I'm trying to get back into the habit of using my Sun blog as part of a (delayed) New Year's resolution. One aspect of the resolution is to learn to use a blog entry editor so I can compose offline and post asynchronously. My first test of that is via w.bloggar, which I downloaded from wbloggar.org. I'm anticipating more opportunity to blog around upcoming events such as 3GSM in Barcelona, Spain, some cool product & technology development work we've got going at Sun, a few geek projects on my workbench at home, as well as chaperoning a high school band trip to Austria in early April.

One minor problem I've already encountered is that w.bloggar interprets the control-T key combination, which I habitually use these days to open up new tabs in Firefox, as the command to "Post & Publish" the blog entry. Oops -- better be more careful about keyboard focus before I twitch for Control-T.

And I've spent the meat of this week at Sun's annual Analyst Summit in San Francisco, which is always fun. The highlights for me are the opportunities to plug into the high-energy brainwave conversations with knowledgeable, articulate, opinionated, fussy folks who make it their business to spot new ideas and speculate on how they might constructively converge. Even if they do break tables in hotel bars or instigate after-hours raids of local wine shops.

Well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I too couldn't help but take one of the nerd quizzes floating around, and you'll see my score here. I semi-jokingly claim to be an engineer by birth, and am pleased to see genetics, two engineering degrees, and fourteen years at Bell Laboratories has given me the background to qualify as a Nerd King God. I once heard someone define "Engineer" as "Someone who knows everything there is to know about everything that's boring," and perhaps that better applies to "Nerd" than "Engineer". At least that seems to be the case here.

On the other hand, I got a great t-shirt for Christmas that says it better than a Nerd Quiz score. "Vintage Geek" might be a better title to aspire to -- gotta love Jinx.com. Hang on a second and let me run out to the garage and grab that 8088 chip I have somewhere...

I had a chance today to finish off my External Hard Drive Project, by which I mean doing some performance benchmarking as well as some game play testing. I’ve been quite happy with the drive so far, though I’ve mostly been using it for routine purposes – archiving files, gathering images from our various home computers, burning backup CDs, and assembling one consolidated MP3 music library out of all the files scattered around on our computers and some data CDs. None of those uses, however, seemed like the kind of thing that would reveal significant performance differences between the hard drive in my laptop and a USB 2.0 external drive.

I wasn’t sure what tool to use to measure disk performance. I couldn’t find anything built into WinXP, and though I easily turned up a number of freeware utilities I couldn’t completely be sure they would do the job (or that I could fully trust them to not be carriers of adware and spyware). The folks at ExtremeTech, who have so far seemed to be pretty reliable, use Winbench 99 version 2.0 to measure disk (and other) performance in their various reviews so I decided to give it a try. Winbench is developed by VeriTest but is distributed by PC Magazine from their FTP site. It’s easy to download, install, and run, and though it is clearly set up to be a serious tool that can be precisely used for detailed analysis, was also well suited to my semi-formal benchmarking.

Winbench warned me that I hadn’t defragged my drives and alerted me that a number of processes were running that could perhaps alter benchmark results. I was just looking for an approximate comparison so I left the drives undefragmented (uh, fragmented), and only worried about the running processes enough to turn off the automatic file system checking feature of my anti-virus package. Also, I only did two performance test runs on each drive. Winbench lets you save each run, with comments, and then compare them all side-by-side afterward. It runs quite a few different disk performance tests and composites the results into a single overall number in units of thousands of bytes per second.

I was surprised at the results. The hard drive in my Sony laptop got scores of 8180 and 8160 on its two runs. The USB 2.0 external drive scored 12,900 on both its runs – over 50% higher throughput than the built-in drive. Excellent!!

The other obvious test to run was to install a game directly on the USB 2.0 external drive and see how it played. I picked one of the games I know runs on my laptop hardware – “Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Outcast” I was quite happy with the results there too. The game installed easily and played just as well running from the USB 2.0 external drive as it does from my built-in hard drive.

So I hereby proclaim the experimental project a very statisfying success. For $75 plus tax I have a portable 80Gb drive that I can quickly and easily use on my laptop or on any other computer with USB 2.0. It significantly outperforms my laptop’s built-in drive, can handle all my storage/archival needs, and can comfortably house quite a few disk-hogging video games.

