Steve Wozniak - iWoz

Here's a great talk by Steve Wozniak (the guy that co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs). He's the guy that created Apple I and Apple II.



He talks about his life, and how Steve Jobs lived the life of a hippie, etc :-). Cool stuff. Plus, he's a great engineer.

"Where really smart people work, there's generally doors unlocked"
Steve Wozniak - on how he managed to obtain documentation to learn stuff.

Play with a Cray

Want access to a Cray supercomputer? Ask Cyber-Cray for access.



Visit http://www.cray-cyber.org and request access to their machines.

$ uname -a
sn5176 sn5176 9.0.2.2 sin.0 CRAY Y-MP

Fake Cisco gear

Those industrious Chinese...

http://www.andovercg.com/services/cisco-counterfeit-wic-1dsu-t1.shtml

Can you say "death by server"?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/64856052@N00/894127714/sizes/o/

NVIDIA Laptop Drivers and Vista SP1 x64

I've upgraded my laptop OS to Windows Vista SP1 Enterprise 64 bit, and I've had a hard time finding updated drivers from the manufacturer.

The trouble with NVIDIA laptop graphics adapters is that you need to use the vendor driver, instead of the one from NVIDIA.com.

I've got a 8600 GT mobile graphics adapter on this Acer 5920G laptop, and the Acer drivers are ancient (101.45), compared to 169.12 version currently available from laptop2go.

The good news is you can grab an updated copy from the LaptopVideo2Go website, copy the modified INF file, and enjoy :-).

Cracking the Kensington MicroSaver lock with toilet paper

I've seen plenty of "rip out the Kensington" or using a pen / screwdriver to crack the lock, but this is just ridiculous...

Disk monitoring and tuning with dd and S.M.A.R.T. - Reallocating bad sectors and predicting disk failure

What is S.M.A.R.T.?

Modern disk drives will automagically reallocate bad sectors on the fly, as soon as they encounter some kind of R/W/ECC error. But in order for this to happen, it must first access that sector. This is why you never see surface errors on modern disks.

Modern hard drives (ATA and SATA) have S.M.A.R.T. - Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology. Once you have that enabled in BIOS (assuming you have a S.M.A.R.T. capable disk and controller) you can monitor a number of disk health and performance parameters.

What you should keep an eye on is the Reallocated Sectors Count (if the drive has a problem with a R/W/ECC error it will mark the sector "Reallocated" and transfer the data to a spare area on the disk). This will result in some performance decrease, and is a sign of imminent disk failure.


Monitoring S.MA.R.T.

ATA and SATA disks:
To monitor S.M.A.R.T. data you can use HDTune on Windows or SmartMonTools (smartd, smartctl) on Darwin (Mac OSX), Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, OS/2, or eComStation systems. If you're up to it, you can also use SmartMonTools on Windows.

USB Enclosures:
While in most cases you should have no trouble using HDTune or SmartMonTools, some USB drive enclosures may be resilient to monitoring with S.M.A.R.T. programs and will require vendor software. In such cases, you can download vendor software to perform monitoring, like "Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics".

iPods:
You can also get S.M.A.R.T. info on your iPod. You can either configure it to act as a pass through device (regular USB media) or boot your iPod in diagnostic mode. You can check S.M.A.R.T. disk data and perform more test on your iPod. To do so, you must reset your iPod and hold REW + Select (5G) at the Apple boot menu. For other iPod models, see here (or Google Apple Diagnostic Mode your iPod Model).

Forcing the disk to remap damanged sectors

Now you should know that if you see any problems with Reallocated Sector Count, Reallocated Event Count, Seek Error Rate, Offline Uncorrectable, UDMA CRC Error Count, Multizone Error Rate, Hardware ECC Recovered values, you should consider getting a new disk. These are all signs of a failing disk. Learn more about S.M.A.R.T. attributes and their meaning here. Note that depending on vendor, there may also be enhanced or propriotary S.M.A.R.T. attributes. Read your HDD vendor documentation.

But sometimes you just need to get a bit more life out of a disk, and force the disk to reallocated damaged sectors. You can do so easily by performing a full raw disk read and write operation. For this, you can use the UNIX "dd" tool. Make sure your target disks aren't mounted (Type "mount" to list mounted disks then use "umount disk").

You can perform a disk read operation (reading the whole disk) using a syntax similar to:

# dd if=/dev/disk of=/dev/null bs=2048

You can perform a disk write operation (zero out the disk, this WILL result in data loss) using syntax similar to:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk bs=2048

Now you may wish to perform both a read and write at the same time, and not wipe out your disk data (zero it out). You can perform such a "disk refresh" using syntax similar to:

# dd if=/dev/disk of=/dev/disk bs=1m

This will read and rewrite the data to disk in 1MB chunks to prevent presently recoverable read errors from progressing into unrecoverable read errors.

Of course, you should read the dd manpage for your OS (on Windows you could use a dd for Windows implementation or resort to some sort of Linux or BSD LiveCD). Replace /dev/disk with your disk (make sure you're using the right disk). On Linux you can find out what disk you need to use from "dmesg" or /proc/partitions:

# cat /proc/partitions

You can also use "fdisk -l" to list partitons on your disk, see if that's the right disk

# fdisk -l /dev/hda

Do note that you need root permissions for all of this activity, so on some Linux systems you may need to use "sudo -i" to get a root shell, or precede all operations with "sudo".

