In two weeks, I’ll be heading out there for the 15th Annual Intercollegiate Taiko Invitationals, coming back to NJ, and then heading back a few days later to Cupertino, CA until September.

I will of course be making regular updates (via facebook, twitter, and this blog) and posting photos, etc.  So check back! : )

Hard drives fail.  All the time.  (Google says so.)

It’s happened to me before, and I’ve seen it happen enough to my friends to know it’ll happen again.  They just weren’t built to last.

Somehow, I’ve been lucky so far in that I haven’t had a major loss due to hard drive failure yet… I’ve always managed to replace them before they die.  I can’t count on that though.

One of these days I’ll turn on my computer and hear that all too familiar click… click…. click buzzz. Or worse, have some component on the bottom circuitboard burn to a crisp (they’re called Quantum Fireballs for a reason…).  And I’ll have lost my games, videos, music, operating system, and/or (perhaps the worst) my pictures.

My needs?

So instead of waiting for that day to come and for me to be left with nothing, I decided I need to start backing up at least my more important data on a regular basis.  This includes my photos, personal documents, video/audio recordings and projects, and whatever else I feel like.  At this point I’d like to come up with a decent backup solution, not just an extra drive in my desktop (besides, I don’t have any bays left!).

I’d like to leave open the possibility to serve other clients off the same box, not just the one I happen to be working on.  It needs to be accessible by multiple clients at once.

I’d like for it also to be network ready/accessible, in case I want to lug it somewhere else to work (home/dorm?).  i.e. I have my main desktop to do work on at my dorm, but on the weekends I usually come home, so I should be able to grab it and hook it up at home for a weekend full of video-editing-goodness or whatever else I’m working on.

It needs to have fast network transport, 1000Mbps is required.

My options?

Online backup – There are a bunch of online services (Mozy, Carbonite, iDrive, to name a few) which can do scheduled or manual backups from your computer to offsite servers over the internet.  They offer some ammount of data storage, usually for a monthly rate, and you can do restores over the web or have them send you DVDs (usually for an extra fee) of your data in the case of failure.

That’s all pretty cool, but for now it’s too expensive, and the storage is too limited for my purposes (my photos from just 2008 total about 100GB!).  Plus, 2/3 of the year I’m at a location with a HORRIBLE internet connection *cough*tcnj*cough*.  I’d probably take all semester to sync my photos up to their servers.

Offsite (manual, ext. HD or DVD) – I could also manually copy all the files onto an external hard drive and take it home every week or something and swap it out, that way I always have a weekly backup off-site in case something happens at my dorm.  That’d be nice, but it’s not a complete solution… maybe as part of a bigger backup strategy.

I could do the same thing with DVD.  Burn all my photos to DVDs as I take them and keep a copy on-site and a copy off-site.  I might so some of this, but with DVDs only holding 4.7, that becomes a heck of alot of DVDs to burn and keep track of.

Drobo – I’ve had my eye on the Drobo for awhile, and it seems to be a pretty good solution for backup that you don’t have to worry about.  A drive fails?  A light turns red until you replace it, and your data is always accessible.  No commands to run to rebuild, no worrying about matching drive sizes like you need to in most RAIDs, the Drobo makes all of that invisible to the user, and the system.  Drobo just uses whatever you give it and it makes your data safe/redundant and it appears as just another hard drive to the system.

Dream come true?  Maybe.  I’ve heard these things aren’t foolproof either though, as they’ve been known to fail.  If they do, it’s not just as simple as taking the hard drives out and throwing them in another Drobo.

Also, just the unit by itself costs $500, and it doesn’t have any network capability.  DroboShare is an add-on that connects the drobo to the network, but that’s another $200.  That’s $700 for a box with no hard drives.

In the end, the Drobo seems a bit too proprietary/creepy for me.  I like to know I have control over my data and can recover it

NAS box – A NAS box of some sort would be more configurable than the Drobo, and for a lower price.  I was considering the QNAP TS-409 for awhile.  It’s still $600 though (empty) and I’d still like a bit more flexibility in what I’m working with.

Home built server – This would give me the ultimate flexibility in hardware and software, but it also costs a fair deal.  Even using the cheapest parts, I priced an empty server at about $500 incl. shipping.  Then add the drives to that and… yeah, might as well grab a Drobo.

