06 Nov 2009
~Three~ Five days!
google.fr has had those ugly logos for ~three~ five FUCKING days.
Why would we care about a lame kid’s show that wasn’t even broadcasted here. The custom logo is not even on google.com!
“It’s the 40th anniversary”, GREAT! Then why shouldn’t we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the birth of Myolie Wu? She’s as popular as beurk and Hernie Hernie here.
I’ve only learnt the existence of Sesame Street because those guys are used for memes on the intertubes. And I can tell you I’ve had my share of lame TV shows for kids.
Who’s behind that Google logo crap? I don’t want to feel like I’m doing my searches on a HappyMeal website. Do the right holders need to sell a few thousands DVD for christmas in France?
At least background pictures on Bing are appealing…
FUCK YOU BIG BIRD!
Update : Squid FTW
05 Nov 2009
UPDATE: There is a SPCR review of this motherboard :http://www.silentpcreview.com/zotac-ion
It’s been a while since my last post, so here’s a fat one!
I want to tell you about my NAS I built a little more than 1 month from now.
My own computer history left me with a small amount of hard drives, from various sizes and various vendors. Each one was partitioned in fancy ways, and mostly in NTFS, since I’ve been using Windows for my desktop for almost 10 years and it was just easier to keep it that way.
Needless to say, almost every partition was full (of Ubuntu and Debian ISO cd images of course) which was preventing me from “re-organizing” the storage.
Sharing those files to my laptop and gateway left me with only one easy possibility: Windows’s CIFS, which sucks pretty much.
My last Desktop was showing signs of weakness and old age (4 years of 24/7 operation) and drives would disappear randomly from the system every now and then. Therefore I decided I needed a dedicated computer for centralized storage.
I needed it to be reliable, as low power as possible since it was supposed to be on 24/7 and I care about the baby seals. Also, I really wanted a ‘real’ computer, on a x86/amd64 architecture where I would be able to run some Linux system and be able to run heavy tasks on it, like encoding a raw movie (of my holidays of course).
ITX form factor is great. I’ve already used those little cheap cards for my gateway at home. Low space, low power consumption, fanless little jewels.
I needed a usable storage space of at the very least 1Tb. I also wanted this storage to use some level of RAID, for safety, and also for fun (UPDATE This sucks, RAID is not safety, it’s disponibility. Do backups instead). Read/write performance is not what I had in mind.
For the rest of this post, keep in mind that I’m also a huge cheapass.
I didn’t want to pay for those still expensive 2Tb hard disks. So I’m building a RAID, that gives me more than 1Tb of storage, using only 1Tb disks. My answer is : 3x 1Tb on RAID5.
RAID1 would have been great, but that would require another drive. Also RAID5 has poor writing performances but that’s not really a problem since I’ll mainly be reading from the NAS.
Of course, I’m not buying any expensive RAID controller card so I’ll leave that task to linux and mdadm.
Regarding power consumption, noise level and $$$, the 1Tb Western Digital Caviar Green looked really interesting.
Ok so I have chosen my disks. Now I’ll need to plug them into some motherboard that’ll run Linux. Again, the requirements are low power consumption, cheap price, low noise levels.
I’ve been reading about Atom platform for quite a long time, everyone praising the decent performances and low power consumption. I also The problem was that most of the MB at that time came with 945* chipsets which were said to be Watt guzzlers.
The ION chipset from Nvidia really looked more like it. I’ve always used Nvidia chipsets in my computers and always been happy with them. So I went out hunting for an intel Atom+Nvidia ION based board, with at least 3 SATA slots at a reasonable price.
Mini ITX + > 3 sata slots + Atom/ION + cheap = narrow choice.*
The website mini-itx.com had just released a review of the “Zotac IONITX A” motherboard and the results were very interesting. I really liked the idea of the “internal” PSU. A block-type AC/DC converter was included, and the PSU is build in the motherboard. It means I don’t have to care about power supply at all, and I could use whichever case I wanted. This particular Zotac ION MB had Wifi included, which I didn’t care about. The best suiting model was the C type.
Now they have an even better one, the F type, with 4 sata slots and a PCI slot. I’ll let you google for the specs, because Zotac’s webpage is really lame.
That process of looking for the best motherboard took me around a month. I was still half hesitating and half waiting for new product to be available.
Last problem to be solved: the case. Cheapassness couldn’t allow me to buy some shiny NAS case, with hotswappable bays and whatnots like this. After double-checking that a miniITX board could fit in a ATX case, I looked for the cheapest ATX case I could find. I could get one for around 20€ (that’s like 19£).
I bought my motherboard when I discovered a local shop had a few of those Zotac A model, for the nice price of 160€ (that’s around 7162$). I could avoid shipping money and delay!
So I got my motherboard, 2x2 Gb DDR modules, and 3 1Tb WD Caviar green….
Yeah I can hear you think: “3 identical disks bought from the same shop will surely die at the same time”. To this I’ll answer: BLARGH BLARGH BLARGH. I’m stronger than the odds!
