2012

Sat, Jan 21

<20:01 EEST> I decided to expand my current hard drive space, and I was about to order some 2.5'' units from Germany, where prices are a little more reasonable. However, I stumbled upon an equally good deal at the local Anttila, a Buffalo Ministation 1 TB for 119 €. This was a little surprising, because hard drive prices have recently been on a steep climb. The Thailand floods have their own effect on global markets, but Finland has also extended the copying fee from blank CDs etc. to external hard drives. I could have gotten the bare drive without the fee, but for some reason this deal was cheaper than any bare drive I could find.

There were a couple of surprises in store from such a basic piece of tech. First of all, as I hooked up the USB drive to my Powerbook, it refused to power up. I was already assuming that these current USB-powered HDs are relying on nonstandard ports and their sloppy power management. In fact, the actual drive is specced for 0.60 A, vs. the 500 mA maximum of USB 2.0. Nevertheless, the drive worked fine on my other machine, and even on the laptop after detaching my cell phone. But things did not feel too stable USB-wise, so I went for another option.

External drives are nice in some cases, but they have their inefficiencies. I considered a lot of options for this space expansion, and I realized that each computer needs a HD anyway. By using this as the only drive on my GPU mining machine, while serving the space over NFS, I could save a little power compared to dedicated drives.

It is usually an exercise in frustration to open up these modern, screwless plastic cases. One way to pry them open without too much visible damage is to use a plastic card, instead of any metallic tools. The drive turned out a Western Digital WD10TPVT, which to my slight surprise was thicker than the usual 2.5'' drives. I guess this is one way to keep costs down, and I had no intentions of using it in a laptop anyway.

The label on the drive also mentioned the need for alignment software on Windows XP. I recalled reading about these 4-KB sectors before, but this was the first such drive I came across. Since I had already partitioned it over USB, I checked that each partition actually started at a multiple of 8 sectors, so there was nothing left to fix. When on SATA, Linux sees the drive as having 512-byte logical blocks and 4096-byte physical blocks.

One remaining frustration was reinstalling LILO. It is tricky to install onto a drive that is not currently the main/bootable one, but is going to be. I ended up using a Gentoo install CD via serial console.

With a fast NFS drive came a new little problem: a bulk transfer could easily congest the 100 Mbit network, which my Bitcoin miners did not like. However, this did not happen with normal NFS use, where files are opened from the drive for their ordinary purposes. The problem with mv-induced congestion was solved by ionice.

Despite the 12.7 mm thickness, the drive does have one obvious laptop feature. It parks the read/write heads when idle, so there are extra clicks involved in disk activity. This may turn out annoying in the long run, but I could always go back, and use this drive via its original USB case or other means.

Actually, it turns out the parking timeout can be tweaked by hdparm, though the implementation is a little experimental. WD has a DOS utility for changing it securely, so I should probably look into it to avoid too many cycles over time. Indeed, this utility works as it should, and now I have a more sensible 3-minute timeout.

Sun, Jan 1

<18:10 EEST> One of the things that kicked off my mayapocalyptic year was reading about a fascinating hack called IBNIZ. Demoscene nostalgia on the audiovisuals aside, the only thing I could think of while reading the machine description was "FPGA implementation". The author's considerations for low-end hardware, such as fixed-point arithmetic, are even more notable when thinking of raw hardware implementations. The odd one out IMHO is the choice to include trigonometric functions, but they would be easy to implement with look-up tables, especially as their overall number is limited. The idea is probably a little too much for my current FPGA experience, and I should probably learn about simpler stack machines first, but maybe some day :)

Reading on, the author appeared to to have interesting, well thought out opinions on a number of other matters technical and social. It turned out I had already seen some of his (parodic) opinions on the pirate movement and the PUA scene, and the more profound side was somewhat surprising, though perhaps it should not be. For example, the writeup on electronic wastefulness neatly summarizes and elaborates on many of the topics on many of my pet peeves, with a style that should be accessible to non-geeks without patronizing.

Finally, another movie in a long line of reviews: Casino Royale, the 1967 parody featuring Woody Allen, Peter Sellers and Orson Welles among others. The story started off rather slowly, and it took a long while to get up to the expected levels of hilarity. At the same time, the style took on progressive notes of 1960 psychedelia, and by the final third or so, it seemed a lot like Austin Powers. Except this was 30 years earlier, with a much more genuine feel and higher production values. The music performed by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass deserves a special mention among all the factors that make this such a uniquely charming piece of art.