Fiends and Followers of this pack of feeble ranting’s will know my love of the
drobo external nas drive, as i had filled mine up with 1tb drives, i was much
pleased with the news that the first of the new uber big Seagate drives came
out (1.5tb), i purchased 4 of said drives, and popped them in, a week later one
seems to fail for 30 seconds then be ok, but the drobo did its rebuild thing
for 24 hours (which means it goes slow), i shrugged, but then a couple of days
later another one failed on the other drobo, so they were both rebuilding,i
started to get nervery if one more failed i would lose the raid, Eeeeeeeek!.
How ever it seems i was not alone, the drobo forums were alive with the horror
of these drives, turned out that something to do with their slightly larger
power requirements, if the drive did not get EXACTLY what they wanted on
startup, they would go in to “autistic mode” for 30 seconds (ie sulk), which
breaks the drobo raid, it turns out that is problem is common to all the modern
operating systems (Linux, Mac osx, vista), Seagate flatly refused to accept
responsibility telling people were miss using their drives (it mainly happened
when people were using them for raid), however as they had put “best usage:
Desktop raid” on their website, that did not cut much mustard (the little
devils removed it once people pointed that out but thanks to the joy of the
internet, plenty of screen shots had already been taken….ha..power to the
geeks!!), they have now released a firm ware fix (which you need a PC to apply
to the drives), but it too late for me, I’ve already swapped back to the 1TB
drives and used the 1.5Tb for other backups, the following is how to format
said drives in Linux as they throw a little tantrum.

Most people who are Linux users who have come from a windows background, like
gui apps, and the best for disk formatting is called Gparted, however the
current “sanctioned” version of Gparted (0.3.5), throws a hissy fit when you
try and format a partition greater than 1TB, Sooooo, with these monster drives,
open a terminal window:

sudo su

means you don’t need to keep putting “sudo” at the beginning of all your
commands for this terminal session

parted /dev/sdd

or what ever drive is if you have gparted you can see the drive name there, now
your in parted, but your drive is completely blank so you need to enter

(parted) mklabel msdos

an msdos label will do these drives fine, Next enter “print” to see the drives
details

(parted) print

Disk /dev/sdd: 1500GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags

as you can see we have no partitions on this drive, in this exersise i want one
partition that takes up the whole drive and to use the ext3 format, the 2
numbers at the end are the start and end points of the partitions so “0” to
“1500GB” to do the whole drive.

(parted) mkpart primary ext3 0 1500gb

now lets do “print” to see if that took effect

(parted) print

Disk /dev/sdd: 1500GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 32.3kB 1500GB 1500GB primary

rayyy, worked, now we need to pop out of parted

(parted) quit

the drive is still not formatted so fill in the following (you can check on
gparted again if you don’t know what to put as the drive, ie. /dev/ssd1)

/sbin/mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdd1

mke2fs 1.40.8 (13-Mar-2008)
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
91578368 inodes, 366284000 blocks
18314200 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=0
11179 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
8192 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208,
4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968,
102400000, 214990848

Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (32768 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

This filesystem will be automatically checked every 28 mounts or
180 days, whichever comes first. Use tune2fs -c or -i to override.

here you go that’s the format done, while your here you might as well sort out
the other bits, soo

e2label /dev/sdd1 mp3picsbackup

This give the drive a label, so that, say this is a usb drive, it will auto
mount to the label, now i like really open security (lazy sod), and as such,

chmod 777 -R /media/mp3picsbackup

oh, i had to mount the drive for this command to work.

For those of us looking at Adobe flex as an additional arrow in our quiver, you might have seen that adobe does an excellent 44 part video training called “Flex in a week”, the training is excellent, the fact they say you have to use their windows only “Adobe media player” is less so, im not going to go into the many things that vex me about this bit of software but it is definitely not “S.S.C.” (you’ll have to ask me if you want to know what i mean by that), however it turns out you don’t need it, just open up http://sessions.adobe.com/FlexInAWeek/feed.xml and down load all the reasonably named .FLV files, and watch them using VLC or what ever media player rocks your boat

….why do people try to ruin a good idea by telling you how to use it.

To my shame I do useless articles, however this one by Stephan H Wissel is just perfect, it has everything a good article could want

1) Informative
2) Excellently presented and clear
3) Something for everyone in the target audience
4) Needs no re-formatting to show to other people

To prove the point, i just forwarded on the link to one of my managers, and got the response “Looks ideal, how long to implement”

Perfect.

Now look you software makers, its all very well saying “built on eclipse”, but i now have 3 completely separate instances of eclipse (Notes 8.5, Myeclipse and Flex3) on my machine and none of them seem to be talking to each other (I’ve even just opened them up all at once to see if there was a glimmer of recognition between them, I KNOW you can check for such thinks during an install because vmware workstation DOES for its debugger, I’m not asking for perfect integration, but come on party people, standard platform is nice, but COMMON standard platform would be better, all you have to do is ask “do you have an existing eclipse workspace you wish to install to”. (mutters and trundles off to see if he can glue them together because most of the players don’t seem to like you just switching to a common workspace, there must be an article to be written in getting these to all work)….end of rant

Recently mainly for geek value and the fact I was renewing my contact I
upgraded from a N81 to the new(ish) N96, now i really loved the N81, its was a
fast phone, had plenty of memory (8gig), EXCELLENT build quality, and worked
well as both a phone and a music player, when the N96 came out, it looked a no
brainer to upgrade as both the looks and layout were identical but with more
memory,features and a bigger screen

However…..

its not all roses, to save you all reading the boring stuff I’m just gona do
the normal pro’s and con’s list

Pros

Nice Screen: can watch an Anime with subtitle on it no prob

loud: it can drive a big pair of earphones at ear rupture level

Features: this does everything, I’m still looking for the “make toast” key

Space: loads, it comes with 16Gig and I’ve put in an additional 16Gig M2 card
with no probs

Nice and Open: This ‘aint no Iphone, you can do what you want on this devil.

Data Transfer: proper USB2 (the N81 only had a sub USB1 speed (400kbs)), and an
excellent Bloothtooth

Cons

SLOW: for some god forsaken reason its got a slower processor than the N95, and
the OS speed in comparison to the N81 sucks

Poor apps: both the built in music and movie player quite frankly are bobbins
(the movie player more than the music), i replaced the movie player with Core
Player and the music player with LCG JukeBox from lonely cat games (although i
keep the music player around when i want to play tracks by id3 tag rather than
file/folder layout), replacing these improved the speed no end.

Build Quality: this is objective but it does seem more fragile than the N81 but
that might be just me giving it a hard life.

Headphone socket: this shares the same problem that the Iphone does, in that
people that want a top of the range phone might not want a top of the range
pair of head phones , but in the N96’s case you cant open the phones
slider when a large pair of phones are plugged in and have to get one of those
IPhone extenders/adaptors.

Still crashes!!: this was supposed to not happen post the N95 but i crash mine
once a week at least, although the fact the alarms still work when its either
crashed or has been turned off is an amazing feature.

Large AAC files: This one is a strange un, large aac files (over an hour) that
used to play fine on the N81, report the wrong length (normally much much
shorter) and cut off when this time is reached, a slight work around to this is
to hide the music player just before the time is up, if you do this it carries
on playing (sort of like the music equivalent of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast
of Traal)

conclusion

In the first week i almost went back to the N81, but after i had ripped the
naff apps out (the music player also seems to leek memory and leaving it hidden
while using the media keys is normally what crashes my phone), i have started
to really like it, good hardware let down a bit by poor software.