The plan…

ZFS / OpenSolaris

While doing research for this project, I discovered ZFS, and I’m hooked.  Basically it’s a new filesystem from Sun which can do native snapshots, volume management, continuous integrity checking and automatic repair, RAID-Z, storage pools, and best of all, it’s open-source!  Read more about it here.  Anyway, it hasn’t made its way into mainstream Linux (due to some lisencing issues), but OpenSolaris (which is F/OSS) includes it!  Score!

Inspiried by other people who had set up similar servers with ZFS and cheap hardware, I decided this was probably the way to go.

The hardware

By luck I stumbled upon a Dual Opteron 2.0GHz, 4GB RAM, 120GB, with 3 free SATA ports 1U rackmount server which I should be able to score for ~$125.  I can then grab 3 x 1TB SATA drives for ~$100 each, install OpenSolaris in a RAIDZ configuration, and that’ll be 2TB of redundant, networked storage for about $425.  Not bad…

Eventually I’d like to do the exact same thing with something like a Rackable System S3012 ( (4x1TB RAIDZ) x 3 for 9TB total redundant storage!?!? ) , but I think I’ll have to wait until I can afford something like that / I can pick a cheap one up second-hand.

Once I get it up and running, I’d like to connect to it as an iSCSI target from my desktop (Vista), and also test how OpenSolaris’s built-in CIFS/SMB server runs.  If I this works well ( / if my parents fund it) I could set one of these up in the basement, hooked into the home Win2k3 domain controller for Active Directory authentication, which would be really cool!

Anyway, it’s going to take me a few days to get my hands on one of these things, so I’ll post back when I actually have it and let you know how it goes!

1. No privacy policy

A Privacy Policy is kind of nessecary if I’m going to be giving them any kind of financial (or personal) information. Authority Sites doesn’t seem to have one. Actually I cant find any kind of policy at all on the website.

2. Insufficient contact info

The only listing for contact info is a general email address. What if I want to speak to a real person? What if I want to know who to issue the subpoena to when my check doesn’t get delivered?

3. No Google reputation

A Google search for authoritysite.com yeilds a grand total of 29 results. If no one wants to link to authoritysites.com, that doesn’t say good things about their service.

4. Spam appears to be primary source of growth

Reading those few results, it appears that most people have heard about the site through spam (be it email or on a forum or something). If you need to spam to attract customers, that doesn’t really help how I view you.

5. Appears to be a one man operation

Looking at the google results, the only contact that shows up is owen@authoritysites.com. The Whois results for the domain seem to show some Owen guy as the person who registered it. Coincidence? I think not…

6. No detailed instructions

On the site, there’s no detailed instructions on how the payment process works, or how the whole process of placing ads on the site. There’s no help section for if someone has problems… there doesn’t seem to be any type of support actually. Maybe because no one uses the service? Or maybe they just don’t care if the publishers have problems.

7. Total # of page on the site: 4

Authoritysites.com has a total of 4 pages to its name. 4 pages. mtwstudios.com has a total of 6,920. Google Adwords (which is a real advertising site) has a total of 51,200 pages. Having a grand total of 4 pages to its name does not make me any more confident.

8. Bad coding

Looking at the code, it’s painfully obvious that whoever made the site has no idea how to code HTML. If you look at the code you can see all the empty and useless elements, improper nesting, and things that don’t make any sense at all. The line

<META content="MSHTML 6.00.2900.2963" name=GENERATOR>

kinda gives it away too. Do I trust some guy who doesn’t know how to code website with coming up for code to put on my website?

Bonus! Doesn’t validate as XHTML.

Try clicking the link at the bottom of the page that says “Valid XHTML”. You’ll notice it’s not.

Bonus 2! Favicon.ico

Take a look at the favicon for the domain. Last time I checked “Authority Sites” does not abbreviate to “HM”. I might be wrong though…

Conclusion

In conclusion, I don’t think I’d trust authoritysites with my business or my personal information. Until they fix or address these issues, I’d advise against using their service.

Facebook

In the past few weeks, Facebook has unveiled a number of exciting new features, from Facebook Marketplace on May 14th to the Facebook Platform on the 25th. Facebook Marketplace offers a place for people to put things up for sale and to discover what others in their network are trying to get rid of. At TCNJ, it eliminates the need for Nexus Trade (which, after months of being online has failed to really take off at least at our campus). The Platform is the logical progression following the Facebook API, which debuted last year. This new application framework is one I’m quite excited about and (if I’m not mistaken) makes Facebook unrivaled in terms of developer-friendliness, as social-networking sites go. If anyone has an idea for an application they’d like to see or would like to work with me on one, tell me!

