Waynisms Revisited

Me: I thought of the most romantic way ever to do it. First date at Chez Panisse, proposal on the banks of the Seine, and a honeymoon trip around the world.

Wayne: You know, Mr. Lee once said to us, “Don’t go with a one carat diamond until she says yes.”

Me: What does that mean?

Wayne: It means that you shouldn’t dig a hole until you’re sure you can get your buck’s worth.

Me: So what happens if we’re at the Seine and she says no?

Wayne: Then you can push her into the Seine.

Recovering From a Hard Drive Crash

One of the lessons I’ve had to learn the hard way over the years is to have multiple backup copies of everything important. Unfortunately, disaster struck at the opportune moment when I was transferring files and didn’t have a backup copy. The story goes as follows:

I had just built a new computer and was transferring all my important files (~160 GB or so) via an external hard drive to the new RAID 0 array. After testing to make sure the RAID array was functional and that all the files had been successfully copied, I formatted the original hard drive for use in an older computer. The intermediate files on the external hard drive was already deleted in the move operation to the RAID array.

Now, electronics had been failing at an alarming rate in my Berkeley apartment that I’m starting to wonder whether it’s built on top of an Indian burial ground or something. First, my roommate’s PSU blows up in a surge. Then his USB speakers start to crackle and hiss and finally stop working. My new desktop boots about 1/2 the time and the other half fails to initialize the PCIe video card, spitting out a string of beeps (8 short ones according to a guide) in a BIOS error message.

One morning, I woke at 5 to the sound of clicks coming from my computer. In my sleepy haze, I thought the clicks were due to my roommate’s computer, which he had forgotten to turn off or something. After waking an hour later to check, I noticed that my computer had started itself up in the middle of the night and that the clicking was coming from one of my hard drives.

Anyone knowledgeable about RAID arrays would know that RAID 0 is the most insecure of the types, offering no extra protection but boatloads of speed and capacity. Failure of one disk means the whole array goes down. Indeed, my computer wouldn’t even boot anymore, throwing out a boot device not found error.

After feeling dejected for a while, I tried a trick I learned from an online post. Following the instructions, I removed my hard drive, wrapped it in a few Safeway bags, and froze it for a day. However, upon plugging it back into the computer, there were no more clicks (at first), but the device was still not recognized. It had to be RMA-ed with Western Digital.

The most worrying part of a hard drive crash is the associated data loss. Indeed, I had lost all the preencodes, scripts, files, programs, ISOs, and bookmarks that took me a few decades to accumulate. (BTW: Yakushiji Ryoko that week was slightly delayed because of my computer issues) Since this happened so quickly after building the computer, I had not yet had the time to transfer files to an external drive for backup. The original source drive had been formatted for use in another machine, and frequent use had probably overwritten what remains of the raw files on the sectors. One expensive option left is to use a professional data retrieval service to recover information from the failed drive. However, the problem there is that recovery can run up to a thousand dollars, and there’s no guarantee that the clicking wasn’t due to the head carving lines on the platter, which would irrevocably destroy all data. Furthermore, the fact that recovery would need to sync all the drives in the array when recovering raw data is even more problematic.

One hope remained in the external hard drive that I had used to temporarily copy files. With any luck, the files (albeit a week old) would still be on there as ghosts. When any file is deleted in Windows, the metadata associated with it (where it is, how bit it is, etc.) is removed and the space is marked as free. However, the contents are not actually deleted until something else writes there. I immediately called home and asked my parents to stop using the external drive and to hold it until I could retrieve data from there.

When I did have a chance to look at it, there was the dilemma of finding a program that can recover files for free. Many unerase programs cost money or have limited # or sizes for files that the demo version can recover. I finally stumbled upon NTFS Undelete, which has a crappy interface but nonetheless did the job effectively. One by one, I dragged out the files onto a separate drive, checked CRCs where they were available, and inspected the contents when they were not. My rough estimate is that all but two text files emerged unscathed, but I didn’t bother to retrieve large ISOs, preencodes, and games because of their large sizes and high chance of corruption with no way of verifying.

From now on, I resolved to be more careful about my data. RAID 1 arrays with high redundancy seem like better choices than RAID 0 now that I have endured a crash. External drives are fine, but for me they’re somewhat unwieldy when backing things up. They’re probably a good choice for backups every month that can be stored at a remote site. I also investigated online storage servers, but none of them appealed to me. I ended up settling on a software Linux RAID 1 array of two 250 GB hard drives with an external drive backing up important small files every month for offsite storage.

