Gadget File

Played with a couple of interesting gadgets recently.

On my way home from work yesterday, I noticed that my local Apple dealer had a little stall set up in the shopping mall I pass through. And, nestled between two Powerbooks, there was the new iPod, singing the siren song from the start of Pufnstuf:

Come and play with me, Jimmy
Come and play with me.
And I will take you on a trip
Far across the sea.

My name's not Jimmy, but hey, whatever. My current MP3 player is a Sony Picturebook. This has the advantage of being a full blown PC, so not only does it play music, but also Nethack, the Sims, videos, Microsoft Word... It has the major disadvantage, though, that it runs Windows XP. While XP is at least a real operating system (unlike Windows ME, which just played one on television), it is a big fat mooing cow of an operating system. A nifty gadget like the Picturebook needs a frolicking lamb-like operating system, like OS-9 or AmigaOS. But it's got Windows XP. So while it works, it's not exactly convenient if you just want to put on your headphones and listen to a tune or three.

The first thing that struck me about the iPod is how small it is. Looking at the pictures on Apple's web site don't really give you any guide to the size, so let me tell you: It's small. It's maybe one-tenth the size of my Picturebook, and the Picturebook is one of the smallest and lightest notebooks around.

Second, it looks better in real life than on the web. The finish is very clean; it's clearly a well-designed and well-constructed item.

The flea in the ointment is the controls. Apple make a big fuss about how the new controls are touch-sensitive, with no moving parts to wear out or break down. The down side of having no moving parts, though, is that you get no tactile feedback whatsoever. Is it doing something when I push here? Oh, look, the screen scrolled! How... novel.

Still tempting, though. Still very tempting.

The other gadget was somewhat larger: A dual-processor Athlon MP 2400+, kitted out with a 3Ware RAID controller and 8 Western Digital 200GB drives. Only 1GB of memory, because the supplier was out of stock of the 1GB memory modules. It came with two 512MB modules for the time being.

This is not a slow box. It's destined to house about a terabyte of archival data, and run various searches and reports. I was wondering just how long it would take Linux to format a 1.05 terabyte RAID-5 volume.

The answer is: Rather less time than it takes Windows XP to format a new 80GB drive on my home machine. This was easily the quickest Linux install I've done; I've never seen the progress meter go flickety-flickety quite like that. If you have a terabyte of data that needs a home, and a modest budget, then this sort of system is highly recommended.

From her broom broom in the sky
She watched her plans materialize
She waved her wand
The beautiful boat was gone
The skies grew dark
The sea grew rough
And the boat sailed on and on and on and on and on and on.

Not quite so impressive, though, is Red Hat's disk partitioning utility. For some unfathomable reason, rather than clicking to select the drive that a particular filesystem will live on, you have to click to turn off all the drives that you don't want it to live on. This gets tired quickly when you have eight drives in the system. No, I do not want this filesystem on /dev/sdb. No, I do not want this filesystem on /dev/sdc. No, I do not... Maybe they've improved things in version 9; I was installing 8.0, since I know that release works with the software I want to run. Red Hat 9 seems to work, but I'm not about to rebuild a terabyte of data due to some minor incompatibility.

No, I do not want this filesystem on /dev/sde. No, I do not...

With all my filesystems RAIDed, and my old-fogey habits of having separate partitions for separate things - so that when something inevitably runs amok, it doesn't trash everything in one go - with those two put together, I had about 30 partitions to create. No, I do not want this filesystem on /dev/sdg...

Oh, and you know how if you have, say, 28GB of free space on a drive, you can allocate it easily to a new partition by double-clicking on it? Don't do that.

Sigh. Reboot. Keyboard-Mouse-English-Custom-No, I do not want this filesystem on /dev/sdb...

It took me longer to get the partitions set up than it did to format 1.6TB of disk. That's good, I suppose. But I just know that my next dream will involve check boxes that just won't stay turned off. NO DAMMIT! I DO NOT WANT THIS FILESYSTEM ON /DEV/SDC!!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:27 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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