The Raid 1 setup in my server has been driving me nuts.

It failed to build so I figured it was time to replace the two Samsung 250Gb drives wth two Western Digital 500Gb Caviars Raid Edition 2's. I needed the extra space anyway.

I bought the drives from scan.co.uk along with a new 150Gb Raptor. After a pile of testing, they all proved to be duds and I RMA's them back. Couldn't believe I could get three bad hard disks in a row.

I got two more Western Digitals Caviars and went through more testing - mostly using the Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows. It's turns out that if there is one bad sector in either disk you're using to build a mirror, the build will fail. Read KB325615.

A bad sector can get remapped at both a file system level and by the hard disk firmware. For a RAID 1 build, it's got to be done at the firmware level. This requres the disk to first read and then write to that bad sector. I found that if I ran the diagnostic tool to do an extended test followed by a write zero's test, I could eventually get rid of a few bad sectors.

For one drive it took about 37 hours for each test. What a pain! It took about two weeks of messing about to finally get the RAID 1 drives rebuilt and loaded up.

I've built myself a new main PC based on a Core 2 Duo E8400 and an Abit IP35 Pro XE. Here's the full article on the components and the build. I built my previous machine back in 2004 and was still running a P4 2.8 Northwood so I figured it was about time for an upgrade.

I've also made the move to Microsoft Vista Ultimate now that Service Pack 1 is out. The Windows Experience Index rates the overall hardware at 5.7. Everything is 5.9 except the E8400 which is 5.7. Complete rubbish! It should be 5.9 across the board.

Looking forward to overclocking it once I'm sure it's stable. I'd like to get it to 3.6Ghz and maybe even 4.0 like many others have.

I'm back in the UK and have been upgrading my home computing infrastructure. My first step was to upgrade my broadband connection so I switched from Plus.Net to O2 Broadband Premium after doing a bit of research on various UK plans.

O2 Broadband bought out Be Unlimited and offers an ADSL2+ network with download speeds of up to 20 mbps.

I've managed to get a connection of 13,272 kbps (down) and 1325 kbps (up) after getting the noise margin tweaked. It's awesome. Ping times playing online is down around 20ms! Downloads are unlimited. I'm about 1.5 km away from exchange.

The caveat is that to get these speeds, I've had to run wires right to the master socket. If I go through the extension line, the speed drops down to about 5 Mbps.

But the great news is that I'm paying less than I was before! There was no connection fee and I get a discount as an O2 PAYG customer and there's even a cashback through www.quidco.com. It's just £10 a month. Excellent value and I'm a happy customer.

Still travelling so that's why there's been a lack of posts. I just got back from China and Japan. Asia is in love with their mobile phones. It's no surprise that mobile apps is the future.

I've shopped around in various electronic shops and even cruised through Akihabara "electric city" but prices don't differ that much. In China its hard to tell because you have to go through a ton of haggling to find the real price. Japan wasn't cheap. I read an article on Tomshardware that places the US as one of the cheapest places to buy elecronics. I haven't found any great deals in Asia. You might get 10% off here and there. You mights as well just find somewhere that's tax free to get that kind of deal.

I travelled for 7 weeks around Europe and it was quite a struggle to find Internet cafe's. Wifi hotspots are common but it was rarely conveniet to find an Internet cafe. It was also a bit of struggle to use European keyboards that swap the Z and Y keys. You use those letters more than you think! We also found more than one hotel that offered an Internet connection using an old PC and browser which typically aren't supported anymore.

But in Kuala Lumpur its a different story and I suspect much of Asia is the same. Internet cafe's are still in vogue.

I bought my first digital SLR camera last week. I used to shoot a Contax film SLR many years ago before going for a digital compact camera. Early DSLR's were way too expensive.

But the DSLR market has many good cameras now for a reasonable price. I knew from the start it was going to be either a Canon or a Nikon because of their reputations and breadth of quality lenses that both offered.

I went for the Nikon D80. I reasoned that I wanted more than the entry level cameras (D40x and 400D) so that left either the Canon 30D or the Nikon D80 and D200. I liked the D80 as it wasn't very heavy compared to the other two and offered all the features I needed. It was an easy choice.

However, choosing the lens has been really hard. I want to travel light so I really just want a single zoom lens. That also avoids getting dust in the camera through lens changes.

