kate's infrastructure

If you’ve been bouncing around the interwebs of late, you may have heard the hype surrounding the Asus* eee pc.  I see no reason to simply become a news aggregator, so here’s a link for the lazy.  For the lazier, here’s a summary:

• It’s a mobile computing device, not a laptop.  It has internet-centric and productivity (think OpenOffice) apps;
• Ultraportable: <1kg, 7″ screen (that’s about the size of an A5 piece of paper);
• Runs a build of Xandros (Linux based), however it’s more like a phone operating system;
• Inbuilt wireless, webcam, speakers;
• No CD drive;
• Solid state harddrives only, just like the iPod nano;
• White;
• Cheap! (AUD$499)**;
• Competing devices include the One Laptop per Child Project, the Nokia n800 mobile internet device, and the iPod touch.

I think the primary market is probably students and folks that aren’t that computer aware.  As the marketing says, it really is easy to use.  I’m not interested because I need my technology dumbed down, but that I want an ultraportable device that can actually do something.  I have a smartphone that runs Windows Mobile 6 and Pocket Word, and has inbuilt wireless.  I could conceivably do most of the same stuff as the eeepc, however I’d look like a tool and the process on a tiny system would be annoying.   It’s probably not a good idea to jump on tech like this so early, but it is awesome.

I’m ordering one tomorrow from Myer.  More updates to come. 

* Apparently pronounced “A-su-ess”, not “A-sis” as I’d previously assumed.  This is a tad annoying.

** It’s cheaper outside Australia, apparently either the exchange rate is to be ignored when pricing locally or shipping this distance costs HEAPS.

So the three year warranty I purchased when I got my laptop turned out to be pretty pointless, as the manufacturer offers a year’s warranty that I’d completely overlooked.  This laptop wasn’t originally intended as a keeper, so I guess the extra warranty is a bit pointless, but my previous track record in snapping laptops in half suggests its still a tad worthwhile.

Warranty rants aside, I really only worked this out when I tried to call for assistance for my failing laptop.  I was redirected to Compaq/HP.  I felt a tad stupid that I had nothing in the way of diagnostic info to offer the helpdesk guy, just that it beeped and wouldn’t boot.  The only additional action he offered was to hold down the power button for a full 30 seconds before again attempting a boot.  No luck.

I had originally been reluctant to call because I didn’t want the hassle of sending my laptop away.  Turns out a local crew, NCSS rock, and would come to me.

The basic timeline that followed:

• Friday 12:30 – Called HP/Compaq helpdesk, logged call.
• Friday 13:30 – Received a called from NCSS, HP’s local support agent, advising that they’d ordered a new motherboard and would keep me posted.
• Monday 10:00 -Received an update from NCSS.  My new motherboard arrived.  Made arrangements to come and get it from my at my office.
• Tuesday 10:00 – NCSS support guy arrived and picked up the laptop
• Tuesday 16:00 – NCSS called to say re-seating the RAM appeared to resolve the issue.  They would leave the machine on overnight to confirm.
• Wednesday 10:00 – Received functional laptop.

I wasn’t in a hurry anyway, but I was pretty impressed with the time and attentiveness of NCSS.  A very professional interaction.

The only thing that stopped me writing a glowing letter of praise to NCSS and HP was the 24hrs that followed.  My laptop was very sluggish.  I went through the usual updates and basic checks.  I stopped everything imagineable, then I fell back to the basics and checked task manager.  When the machine was doing nothing, it was using 80% memory and ridiculous load on the page file.  A few more checks and I saw that it thought it only had 512mb of RAM, that’s half the minimum spec for Vista Basic and it really really sucked.

The choice now, was to roll through the same process again or consider a few alternatives.  A quick internet search, coupled with massive impatience, meant that I decided to trust the internet when it told me that replacing RAM wouldn’t impact my warranty.  I figured I may as well upgrade the memory at the same time. 

Checking the max spec for the laptop, I decided on 2 x 1GB SO DIMMs:

• Ebay were roughly $50 ea, plus postage.  But the whole caper seemed a little hit and miss and I was a bit concerned about buying something like this on ebay;
• DSE, Domayne etc all probably sold the stuff I needed, but they didn’t list online, so I couldn’t confirm and wasn’t into shopping around;
• Harris Technologies, which I normally find pretty uninspiring allowed me to search online for RAM compatibility (as long as it was Kingston RAM) and but it online for pickup in Fyshwick.  Only $80 ea. 
• Local Computer Markets were scheduled for the weekend, and I’d probably do better there than most places, but the effort was a bit too much of searching each stall;
• HP genuine parts cost $249 ea, plus postage. For 512mb DIMMs.  I may have ordinarily preferred to buy from the laptop vendor, but that was more than ridiculous;

HT was the winner, and I picked up the RAM on Saturday morning.  I’ve never played inside a laptop before, so again I looked online for reassurance.  I found my saviour: http://www.technibble.com/how-to-install-laptop-ram/

Now I have power and speed, there’s nothing I can’t do.  Joost might be the place I start.

Laptoptopia began for me back in Feb 07.  I was dismayed by a failed desktop pc that had promised much, and couldn’t face another similarly sensible choice.  I decided a laptop was my future.

I did very little research, but basically decided that I wasn’t in the market for an ultra portable, and I wasn’t in the market for a desktop replacement.  I needed to do ‘stuff’, but I didn’t need to pay extra to be able to run some high end apps and games.  Wouldn’t happen.  So for just over AUD$1000 I got myself a Compaq v3000 series.  The battery sucks, vista took some getting used to, but otherwise it did all I needed.  Unbelievably Domayne had the best deal and warranty, though the most offensive sales person.

