Spinning down my disks

Good morning fellow workers of the world.

It’s been a while since my last post (I can tell you’re devastated). I’ve been penning a number of new articles, none of which have left the draft tick box behind, partly due to an abundance of work, small babies, stomach bugs, and colds. During last weekends bout of vomiting, I thought I needed to take my mind off things, so I whipped out my credit card and ordered a new 160GB disk for my Macbook Pro.

My old 100GB 7200rpm disk was filling up fast with virtual machines and retro gaming, so the extra space was much needed. However, the only 160GBs around today are 5400rpm, and I was somewhat worried about the spin speed difference. When I got my Macbook Pro, I made the effort to get the most, the fastest, the best I could get, as getting work to shell out for one is usually a one time deal :) Now, there’s a lot of talk from both techies and newbies alike to say that 5400 rpm disks are noticeably slower than 7200 rpm disks.

For those of you that don’t know the importance of the spin rate of hard disks (RPM=Revolutions per minute) heres a very (very) simplistic overview:

Inside your hard drive are lots of circular layers of silicon called platters. These are where the data is stored. The data is read from these (and written to these) by read/write heads which hover at miniscule distances from the surface of the platters and are fixed in position, with the platters rotating beneath them. Whenever you request a piece of data (be it a document, or an email or whatever), the computer looks up the position of the data on the disk, and tells the read head where to read the data from. The platters spin round until the read head is above the correct location and then they start the process of retrieving your data.
Now, the basic premise of the importance of spin speed (and it is basic, as other factors can, and do, come in to play) is that the faster the platter can spin round and present the read head with the data, the quicker the data can get fed to your operating system (Windows etc). Given that doing anything in a modern operating system involves saving some piece of data (be it a small cookie in a browser just for a refresh or changing the ‘last accessed’ date on a folder you just looked at) even the slightest speed improvement can accumulate in to a visible speed increase.

Most people, when asked, will say “get the fastest disk you can”. It’s possible to find hardware benchmarking sites that will happily show that there is very little real word increase in a 7200rpm disk over a 5400rpm disk, but these are typically ignored.

Having swapped disks, and copied my data back, I sat and fiddled around. Now, I didn’t think I was writing this before I upgraded my disk, so I didn’t make any proper timings of things. I don’t really think that speed performance is all down to numbers-on-paper, it’s far more about the users perceived pleasure of the results - which is good as that’s all I have :).

Now, booting OS X does seem marginally slower, by a few seconds. However, that’s about the only noticeable issue. In my day to day usage of Entourage (aka Outlook for the mac), Word, Safari, Camino, Adium, MSN, Transmission, iPhoto etc etc, I see, and indeed feel, absolutely no decrease in speed. Indeed, there have been positives. The machine as a whole runs far cooler than it did. Users of Macbook Pros with the 7200rpm disks will confirm that the case behind the function keys can get very, very, hot. Now, it’s just a warm tepid. It’s also quieter, not that Macbook Pro’s are every really loud, but the soft noise of the fan is softer than it was. Also, today my battery has lasted longer than it. Most days I get in at 8:30am or so, and by 11:30am I’m in the red on the battery meter. Today, the first day after the upgrade, my work load is the same (most days here are the same), and yet the battery lasted until about 12:15am or so.

Clearly, this isn’t a scientific test, but for those you ummming and arrrring about whether to upgrade the size of your disk at the cost of speed, then do it. Don’t worry at all. There are areas that will notice a difference, Aperture users, Photoshop experts etc, but then it’s likely that they will be using larger, faster, external storage if they are serious about it.

O.

Hooray Hooray…it’s Vista day

Welcome back.

Well, yesterday was Vista day, and amidst the bongo players and rock bands, the whole thing left me cold. Now, normally I’m a hardcore Windows fanboy. Until recently. My recent love affair with OS X and a 17″ laptop of love (yes, it is size that counts) has left me totally uninterested in Vista all together.

