Finished Building Custom Windows Home Server for Work

Vanguard Instruments Company, where I currently work at, was founded in 1993, but ever since then they have never had a network server. Although we have a network, there is no server and no one uses any shared resources, mainly because my boss is afraid of networks and the internet, and technology in general. So up until now, everyone here runs around with a USB memory stick that is used to transfer data (and viruses) from one computer to another.

When I started here in January of this year, one of my main goals was to build and install a network server to handle computer backups and data storage. Sadly, it took nine months till I could finally get to building one! The last nine months I’ve been mainly buried under user’s manuals that I’ve been writing and re-writing.

Last month I finally convinced my boss that it was time to spec and build our server. Since we have a very small network here and we aren’t going to be serving up any applications, I decided to go with Microsoft Windows Home Server. I’ve been in love with Windows Home Server ever since I built my own server for my home network. It’s really a wonderful operating system with a great set of robust features and very easy administration. I love the automatic computer backup feature, and especially the automatic file duplication feature for shared folders. I also really like how it creates one huge storage pool from all of the hard drives you have connected (internal and external) and manages storage balancing automatically.

For the server at work, I used a lot of the same parts I used for my home server with a few upgrades. Here’s the full parts list:

ASRock A780GXE/128M Motherboard

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 6000+ 3.0 GHz Processor

Cooler Master Centurion 5 ATX Mid Tower Case

OCZ OCZ2N800SR4GK SLI-Ready Edition DDR2 PC2-6400 4 GB Dual Channel Memory Kit

I-Star BPU-340SATA – Internal RAID enclosure

4 x Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB SATA Hard Drives (Love these quiet drives)
Microsoft Windows Home Server Operating System

So far this is the second Windows Home Server machine that I’ve built from scratch without a hitch. So if your small business is in dire need of a network server that can provide reliable network storage as well as automated backups, shoot me a line!

Canceling Stamps.com account

We use Pitney Bowes at work for stamp metering but my boss recently had the great idea of trying out stamps.com because he thought he’d be saving money. So I went ahead and signed up with them and gave it a try. Then his secretary called Pitney Bowes to close their account and they offered us an even better deal, so we decided to stay with them and cancel stamps.com.

So I went to the stamps.com site to find a link to cancel our account, with no luck. I finally found a page that told me to call a toll free number to cancel our account. Being that there was no way to do it on the site, I knew this wouldn’t be a pleasant process.

Upon calling the toll free number I was placed on hold for about 8 minutes. And then the classic outsourced Indian accent appeared on the phone. Not only that, the phone call even had a horrible echo, pretty much confirming that this was most likely being forwarded overseas.

So the operator first asks how he can assist me and I tell him that I want to cancel our account. He says, “I would like to help you with that” and starts asking the basics like my phone number, etc. Meanwhile, he keeps asking why we want to cancel and I say, “My boss decided we are staying with Pitney Bowes”. And again he says, “I would like to help you with the cancellation” but continues to ask more questions about how much we pay for Pitney Bowes, etc. Again I tell him that I’m not the decision maker here and just calling for my boss to cancel the account. And again he says, “I would like to help you with that”. But then he goes on to say that he can offer us a discounted rate if we would like to continue using stamps.com. At this point I was pretty pissed because I had been on the phone for over 15 minutes trying to cancel the account.

After repeating myself over and over again that I was in no position to make any decisions other than request cancellation of the account, he finally closed the account. I swear, these phone operators are complete automatons. Overall time wasted on the phone: 16 minutes. They could’ve made my life easier by just providing a damn on-line cancellation form with required fields for the questions they really wanted answers to.

Gmail is down again!

I have been trying to access since 1:00 PM (PST) and I keep getting a 502 server error with the following message:

Server Error

The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.

Please try again in 30 seconds.

Well, it’s been 30 seconds…and another 30 seconds…and…45 minutes already and it’s still not back. If this was the first time I experienced a Gmail outage that would be something, but this is the THIRD time so far in about 4 months. And if it was the free account, that would be something, but I’m using a paid Google apps account, so this is getting really frustrating.

About 4 months ago I convinced my boss to switch our company email over to Google apps. For the most part we’ve been very happy, but if these outages continue, then I’m gonna be pretty pissed real quick.

