Grant Zhang: Snapshot of life

AnandTech: Apple's Redesigned MacBook and MacBook Pro: Thoroughly Reviewed

I now become a fan of this anandtech site and hopefully I will learn a thing or two on how to write a good review.

华尔街日报：微软“黑屏”反盗版在华惹争议-搜狐IT

What a great opportunity for OpenSolaris adoption. If you are not into games, OpenSolaris with OpenOffice can fulfill all of your computing needs, and it is stable, virus-free, money-free and black-screen-free. Go to opensolaris.org and have a try.

Now I wish I am in Marketing.

Finally I am able to configure the account. It turns out I have to use my sun email address as the account name and old BSC password(as opposed to my LDAP password).

I am not a golf fan and don't follow golf games that much. From time to time, I am attracted to watch golf news or games on TV. Most of times it is because of Tiger: Tiger's passion and desire for winning is among the best I've ever seen. It is fun to watch Tiger winning with his trademark fist pump. Anyway, this post is about Sergio, who just lost in a playoff in this year's British Open. Sergio will still have to wait for his first major championship. A guy being described as talented as Tiger, Sergio pretty much becomes the next Phil Mickelson: the long-waited major. It will be interesting to watch how and when Sergio will pursue his first. I hope Sergio will get his in the Mickelson fashion.

I got some inquiries on the usage of SCSI mode pages in Solaris. I am posting what I am currently aware of. Mode pages related to removable media are not covered here. In <sys/scsi/generic/mode.h>, the following SCSI-3 mode pages are defined.

• Mode page 0x08--caching mode page: this page is used by sd driver to enable/disable disk write cache.
• Mode page 0x0A--control mode page: this page is used by sd driver to use descriptor sense data (for greater than 2TB lun support). It is also used in format, fma(libdiskstatus), and aac driver.
• Mode page 0x02--disconnect-reconnect mode page: only used by format and emul64 driver.
• Mode page 0x09--peripheral device page, obsolete in SPC-4: only used in format.
• Mode page 0x1A--power condition mode page: only used in sata framework.
• Mode page 0x03--format device page and mode page 0x04--regid disk drive geometry page: these two pages are consumed by sd to initialize the physical geometry.
  

<sys/scsi/impl/mode.h> also defines some SCSI-2 mode pages. One can use the format command to take a quick look at these pages: format->scsi

SCSI MENU:
        p<n>                   - display a mode sense page
        p<n> b<n> <op> [~]<n>  - change a byte and issue mode select
        b<n> <op> [~]<n>       - add an operation to the mode select list
                                     for the current page
       
                where:  p<n> specifies the page with page code <n>
                        b<n> specifies byte <n> of the page
                        <op> can be one of the following operators:
                             =    (set specified value)
                             |=   (bitwise OR with current value)
                             &=   (bitwise AND with current value)
                        <n> can be a decimal value in the range 0-255,
                        or two hexadecimal digits, in the form 0x<xx>.
                        [~] complements the specified value
       
        apply                  - apply mode select list
        cancel                 - cancel mode select list
        display                - display mode select list
        all                    - display all supported mode sense pages
        default p<n>           - mode select page <n> to default values
        default all            - mode select all pages to default values
        format                 - format without standard mode selects
        inquiry                - display device's inquiry response
        list                   - list common SCSI-2 mode pages
        !<cmd>                 - execute <cmd> , then return
        quit
scsi> list

Common SCSI-2 pages applicable to direct-access devices:

Page 0x1   - Read-Write Error Recovery Page
Page 0x2   - Disconnect-Reconnect Page
Page 0x3   - Format Device Page
Page 0x4   - Rigid Disk Geometry Page
Page 0x7   - Verify Error Recovery Page
Page 0x8   - Caching Page
Page 0xA   - Control Mode Page