musings

This past weekend saw the death of one of the drives in my Linux media server. Sadly, it was the drive with all my media. This means I’ve lost my entire music library. All my ripped albums and seven years of emusic downloads all gone in the blink of an eye. And, like an idiot, I hadn’t backed up any of it. I back up everything else. I have two complete backups of my main computer, and my photographs are backed up in three places, but my music was left entirely sans backup. I can recover from this – I can re-download the stuff that’s still available on emusic, and I can re-rip my CDs but it will take time and bandwidth. I’m more annoyed at myself than anything – I know better but I still got caught flat-footed. Stupid.

Former CFNY DJ Martin Streek chose to end his life yesterday. Marty had been a fixture on the radio and the local club scene for the past two decades. I listened to him on the radio, and went to “CFNY Nights” at clubs in the Greater Toronto Area for years and years – all through university and then some. When anyone mentions CFNY, I think of a select few names: Dani Elwell, Alan Cross, Maie Pautts, Brother Bill, and Martin Streek. All of those people had moved on, either through station restructuring or moving onto new opportunities. All of them save for Marty – he’d hung on ’til this past May, when a new restructuring finally showed him the door. He was the last tie I had to CFNY, the last person that kept me even wanting to listen. His death marks the end of an era – maybe just a personal era, but an era nonetheless. His death is a much more personal loss to me than all the “big” celebrity deaths of the last couple of weeks. Though I never knew him personally, I knew his radio persona, and I’ll miss him. Good night and godspeed, Martin – I hope you’ve found the peace you sought.

If you’d read the comments on the previous post, you’d have seen that Brent Cameron suggested I try the Apple Hardware Test that came with my G5. A capital idea, I thought, and wondered why I didn’t think of it myself. I fired up the G5 and it took 15 minutes booting and never did finish so in annoyance I rebooted it with Command-Option-O-F held down to invoke Open Firmware. That worked just fine, and I was able to eject the CD and reboot the machine successfully. I held down Option to invoke the startup disk chooser and booted the Hardware Test. And after a couple of minutes of booting the machine’s fans spun up to hurricane-speed. I looked up at the screen and the hardware test had crashed. I tried again and still the same thing. I’m kinda stumped at this point. I think I’ll just get a rig of external drives and populate them with the drives out of my G5, and then get a shiny new MacPro when I’ve got a bit more spare cash.

So it seems my much beloved PowerMac G5 is well and truly b0rked. It’d been behaving very badly for the past few months – from general flakiness like graphical corruption in the Time Machine interface, and the iTunes library getting corrupted every couple of days (requiring a restore from the Time Machine backup) through Safari and Mail crashing on launch all the way to kernel panics and random freezes. I’d kinda written this all off as symptoms of having done in-place upgrades from Panther to Tiger to Leopard, but after I returned from India, I found that the lockups were far more frequent than before. In fact, I could get LightRoom 2.0 to reliably lock the machine up just trying to browse the photos I’d brought back from India. In an attempt to narrow down the problem (the machine vs. the photos) I put LR2 on my MacBook and loaded the photos onto that machine … and no problem at all. Works a treat (and fast ; the G5 has nothing on the Core 2 Duo).

So I tried a clean install with a restore of the user data and applications from backup. No good. Still the same problems. Then I tried a clean install with just the user data restored. Again, no good. Finally a clean install. Guess what? Yeah, still no good.

I really need my computer, so I just shut the big bastard down and moved my daily computing to my MacBook. I love this little machine – it’s ever so fast, and thanks to the SSD, it’s ever so quiet. Still, I miss my 30” main screen and 24” secondary screen, so I decided to try and get the G5 up to shape today.

About a year ago, I bought 4G of RAM from Crucial and jacked it in alongside the 1G that came with the machine. At the time, it was a huge performance boost, but (perhaps faulty) memory seemed to think the stability issues arose with the installation of that memory. At the time, it wasn’t a big deal – the machine crashed once in a blue moon, but I didn’t remember it ever crashing before the extra RAM was installed. So I pulled it.

And the machine wouldn’t boot. At all.

So I pulled the original 1G and installed the 4G from Crucial.