My first choice was the AF-S 18-200 VR but after a day of shooting I was pretty disappointed by the lack of sharpness - particularly on the long end of the zoom. It didn't seem much better than a compact camera and I was expecting a lot more sharpness from a DSLR. On macro shots, it just didn't show up surface textures that well.

I returned it to Kerrisdale cameras (in Victoria, Canada) and tried another copy of the same lens just in case the one I had was a dud. Nope - the second one was lacking too. I have since read up on the internet and found quite a few people complain that its a soft lens at either end of its range but that's the sacrifice you make when you have cheap consumer glass and a huge zoom range. The build quality is also lacking. I have to say the 18-200 zoom range is fantastic for a travel camera.

Instead, I'm now using the AF-S 18-70 kit lens. It's 1/3 the price and has a respectable 4x's zoom range. But I'm still not impressed with the sharpness. Maybe I'm expecting too much? At any rate, it's supposed to be better than the other kit lens which has a 18-135 zoom range.

I've been tempted to splurge on the AF-S DX 18-55 2.8 G IF ED lens but its horrendously expensive, very heavy and covers quite a short zoom range. There are many people raving about how good it is.

So I'm stuck with the 18-70 until Nikon creates a better walkabout lens for me. I'd like them to invent something like an AF-S DX 18-105 VR ED. Take the current kit lens, add a little bit more range, add VR, add pro glass and voila, it would be almost perfect.

I bought an Epson Perfection V100 Scanner last week.

I needed to scan some documents that I wanted to take travelling with us. That was my main motivation. But its been on my mind to get one for a while now. Scanners are just plain useful. The big project I want to do is scan all my 35mm slides and negatives but I've been humming and hahing about what's the best scanner to get for a couple of years. I mean I only ever want to scan all that film I have once and that's it. Flatbed scanners like the Epson V700 seem to be able do the job as well as dedicated (low end) film scanners. As always with technology, it pays to wait since it just gets better. Buy only when you need it.

Since I'm not about to embark on a film scanning project for at least another year, I just needed something cheap and cheerful for document archiving. The V100 does a great job and it's only £60. I wouldn't use it for scanning film or photo's but it fine for any kind of document.

The V100 has an optical resolution of 3200 dpi. The next scanner in the product line is the V350 which has an optical resolution of 4800 dpi. I'm willing to bet that the electronics in both products are exactly the same and the V100 just has an artificial limit. You can see where I'm going right? I'm sure there must be a hack that would enable the V100 to scan at 4800 dpi. Tell me if you know how.

There are cheaper scanners but I was particularly impressed that the V100 is supported by SilverFast. They're well known as making pretty much the best scanning software around. That made it an easy decision.

I mentioned before that I bought a Samsung YP-TP mp3 player. I just want to say I've been very impressed with this device. It's very easy to use and the battery lasts a long time. I just upgraded to the v1.6 firmware and it now supports bookmarks. This is perfect for the lectures I listen to from The Teaching Company.

Great little device and its now come down to £105 on Amazon UK.

There are some negatives. The file transfer is a bit slow. My daughter did manage to crash it once but I've never done it. I wish it could play quicktime movies since that's what my digital camera creates. But I consider video on this size of device just a novelty anyway. I also wish these mp3 players would support a line out so it would be easy to connect to an amplifier. The earphones it came with are rubbish but that's always the case. I need to replace them.

I've also bought the Media Monkey Gold version (with Lifetime Updates). It works just fine with the YPT9 although you do need to install Windows Media Player 10 or above for the device to get recognized.

I've been flirting with A2DP for the last few months and have generally decided its a bad idea.

The main motivation was that my wife wanted to listen to podcasts and audio books in the kitchen. First, I got some A2DP speakers (from the Orange shop) and a Bluetooth USB stick. I got the old "Amazon 3rd party not in stock" trick which got me a USB Bluetooth 1.1 stick that I didn't want. Wasn't impressed with the usability of the BlueSoleil software but it worked as long as the laptop was in line of sight of the speakers.

I bought another Bluetooth USB stick - this one a version 2.0 spec. It was actually worse with some random cutouts. The Widcomm drivers were more user friendly but weren't reliable. But the line-of-sight issue made it useless. Even a jug of water or a person standing in the way would cause drop outs.

My wife bought a Sony Ericsson W850i walkman phone. The A2DP worked fine but she found it hard using the software that you use to put music on the phone. While passing through an airport, I bought a Samsung YP-T9 mp3 player (with A2DP support) on a bit of a lust whim. It worked well with the A2DP speakers and its simple enough to load with music.