At last, I wanted to have my whole system on another media than the disk array. Since the Zotac motherboard doesn’t provide any IDE slot, I just bought a 8 Gb Corsair Voyager Mini USB thumb which was supposed to be on of the fastest usb key around…
Anyway, enough tl;dr, time to play Grown-up-lego!
Teh box, on a purple couch:
Teh box, open, on a purple couch:
Close up of teh board, on a coir mat:
That board has almost everything included. It just lack a PCI or PCIe slot, and maybe a few extra SATA slots.
Now, to screw that board in a PC case. Yes the case, I’d have to find the cheapest one. I actually found a REALLY cheap case in the computer-parts stores district. On the pavement. For free. Here it is, in the state I found it:
And after the useless stuff removed, and a quick cleaning:
And after some screwdriver’s evil power summoning:
Yep! That’s all! The NAS is complete. Notice how the drives’ power cables all gather on the little motherboard molex slot with the included ‘3 way’ adapter.
You also might have noticed that a fan suddenly appeared on the heat sink over the atom and ion chipset. Just after a quick boot on the Debian installer, the whole thing was hot, almost painful to the touch so even if the constructor says the fan is optional, it’s not an option to not use it.
It’s a thin 5 or 6 mm wide fan that was a little too loud. So I just built a home made ‘fanmate’ around a common LM317:
You’ll find the schematic in any LM317’s datasheet. Don’t forget the little heatsink though!
That’s all to be said on the ‘hardware’ part of the NAS. Well except that one of the disks gave me smart errors after 2 weeks and had to be RMA’ed. Of course I couldn’t wait 2 weeks with a degraded RAID so I just bought another WD disk. Now I have a spare one!
For the total bill, I think it’s around:
169 (MB) + 229 (RAM) + 369 (Disks) + 19 (USB thumbdrive) + 5 (fan mate parts) ~ 450 euros (that’s around 1547800 yens).
I used one of those watt-meter plug to get a precise idea of the NAS’s consumption:
50W Peak at boot time
32W Being idle, just after a boot
45W Under heavy load (4 bzip2 –best /dev/urandom and 4 bonnie++ on the whole Raid )
25W After a long idle time, when the disks go in sleepy mode
Oh, it reads 1080p video too.
04 Aug 2009
It’s been eons since my last post about FEWD. So here’s one!
I’d like to introduce my absolute favorite fruit of the summer season: the MELON!
I’m of course talking about the king of melon, the Canteloup type (or ‘charentais’) also called ‘muskmelon’ but I’m not really sure. Here in France we just call it “melon” because any other kind doesn’t deserve that sacred name. Here’s a melon chart so you don’t get lost:
Got it? Green on the outside with generous deep green lines and orange flesh is teh win!
Now that you’re a little more familiar with the melon’s dynasty, let’s find more about the Cantaloup’s way!
So that is your common melon, you’ll find it in every shop that sells it:
Chose one that smells this sweet melon smell through the shell.
It’s a little hard and impractical to attack it directly from the shell. You’ll find it more easy to use a knife and slice it in two (relatively) similar halves. You’ll notice the green meridians are really easy to follow.
You’ll want to obtain something that looks (relatively) like this:
At the first glance you notice two areas. The flesh and the seeds nest. This kind of melon is nice enough to group all its seed in the same place, unlike other fruits. Yes, Watermelon I’m looking at you.
Another great invention of the Cantaloup is the pre-cut seeds nest. You just have to use a spoon and gently insert it at the frontier between seeds and flesh:
In this case, the shape of the nest adapts perfectly to the shape of my large spoon. It’s so easy you don’t even need adult supervision.
The operation might leave some rogue seeds still attached to your precious orange loot. It’s up to you to leave them or scrap them and go “THERE CAN BE ONLY NONE”!
The result is an orange jewel:
You’re done! No complicated tool needed, just use the previous spoon. Now the feast can begin! hoorraaayyy! You’re about to experience extreme juicy sweetness made fruit. I mean, OMFG just look at this:
While you’re in total melon-bliss, you’ll also notice how handy the melon is. The shell has now the shape of a bowl. It will fit easily in your hand and will keep the while melon liquid essence from running around.
As you’re eating, you will inexorably dig til you get to the green part. Yeah you’ve guessed right, you shouldn’t go farther than that. Actually the shell is strong enough and will prevent any misjudged movement from piercing the shell and letting the juice run on your hand. It’s again really easy: stop eating when it’s hard and green.
The empty shell is easily disposable. It is biodegradable too. Don’t throw it though, I’m sure you can find many clever uses for it. It can be a good ashtray for example and the wet shell will prevent any fortuitous fire.
As a conclusion Cantaloup is the proof that God exists and loves us. Share some with your friends! It goes well with Porto wine and [Prosciutto]
Prosciutto
. Melon is Love!
Cheers Awesome Melon!