I need a special dialing wand: Asus Eee PC

(tags computer, hardware, Windows)

I had a chance to try out the Asus Eee PC in person this week. It's the "Eee PC 4G-X", which I think corresponds to the Eee PC 4G. As I said before, I am disappointed that the Japanese version comes with Windows XP Home SP2 for the OS. I did want to try Linux on this machine, but it's a minor gripe because I actually like tolerate Windows XP, huh. I think the reason for the Windows XP is that Linux distributions don't have comfortable Japanese input methods for free, and the much heralded ATOK for Linux would add 1_0000 yen to the price (20%!).

However, the most important part, the keyboard, is unusable with my hands. Maybe my fingers are too fat. :-( I've always wanted a small computer to just type with, like a Tandy Model 102, or an AlphaSmart. For a time I had the Palm with the foldable keyboard but it was tacky. Also I have a Libretto L1 which is pretty much what I want, but too bad its slow (too slow for even AJAX Gmail ugh) and obsolete (short battery life, noisy fan, low memory, no on-board wireless or ethernet!). Coming back to the Asus Eee PC, I like the keyboard layout itself. The FN key coupled with the arrow keys are the Home, End, PgUp, PgDw combination that makes so much sense. I don't really like the tilde key (Kanji key) being in the same row as the Esc and F1, but I can deal. I'm an Emacs Caps-Lock-Is-Control-Key and AutoHotKey user, so any other niggling bits I can fix up quick.

Other than that, I found that it gets hot on the bottom, which is disconcerting. XP Home, but with no games installed (sol.exe is not there!) and Windows-F1 has no contents installed! The disk reports 1.3 GB free out of 4GB. I am wondering if I can keep an SD card in the slot for my essential apps like Firefox, Emacs, Ruby, Git, Subversion, Cygwin, etc. I wish I could have tried out Parsec47 on it. I didn't bother figuring out how to install more RAM. And there was no camera application for the camera, that I could find (nothing in the Start Menu or Desktop). Strange. notepad.exe, winver.exe, dxdiag.exe, calc.exe, and mstsc.exe I checked and they are all there.

The screen itself is readable, but just barely. I wonder what the DPI is. Let's see, is it 133 DPI? (/ (sqrt (+ (* 800 800) (* 480 480 ))) 7.0) Oh yeah. Oh this is interesting, set the Windows DPI setting to 80 DPI for mo' better viewing. Probably Japanese is unviewable though.

Now I am viewing the various user threads and wikis about gaming on this machine and I figured out Unreal Tournament 99 and StarCraft are playable. Wow. Oh wait, it's 2008 already. Where's my flying car, hurk hurk.

I gotta wait for Eee PC version 2.0, but at least now I can rest easy knowing that Asus will target the Japan market.

What if I ripped my DVDs? (And how about a pony?)

(tags DVD region 2, DVD region 1, DVD region 3, computer, storage, hardware)

While cleaning up my totally disorganized cave, I contemplated ripping my DVDs. For my music, I don't even do FLAC just 192 Kbit CBR MP3s, so this whole excursion is out of character. But let's just calculate. I am assuming that if I rip the DVD, I can play it back on some software DVD player, with all the subtitles and niceties intact.

Let's say I had 400 of DVDs. WTF! I just realized I don't have a complete list of the DVDs I got. The CD (compact disc audio) situation is even worse. And I don't want to even think about all the game discs and other stuff I can't copy. :-(

One DVD holds at most 4.37 Gib (Gigabits SI notation). I suppose I have some dual-layer DVDs but let's skip that for now. I know I don't have more than 5 dual-sided DVDs, so I'll also skip that. So! I'm looking at 1.75 Tib of raw DVD data.

On 2007/08 I bought a 500 Gib hard drive for about 1_2800 yen. So without any redundancy it will cost me 4_5000 yen just to keep stuff I already have, but with more convenience. I assume that compression won't get me much because this is already lossy data. In terms of a 12-13 episode anime (in Japan), that's about 1.5 sets.

Would I want to RAID it? Probably, and at RAID 5. This would probably entailing buying another computer and buying cards/switch for Gigabit Ethernet, and budgeting 1_5000 yen per year for electricity. I would also wish to encrypt it. Or I was thinking of doing the single HDD swap trick with those fancy eSATA or "USB 2.0 to SATA" connections, which is risky, right?