While you're doing this rewrite operation, you should monitor the kernel log (dmesg). You can monitor /var/log/messages for this:

# tail -f /var/log/messages

You usually watch out for "DriveReady SeekComplete Error status=0x51 DriveStatusError error=0x04" or some other error.

You should also keep an eye on the Reallocated Sectors and other Interesting Parameters in smartctl:

# smartctl -A /dev/hda

Do this every now and then, and note the values before you've started the operation.

Once you begin the "dd" operations you can send dd a SIGINFO signal (use pkill / kill / whatever) to make it print out I/O information (progress). Some shells / TERMS also respond to Ctrl-T by sending SIGINFO.

# pkill -SIGINFO dd

Once you're done with dd and S.M.A.R.T. tools you should also perform a filesystem check (fsck / chkdsk / whatever).

Conclusions:

1. Monitor S.M.A.R.T. data with smartclt, keep an eye on Reallocs. Consider getting a new disk if you see reallocated sectors
2. Perform a disk refresh with dd in order to prevent recoverable read errors from progressing into unrecoverable errors. You don't need fancy tools like SpinRite.
3. You can use a simple Linux or BSD LiveCD to perform the disk refresh.
   
4. This is NOT a data recovery procedure. If you're doing data recovery, use something like dd_recover to a separate media.
5. This is NOT a step by step tutorial. Read your OS manpages to make sure you're not wiping out the wrong disk or something.
6. Always monitor S.M.A.R.T. parameters in order to spot disk failure before it happens.
7. Always keep backups.
   

Links and resources:

• Linux Harddisk Monitoring with SmartMonTools (smartctl)
• HDTune - S.M.A.R.T. tool for Windows
• Wikipedia S.M.A.R.T. page (good links)
  

Crazy EEE modding

And I thought the touch screen mod went too far...
http://beta.ivancover.com/wiki/index.php/Eee_PC_Internal_Upgrades

Then run MacOS X on the EEE :-).

Macbook Air - Razor Thin Computing

Razor thin MacBook
64 GB Solid state drive and 1.36 kg is awesome for a 1.6-1.8Ghz machine with 2GB of RAM.

Cell accelerator boards, NVIDIA GPU servers and HPC

This is pretty interesting considering your basic CPU does something like 30GFLOPS (something around 16 GFLOPs per POWER 6 cores, 10GFLOPS for a Itanium cores). A cell board like this does 180GFLOPs.
(Don't take this is a benchmark or anything. This is just some RAW data).

Some NVDIA something like 500 (technically the G80 has 128 fp32 ALUs @ 1350MHz with MADD - about 350 GFLOPs), a R600 is supposed to have like 500 and a Realizm 800 (Dual Wildcat VPUs) about 700 GFLOPS :-). So yeah, with 16 or so of these cards used right, you could score yourself a place on TOP500 SuperComputers. "Hey, my 4 graphic stations can beat your 1000-node Xeon cluster!".

And this is no joke, since GF8 series and the whole NVIDIA CUDA thing, NVIDIA has also started making... erm.. servers.

NVIDIA Tesla S870 GPU computing system peaks something like 2TFLOPS.

While one of those "low powered MIPS 64 CPU's" in the SiCortex, about 1GFLOP :-). But they have clusters of up to 5832.

PCI-E Cell accelerator board:

• Cell BE processor at 2.8 GHz
• More than 180 GFLOPS in PCI Express accelerator card
• PCI Express x16 interface with raw data rate of 4 GB/s in each direction
• Gigabit Ethernet interface
• 1-GB XDR DRAM, 2 channels each, 512 MB
• 4 GB DDR2, 2 channels each, 2 GB
• Optional MultiCore Plus™ SDK software

A WildCat 800:



There's an awesome potential HPC market here... GPUs, Playstation 3s with Cells, Cell PCI-E cards... exploited properly, it can make some pretty fast clusters. See Folding@Home for example where where GPUs count for 58.3 and PS3's count for 18.1 average computations per client.

HP Calculator Emulators for the PC - your very own HP-48

HP-48 was a graphing calculator that uses Reverse Polish notation using RPL (Reverse Polish LISP). It's pretty the best calculator. Ever.



http://www.hpcalc.org/hp48/pc/emulators/

The HP calculators are fully programmable, and you can also download a LOT of applications for it. Even games :-).

Gigabyte i-RAM memory disk - acts like regular SATA disk

iRAM is a RAMDISK that acts like a regular SATA drive, but uses DDR memory modules(4 battery backed 184-pin DIMM slots that accept any DDR DIMM and support up to 4GB unbuffered / non-ECC memory).



http://techreport.com/articles.x/9312

Some cool usage: Using more iRAM drives in a RAID-0 :-).

http://kiti.main.jp/Report/Waller/Waller1.htm
http://kiti.main.jp/Report/Waller/Waller2.htm