But when you boil it down, it's a pain turning on and binding A2DP connections. At home, its just as easy to plug in a wire. When the YP-T9 is transmitting, it turns very sluggish which I suspect is due to the processing overheads. That's gotta kill the batteries.

I also find it annoying that A2DP is sold as "CD quality". It's not. It's 320kps. That ain't bad but its not CD quality. A piece of wire gives better quality and doesn't kill your batteries.

For the home scenario of remoting audio, its better to use WiFi. The only scenario where A2DP might be worth it is in a car. However, I decided its not worth spending £150 on a new stereo head just to get this feature. Instead, I bought a AudiaX DGT-202 FM transmitter for £23. It's not the greatest solution but its simple, inexpensive and it works in any car.

I've sold the A2DP speakers and my wife just moves her laptop.

If you haven't heard, check out the new Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR). Awesome. It's been a long time since I've been excited by a technology.

I thought it was about time Microsoft brought something like Silverlight out. There have been numerous Microsoft projects trying to introduce new UI technologies that never got released. With Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight, Microsoft has firmly put up a neon sign showing how to construct the next generation of rich user interfaces. It solves the Rich Internet App (RIA) puzzle. 

But the DLR vastly improves this proposition. RIAs, installed on demand, built with your favourite dynamic (or static) langauge and that run fast! Yes! It's what I've been waiting for. Well, I hope the reality checks out when I start diving into the details.

This will relegate ASP.NET and AJAX to pure breadth applications. I've always felt AJAX was a kludge. Libraries built on JavaScript just doesn't feel right. To me, AJAX is an indictment of stifled browser development.

Now what about Adobe Flash?

This will be interesting. Flash is way, way, way ahead. It won't die or disappear. The tool and community support is phenomenal.  Flash will always have greater runtime breadth and a great choice for media delivery. But Silverlight + DLR will put a big dent in the Flash + Flex for business RIAs proposition. It wouldn't surprise me if Flex dies in a few years.

Just discovered this great little utility from Pixelab Inc. Succintly described as xcopy on steroids, it's a command line tool with a huge array of options. What I like is this one:

XXCOPY M:\SOURCE\ E:\DEST\ /CLONE

which synchronizes a destination directory with a source directory ignoring files that haven't changed and deleting files no longer in the source. It's a much easier way to backup my data files - especially my photos and music. Just gotta put a few of these lines in a batch file for a dead simple backup method.

 

A few months ago, I wrote a small .NET application I've called the Send HTML Wizard. It was cool doing a bit of coding in C# again and actually finishing it.

Download Send HTML Wizard

To install, you just need to unzip and run. You will need the Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0 installed on your machine as well.

The wizard prompts you through five steps:

1. Get your SMTP server information
2. Get the path to an HTML file on your local hard disk
3. Get the list of TO and CC recipients you want to send the message to
4. Get the message subject line and alternative body text
5. Send

Then it creates an email message using System.Net.Mail encoding the HTML file as the message body. It will embed any files that are linked using href=, src=, dynsrc= and background= tags. These embedded files don't even show up as attachments.

I originally did this for a friend to see whether we could embed video and play it in-situ within Outlook. It could be done with the dynsrc tag and IE 6 but IE 7 tighted up security and killed it. However, it's still useful as a way of sending HTML email. The other way is to use Outlook signature files.

The app is flagged as beta since that's the level of quality you can expect. I haven't done any extensive testing and don't plan any further releases.

The app makes use of the Wizard Framework dll by Divelements which is included in the zip file. It made it much easier to code and works well.

Hairball alert. This has been bugging me recently; I've concluded there are three devices I want.

The first device functions as a phone above all else. I also want it to be a decent MP3 player - at least 4GB. It must do calendar and contacts well. Email is good. I don't mind if it has a camera too and maybe some games but it's not critical. However, it's very critical that it has a really long battery life. It makes sense that it would be a flash-based device and must survive nasty shocks. The good news is that these devices are coming along and they're getting better all the time. I'm looking forward to see how the iPhone challenges the market.