Sounds expensive. I think I'll just let them sit in my cave right now. Or maybe I should get rid of some? :-/ I can't "beam them up" where I'm going.

OMG Bad Cable!

(tags computer, hardware, failure)

I'm back and copying data to my new 0.5 TB RAID-1 drive. This is going to take a while :0

I was totally wrong about my RAID woes... It was a bad cable! I first determined that it wasn't the HDD data condition by retrying the old cable. Then I closely examined the old cable. I could even see it for myself: if I wiggle the cable I could see the contacts inside the clear connector bounce around, eg its not soldered correctly. OMG! Its sickening.

I read somewhere that SATA connectors are supposed to be able to withstand tens of insertions or even less. I wonder if its true. Maybe this is the difference between SATA and eSATA.

5 nines? I don't even require 1 nine

(tags computer, hardware, failure)

I was complaining about RAID-1 woes, but it turns out that it was user error. Never mind that it was me who booted the computer while a cable on my RAID was loose. Though I fixed that problem on another boot, I compounded the problem by ignoring the RAID controller screaming at me at every boot. After I backed up the RAID-1 disks and using rsync to figure out the difference between the disks, I let the RAID controller BIOS fix the disk set. After that the RAID controller doesn't complain at all even with the same HDDs. (Also I replaced the SATA cable to each of the drives but I doubt that is resolution.) Imagine that, the RAID controller checks the stability of the data of each drive.

So, no, my motherboard is working fine. In fact I'm going to trust it with more RAID.

Now I'm going to fix my computer. I just need to remove 3 HDDs from my case. Instead of posting a blog about it, I should be motivating myself to do it. Hence the title. My computer has been "down" for a little over a month. (I am changing the meaning of uptime to just my data, not my host OS for dramatic purposes.) Uptime for my data doesn't seem to be important to me, only connection to my entertainment Internet. I haven't synced my iPod in a month! Also I seem to be more dependant on services provided over the Internet like Gmail and Google Reader.

Okay, I'm turning off the computer now. Here we go!

Jinxed it: Current RAID 1 woes

(tags hardware, computer, failure)

Looks like my Project Sugar got upset or jealous about my new PC explorations, because it corrupted my RAID 1 data drive. Yikes. I don't have a backup of my RAID 1 drive. How to backup at least 70 GiB of stuff? Get another HDD?

About a month ago, I got a new SATA HDD to replace a failing non-RAID data drive, initally via external USB 2.0, but starting last week, via internal SATA. I must have bumped something or whatever, because the RAID drive problem started then. First it was as if the motherboard didn't recognize the RAID 1 at boot. I figured out that BIOS couldn't recognize one of the drives, and/or finding the second drive as failed. Denial set in and tried a trick: I forceably deleted and re-added the registration of the RAID array, which seemed to work only if I didn't cold boot.

But I checked the Event Viewer's "System" Log and the RAID driver was failing with timeouts. Uh oh. I decided to do a ChkDisk but that revealed the corruption. I lost:

• My zsh shell history
• My iTunes Library metadata
• recent CDs I ripped
• other not so recent CDs that seemed to get the contents of the recent CDs
• my trust in software RAID controllers

I truly don't know how much has been corrupted. :( There's no log file a log file available in Event Viewer's Application Log "Winlogon" source (thanks pcstats forum) but it is incomplete (!), and all I have to work on is the modification dates and the re-syncing of archaic MP3s to the iPod that left my head scratching.

The biggest problem I think is my iTunes Library metadata. The binary file iTunes Library.itl was lost, and it was rebuilt from supposedly pristine iTunes Library.xml file. Unforunately that meant that every song in my 50GB library was imported with today's date. Ugh. And unfortunately the iTunes COM for Windows SDK doesn't seem to allow modifying the Date Added field. Perhaps if I (programatically) edit the XML file by changing the Date Added field and force a re-import... XML massaging, ugh.

I considered building another RAID 1 ... I would need a interface card (3970 yen) because I think its the SATA controller failing. Then I would want two 500 GiB HDD (1_3500 yen each). Then again I thought, "what are you going to do when that fails"?

I'm leaning more and more towards online services, and online storage (backup) is something I need to look into. At say 70 GiB, a service such as Amazon Simple Storage Service would cost me initially 20.00 USD the first month and 10.00 USD for storage. I could either try to figure out how to rotate and encrypt a backup out of this raw service, or try a registered backup client. My naive implementation would require a seperate disk for scratch space. Hm. Naive.