Simon’s blog

After getting a decent version control system setup on this ZFS NAS (git, Subversion or something else ???), I will be feeding the source code of Breden’s BASIC into it.

Then after re-familiarising myself with the code, I plan to make the 6502 assembly language source code available online for 6502 enthusiasts, or anyone else curious to know how we had to program system code back in the 1980s.

Anyone unfamiliar with assembly language for a simple 8-bit processor like the 6502 might be quite surprised (shocked?) how low-level coding was. One little mistake and the whole machine would lock up!
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Popularity: 1% [?]

Your ZFS home fileserver / NAS is a great place to store your music, photo and video media, and if you’ve setup your ZFS file systems similar to the way described in Home Fileserver: ZFS File Systems, then it will be quite simple to view this media from a media center.

The nice thing about storing your media on your fileserver is that if your original CDs or DVDs get scratched, you will always have your backup available on your fileserver. The other huge advantage of having your media on your NAS is that you don’t have to go hunting through your DVD library to find the right box, only to find that it never got put back in the right box. And with a network-enabled media center hooked up to your ZFS fileserver / NAS, you can locate any media at the touch of a remote control.

There are many different media centers or HTPC products out there and they vary in openness, price, power and usability.
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Popularity: 3% [?]

After running SXCE for the last year, due to a failed hardware upgrade, it was time to install OpenSolaris 2009.06.

I was due to leave on a trip the next morning, but foolishly I decided to install a 3.5″ drive into a 5.25″ drive bay with some anti-vibe rubber grommets installed. When re-attaching the IDE cable onto the back of the drive in an awkward place, I broke one of the IDE interface pins and the drive failed to be recognised at POST after rebooting. After several attempts to reboot, it was time to face facts. The IDE boot drive that had served me faithfully since these days over a year ago, had reached the end of the line. Game Over.
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Popularity: 4% [?]

Once you’ve built your ZFS home fileserver / NAS, you’ll want to create your storage pool, create your file systems and share them to various devices around the home, such as laptops, PC’s, Macs, media centres etc.

I will go through all the necessary steps from start to finish, so you can see how to create a full, working file system hierarchy that is practical and useful.
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Popularity: 13% [?]

During a recent trip to the Hillier Gardens in Ampfield, Romsey in Hampshire, England, I took the following photos with a Nikon 105mm VR macro lens. This lens has excellent bokeh properties, due to the use of a nine-blade rounded diaphragm opening, giving pleasing effects in the out-of-focus areas of the photos.

I visited Hillier Gardens when the weather was overcast and, crucially for macro photography, windless. Well, virtually no wind.

I did not use a flash on any of the photos, relying purely on the available light, to give as natural as possible colours, lighting and textures.

When taking these photos I used (1) a tripod, (2) cable shutter release and (3) shutter release delay, in order to provide stability, prevent introduced vibrations from blurring photos, and allow longer exposures to allow greater depth of field using the available natural light.

The only image editing that has been done is to scale the photos to fit this web page, and to overlay a watermark for the copyright message and web link.
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Popularity: 7% [?]

Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as ‘A Year in Provence’, does it? Oh well, never mind.

After a year of using Solaris and ZFS for a home fileserver, I thought I would share my experiences here to give an insight into things that worked or did not work.

Also, others have asked me to give a summary of my experiences of using ZFS to highlight strong and weak areas, and to give a critique.
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Popularity: 13% [?]

The term ‘credit crunch’ has been well and truly flogged to death during the recent financial chaos, so it was time for me to dump all this stuff out of my head into this new blog post. As well as cursory explanation of what happened, I’ll chuck in a couple of chuckles as we all need to laugh.

After imprudent lending on a monumental scale to people who hadn’t a chance in hell of ever being able to pay back enormous housing loans, the shit has finally hit the fan, as ’sub-prime’ borrowers default on their loans in ever-growing numbers. The ‘credit default swaps’ (CDS) insurance policies underwriting these sub-prime (high risk) housing loans have now been found to have been woefully under-priced, thus the sellers of these insurance policies have had to face enormous pay-outs as the borrowers default on their loan repayments. Worse, as various investment banks ‘invested’ in this sub-prime debt, they infected themselves to the point of no return, as they discovered when the CDS’s were unable to pay out when the sub-prime borrowers defaulted on their loans. The final straw that broke the donkey’s back was high fuel and food price inflation, pushing up household debt to unaffordable levels. Oh, and a falling house price market, meaning that selling the houses would not cover many of the recent loans. It was the ‘perfect storm’ of the financial world.
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Popularity: 23% [?]

It seems that the U.S. government seems to think there is some impending calamity ahead, as it will be deploying the army on home soil for the first time.

