Category Archives: Technology

Storage Problems Part 3: Resolution

I’m declaring my storage problems to be resolved. Though I’m sure this will come up again. I have to believe at this point I will not encounter the issue for several more years. I now have about 5 TB of free storage across several systems, with another 1.5 TB drive ready to act as either a backup or additional space. About three years ago I had about 1 TB of free space and no idea how I’d ever fill it. Now I know.

Continue reading

Snow Leopard 10.6.1 Update Weirdness

About a week after release I ran the 10.6.1 update only to find that it had failed to install. I’m not sure exactly what happened since my typical method of carrying out updates is to click whatever needs clicked then move back to working on whatever other system is available. I do know that I was left with a dialog proclaiming that the update had failed and I should restart. Fine. I restart. Upon restarting the machine – my MacBook Pro circa 2007 – sat at the boot screen (grey screen with the little spinner) for at least 30 minutes. Not good. I restarted again but this time with the verbose boot sequence – Command-V at startup. Turns out the machine could not find a needed kernel extension for SCSI. Not sure why it needs SCSI but apparently the file was lost in the attempted update. It was clear that whatever happened the system was not going to fix itself, and Google wasn’t sure what was happening either as most the posts I could find related to the specific error talked of hardware failures.

Continue reading

Television Issue Resolved

I managed to resolve my television issue. After a little search last Sunday my wife and I both preferred the look of plasma. I was a little concerned about burn-in but apparently technology has progressed to the point of this being a non-issue, or at least it’s about the same as old style televisions (see here and here). We decided on theĀ Samsung PN50B550 50-Inch 1080p Plasma HDTV. Very nice.

Storage Problems Part 2: Proposed Solution

I’ve adopted a solution to my storage problems. Basically, I’ve decided on the Drobo solution. If you recall from last time, I was leaning heavily toward an OpenSolaris solution using ZFS. I still think ZFS is ultimately the way to go because it’s cool software design, but I’m not convinced of running an entire system for that purpose. I really wish Apple would get their act together and implement ZFS to go along with the rest of their even cooler software design. I’m also not quite sure why there are no cheap external eSATA enclosures. I’m thinking $150 for a chunk of metal with a fan, a power supply, and enough circuitry to support 8 drives as JBOD. Is that unreasonable? Maybe not enough market.

Continue reading