Disk Fragmentation

As it turns out, the built in disk defragger in Windows XP kind of sucks.  After a year of use, my laptop’s drive was increasingly fragmented, and performance was suffering because of it.  So I fired up the Windows disk defragmenter program.  After 12 passes or so, the disk was little improved, and still heavily fragmented.

So I looked for an alternative and came across Raxco Software’s PerfectDisk8.  This did in one pass, what the built-in windows one could not do at all.  I’m told that the the built in windows one is based on Executive Software’s Diskeeper, but that it is a “Lite” or crippled version.  Perhaps it works on disks that aren’t heavily fragmented, but it just wasn’t up to the task for anything serious.

Kudos to Raxco on an excellent utility.

It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity!

This morning, Google, via my Fugue.Net portal page told me that it was going to be 27c and humid (that’s about 81f for you metrically challenged folks).

Here in Toronto, this seemed a bit warm for April, since yesterday it was 6c. Could global warming have come, seemingly overnight?

I reloaded the page to be sure, and to my great relief was presented with a more seasonal forecast:

I miss my Blackberry

I switched jobs last November, and my new company is not a Blackberry shop… In my previous role, I had deployed our Blackberry Enterprise Server and found the whole experience to be outstanding — both from an administrative and end-user perspective. It was everything I wanted in a messaging platform, and it just worked. I had an older Blackberry 7280 — no Bluetooth, only 16 MB of RAM — but it just worked, and never gave me any trouble at all.

My new company uses the Good Mobile Messaging platform, recently acquired by Motorola. PC Magazine gave the platform 4.5 out of 5 stars in their recent review. Most folks have Palm Treos, with the occasional Motorola Q thrown in. I opted for the Nokia E62 — mostly because I can’t stand the keyboard on the Treo. The E62 has impressive specs… 80MB RAM, an outstanding screen, and Symbian S60 3rd Edition. On paper, it should rock.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t lived up to my expectations. Several times a week, it stops sending/receiving messages from the corporate Good Mobile Messaging server… only power cycling the phone seems to help. Occasionally, the phone locks up and won’t make calls… again, a power cycle corrects the issue. The interface seems sluggish compared to my old Blackberry, not a major irritant, but surprising given the specs.

When it’s working, the push email and synchronization with my Exchange server account is outstanding. Perhaps the stability of the solution is better on the Treo than on my Nokia E62, but every time I power cycle my phone to get email working again, I miss my old Blackberry.

Feeling Blue about Bluetooth

Good technology should just work. Pairing a Jabra 250 Bluetooth headset with my Nokia E62 Cellular phone is a painless event. Pairing my wife’s Motorola Bluetooth headset with her Motorola phone was a similar non-event. It just worked. So why is it that when I want to use the same Jabra 250 headset with my laptop computer, it’s an ordeal?

My laptop didn’t come with Bluetooth built in, so a picked up a cheap USB Bluetooth dongle for around CAD$50. It came with the BlueSoleil drivers and an ISSC chipset which appeared to install perfectly on my Windows XP SP2 laptop. To all outward appearances, everything looked good.

Of course, when I actually went to pair the headset with the laptop, while it appeared successful, it just plain didn’t work. Our old friend Google turned up a bunch of links with folks experiencing issues with the Widcomm (not BlueSoleil) drivers and XP SP2, and a whole mess of folks with similar headset-related woes.

I’ve tried the latest BlueSoleil drivers, the latest Widcomm drivers and wasted more time on this than I care to admit. Seems like there’s something seriously wrong with the standard. Silly me, I expected things just to work, like they largely do with WiFi/802.11.

I won’t go into the technical details here as to what I’ve tried and what did not work and I’ve stopped working on the problem for now opting to go buy a USB headset that I know will work.

Seems like Bluetooth still has quite a ways to go.

Speaking of Cappuccinos…

Here’s a neat site that calculates how many of them you’d have to drink to kill you. I’d have to drink about 176 cappuccinos for it to be lethal. And the site is not just for coffee either… energy drinks, soda pop… anything with caffeine. If you want to do the same thing for chocolate, check it out here. Apparently it’ll take 10,237.50 Hershey’s Kisses to do me in.

I’ll have two cups of ccino…

We recently started using our cappuccino maker which has significantly cut down on trips to the local Starbucks (only half a block away). It’s simple to use and makes a pretty good cuppuccino at a fraction of the cost.

The coffee afficionado will tell you that you really need to get an expensive pump driven espresso machine instead of the cheaper steam pressure type that we have… but frankly, at the $60 dollar pricepoint and the oodles of money we’ll save by not shelling out for the $4.50 lattes and cappuccinos at the “premium” coffee stores, you can’t go wrong.

We feed the espresso machine LavAzza Qualita Oro Espresso which comes packaged in a vacuum sealed brick, one of which usually lasts us about a week at an average of 4 double-espressos per day. All things considered, we’re quite pleased.

