Brian's Blog

Da jeg sad og læste nyheder i dag, faldt jeg over denne artikel fra Computerworld.dk, som handler om hvordan en dansker bygger sine egne “Super Work Stations”, som filmindustrien finder virkelig interessant, da det åbenbart sparer dem uger (og millioner af kroner), fordi denne “Super Work Station” er så meget hurtigere, og kan klare det på 90 sekunder.

Alene med sin processorkraft imponerede computeren den erfarne instruktor, da den renderer – eller bygger – en hel spillefilm på halvandet minut med live-rendering, hvilket ellers normalt tager over en uge.

Min første tanke da jeg læste det, var at enten brugte filmindustrien nogen helt sindsygt langsomme computere, eller også var der tale om en helt sindsyg cluster baseret computer fra Marius. Det var indtil jeg flyttede mit blik til spalten til højre for artiklen, som listede specifikationerne for computeren.

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Yesterday I received my brand spanking new Drobo FS, exciting stuff. It was delivered in a boring brown cardboard box. Opening the box I’m greeted by another box with the words “Welcome to the world of…” and below that was the Drobo in a nice cloth bag with the title “Drobo” on top.

So after I unpack and plug everything in and install the Drobo Dashboard I sit looking at an annoying Drobo Dashboard that just states something like “No Device Detected”. I check the DHCP leases and find the IP of the Drobo, so that looks OK. Pinging the Drobo also turns out as one would expect, replies all around. Even opening the Public share in Windows Explorer works great. Everything except the administration tool seems to actually work. Checking the Drobo Knowledge Base they point to Firewalls being the main cause of these kind of problems. Well, everything is on a closed of LAN, no Firewalls there. Several restarts of the Drobo later I figure I’ll attempt doing a restart of Windows; lo and behold, that seems to have worked.

So time to play around a bit. Installing a few Drobo Apps and see how that works. Well, it kinda doesn’t, at least not as one would expect from a “Plug and Play” device. Downloaded the App, unzipped and copied the TGZ file to the Dobo Apps folder. Oh yea, and then you have to RESTART the Drobo for it to actually install the App? Why the hell that? The Drobo operating system is based on Linux. Why not just call a small script from the Drobo Dashboard, or even with a Cronjob, that does all that unpacking and installing except first doing it during reboot?

Anyway I install DropBear, a small SSH server and client. I reboot the Drobo to get it installed, then I try to SSH into it. Guess it didn’t work; connection refused. Well, I take a look at the log and it seems that generating the host keys didn’t work. Oh well, another reboot of the Drobo solved that. That was 2 reboots just to install one App? Plain stupid.

So finally, after a couple of hours, I have 2 Western Digital 2TB disks installed and are copying data at a whooping 22-27MB/s over a Gigabit network. Oh well, it’s acceptable speed just for data storage. So after a while I add third 2TB drive, the Drobo starts doing its thing. While the Drobo does its thing I copy some more data to it, or so I thought. Suddenly the Drobo apparently drops all connections and Drobo Dashboard can’t find it. I ping it and it responds just fine *sigh*.

So I turn of the Drobo again, and it apparently takes some time, but rather that than loose the data I already copied there, because the third drive I added was the drive that previously contained the data I already copied. After about 5 minutes I see the Drobo finally is turned off and I start it up again. The drobo starts working on protecting the data telling me not to remove any drives because the data currently isn’t protected, or some such. After another 15-30 minutes I notice that the Drobo is reporting the third drive faulty. Worked fine with no S.M.A.R.T. errors on my Windows 7 computer.

After those initial annoyances I might actually come to like the Drobo, even with the shortcomings it have. The fact that I don’t have to expand and rebuild arrays is nice and the Dashboard is only really needed for first-time setup, or so I think. More updates, maybe, when I have played around with it some more.

Hvordan er det så at skrive fra en iPad?
Bestemt bedre end at skrive fra en iPhone, men på ingen måde i nærheden af produktiviteten ved en rigtig computer. Man har ikke 10-finger systemet til rådighed. Man har ikke de vante tastaturgenveje til formattering af tekst.
Denne post skriver jeg på en iPad vha. WordPress App. Det er langsommeligt og jeg skal selv skrive HTML koderne til formattering, hvilket er endnu mere langsommeligt fordi man skal ind under tal, videre under tegn, tilbage til tal, tilbage til bogstaver, så igen unr tal og under tegn for at skrive et enkelt HTMLtag.

Hvordan er den så at læse bøger og magasiner på?
iPad er for tung og uhandig til at være behagelig at læse længere tid på. Også fordi det er en aktiv skærm (oplyst) bliver man hurtigere træt i øjnene ved at læse derpå.
Den ere ret god til at læse magasiner på da de som regel er meget billedtunge, og med pinch-to-zoom gør den det ret godt.

Hvad er fordelen egentlig ved en iPad?
Den er god til lige at læse et eller andet på internettet med, hvis man ikke har en ordentlig computer og browser ved hånden.
Den er god til at spille Cut the Rope og Angry Birds på.
Den er god til at blære sig med, uden egentlig at kunne noget.
Den er ganske glimrende til lige at at fjernstyre hjemmecomputeren via TeamViewer, hvis man ikke lige sidder ved en rigtig computer.
Med Dropbox er den super til lige at få adgang til dokumenterne i skyen.
Den er god som foto album. Jeg kan især godt lide Web Albums App som kan bruge Picasa og Facebook albums.
Den er okay til noter.

Denne ene post tog nok en time at skrive på en iPad. Mistænker dog WordPress App’en for at væ den langsomme del. Dog er iPad’ens ordbog samt måden man navigerer i et dokument også med til at det tager så lang tid.

Nu har jeg efterhånden testet Apple iPhone et par måneder og Apple iPad (iDevices) et par uger, og der er allerede flere grundlæggende ting som irriterer mig grumt.

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