The second device is essentially a PDA with a replaceable laptop hard disk. I want it mostly for portable media storage - pictures, music, video, PDFs. It needs to playback on either a small screen or external TV's. I'd like A2DP support. I want to plug it into the car as my main music source. It must hold my entire music collection. I want it for backing up digital photo's on CF and SD cards while I'm travelling. I want it to be a USB Host so I can manage the files on my phone/music player and external USB hard disks. I would like a few simple PDA-style applications - GPS navigation and Internet browsing would be my top picks. Some games would be cool too. Long battery life would be great but isn't as critical as my phone since I expect to carry it less and plug it in more frequently.

I can't find this second device - yet. The closest beast is the Epson P-5000 but it's very expensive and the hard disk can't be replaced.  While I really like the media playback angle, the killer application for me at the moment is CF/SD photo backup and storage. To that end, the Hyperdrive Space looks like a good deal. Nextodi have some interesting products too. Archos does good stuff but they don't do backup.  I think there's a real gap in the market that ripe to be filled. The trick is to keep it very small with massive storage and focus on a few key scenario's and not be too general.

The third device is a laptop - a full computer with a keyboard that can run any app and is comfortable to type on.

These three devices would work well together. The phone+player lives in my pocket and goes everywhere. Its job is communications, time organisation and a bit of entertainment during commutes. The PDA+hard disk is my travel device and lives in my shoulder bag. It has all my entertainment and backs up my digital camera. I want maps and guidebooks on it. GPS navigation and Wifi Internet access would top it off. The laptop is for applications. It can use the PDA+hard disk as an external storage device. Meanwhile the PDA+hard disk can change the photo's and music on the phone.

I'm watching the Ultra Mobile PC products as the niche they fill is intriguing. They combine the laptop function with the portable media storage function. However a generic pc has to have a decent sized display screen for the UI to work so they can never very small. That's why I believe the PDA format is better than a UMPC. However the PDA will be relegated to a niche scenarios if it doesn't get more storage. For travelling, I'd love to have this PDA + hard disk device but I can't find it yet.

Last Christmas, I got my wife a TomTom One Europe GPS car navigation system. She had been lusting over this little device for quite a while. I did some research and all the reviews were very good for it.

She doesn't really use it a whole lot since we usually know where we're going. However last week, I borrowed it and took it to Austria for a ski trip. It's the first time I ever tried relying completely on a GPS system to get me somewhere. I must say it worked really well and both my travel companions are now considering getting one too.

It's a bit weird but I found you soon start to completely ignore road signs and just follow instructions from the unit. I can see it being a bad habit if you find you've programmed your destination wrong! I also found that having a GPS unit makes you feel much more confident about not getting lost and that makes you more willing to explore an area. It also makes for less arguements between the driver and the navigator! Highly recommended.

I recently bought a new server on behalf of the local junior school. I wanted a good name brand server for which they could get support. Custom building a server wasn't an option because of insurance/liability issues.

I did quite a bit of research to source it. I wanted a multi-core CPU and much preferred an Intel Core 2 Duo for its excellent performance and lower power consumption. I also wanted a case that could hold at least 3 hard disks and a motherboard with spare SATA connections.

The cheapest server that offered all this was an HP ProLiant ML110 G4. It was cheaper than anything from Supermicro or Dell or anything else I looked at. I bought the minimal configuration which included an Xeon 3040 (1.86Ghz), 512Mb ECC PC2 5300 DDR II RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, 160Gb hard disk, DVD-ROM and built-in video.

I also bought two extra hard disks to install in the server in a RADI 1 (mirror) configuration. It's much cheaper buying them seperately and installing them yourself than adding it to the server configuration. I chose two Western Digital Raid Edition (RE2) 400Gb SATA150 disks (WD4000YR). These are excellent enterprise level disks.

It was all bought from PC World Business for only £620 - a bargain in my books.

I assembled the server this last week. The build quality is a bit flimsy but it does the job. I'm pleased that there are 4 SATA connections and room for four hard disks. It's a bit noisy - especially the turbine start-up - but it will be hidden away in a closet so that doesn't matter. I'm dead pleased that we've been able to put together such a well specified server so little money.

I recently bought this case and yesterday moved my Athlon gaming PC into it.

It's good value for only £33 but you need to be a familiar with building PC's if you buy this case. There's no documentation. The drive cage feels a bit crude but it does the job and comes with rubber grommet mounts for up to five hard disks. I don't like the air vents in the side panel; it seems to allow the internal resonance to be heard more. The 120mm fan on the back is quite good with three speed settings. The highest speed is too loud but the middle position is ok. There's space for a 120mm fan to be mounted on the front but the mounting is a naff plastic thing. I'm going to try and install a Nexus fan there soon and then I can set the rear fan to it's lowest setting. Hopefully that will make it a real quiet machine.