So here I am 8 months later.  I’d gotten used to logging on and doing nothing in particular.  It was my only HDTV.  It was my study vessel. It was handy.  Then one day when I was reading about foldable kayaks it stopped.  Being the infrastructure IT professional I am, I gracefully rebooted it by popping the battery.  Being a Vista user made me pretty comfortable with doing some pretty odd things to maintain service*.  Unfortunately laptoptopia was never to return.

Now I boot and am met with a series of beeps.  My immediate reaction was that my computer may have been complaining in morse code.  I asked google, and was told a bit more about beep codes.  More info on HP laptop beep codes here and general beep codes here.  None of them look particularly reassuring right?

Lucky I purchased the warranty.  We’ll see how that goes.

* Not a subtle Vista dig, I thought it took some getting used to and was originally not particularly stable.  Now I like.

It’s fact that xkcd is a damn fine web comic.  I’d be happy to have just linked to that.  Because I also need to be entertained to learn, I choose to present you with xkcd’s map of the internet in all it’s comicy goodness.

MetaFilter just also sent me in the direction of a much more sensible version, which is an interesting reference.

A relative had a child recently, and I thought it was a very ‘now’ thing to do to register them a domain name.  It might not be for much more than baby photos now but it might be a useful myspace redirection when they’re an angsty teen.  Completely infatuated with my new web host I thought I’d kick the domain registration their way.  A few clicks and I’d confirmed the availability of the new domain and registered it.  Awesomely easy and I felt like a technical genius. 

As my webhost of choice acts as both a host and a domain registrar, I had to run through the final step of setting it up to be actually hosted (2 month old children aren’t awesome at doing such things themselves).  It failed immediately, which led me to believe I’d done something wrong.

I checked their support wiki, I’d appear to have followed the steps.  Really there’s no rocket science involved, so I don’t see how I could have screwed it up.  That being said, it hadn’t actually worked, so evidence suggested that I had in fact screwed something up.

Next was time to eliminate some of the obvious stuff.  Unfortunately I had a pretty short list:

1. Try again.  Nope, still doesn’t work.
2. Try again using a different option (e.g. Park the domain).  Nope, still doesn’t work.
3. Check that the domain name has propogated.  Yes, whois records show my registration and I can reach it from other sites on the interweb.  All a-ok.
4. Um, Try Again.  Still doesn’t work.
5. Raise a support request.  Try to not sound like a lunatic.

(Yes, I should be in testing)

A quick back-and-forth with the support team and I learn that I can’t add my newly registered domain to my host because it’s already registered under an expired account there.  No, that wasn’t in my list above of random tasks to try.  Seriously though, even if it was in someone’s account they didn’t hold the registration for the domain itself.  Obviously it wouldn’t have let me register a domain that belonged to someone else, and I did a WHOIS from a different registrar to start with, so as far as the internet was concerned, this was up for grabs.

I tried to plead my case, as this sounds a little crazy, and my request has been moved to a different support queue.  It got me thinking though, aside from my receipt for payment, I have nothing to refute the history of the domain.  I didn’t even think to check this.  What if it was chock full of unsavoury content in a previous incarnation?  How can I find out what has gone before? 

1. Google Cache: I decided that this would show me nothing so I didn’t check it first.  I generally use the cache to check out sites that are offline when I need them. 

2. WayBack Machine: The Internet Archive is the most awesome at this sort of venture.  Ultimately you either love or hate that it exists.   There’s always stuff you wish wasn’t archived, but it usually pretty useful.  No matches for my site.

3. Search for WHOIS history tools:  I guess this is all I really wanted, I just wanted to confirm that it had been registered before.  I stumbled upon domaintools.com and it looked perfect.  Unfortunately the front page did little service to a skim reader such as myself and I came away with the conclusion that additional funds were required.  A little frantic searching later and I found their ultra awesome subdomain: http://whois.domaintools.com/.  Running a WHOIS from there not only returns the WHOIS record, but gives me some added extras including the host, web server software and history.  Perfect.

4. Google Cache: I did eventually check google for completeness.  It did return me results indicating my domain of choice had come up on lists as about to expire back in March.  That was enough info for me to use in the first place to confirm that it had been registered previously and that the registration had long since expired. 

Conclusion: The unexpected will always arise, the simplest solution is best and bookmark whois.domaintools.com.

Check out the NetCraft web server survey and news site: http://news.netcraft.com/

It’s pretty straight forward and contains some interesting data about web server trends and usage.  It’s particularly interesting to see major organisation downtime (Blogger, Cisco) as well as some of the shift away from Apache.  Microsoft’s IIS and the not so Microsoft lighttpd are emerging as interesting players.  I think I might need to take another look at these.

Storage illustrated through russian dolls: http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/matryoshkus/

Excellent, except for ending with Terabyte.  Must future proof gimmicks.

A reminder of what’s already in place, and maybe the soon to be common:

• Kilobyte (KB) - 1024 Bytes
• Megabyte (MB) - 1024 KB
• Gigabyte (GB) - 1024 MB
• Terabyte (TB) - 1024 GB
• Petabyte (PT) – 1024 TB
• Exabyte (EB) – 1024 PT
• Zettabyte (ZB) – 1024 EB
• Yottabyte (YB) – 1024 ZB

I remember having under a GB storage on my home computer, and in 2007 a TB is now in reach for home users.  Even Mac users. Crazy times.