Further Reading:

• Techcrunch.com – Facebook Launches Facebook Platform; They are the Anti-MySpace
• Techcrunch.com – MySpace v. Facebook: “It’s Not A Decision. It’s an IQ Test”

Linux on Dell computers

Finally, a major computer manufacturer has started offering Linux pre-installed on their machines as an alternative to Windows. On May 25th, Dell started offering Ubuntu Linux 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) pre-installed on 3 models of its computer systems: Dimension E520 N, Inspiron E1505 N, XPS 410 N. Hopefully they’ll start opening this up to more systems and more distributions of Linux, but even this is a great start! Watching Dell explaining Linux to the average user reminded me how far Linux has really come in terms of user-friendliness and maturity, even in the past 5 years.

Further Reading:

• Dell.com – Dell’s Ubuntu system offerings
• Direct2Dell – Dell Offers Three Consumer Systems With Ubuntu 7.04

Firefox reaches 25%

According to W3Counter, Firefox has reached 25% overall market share as of… today. Any gain is a good gain I say, but it’s good to see that Firefox seems to have maintained steady growth since it was introduced. Once Firefox becomes the GRand Unified Browser, securing 100% of the marketshare, I’ll only have to code for 1 standards-compliant internet browser. … or something like that.

Further Reading:

• W3Counter – Global Stats for 2007-5-20

In other news, mtwBlog was updated from WordPress 2.0 to 2.2 the other day. The main advantage to 2.2 is the integrated Widgets functionality, which my custom theme doesn’t yet utilize. I’m probably going to be tinkering with the sidebar to get widgets properly installed, so expect a few changes in the next week or so. The process was painless, thanks to Dreamhost’s One-Click-Installs updater. Thanks Dreamhost!

Announcement on the WordPress Blog

• Tag/Keyword Support – Now all those tags I spent adding to pictures wont be in vain! Keywords are now searchable, and you can click on a keyword for a particular item to view other items that match that keyword.
• Dynamic Albums – Long awaited support for dynamic albums lets me do things like albums for Highly Rated, Most Viewed, Recently Added, as well as albums based on a particular keyword.
• Autorotation – Gallery will now auto-rotate the pictures from the EXIF property Orientation if your camera has an orientation sensor.
• Watchlist – Now on each album, there’s a ‘Watch’ button on the sidebar where you can have photos.mtwstudios.com notify you (via email) whenever a new item is added to that album. Think of it as equivalent to the Facebook mini-feed…

Also, in celebration of nothing in particular, I’m bumping up the quota for all normal users to 1GB. Enjoy!

Before we spent any money, we took some time to figure out what our goals for the setup were. We wanted a relatively-low-cost system that would give us CD-quality, multichannel audio recording capability. Putting our minds together (…and our wallets,) we put together the following system which we thought would suit our needs.

Microphones

• 4 x Nady SP1, boom stand, XLR cable – 4 x $20 = $80
• 1 x MXL V57M w/ shock mount – $70

After some discussion, we figured we’d want to go with a combination of dynamic and condenser mics, to be able to get the quality of the condenser and the affordability of the dynamics. I spotted a $20 mic/stand/XLR cable combo on Amazon.com which we agreed was an amazing deal. Even if the mic was garbage, the stand and the mic clip and the cable for $20 was unbeatable! We ended up buying four of these packages. After doing some looking on zzounds.com, I decided the condenser for the job was the Marshall MXL V57M. It got good reviews all around, and at $70 including shock mount, I figured I couldn’t go wrong.

Mixer

• 1 x Phonic Helix12FW 12-channel Firewire Mixer – $300

Once we had decided on the mics and preferred mic placement, we started looking at what mixer would be right for what we wanted to do. We both liked the idea of being able to hook the mixer directly up to a computer and record realtime. Looking at mixers that could do this, we selected the Phonic Helix12FW, due to its good reviews, being able to record 10-channels in realtime over Firewire, and the fact that it was in our price range.