After several weeks of pretty steady rain, fog, and cloud cover here the last two nights have been clear and I've had my first chance to take a look at Comet Machholz. If it is clear where you are, it's definitely something you should go out and see as well.

But if you've never seen a comet in the night sky there are a few things you should understand first. Most people have a mental image of a comet as a bright object with a long, flowing tail that streaks quickly across the night sky while you watch. Very few comets really qualify as bright, fewer still have long tails, and none of them go shooting across the sky. Comet Machholz is pretty bright as comets go, but unless you live fairly far away from city lights you'll need binoculars to see it. (Happily most folks have a pair of binoculars around the house somewhere.) And even with binoculars you'll not be able to discern much of a tail - Comet Machholz will look like a glowing, fuzzy blob. It'll be easy to recognize that it is not a star or planet.

You will also need to know where to look. You'll almost certainly never find it by just taking your binoculars outside and scanning the sky with them. Fortunately Comet Machholz is passing not too far from a couple of easy landmarks in the night sky, most notably a beautiful little open cluster of stars called "The Pleiades". It is also gradually approaching the fairly bright star Algol, which it will pass on the night of January 17th. A finder chart makes it much easier to figure out where to look.

"So why bother?", you might ask. "I can't see it without binoculars, I'll have to be patient in finding it even with some good information about where to search, and it doesn't have a big tail or go zooming about." It's hard to answer that convincingly, I guess. Comets are artifacts of our solar system's formation and great cosmic wanderers - huge globs of frozen gasses and rocky debris that once in while drift into the inner solar system and thaw a bit so that we might see them. Comet Machholz comes by this way about every 120,000 years. When I catch a glimpse of its faint glow through my binoculars I can't help but think about the trackless depths and incredible time scale of space, and it all seems so wondrous and beautiful.

I think you should give it a try. Drop me a comment or some email if you can't find it, or perhaps even if you can...

Western Digital WD800JB

I wanted a hard drive that had good overall performance, was reliable and quiet, and wouldn’t have heat dissipation problems in an enclosure that I figured would be small and lack a ventilation fan. Several build-it-yourself game rigs I’d seen used Western Digital drives, and user reviews seemed consistently very positive. I discovered an 80 GB model – the WD800JB – that offered 7200 RPM performance plus the benefits of a larger-than-usual 8MB buffer, good overall ratings, and low enough heat dissipation that it doesn't need additional cooling (e.g., via a fan). Best of all, I found it on sale at Circuit City for $49.99 after $40 in rebates and in stock at the nearest local store.   (The rebate has expired, alas, but from examining Circuit City's recent rebate listings it appears to be a recurring offer so I wouldn't be surprised to see it reappear.)

The WD800JB is an EIDE drive, so I needed an EIDE enclosure.  Other than that, though, I didn't have much knowledge to go on so narrowed the field down to a few options based on some quick web research and general shopping around (e.g. Newegg, Amazon, etc.).  As luck would have it, that very day Fry’s local newspaper ad included a sale on the Kingwin KH-350U-BK enclosure for $25 (after $15 in rebates), including the USB 2.0 cable. I didn’t really need the orange and blue bubble lights, but the price was right and the all-aluminum case seemed sturdy and well made.

Kingwin KH-350U-BK

After two quick stops I had the components in hand and sat down to do the assembly. It wasn’t clear from the drive or enclosure documentation how to configure the drive’s operating mode. I figured I’d start out by trying “Master”, and set the jumper accordingly. Getting the drive in the enclosure turned out to be a bit tricky. The tiny controller circuit board is fastened to the enclosure's back plate and both the IDE and power cables are pretty short. Fortunately the enclosure’s top plate slides into place via some grooves on sidewalls, allowing it to be removed and then easily reinserted. After some careful experimentation the right sequence turned out to be to remove the back plate from the enclosure, fasten the cables and back plate to the drive, slide the top plate off the enclosure, attach the drive to the floor of the enclosure with the supplied screws, orient the back plate so as to line up with its own mounting holes, bend the drive cables carefully into place, slide the top plate into place, then fasten the back plate onto the enclosure with the four supplied screws.