What problem does the government foresee? Who knows, but if they’re making it public by putting this info on the internet then it’s obviously not that secret. But too secret to tell you outright, it seems. Yes, you’ll have to guess on this one.
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Popularity: 28% [?]

Quote from eWeek.com:

The embattled FAA, which has suffered a number of embarrassing flight-plan system crashes this year, has upgraded its legacy internal business systems to a new open-systems server and storage infrastructure supplied by Sun Microsystems and an IP network provided by Cisco Systems. If all goes as planned, this architecture may replace critical systems that directly affect all air travelers in the United States.

The most recent example of this happened on Aug. 26, when a corrupt file entered the flight plan system and brought it down for about 90 minutes during a high-traffic period late in the day on the East Coast. This was not an isolated incident, as the FAA’s chief administrator originally had told the media. Similar crashes occurred on Aug. 21 and in June, FAA records show.

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Popularity: 28% [?]

Here are a few selected links from my trawl through the blogosphere and information super highway, aka The Internet for September 2008. As always, as with any information you read, check for authenticity by doing your own research. Enjoy!
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Popularity: 25% [?]

Matt Harrison wrote to me recently, to notify me about a guide he’d written showing how to integrate a ZFS-based OpenSolaris fileserver with Microsoft Active Directory.

His guide covers all the necessary areas like: configuring Kerberos, synchronizing time/dates, enabling the CIFS server, joining the domain, user and group mapping, ZFS datasets, setting ACLs and auto-sharing home directories.
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Popularity: 37% [?]

Recently I decided to expand the storage capacity of my ZFS home fileserver’s ZFS storage pool, which was configured to use a single RAIDZ vdev comprising of three 750 GB drives.

I wanted to expand the RAIDZ vdev by adding one extra 750 GB drive.

As you may or may not be aware, it is currently not possible to expand a RAIDZ vdev in ZFS, which is a great pity.

However, it is still possible to achieve this expansion goal, but you have to perform a few tricks. Here is how I did it.
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Popularity: 42% [?]

The UK seems to be embarking on a big nuclear power plant building exercise, to replace existing plants about to be decommissioned, to help reduce reliance on oil and gas, to reduce the carbon footprint and to increase availability of power for increasingly power-hungry consumers. These new plants will most likely be the new EPR reactors.

Apart from past horrors like Windscale, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, constant ‘minor’ leaks, spills, irradiation of power plant workers, radioactive contamination of the water table, the political ‘hot potato’ of the costs and dangers of long-term safe storage of radioactive waste for thousands of years, plus costs of securing the waste from terrorists, a big nuclear power plant rollout plan sounds like a great idea.

But what about renewable energy sources? Are these really viable, or just a crazy idea? They are at least clean and safe, don’t generate waste in operation, and provide employment for installation and maintenance personnel.
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Popularity: 28% [?]

July 2008 has been a bad month so far for the French nuclear power industry with two nuclear spills already, and the month is not finished yet.

The first nuclear accident occurred on Monday 7th July 2008 at the Tricastin facility, where 74 kg of liquid uranium was spilled and entered the water table.

Interestingly, or not, at the time of writing this, the original Tricastin nuclear spill story I read on The Daily Telegraph website at this URL France orders tests on all nuclear power stations after leak has been removed (it seems back again, although edited perhaps, as the edit date is inconsistent with the Google Cache version). However, while it lasts, here is the Google Cache version.

As if the first nuclear spill at the Tricastin site at Bollene was not embarassing enough, there was a second nuclear spill at another Areva-controlled nuclear plant at Romans-sur-Isere, south-eastern France on Saturday 19th July 2008, which you can read about here: Second Nuclear Leak In France. Inspectors reportedly found that the pipe had been broken for several years and did not meet safety standards. Tut, tut, but never fear, as French Environment Minister Jean Louis Borloo has called for tougher controls at nuclear power plants, suggesting automatic problem detection and alerting systems be used in future. Now, which companies sell that cool technology, and why aren’t they already using them if they exist? Borloo’s comments will no doubt soothe any fears any potential buyers of French nuclear technology might have.
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Popularity: 32% [?]

I would be the last person to claim to be an expert on issues related to global warming. However, recent news items that have caught my attention have made me curious. In today’s article American physicists warned not to debate global warming it appears that there is unease regarding the close examination of the figures used in the current global warming algorithms and models.

Viscount Monckton claims that the fundamental figures used in the global warming models were derived from a theoretical model that looks good initially, but that fails to take into account the infinite variations in conditions presented by the real world. Here is his explanation of how the global warming believers’ climate models are verified:

“Since we cannot measure any individual forcing directly in the atmosphere, the models draw upon results of laboratory experiments in passing sunlight through chambers in which atmospheric constituents are artificially varied,” writes Monckton. “Such experiments are, however, of limited value when translated into the real atmosphere, where radiative transfers and non-radiative transports (convection and evaporation up, advection along, subsidence and precipitation down), as well as altitudinal and latitudinal asymmetries, greatly complicate the picture.”