Computer

• 1 x MacBook Pro, [free]

Any computer that had a IEEE1394 port and could keep up with the recording process would suffice for what we’re doing. While testing the setup at TCNJ, we hooked it up to my computer, Tulip, as well as Kyle’s MacBook Pro. They both detected the board perfectly, and it was a breeze to select the different channels in Audition/GarageBand. We ended up using Kyle’s MacBook to record Immacuata’s Christmas Concert, but the setup is flexible enough to accommodate any decent computer.

Redundant Recording

• 2 x MiniDisc recorders, ~$40

As per my insistance, we also invested in backup recording, just incase something were to go wrong with the mixer, the computer, the connection between the two, or whatever. At a concert a few weeks earlier, I had spoken with the guy running sound, and he had suggested MiniDiscs as a cheap, high-quality recording solution. Having heard other people’s recordings using MDs, I decided it was worth a try. I picked a few recorders and discs off eBay for about $20 each, and hooked them up to the Pre-outs on the mixer, so that we could capture the raw inputs for reference/backup, in case we needed to.

Other

• 10 x 20′ Whirlwind MC20 XLR Cables, $70 total
• 6 x 20′ Whirlwind MGC 1/4″ Patch Cables, $40 total
• 1 x ART Tube MP Studio Microphone Pre-Amp, $50

Having already planned our first gig (the IHS concert), we realized the 4 XLR cables that came with the mics weren’t going to cut it. We invested in 10 20′ XLR cables, figuring we’d over-shot it alittle, but that we’d use all of them eventually. We added 6 1/4′ patch cables to the order because we didn’t have any, and we figured we’d use them also.

I actually had bought the Tube MP preamp before we put together the rest of the system to buy. I was using it to hook an SP1 mic up to my computer (which gave me pretty decent results, actually), and added it to the arsenal once we bought the rest. We figured we’d need it, because we were now in possession of a total of 5 microphones, but a mixer with only 4 mic preamps. Therefore, we’d probably have to hook up the preamp between the 5th mic and the mixer at some point.

TOTAL SYSTEM COST – ~$690

Observations

We under-estimated how fast we use XLR cable. At IHS, after we had set up the first 4 mics, we realized we only had one 20′ cable to run the last (and farthest) mic, which was about 80′ away. We had never thought we were going to use that many cables, and thought we were buying in excess.

Redundancy was a good idea. The computer/mixer interaction acted weird once we actually got on location. This took us by surprise, as we had worked with it all week without any problems. Luckily, we did fix it before showtime, so nothing was lost, but we were lucky we actually knew what we were doing. When the computer started giving us errors, I at least had some comfort in the fact that we had the MiniDiscs to record onto. So far we’re blaming the mixer misbehavior on a dirty power source. We’re going to invest in a surge-protector or power-regulator, and hopefully that will solve any future problems.

It turned out surprisingly well. When I first took a listen to the recordings of the Christmas Concert, I almost couldn’t believe how good they sounded. The mic placement provided a good stereo-separation, and the combination of the dynamic and condenser microphones gives a nice, warm sound to the overall recording. All-in-all, the recording sounds alot better than I had originally anticipated, and I was happy with our performance.

Conclusion

So far, I’m extremely happy with what we’re now capable of doing, and how we did at our first job (the IHS Christmas Concert). We’re currently mastering/producing the CDs, and we hope to be able to do future IHS recordings. Also, we’re looking for more recording opportunities, not only to gain experience, but to make back some of the money we’ve invested in the system. If we make back the cost of the system, we’ll consider expanding our capabilities. One notable area that we both expressed interest in was the capability to DJ parties and such. That might be alittle in the future, but we’ll just have to wait and see!

Shameless Plug

If you’re interested in having me record a performance or anything at all, the system is flexible. Before the concert, I recorded a single instrument to make an audition CD for a friend. I was actually able to sit down with him and do all the editing and burning of the CDs right there, in no longer than an hour. (link) So if you’d like something recorded, get in touch with me!

Well I’ve finally started my new job on campus, working for the school’s Tech Shop. It’s good to finally get paid for what I’d be doing for people anyway .

The Tech Shop is the branch of the IT Department which deals with hardware and software maininence, inventory, and support for all of the school’s computer systems. As a computer technician in the Tech Shop, I’ll be mainly going out on calls to faculty who call in with problems, and my job is to fix said problems. Issues we have to deal with range from a computer not being able to print to blinking green bars on the monitor to smoke coming from the tower.