Vista has a few plus points. When XP came out, I, like a lot of people in my corporate IT world, had no intention of really looking at upgrading, and really only started to use it once it came pre-installed. Even then, we occasionally reinstalled machines with older versions of Windows. There was simply very little to attract the layman to XP compared to Windows 2000, except perhaps a shinier interface. Vista has similar issues though this time I think the interface is a worthwhile reason to look at it. It might just be so much eye candy, but it does also, finally, remove the dependance on bitmapped graphics and move more of the graphical business to the GPU rather than the CPU. It also gets rid of the sodding annoying ‘My Computer’, ‘My Documents’ and other ‘My’ prefixes that only served to confuse and irritate users across the globe.

Graphical interface aside, I’m still of the mindset that the whole thing could just be service pack update to XP. Of course, where would the fun be, but the original Vista trumpets heralded a brave new world of SQL based filestores and other much needed and much vaunted major redesigns. What we have (Aero glass interface aside) is really just a series of product updates, security fixes, and a few new tools chucked in.

Don’t think I’m now about to say how the world on the Apple side of the fence is any better. OS X 10.5 is about to launch, and while I’m gagging to get hold of some of the features, for the most part there seems to be very little about the upcoming release that would deserve the label of ‘new OS’. The only note worthy thing about 10.5 is that I haven’t had to wait 5 years for it to arrive !

O.

Worry not, I’ve saved the environment.

Yes Folk,

You can continue to dispose of your plastic and your paper in normal kitchen bin. Go crazy burning those old car tyres. Greenpeace, you can sell those old fishing boats and put your feet up in front of a nice imported, gas powered, faux fireplace. The environment is safe !

As you can see, my solution is finished, the wrapping is off. My two stage, once-was-summer-house, composter is finished. It features a flip top lid on a hinge, for easy access, and two compartments (vital for getting good compost). Version 1.1 will include three compartments, and the roadmap for v2 shows a removable front panel for complete ‘mulch isolation’.

R0×0r

O.

Heaven in a flat screen

Hello again.

Aspyr have finally released the Universal update for the mac version of Command and Conquer Generals. Whilst not the best episode in the series (such a title is reserved for Red Alert) it does still have a great fun quota, and remains a great great game.

If you want to grab a copy, you can download it from the link below.

http://support.aspyr.com/index.php?x=&mod_id=2&id=380

My mate Chris and I are going through a retrospective of our gaming upbringing and revisiting lots of our old favourites. I’m sure more up to the minute reviews will follow this way :)

O.

What really happened to Ichabod Crane ?

While my lady is next door with the flu, and my darling second daughter is visiting Nannys, I thought I would sit down and read a quick tale, when I found “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving on Short Stories (Link here). Now being a great fan of both the film and of pre-1900 storytelling, I thought I would have a good read.

Suffice to say that it’s nothing like the film (though did I mention I liked the film?), and is definately worth a read over a cuppa.

O.

Waiting for the blue bar…

Hello again.

In my job there’s a lot of waiting around, often late at night as it’s the only time you can work on a system, and it’s the most common time for backups. First backups can take hours, and though we offer to copy the data on to a removable hard disk in order to speed up that everso important first backup, alot of people choose to just let it run, and so we sit and wait.

Anyhoo, while I’m waiting for the mother of all Exchange backups, I thought I would be one of those people (oh the shame) and create a list for your delectation, a list of ‘Things to keep you occupied whilst waiting for backups’. Catchy…heh?

1) Sketchfighter 4000 Alpha Great, old skool (literally), shooter. Lovely simple graphics. If you get bored on your own, fire it up against a friend, or spend a few hours designing your own level. Superb.
2) Kult Heretic Kingdoms An excellent rpg romp-n-slash game for both the mac and the pc. Very much in the visual style of Ice Wind Dale and others of that ilke, and only £20 to buy (that’s about $18,000 at the moment) it’s great value for money. I’ve wasted many a late night on this game…damn my addictive personality :)
3) Digg Love it, or hate it (and I’m still not sure which one applies to me) the mix of news articles and comment flaming make it a great way to waste some time waiting for the clock to tick.
4) Delicious Library I’m a total nerd when it comes to listing and sorting my stuff. In the real world, I just chuck it on the shelf, or in the cupboard, but in my virtual shiney OS X world, everything is listed and tagged. Delicious Library allows me to combine my love of reading and books in general with my need to organise my collection. It’s like crack for bookworms.
5) Short Stories As I’ve said before, I love reading, and I’ve always been a fan of the short story. It’s such an easy way to get in to (and out of) of reading. This site has it all; the good and the bad.