GMail for your Domain

A few weeks ago, I switched all mail for fugue.net to Google’s hosted email service. After running my own mail server since 1999, and going through multiple iterations of mail software (sendmail, Postfix, Courier IMAP, Horde/IMP, etc…) I decided I was just as happy to let someone else do it.

Also, the server that was hosting fugue mail was an old Pentium II 300 that I’ve somehow kept running over the years. The plans to cutover to a “new” Dell PowerEdge 1300 with dual Pentium III 500 MHz processors (what power!) never seemed to materialize, so I’ll be turning that box into a CVS/file server/lab environment.

Anyway, Fugue Mail (powered by Google) is awesome.

Ordering a Rack Kit from IBM

When we moved offices last spring, I built out a brand new server room with largely new rack equipment. For the rack enclosures, I selected APC’s NetShelter four-post racks. Unfortunately, the rack kit that had shipped with our IBM p520 was not compatible with the industry-standard APC rack dimensions, so I needed to order a “Universal Rack Kit” from IBM.When the rack kit arrived, I thought a mistake had been made. A large box on a wooden pallete showed up at the loading dock. It looked like this:

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I remember thinking that a mistake has been made… after all, we only needed a rack kit, not a whole new server. But the box was rather light, considering its size, so I opened it up. Inside, there were a lot of cardboard boxes marked “empty”. They looked like this:

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Now, this struck me as a little odd, not to mention a lot wasteful. When I removed all the extraneous packaging, I found a small box containing the ordered rack kit. To give you an example of the relative sizes involved, take a look at this:

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And the total amount of wasted packaging:

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Now if that’s not broken, I don’t know what is.

In honor of this story, you can now buy your very own “IBM Way” t-shirt at the Fugue.Net Store.

A New Home for Fugue Blog

After a somewhat long hiatus, I’m pleased to relaunch Fugue Blog on Wordress.com’s hosted offering at http://blog.fugue.net/.

Once again, you will be able to revel in the random technology thoughts and oddities of a self-proclaimed opinionated bastard.

If You Can’t Take the Heat…

Last Sunday, our furnace stopped performing its designated task of heating the house. We awoke to a cold-snap after a week or so of unseasonably warm weather here in Toronto which almost led one to beleive that central heating in Ontario in the month of January was optional. Sadly, the thermostat reading of 60 degrees F (about 15 C for those of you who understand metric) confirmed that it was not optional after all.

With lows expected to be around -15 C (about 5 F for those of you who don’t understand metric), we were scrambling for some space heaters as we called Direct Energy, with whom we have a maintenance contract.

So four hours later, the Direct Energy service guy who I will refer to as “Service Guy #1″ shows up. He goes down to the furnace, opens it up, and starts making disparaging remarks about whoever inspected it last. Having diagnosed the problem as a faulty ignitor, he replaces it, and fires up the furnace to a shower of sparks as the ignitor shorts out. Turns out it blew the control module when it shorted. Yep, none of those parts on-hand, so off he goes to order one promising it’ll be here “first thing tomorrow.”

The part finally shows up at 6pm, and at 9:30, “Service Guy #2″ shows up to install it. #2 replaces the module and installs a new ignitor, which promptly shorts out taking the new module with it. After tinkering for a while, #2 decides that the ignitor must’ve been touching something. But we have no working module anymore, so they promise to order one and return the next day.

The score so far:

Furnace: 3 Ignitors, 2 Control Modules
Direct Energy: 2 Service guys
Days without Heat: 2

At this point it’s getting amusing. Not the lack of heat, or the fact that pur gas fireplace has been operating non-stop for 2 days straight now. Not the fact that the electrical grid in the house is now so close to capacity that any additional appliance plugged in trips the circuit breakers (no, you can’t plug in the kettle for a nice cup of tea!). But the fact the Service Guy #2 apparently had no record of what Service Guy #1 did, and made the exact same mistake.

The next appointment windows was the following day (Tuesday) from 2-6pm. I let work early to see if I could catch the repairman (Service Guy #3) and I walk in just as he’s about to fire up the furnace with the new control module and yet another ignitor. So I filled him in on what Service Guy #1 had done, and then on what Service Guy #2 had done. He shrugs off my history lesson and proceeds to short out ignitor number 3 (4 if you count the original one). But Service Guy #3 was on the ball and cut power to the module before it fried!

After hearty congratulations all around on being the first of his colleagues not to blow the control module, Service Guy #3 tinkers around with mirrors and electrical equipment for the next 90 minutes to be sure that the ignitor is not touching anything and that there are no shorts in the system. The attention to detail pays off, and at 6:15 pm, we have heat!

Final Score:

Furnace: 4 Ignitors, 2 Control Modules (~$340)
Direct Energy: 3 Service Guys
Days without Heat: 3

Been walking around with a smile on my face for two days now. I never appreciated heat in January in Ontario until I didn’t have it for 3 days! And that maintenance contract we bought sure has paid for itself.