UPDATE

2:17 PM(PST) It’s finally back up. *sigh*

Not Buying Another Kindle Book

I bought the Amazon Kindle 2 just when it came out and was immediately in love with it. I have to admit, the screen is wonderful to read and feels very much like paper. Also, I love the free wireless access. Although the Kindle features a basic web browser, it’s still very useful and functional. At first, I also really liked the idea of being able to download books when I’m on the road, or anywhere for that matter (most of the U.S., that is). But then they yanked my copy of 1984, and that really opened my eyes.

In this day and age, companies are trying their best to take away ownership of media and forcing people to move to subscription-based models because that way they can make huge profits by not really giving you a product but mere access. In the “old days” I could take a music CD and lend it to my friend, listen to it myself, or use it as a coaster if I wanted. I paid for it, I owned the disc, and that was that. But with the proliferation of digital media, that has all changed.

I have no problems with digital media. In fact, I love digital media. The thing I can’t stand is the media companies trying to control it to the point that it makes the media almost useless. In my opinion, the biggest culprit is DRM (digital rights management). A LONG time ago I bought a couple of Depeche Mode songs from iTunes, and it was the last time I ever bought anything from them. They wanted me to jump through hoops so that I could play the same songs on multiple digital devices (my PSP, my phone, etc.). Why the hell can’t I listen to the song anyway I want if I paid for accessing it? Just give me the damn thing in MP3 format and let me listen to it however I want.

I believe the Kindle has taken this to an even further step. With iTunes at least I had a copy of the song and could’ve burnt it to a CD and then ripped it back as an MP3. But with the Kindle, all I get is a DRM-protected file on the Kindle that can’t be read by anything else. I can’t print it, I can’t read it with something else, and I can’t lend it to anyone. And as I rudely found out, they can just yank it from my Kindle without my permission and without my knowing, as they did with the George Orwell books (the ultimate Big Brother irony).

Since I don’t own any of the books that I buy for the Kindle, what happens if Amazon decides to scrap the Kindle service? Or when the device eventually becomes obsolete? I’ll either have to move to their “next” device to access my books or just lose complete access to them. So if you’re amassing a huge collection of Kindle books, you are putting your entire faith in Amazon and the existence of their services, something I’m not willing to do. The convenience is great, but from now on, I’m going back to my paper books, thank you.

Does this mean my Kindle is useless? Far from it. I still love my Kindle. I recently took a mini vacation to San Francisco with my wife and the Kindle was absolutely an awesome tool. I used its FREE wireless access to get bus schedules, send emails, find maps, etc (yes, you can do that on your cell phone too, but I’m not willing to pay $200/month for a cell phone plan). I also use my Kindle in conjunction with Google Reader to read my favorite news and blog sites. Also, I transfer a lot of my own documents to my Kindle for convenient reading.

I think the Kindle is a great device, but sadly it’s being crippled by DRM. The media industry just needs to do away with DRM altogether, because frankly, 99% of the time someone will wind up cracking the DRM anyway. I mean just look at BluRay. It was supposed to be the “uncrackable” format, yet you can already rip BluRay discs, and it hasn’t even become mainstream. The media industry needs to stop treating all their customers like thieves and pirates. Those who pirate software, music, books, etc. will continue to do it regardless. Protection schemes like DRM only hurt the average consumers who just want to easily access their media without having to worry about a million formats and what devices they work with.

Resurrecting My Dell Inspiron 1501 Laptop

While still contemplating my next purchase, I realized that I might actually be able to use my current Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop for music production. The biggest problem with this laptop is that it doesn’t have a firewire port, which I need for the Presonus FireBox audio interface. However a long time ago I had bought a Startech Firewire Expresscard for it which I couldn’t get to work. Then I remembered that I was trying to get the card to work with Windows Vista.

I hate Vista. I regret the day I “upgraded” my laptop to it. It slowed it to a complete crawl. So yesterday I decided to upgrade back to upgrade back to Windows XP which the laptop came with originally. To sweeten the pot, I also decided to swap the stock 30GB drive for a Samsung 500GB drive that I had bought for one of my PS3’s. I never used the drive for the PS3 because frankly I found no use for it, so it has been just laying around.

The move back to XP went great and I was able to get the 500GB drive in there as well. In fact I’m currently posting this from my laptop. Also, I ordered 2GB of RAM for the laptop because currently it only has a measly 512MB and it’s swapping way too much for the hard drive.

