Volatile Yard 挥洒自如 Write anything I want to write...

(Part 1 is here if you haven't read it.)

Checked Again

A few hours ago, I connected my 'suspicious' Seagate 500GB harddisk to a motherboard of another computer. I fired up Palimpsest and checked the harddisk again. Oops, I got the same Last self-test FAILED (Read) error again. I repeated the test for a few more times and still got the same error.

I thought I couldn't do much with the harddisk already, so I started to shred [en.wikipedia.org] it. Why shred it? There were no sex videos on my harddisk, but these days you won't know how those weird people will make use of whatever irrelevant data you have in whatever ways beyond your imagination. So I just gave shred a few hours to do her job.

After shred-ing, I checked the harddisk again. I ran a self-test and re-ran both the short and conveyance self-tests for a few more times. Again and again, I got this:

Computer Hanged

My Linux box hanged yesterday! When a Linux box hangs, you normally blame (1) a memory-leaked program, (2) an I/O-hungry program, or (3) a hardware failure. Checked my Conky monitor, no program was swallowing my memory or I/O bandwidth. Hardware problem? I checked my /var/log/messages, and something really went wrong (I've highlighted those abnormal events):

  Mar 10 15:53:11 peace-desktop kernel: [ 2434.881018] ata3: hard resetting link
  Mar 10 15:53:18 peace-desktop kernel: [ 2442.392316] ata3: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310)
  Mar 10 15:53:23 peace-desktop kernel: [ 2447.400079] ata3.00: qc timeout (cmd 0xec)
  Mar 10 15:53:23 peace-desktop kernel: [ 2447.400092] ata3.00: failed to IDENTIFY (I/O error, err_mask=0x4)
  Mar 10 15:53:23 peace-desktop kernel: [ 2447.400110] ata3: hard resetting link
  Mar 10 15:53:24 peace-desktop kernel: [ 2447.940060] ata3: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310)
  Mar 10 15:53:24 peace-desktop kernel: [ 2447.943275] ata3.00: configured for UDMA/33
  Mar 10 15:53:24 peace-desktop kernel: [ 2447.943311] ata3: EH complete

Was it really a harddisk problem? Turned out that it's not that simple yet!

When I upgraded my computer a few days ago, something on one of the casings involved caught my eyes:

Saw it? There is a Taiji [en.wikipedia.org] symbol (太极图) at the bottom of the casing!

Is there any special structural design that results in this taiji symbol? I took a look the bottom of the casing.

Hmm... No, I can't think of any other reason except that the symbol might be used to bless the computer components inside the casing? Some Feng Shui purpose? Nonetheless, the motherboard installed in this casing was spoiled last month (after using it for about 2 years). And this was the first reason that made me to upgrade my computer. :p

So do you have a better idea why the symbol is there? Tell me.

I decided to upgrade my computer a few days ago (the reason is tedious...). In particular, the processor, motherboard, RAM, and graphics card will be 'gone' and I need to buy them. If you know exactly what you use the computer for, then it's easy to spot what components you really need. Here's mine.

Processor
I often use VirtualBox. So, for reasonable performance, the processor must support nested paging. I'm inclined to buy an AMD processor. No need to have very fast processing speed.
For AMD processors, nested paging became available starting with the K10 architecture[en.wikipedia.org]. I checked some prices lists, but found that the cheapest AMD processor with K10 is AMD Athlon II X2 240, which was priced at RM198. Ok, would get this.

Motherboard
The AMD Athlon II X2 needs AM3 socket. The cheapest motherboard on the price list that (1) supports AM3, (2) has a good name and stable, and (3) has a good name/review is ASUS M4N78 SE, which was priced at RM220. Besides, it's good that the motherboard has an UltraDMA interface, as my optical drive and a harddisk still use this interface. Ok, should be a good choice.

Graphics Card
The ASUS M4N78 SE motherboard supports only graphics cards with PCIe interface. I don't play high-end 3D games, so I decided to get the cheapest card out there. There are three cheapest (cheapest again. :p) cards priced at RM125, and i finally chose XFX NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS. Both the motherboard chosen and this card used the chipsets designed by the same company (Nvidia). Besides, the card supports GPU programming via CUDA. Ok, would get this too.

RAM
The motherboard supports only DDR2 RAM. Decided to get 4GB as I often opened several big applications at the same time. Finally chose two 2GB Kingston DDR2 RAM, each priced at RM133.

So I spent RM809 to buy all these yesterday, and upgraded my box last night. The performance and features are satisfactory. I get a very significant performance boost when using VirtualBox due to the support of nested paging. I'm using it to write this post using the enhanced box now. :)

I bought an Eee PC [eeepc.asus.com] 4G (701) last month and had been playing and using it. It is quite a lovely machine.

I have also installed Ubuntu 7.10 on it, and make all peripherals (except the modem) to function properly. There are a lot of good resources online, including the excellent EeeUser.com. I will install Xubuntu 8.04 on it when it is officially released next week, and write an installation HOWTO if time permits.

1. What is This?

cdlock includes utilities for locking and unlocking the door of your CD/DVD drives. Once the door is locked, you should not be able to eject the tray by pressing the 'Eject' button located at the front side of the drive (even the tray is empty). It works on Linux with 2.6.x kernel.

Scroll down for technical notes. I implemented this to guard my DVD drive!

2. Source Code

To install it, simply do:

\$ make && sudo make install

The code is distributed under the terms of GPL.

3. Usage

To lock the door of a CD/DVD drive:

\$ cdlock [<device>]

The program assumes /dev/cdrom by default. The program returns zero if and only if it does not detect any error.

To unlock the door:

\$ cdunlock [<device>]

4. Technical Notes

The program is so simple and it basically does an ioctl() with CDROM_LOCKDOOR. I write this because I fail to find a handy utility just to do this simple task. Tell me if you are aware of any utility that has included this feature, or you want to include this program under the umbrella of a more sophisticated and GPL-compatible software.

I have tested the program with three CD/DVD drives. All of them work in the sense that, once I have run the utility to lock the door, the function of the 'Eject' button is virtually disabled. However, there are some weird behaviors I do not understand yet:

• On some computers, the eject command fails to eject the tray after I have locked the door. Good. But while I expect eject to return 1 since the operation has failed, it returns 0 instead. Is it a feature or a bug?
• I use DVD writers of the same model (LITE-ON DVDRW SOHW-1673S) on two different computers instead with Ubuntu 7.10. After locking the drives' doors, I can eject successfully on one computer but fail on another. Why is it so? I don't think I have change any setting related to the drives. Is there anything to do with the IDE cables?

Tell me if you know the answers.

Microsoft just lost the vote on OOXML! However, the war is not over yet. (For details, see the news coverage at http://www.noooxml.org/) ISO has decided to move forward to a Board Resolution Meeting from February 25-29, 2008.

We just DON'T NEED OOXML!