Aspiring Artist Alert – Teresa Tseng

One day last semester, I was searching Youtube for a copy of F.I.R’s song 你的微笑. One of the renditions I stumbled upon was by a young high-school artist called Teresa Tseng (曾咏霖).

After digging further, I found the following gems:

Zhang Hui Mei (阿妹)’s 记得

Sandy Lam (林忆莲)’s 夜太黑

Liang Jin Ru (梁静茹)’s “Fly Away”

Zhang Hui Mei (阿妹)’s 灰姑娘

Now, those are some of the hardest songs in Cpop to sing. Other aspiring artists have done much worse, but Teresa managed to create even better renditions of the songs. Her voice is naturally mellow and strong but is not really that unique for female singers. No matter. I think she’ll be more successful singing love ballads than fast songs, an artist in the mold of 梁静茹.

Did I mention she’s got a pretty face and cute clothes?

Oh, as a bonus, I really like F.I.R’s 月牙弯 from their new(est?) album

Reactions to Jesse Helms’s Death

At age 86, Jesse Helms, the longtime senator from North Carolina, passed away on the 4th of July. Though we grieve for his family, we must also contend with his legacy. And what precisely is that? Many people in the media have thoughts:

Undoubtedly, Helms was a controversial figure, one who embodied along with Strom Thurmond the ideals and values of the Old South. This is in contrast to New South politicians like Robert Byrd who have moved on from overtly racist language (but not thought, as Trent Lott and George Allen demonstrated). Personally, I think the strong social conservative nature of the modern Republican Party is alienating to much of the populace. They should focus on publicizing and abiding by their fiscal conservativism if they want to win mainstream voters. The feeling of exclusion is offensive not only to the growing numbers of minorities in the US, but also to mainstream centrist whites.

Take the following quote from OTB:

I started calling myself a conservative because I was proud to be associated with the ideas and politics of people like Barry Goldwater. I stopped calling myself a conservative when the title became too closely associated with assholes like Helms. Good riddance.

- FanOfBarry

My favourite quote:

Jesse Helms’ legacy is one of hatred, homophobia and racism. Although not its intent, that legacy has made our community stronger and more able to forcefully respond to bigotry and prejudice. As a community, we are more committed than ever to securing full equality for all GLBT people.

— Joe Solmonese, president of the Washington-based Human Rights Campaign.

Intel Atom Performance Comparison

Even since Intel released its Silverthorne project as the Atom, I have been salivating at finally picking up a small, cool, light desktop that is a cheap and versatile performer. Why do I need a power-guzzling Core 2 Duo when everyday tasks don’t need something more powerful than a Pentium III? I know because I have run XP on a 866 MHz P3 and thought the experience sufficient for the internet, music, office, and basic 4+ year old games(AOE2, Starcraft, Rise of Nations, Rome Total War). Since we passed the gigahertz threshold, I’ve been asking why the regular PC user needs anything more powerful? Sure, if you’re a gamer or a video ripping fanatic, you’ll need all the power you can get, but really for basic office tasks, is the Atom up to the task?

Since I do not own an Atom, I thought that the best way to do a comparison is to find which old CPU is the most comparable to the Atom. In terms of transistor count, the Athlon XP at 37.5 million and Willamette P4 at 42 million were good initial guesses for appropriate counterparts to the Atom, standing at 47 million. Benchmarks were few and far between, but I did dig up the following:

Tomshardware says that the Atom with HT passes PCMark05 with a score of 1478. Not bad. How does the Athlon XP compare? Well, the Athlon XP 1800+ with a score of 1497 came close. On the Intel side, the Celeron (Willamette edition) 2 GHz scoring 1449 was the closest comparison.

The verdict? Having owned an Athlon XP 1800+ and having played with a friend’s P4 @ 2 GHz, I can confidently say that all users with basic requirements (office, internet, email, music, basic video playback, and light gaming) can get by fine with an Atom CPU. Watch out, Intel. Don’t be caught cannibalizing your own products!

Now I am interested in whether the Atom is capable of playing 1080p x264 video, which is typical of most anime fansub encodes these days. If it can handle that, I’m sold on selling off my existing desktops and replacing them with Atom-based machines.