Once the OS issues were worked out, I went back to the Firewire expresscard. Plugged it in and sure enough, it’s working great with the FireBox. Well, I mean it seems to be so far. I haven’t tried it with any soft synths yet, but I’m not really anticipating any problems. If anything, the problem may be with the speed of my laptop since it’s only got an AMD Turion X2 running at 1.6Ghz.

UPDATE

Well, I finally got everything installed and for some crap reason the FireBox doesn’t work correctly. Such a waste of time. I plugged in the Firewire Expresscard to the laptop and plugged in the FireBox to the Expresscard. The card seems to be functioning fine and the computer sees the FireBox. I was able to install the drivers and everything just fine. I even get sound out of it, but the sound has a ton of garbled noise mixed in with it. That’s usually a latency issue, but changing the latency time values didn’t fix it at all. I rebooted the computer many times and only ONCE I actually got perfect sound out of it, but the next time I rebooted it was back to the crappy distorted audio.

At this point I have no idea what the hell is wrong with the computer. My best guess is that the ExpressCard firewire interface isn’t fast enough or is causing problems. I’m not gonna spend any money to buy another ExpressCard because I have a feeling the FireBox won’t work with any of them. *sigh* This really sucks because I was hoping to use this for music production.

Wishlist for My Next PC Build

I’m in dire need of a new main system. My main desktop PC is a 3.0 Ghz single core Alienware Area 51 and it takes literally 10 minutes to boot. And sadly it just doesn’t have the horsepower to run the main apps I want to run now – mainly music production software and soft synths.

I’m currently eying the Intel Core i7 CPU’s, mainly the Core i7 920 which has gotten to a very reasonable price point (around $250-$280 street). I might actually be able to use my existing Alienware tower case, but that thing is just too huge. I’m leaning more towards a mid-tower case, probably the same one I bought for my Windows Home Server build. So without much further ado, here’s the current wishlist:

CPU

Motherboard

Case

Cooler Master HAF 932 High Air Flow ATX Full Tower Case Black

Memory

Corsair TR3X6G1333C9 XMS3 6 GB 3 x 2 GB PC3-10666 1333MHz 240-Pin DDR3

Graphics Card

Gigabyte GV-N96TSL-1GI Geforce 9600 GT 1GB Silent

Power Supply

Undecided at the moment.

This list subject to change!

First Go at Blender

I’m a huge fan of Open Source software, and one in particular, Blender,  has recently re-kindled my interest in 3-D modeling and animation. Blender is a full-fledged Open Source 3-D modeling and animation software that’s been making quite a few headlines as of late, so I figured I’d give it a shot. I’ve used 3D Studio Max before but there’s no way I can afford to buy that, so I downloaded the latest version of Blender (2.49 as of this writing) and started to mess with it.

I’m one of those people who HATES reading software manuals (or any kind of manual for that matter) and I usually just like to tinker with things and figure them out. But I have to admit that the first time I ran Blender, I was completely lost. I think that initial startup screen can really drive some people away immediately because it’s just so different than any other software that I’ve ever used. You get a window staring back at you with a cube in the middle of it. You left click thinking that it will select something, and it doesn’t. Then you look at the bottom of the screen and there are tons of buttons, and panels, and dialog boxes, and buttons. It just freaked me out. I wanted to create something and finally found the menu to add a sphere. But then I had no idea how to select it, scale it, or do anything else to it.

After my first fruitless encounter, I was still determined to give Blender a fair try, so I got on blender.org and started searching for some tutorials. Fortunately there are plenty of great tutorials out there for Blender, as well as a huge community of active and friendly users. I was able to quickly find some excellent tutorials that got me started on my way.

So I started my second session of Blender with a focus on learning the user interface and getting the hang of the way Blender “thinks” and operates. After about 15 minutes, I was thoroughly amazed. Frankly, it’s a beautifully designed program. Once you understand how it works, you realize that it’s really very intuitive and efficient. I’ve only spent about 15 minutes with it so far and was able to make the following experimental geometry which started out as a simple cube:

I still can’t believe that this is Open Source software and free to use. I think it can easily hold its own against most of the high-end commercial 3-D apps. I will definitely be messing with it more and posting my progress here, so keep your eyes peeled!