I’ve spent the past week or so training, and it’s been fun so far – the people who work there are cool, and I’m only working 10 hours a week which is enough to leave room for study/class time. It’s also cool because I’ll get to meet a bunch of the different professors/faculty (namely the ones in my school) while on the job.

All-in-all, it seems like I’ll be enjoying working here for awhile!

More details about other services will be posted here with a better explanation when I get the chance.

Hopefully I’ll be able to lift the restrictions soon.   As a side thought, placing small advertisements would help take care of the cost.  Would placing ads on the site be an acceptable way to keep it free and expandable?  Comment.

PARTS:

• DFI LANPARTY UT nF4 Ultra-D Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra ATX AMD Motherboard – Retail
  
• Rosewill TU-155 Black 0.8mm SGCC Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 400W(20+4 pin) Power Supply – Retail
• SAMSUNG 16X DVD�R DVD Burner With 5X DVD-RAM Write and LightScribe Black ATA/ATAPI Model SH-S162L – OEM
  
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS (Perpendicular Recording Technology) 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive – OEM
• Kingston ValueRAM 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Unbuffered Dual Channel Kit System Memory Model KVR400X64C3AK2/1G – Retail
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Manchester 2000MHz HT Socket 939 Dual Core Processor Model ADA3800BVBOX – Retail
• eVGA 256-P2-N554-AX Geforce 7600GT KO 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card – Retail

[I was going to write a story about how I put it together and everything and it was going to go here. However I lost interest and you would probably do the same reading it. Therefore you can just look at the pictures here]

Finally done with the hardware, I went on to trying to set up the software on the machine. I decided on the name TULIP for reasons only some of you are meant to get – dont think too hard about it if you dont.

My first attempt at installing Windows XP proved unsuccessful (the installation phase after 1st restart happened twice for some reason, and then after auto-login, explorer failed to load). I realized the media was faulty, and proceeded to burn another copy of the disc. After trying installing with the new media, I ran into problems after booting which I eventually pinned down to the memory having issues. After doing a little research I realized that the LanParty motherboard was not liking the ValueRAM I had fed it. I was forced to make it run single-channel at 333MHz, which I was NOT happy about.

Even though it installed with the RAM at 400MHz, it was a corrupt installation, so running at 333MHz still resulted in system instability. The answer was to start from scratch (this was at about 10PM), re-installing Windows with the RAM at 333MHz. This went flawlessly, and within minutes I was running on a stable system and installation.

It’s working very well – quite snappy and all. Running BOINC on it shows it performs considerably better than the VPRM2660, but that’s not saying much. Because of that memory problem, an upgrade for the memory (probably to 2 or 3 GB, but this time with the right speed) is in order. A new power supply would be the next thing on the list….

Myself, I’m alittle more interested in the computer I’m buying.

After doing some looking at different options, I’ve compiled what I think is the best value system that will get me the best performance and be able to last me for all my college needs. Keep in mind this is subject to change, and I’m looking for additions, comments, suggestions, etc.

Part	Picture	Name/Description	Price
CPU		AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Manchester 2000MHz HT Socket 939	$150.00
Motherboard		eVGA 133-K8-NF41 Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce SLI ATX	$78.99
Video Card		eVGA 256-P2-N554-AX GeForce 7600GT KO 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16	$165.99
RAM		Kingston ValueRAM 1GB (2x512MB) 184-Pin DDR 400 (PC 3200) Unbuffered Dual Channel	$99.99
Hard Drive		Open Box Segate Barracuda 7200PRM ST325082 250GB SATA 3.0Gb/s	$71.57
Optical Drive		NEC 16x DVD+-R DVD Burner IDE	$29.50
Case/PSU		Rosewill TU-155 Steel ATX Mid Tower w/ 400W PSU	$49.99
Monitor		NEC Accusync 70	$0 Donated by Mr. Marino
Total:			$646.03

Keep in mind I’ll be adding 3x160GB IDE HDs to this configuration for a total 730GB. Also, I might be overclocking the CPU since reading an article showing that the 3800+ is easily overclock-able into the 4800+ range! I also want to expand the memory to 2GB, but not in the near future.

It interests me what other people are doing/did in terms of what computer they chose and how much they spent on it… just for comparison’s sake.