And the machine wouldn’t boot.

So I replaced the original 1G and put the 4G from Crucial back in.

And the machine … booted? WTF?

But it was just as flaky as ever. Worse, when I looked at the system status, it said I have 4G installed. I double checked the memory and it’s all seated correctly. Either some of the memory is bad, or the memory slots are. Since this is a G5, the memory has to be installed in matched pairs – and the memory is slotted in as 512k/1G/1G in the primary and secondary banks. Since I’m seeing 4G installed, and the memory can’t be unbalanced, I can only conclude that the Apple-installed 1G is the culprit. But the machine won’t boot with the Crucial memory in the first slot, or without the Crucial memory installed. :/

I no longer know what to do, and I’m pretty much resigned to the fact that the machine isn’t usable any longer. My poor G5 served me well, but it’s time to move on.

The only thing is, a new MacPro is gonna run me another small fortune, and I don’t have one handy. At least not one that I’m willing to part with. The Mini isn’t up to snuff for what I want (it’s slower than my MacBook!), and the iMac is full of stuff I don’t need – I already have 2 giant screens. I wish Apple made a mid-range machine – a Mini that had the innards of an iMac, maybe in a small tower instead of the tiny brick, so it could have extra drives slotted in.

As of this afternoon, Toronto independent game developer SilverBirch Studios is no more. Two and a half years ago, my company, Electron Jump Games entered into a buyout agreement with SilverBirch. All seemed well ’til this past September when the proverbial crap hit the fan. Rapid overexpansion (read: buying companies without any money to pay for them) finally bit us in the ass. We’ve spent every day since in agonizing limbo, not knowing if we’d survive. A last minute buyout collapsed today and the studio’s creditor finally pulled the plug. I’ve got mixed feelings about this – it was really nice knowing I has a steady paycheck, but the past three months of Hell really took a toll on all of us, so it’s a relief to know. On the up side, SilverBirch defaulted on its commitment to Electron Jump, so all our tech is still ours, and many of the people involved are interested in trying to keep the staff of the studio together. Anyone interested in investing in a skilled and experienced team?

That’s it. Just “Happy New Year!”.

I just bought a 13″ aluminum MacBook. It arrived today, and it’s small, shiny and dead sexy. I’m just geeky enough to have documented the unboxing and posted the photos on my flickr page, but you can see them more easily at the Photos page. Waiting for the first charge to finish is pure agony.

After ages of the old (read: circa WordPress 1.5) theme, I’ve finally upgraded the site to use a new style theme that supports things like pages and widgets. You’ll see the new widgets down the right – the Photo widget ties in to my flickr page, and the Tunes widget shows what I’ve been listening to based on my scrobbled tunes at last.fm. I’ve also added pages for the archives, links, and photos because the WPTouch plugin is smart enough to add those and reskin them to look nice on Mobile Safari. Actually, all this was prompted WPTouch – once I found it I wanted to make everything work well in Mobile Safari. Silly, I know. It’s not like I get a million visitors or anything.

I’ve added the WPtouch plugin to WordPress, so if you visit with Mobile Safari, you’ll see a really cool iPhone/iPodTouch optimized version of the site. Huge props to the guys at BraveNewCode for making this and then releasing it for free.

I’ve abandoned uShare as my media server, and have gone back to MediaTomb. It turns out that there’s no magic mp3 that causes both uShare and MediaTomb to crash ; uShare just falls over and dies if there are enough MP3s in the library. MediaTomb, on the other hand, deals with a large library just fine … it just doesn’t like .m4a files. I figured out how to get it to ignore .m4a files and have a script running to transcode my m4as to mp3s (yes, yes, transcoding is bad, I know, but my CDs are in utter disarray and I want that music available NOW, not in a year when I finally find the CDs). Also, MediaTomb parses tags, which uShare didn’t, and it supports skipping forward and back, which uShare didn’t (at least not from the PS3). Now that I’ve figured out MediaTomb’s deficiency, I’m happy to work around it. I’d prefer if it would actually grok .m4a files, but I’ve had no joy there, so this will do as a stop-gap measure.