han, who is a research scientist for New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Get the feed or download a zipped copy of the QuickTime file.

This is multi-touch gone crazy. The keywords that grab me are “low-cost”, “scalable” and “high resolution”.

This is a must-see.

I was trudging around, reading blogs, and whatnot when I came across, among other things, Dave Shea’s blog, and his entry reviewing the Mighty Mouse – I definitely laughed out loud on this. Good stuff, and I couldn’t agree more. The one that came with my G5 iMac continues to aggravate my wife on a daily basis.

As Carly and I were setting up our new place, we got her some “office space” in a nook in our master bedroom. As she does quite a lot of work on the computer, she ended up with the G5 iMac in there, which left me with only one development machine.

The perfect opportunity had arrived for justifying a new development machine, so utilizing Carly’s ed discount, I managed a new MacBook along with an almost free 30GB iPod (thanks to that promo Apple has going on right now).

So far I am very impressed, although there are a few shortcomings. Most noticeably there is a bit of a jagged edge right along the wrist-rest at the front of the MacBook, so my wrist often feels quite agitated if I’m not sitting up nice and straight while typing. I purchased a wrist-rest-guard thing to protect against discoloration, but that’s not what’s causing the agitation. Other than that I notice just a slight imperfection near the vent where there is a noticeable bubble of plastic that doesn’t quite seem to fit as perfect as it ought to. The MagSafe connector is great, but it looks very cheaply built. Hopefully it doesn’t light on fire. The RAM was dead easy to install (once I went out to buy a #0 Philips screwdriver, that is). All in all – I am super impressed. Currently running a trial version of Parallels, which seems pretty great. I notice a bit of mouse lag, and some right click delays, but that could be due to the wireless mouse I’m using. Not totally sure yet.

After about 5 days of use, I’m a very happy MacBook owner. Yum.

Two weeks ago while Carly and I were in Macau, I somehow managed to get my wallet ripped off, along with our digital camera. Then at the end of last week (Friday, I think it was), I lost my cell/hand/mobile/whateveryoucallit phone.

All in all, none of this has proven to be a good experience, in the slightest, and I’m sure I’ve taken a few years off my life in trying to deal with insurance companies, and the general frustration that goes along with getting stuff stolen / lost.

Today though, I managed to head down to Sim Lim Square (huge IT type mall here in Singapore) and picked up a new handphone and camera.

The last camera we had was nice and small, a Canon Digital ELPH (SD110), but we were starting to really crave something with a much better optical zoom. After doing a boatload of research, it seemed that the best options were the Canon S3 IS, Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ7, and Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ1 (5 Megapixel and 10x Optical Zoom in a Compact format thanks to folded optics). We settled on the latter of the three as it is a bit more of a point and shoot, and we’re not really photography ninjas. Kodak released that crazy V610 a few weeks back, but it always makes me nervous buying electronic gadgets that I can’t read any reviews for.

On the phone side of things, as much as I really would have liked to pick up a Motorola PEBL, I can’t really justify dropping S$500 on a phone that I only talk on for 22 minutes a month, so I settled on a Nokia 6021, which was a great find. Nice little phone that has bluetooth, without all the camera/mp3/magicpixiedust/othercrap.

...and it’s about time, too.

I’ve been wondering for the past two years what on earth he was still doing at the helm of Sun. Whether he intended it this way or not, it has seemed to me that for the past two or so years, his intent has been to drive Sun into the ground, not make them competitive.

“Let’s just open source every product we have, and give everything away for free. Heck, we should even give our servers away for free.”

I can’t say that “make your strategy controversial” (quote from McNealy on some of the latest paraphernalia I received at Sun Tech Days) is the best way to keep your customers and shareholders happy.

Who knows if Schwartz can do any better, we can revisit again in another 2 years and see.

Someone on the Mac Users Group here was selling a pair of Shure e2c’s they bought a few months ago at about $80 less than retail. I picked them up and am totally loving them. Jeffery while he was here let me try out his e3c’s, which were awesome, but I currently can’t justify dropping that kinda cash on headphones.

So far I must say I’m uber impressed with the sound quality and sound isolation of these. I don’t know if I like the flex sleeves or not yet, I might move to the foam instead, both for comfort and sound isolation reasons.

If I wasn’t so lazy, I’d take some pictures and put them up, but unfortunately, I’m not feeling so inclined.