If you're trying to build a PC on the cheap, it's a decent case.

Followup: I installed the Nexus fan on the naff plastic mount and switched the rear fan to its lowest setting. It's now much quieter. While I can live with it as is, the Nexus fan running at 12v is a tad bit loud. Once I come up with a cheap way to undervolt it, the machine will be near silent. It would also help to add some sound dampening material to the case lid and cover the main vent.

I recently helped the local Boy Scouts club source a wireless router and modem and install it. After a bunch of research, I concluded the best value was with either a Netgear DG834G or a 3Com Office Connect 3CRWDR101A-75. After several failed bids I finally managed to grab a DG834G on ebay for only £32. It's a version 2 rather than a version 3 which is a little unfortunate. The main difference is RHOS compliance although I hope that they will still be providing firmware upgrades for version 2.

I went to the BETT show a couple of weeks ago. I don't know what BETT exactly stands for. British Education Technology something or other. It's the definitive educational technology show in the UK and probably Europe. It's huge. It took up almost all of the Olympia conference center. Jenny and I got there by around 10:30 and spent five and a half solid hours wandering the aisles. That wasn't enough time to cover all of it. We didn't even take in any of the seminars.

I found it pretty inspiring. There's a great match between ICT and Education. It's been a growing interest of mine for a couple of years now. There's so much potential but at the same time it's a very difficult task to get it right. It can also be a very expensive exercise.

I've even been mulling over doing a Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) and qualifying as an Secondary School ICT Teacher. It could be my second career.

I've made a few more upgrades to my home computers. First, I got fed up with my P4 1.6 in the server and upgraded it with 2nd hand P4 2.8Ghz (800FSB) I got off ebay. The 1.6 would often get pegged at 100% CPU utilisation but the 2.8 is working out much better and the hyperthreading keeps the UI responsive. The lesson is that for an entry level server, at least get hyperthreading. Of course, dual-core is better but I really like that the Northwood 2.8 runs cool using only 69 watts max. If I was building a server today, I'd get a Core 2 Duo.

I needed some new 800Mhz RAM to go in the server so I took the 1Gb from my gaming machine. It was just slow "value " memory. This was a good excuse to get some performance RAM to boost gaming performance. After a bit of research, I settled on 1Gb of Crucial Ballistix. CPU-Z reports the latencies at 2-3-2-8-7. I haven't gone through any overclocking exercises yet but I'll give it a shot at some point.

Soon after I upgraded the server CPU, I started getting Blue Screens Of Death (BSOD) with the error "unmountable_boot_drive". I could fix it with chkdsk but it would soon hang and get another BSOD. SeaTools from Seagate reported quite a few bad sectors so I decided I had better replace the disk rather than bang away trying to work around it.

I now have a Western Digital Caviar 250Mb RAID edition boot drive. I keep my server on much of the time so I've gone for the RAID edition. I now wish all my other disks in the server had been RAID editions or rated for 24x7 operation. I've set the power management settings to power off the hard disks after an 1 hour in the hope that will extend their life in the long run.

After all these upgrades, I've found that I now have enough bits and pieces lying around to build another PC! So I've ordered a new Antec case... :-)

My three year old PC built using an Antec Sonata case started developing an annoying whine. I tried ignoring it for quite a while hoping it would just go away. No luck. Eventually traced it to the Antec power supply that came with the case. So after consulting the SilentPCReview website, I bought a Seasonic S12-430 to replace it.

I'm very pleased with the Seasonic power supply. Very quiet and excellent cabling and connections. The only thing that would make it better is if you could unplug unused cables and monitor the PSU fan speed.

After replacing the power supply, I discovered a new problem. The old Antec power supply cleverly controlled the case fan so that it ran quietly unless the system got hot The Seasonic didn't provide this so now I had to run the fan at a constant 12V and it was proving itself a noisy fan.

Back to SilentPCReview with the idea of replacing the fan. After drooling over the pricey Noctua fan that I couldn't justify buying, I bought a few Nexus fans from Novatech at half the price. The Nexus fan proved much, much quieter at 12V and I now have the option to drop the voltage and make it near silent. I can certainly recommend these products.