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Popularity: 29% [?]

I knew it was only a matter of time before this happened, due to seeing high traffic in the web server logs and lots of links appearing, but today my website was Slashdotted. If you are a webmaster, this is either your best day ever, or your worst nightmare, depending on how robust your web server solution is.

Luckily for me, I upgraded to some decent infrastructure recently, in expectation of something like this happening one day.

After writing an extensive series of articles that cover Sun’s excellent new file system called ZFS, I’ve had absolutely thousands of page reads on this web site.
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Popularity: 38% [?]

During a recent trip to the ‘Golden Triangle’ area of the Luberon National Park region of Provence, France, I took the following photos, mostly with a Nikon 105mm VR macro lens. This lens has excellent bokeh properties, due to the use of a nine-blade rounded diaphragm opening, giving pleasing effects in the out-of-focus areas of the photos.

I made many mistakes, causing limited depth of field, which I have learned from.

However, this time, I used (1) a tripod, (2) cable shutter release and (3) shutter release delay for almost all of the macro shots, in order to provide stability and prevent introduced vibrations from blurring photos.

However, in many cases, in an attempt to use natural light, I achieved reduced depth of field. I need to investigate more the use of high-powered flash to obtain higher depth of field in an outside environment where you need to have fast shutter speeds, due to environmental problems like wind moving the subject being photographed.

Nevertheless, I still managed to get the following fairly reasonable shots.

None of the photos have been enhanced in any way. No Photoshop. No photos have been enlarged. Crops have been made on selected photos to show the detail the macro lens is capable of providing at 1:1 reproduction ratio.
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Popularity: 33% [?]

In the last few months I have read a few news stories regarding the UK police treating photographers like criminals, by telling them that they are not allowed to take photographs, even when the photographers have clearly not been taking pictures of any items related to national security.

It would appear that many police offcers are ignorant of the laws applicable to photography, as there have been many recent cases of photographers having their photos deleted or memory cards seized.

This must stop, and a clear statement needs to be made to the police and citizens, so every police officer and photographer knows what is allowed, and what is not.
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Popularity: 33% [?]

Sometimes you wonder where we are heading when you see the effects of political correctness carried too far. A couple of articles I read recently on the BBC news site can help to illustrate this.

The first article entitled Baby’s bottom censored by store described a woman taking a photo of her own baby along to a supermarket and asking to have it printed on a cake for his 21st birthday. The shop refused to do this because the baby’s bottom was visible, and they would only print it on the cake if a star was placed over its bottom.

The second article was entitled Adults ’scared to go near kids’. It stated that ‘many adults are afraid to interact with children for fear of being labelled as paedophiles’ and ‘Think-tank Civitas said the “escalation of child protection measures” had made everyone from sports coaches to Santas seem like “potential child abusers”.’

One wonders if things are perhaps not heading in the right direction.
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Popularity: 31% [?]

Well, after writing this piece advocating a flat-rate music purchase model a year ago, today I was very pleasantly surprised to see that the likelihood of this happening seems to be increasing.
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Popularity: 32% [?]

GarageBand is one of the applications you’ve probably seen on your Mac but never really used much, but it can be a lot of fun, as I discovered.

Using the built in loops and the music editor, you can create music really quickly. It can start like a kind of ‘painting by numbers’ for music.

I’m still learning how to use this fun piece of software, but I collected together my first attempts and made them into a small compilation.

Real musicians will probably say these ‘tracks’ completely suck, and I know there are many faults and mistakes I have made, but as a first attempt I think the results are not too bad.
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Popularity: 33% [?]

This Spring I got myself a Nikon 105mm VR macro lens and took it for a test drive. These photos were taken with a Nikon D200 digital SLR camera, but without a tripod, so were quite tricky to get reasonably sharp.
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Popularity: 34% [?]

I’d heard of ‘Hackintosh’ and various attempts people have made to build their own computer to run Mac OS X, but I wondered if Mac OS X would run on a new computer I had just built — surely not, but I decided to find out.
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Popularity: 37% [?]

An intriguing post appeared yesterday on the blog of Jeff Bonwick, where it simply shows photos of an informal meeting between Jeff and Linus Torvalds — could it be that Linux will get ZFS soon, due to changes in licensing, or could Linus be joining the ZFS team with Sun, or something else?
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Popularity: 39% [?]

With the summer coming on, the ambient room temperature is increasing, and so here’s a handy script to help you monitor your drive temperatures to help prevent heat-related data loss.
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Popularity: 46% [?]