O.

Welcome to me

I thought I would do a shamless plug for me. Apparently one of the current wafts of advice zipping around the ether for web designers is to never advertise yourself, but rather to ‘big up’ other people, products and services, in order to get them to give you freebies, sponsership, links and what not. Well, bollocks to that. I figure if I am going to publish and be damned, then I may as well get something out of it :)

Anyway, so, I run an online backup company on the south coast of England, which provides businesses of all sizes with managed, secure, backup services. We also offer server management services, looking after and securing web servers and the like as well as varies kinds of information consultancy.

Online backup is actually…perhaps sadly…a bit of an interest of mine. In my job I deal with all kinds of people, as do those that I work with, and a surprising amount of companies, of all sizes, are so very uninterested in doing backups as to make stocks drop across the country if the word got out. Disaster management seems to be limited to making sure that they have contents insurance. From as little as £15 a month we can take over all the responsibilties of the backup process and they don’t have to take home any backup tapes. On top of that, they get to have their backups stored at three locations (currently, more to come), so even if our office blew up, their information is still lovely and snug somewhere safe.

Nifty..heh ?

O.

Computer life

For some reason I have been thinking, as you do, about computer life. Specifically, what form that life would take. Not robotic life, all androids and Terminator, but solely computer based ‘life’; intelligence within a silicon wafer.

Imagine if you had a computer, something like a big old Cray X1e. Say that that computer was able to learn and adapt in a totally organic, Neural Net, Data-from-Star-Trek, kind of way. Then imagine strapping a nuclear power supply to it, along with some sensors for good luck, and catapaulting it in to space, in a massive orbit not to return for a thousand years.

What would it be like upon it’s return ? Physically, it would be the same, assuming it had survived the ravages of time. We could still interface with it on the physical level because it would have no way of changing its own outer self. However, would we, or even it, recognise itself internally ?

I’m not sure what has sparked my brain to think about this. I guess I’m just interested in how a completely artifical intelligence would cope, and evolve, over time, with little or no outside stimulus, and without such facilities as factories or labs with which to physically alter or adapt itself.

O.

Once more unto the breach

Once more I find myself in Manchester, though this time in a hotel of higher repute than the last, and this time with wireless. Italy have just won the World Cup, and the crowds are going wild, literally.

After less than four hours sleep, five hours driving here, I was finished up in less than 2 hours. What do you do after a five hour drive to Manchester? Drink wine, eat chicken, and surf the web! This is, after all, the world of the blog, where data is king.

O.

Revisiting the war

As you may have seen from my previous posts - that is to say my two other posts - I am currently resting in the wonderful city of Manchester. It’s safe to say that, in my own opinion, the Travelodge in Sport City, while implying the promise of stadiums and sport prowess, is actually a smoke filled, fawlty towers’esque brothel*.
This isn’t however the most frustrating thing about my stay. While I have been travelling the streets of Manch, visiting the offices of my northern collegues, I have noticed that Manchester has a serious lack of street signs.

Those of you from the United States may not realise, but during the second world war, vast regions of the UK had their street signs removed. The reason for this was so that visiting (sic) german soldiers would find it prohibitively hard to find their way around. By the end of the war relatively few Germans had set foot on the British isles, but the idiology remained for several decades, and street signs were missing from the streets of the UK. In recent decades, however, there has been an explosion of street signs, from parking restrictions, to needless chequered regions, and numerous signs that no one understands.

Manchester, it would seem, has yet to be reminded of the date.

O.

*Clearly, it’s not a brothel, and I have no proof whatsoever that it’s used as one. Just wanted to clear that up ;)