I connected the removable power cord to the enclosure and plugged it in, then ran the USB 2.0 cable between the enclosure’s B receptacle and the A socket on my laptop. I powered up the drive using the convenient switch on the enclosure and my system immediately recognized the presence of what it identified as a Western Digital WD80 USB device. However, WinXP didn’t see a file system to mount, so I concluded I needed to format the drive. A quick check with Partition Magic confirmed that the drive was unformatted, and allowed me to easily correct that by creating a FAT32 volume I could access both from WinXP and Linux.

Next (and finally), some observations on using the drive system...

My Sony Z1 laptop has a 60GB hard drive that I've parceled out so as to support both Windows (WinXP) and Sun's Java Desktop System (JDS) environment.  Specifically I have about 32GB allocated for WinXP and associated applications, 10 GB for JDS and associated applications, and 18 GB for data that I need to share between the two environments -- documents, music, images, photos, etc.  While that's quite sufficient for basic use, increasingly I've encountered situations that pushed the limit of what I can do with that amount of disk space:

• I download photos and video clips from my digital camera (a Canon A70, which is a great little device) to my shared file system and that can chew up significant storage space.  Doing clever things with those images using Photoshop Elements and creating portable slide shows for family and friends chews up even more space. The solution is to archive all that content off now and then and burn CDs for backup, which I have been doing using a chunk of hard disk space on one of our home computers.
• I've been steadily ripping my audio CD collection to MP3 files.  That started out as a way to have music I could listen to when traveling, including copying a variety of mood-oriented 256MB playlists off into my Samsung YEPP MP3 player (another cool gizmo).  Come this past holiday season I decided I wanted to copy off a bunch of my seasonal music, which resulted in a fairly large collection of music files that I liked having around for December but couldn't see keeping on my laptop the other eleven months of the year or copying off to multiple backup CDs.
• I keep a few fun PC games around for those long trips, or after crazy days when I need a diversion, or when my son is home from college and we have some time to spend together.  Increasingly, games come on sets of CDs and chew up 4GB or more of disk space when installed (not counting all the saved game files).   I found I could manage one or maybe two such games on my system at a time, but only through some clever juggling.  And even with that it was hard to experiment with new games, including testing to see if they would work on my laptop.

After some thought, I decided a good solution would be a USB 2.0 external hard drive.  While I could purchase one already assembled, I wasn't particularly impressed with the user reviews I found on various web sites for the pre-built models.  Instead I was encouraged by an old but still useful ExtremeTech article on the subject.  It looked like I could get adequate data throughput with USB 2.0, which my Sony Z1 supports, and with some judicious shopping should be able to construct a 60 to 80 GB drive for around $100-$150. And why buy one when I could build one.

Next steps... selecting the enclosure and the hard drive, and making sure they worked together...

The third best thing about Christmas Break is that it gives me a chance to putter around on a few exploratory projects, which are usually things I've been thinking about for a while but need uninterrupted time and opportunity for trial-and-error to complete.  This year I had two such efforts planned -- getting involved with the internal testing of version 3 of Sun's Java Desktop System, and solving my laptop storage space problem by building an external hard drive.

Both projects were successful, fun, and educational. I figured I'd capture those experiences here, starting with the External Hard Drive Project.  That way I can also get a bit more blogging under my belt (though all the great holiday party food and extra home cooking have left significantly less belt room to work with, if you know what I mean).  I suspect it'll take a series of entries over a few days to cover each project, beginning today. Stay tuned...

It seems to me there ought to be some way for me to provide context for whatever bloggings might come.  A little knowledge about me might help in the interpretation of musings or in cutting some appropriate slack, but I can't find any place in the overall interface to fill out even a brief profile.  Maybe the idea is to do that on the installment plan, via the entries, but that sure puts the burden on the reader.

As a starting point, as you might have noticed from Rich Sharples' Mirror World, I'm the Director of Marketing  for Sun's Application Server, Web Server, and Portal Server products.  Be therefore forewarned that I'm likely to hold forth on topics related to web technologies, portals, the Internet, and perhaps even just marketing.

Beyond that it might help to know that I'm from Tennessee, am an engineer by birth and also by education, and enjoy travel, tinkering with gizmos, photography, music, and spending time with my family (whom I expect you'll meet along the way).

Caveat lector. But I think the worst you have to worry about at this point is boredom...

I just created this weblog, thanks to the power of blogs.sun.com and the good graces of Sun Microsystems. Hopefully I'll develop the good habit of using it and will have something interesting to say. Next steps, though, are to read through the documentation and experiment...