DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The second day of my Jaguar upgrade attempt ended much as day one — with an inaccessible mirrored RAID volume.

The driver is supposed to time out when a mirror isn’t available, and mount the one available partition. The bug is that this “waiting” condition never times out.

At the request of the software vendor, I booted the system after disconnecting one of the two RAID drives. I hate to muck with disk drives… but this seemed to be the only solution. I’ll summarize an afternoon’s work and a dozen email exchanges with the vendor, and simply say that although I was at one point able to mount one of the mirrors and copy off all my data, I was never able to correct the core problem. Throw in the usual mix of inexplicable SCSI weirdness (“Erm, it’s run that way for 4 years; why won’t it boot?”) and you’ll have a decent picture of the process.

So the good news is that my system is fully functional — I’ve installed most of the apps I need, configured the UI to my personal taste, and begun the tedious process of becoming accustomed to a new email client.

Monday I’ll revisit the RAID issue. Wish me luck.

Pictured is about seven pounds of multigrain sourdough… a double batch, baked into two boules, a 10 oz. batard, and a 3.5 lb. monster sandwich loaf that nearly overflowed my pizza stone.

We served a pile of it for dinner. The rest is in the freezer.

I eat bread nearly every day. (I might have a problem.) I used to bake three days a week so I’d always have a fresh fix. Because most recipes turned out more bread than I could reasonably eat in two days, I gave away surplus loaves frequently.

Then I discovered that bread keeps well in the freezer. It changed my life. Now I bake only every few weeks, but in enormous quantities. Our freezer is full of the stuff.

The downside is that I’m a lot less generous with bread now. Years ago I was eager to give it away because otherwise it would go stale on my counter… now, though, I know I could eat every bite, given a few weeks’ time and a toaster and maybe a little dish of extra-virgin olive oil. So I rarely am willing to sacrifice a loaf to friends. I’m trying to compensate by being really generous with my time.

(That’s a joke.)

The time has finally come to upgrade this creaky MacOS 9.2.2 workstation to a modern, efficient, secure, feature-rich operating system: I’m switching to WinXP.

Heh. Pick up your jaw. I’m only kidding.

I am sorely past due for migrating to OS X (which I use and embrace on my laptop). Upgrade pain is acute in my case — I’m so thoroughly wedded to my particular collection of apps and utilities that any minor disruption could take weeks to overcome. And a few of the apps I rely on don’t exist for OS X, so I have to find uncomfortable replacements. Join me as I begin to bite this bullet, hopefully without blowing the back of my skull all over the wall.

1. Make backups: set up firewire drive, find Retrospect installer disk, find license key, install Retrospect, run backup, run backup again after reducing match criteria because archive was bigger than OS filesize limit (2gb), run four more backups with carefully-selected criteria to keep archive size down.
2. Update SCSI card firmware for OS X compatibility: decipher cryptic notes on vendor’s website, download latest utility, download latest firmware, act surprised when latest firmware package contains utility newer than “latest” utility downloaded separately, run utility to flash firmware, ignore configuration screen with about 75 incomprehensible parameter-tuning widgets in hopes that the defaults are OK.
3. Install new boot drive: find baggie of surplus machine screws that’s buried in the garage somewhere, remove drive sled from computer, mount new drive to sled, restore sled to computer, discover that the single remaining power cable won’t reach new drive. Pull on harness, cut cable tie, re-route many connectors, fiddle. Search in vain for 4'' extension cord that I know I have, somewhere. Re-route connectors again. Finally make everything fit. Close case.
4. Find Jaguar CDs, which haven’t been seen since last September: look at prominent place on shelf where other utility disks are kept, but find (for reasons I cannot explain) only the old Panther disks. Look in storage area under stairs where all remaining media is kept. Look in closet. Look through media box again. Search desk. Look through media box again. (Yes, I am a George Carlin comedy sketch.) Finally find Panther disks in box of ancient audio CDs moved from the living room because we never play them any more.
5. Install Panther: Format new disk with Disk Utility; see error message that system can’t boot from new drive and therefore OS can’t be installed, re-partition new drive, see error again, call Apple, explain problem, learn that OS X drive has to be “primary” ATA drive. Pull both drives from case, look up jumper configuration on vendor website, reset master/slave jumpers, reinstall drives, re-attach power cables. Re-run installer. Act nonchalant when it works. After all, why wouldn’t it work?

For most people, the above would describe an afternoon that, if not exactly pleasant, at least resulted in success. But I have complex needs, or at least a complex configuration, so I was only beginning.

My OS 9 system had three logical drives: an ATA boot drive, a SCSI RAID-1 (striped) drive for applications, a SCSI RAID-0 (mirrored) drive for data. I’d need to upgrade the RAID drivers for OS X. The process can’t be reversed.

The striped array came right up. The mirrored array — the one with five years’ worth of data — did not. Sigh.

I shot an email to the vendor. I know they work weekends because they’ve bailed me out once before, when a previous upgrade went awry.

And then I addressed the next critical phase of any OS X upgrade: setting up cute desktop icons.

BTW, OS X kicks ass. Don’t mistake my tale of woe for a general gripe about Apple or even about the third-party RAID software I’m using. I wish computers were easier to set up, but I recognize that I push mine harder than most people.

I attended a panel discussion on “Blogging and Social Networking” tonight.

One of the panelists (I didn’t note who) declared that “journalism is dead.” I read the paper every day, so I can’t say I agree, but it made a nice soundbite, a nice affirmation for anyone whose living depends on whatever thing has been crowned the “new journalism.” The evidence cited: media consolidation results in a loss of perspective, a loss of fair coverage, and a homogeneity of interpretation; scandals like Jayson Blair undermine the credibility of even the most revered news sources.

The proposed solution — of course! — is blogging. Therefore you should immediately cease reading Google News, the Tribune, the Chronicles and Timeses and Heralds of the world, and rely solely on debris.com for all your news. Thank you.

Blogs are unfiltered. There’s no newsroom bias, no editor squashing stories that would offend an advertiser or board member or President. The implication: blogs are more honest.

Also, most blogs (erm, not this one) have a feedback loop — an opportunity for readers to comment on stories. One of the panelists suggested that had the NY Times provided a commenting feature, Jayson Blair would have been accused and outed long before he’d managed to fabricate 30+ stories.

Jason Calcalis challenged Dan Gilmor with this question: assuming compensation and benefits were equal, wouldn’t you rather be a full-time blogger than a newspaper columnist with a blog on the side? Gilmor’s answer surprised me, and probably most everybody in the room: he said no. He said he already has total journalistic freedom. And he admitted that being on staff at the Merc has brought lots of traffic to his blog. I appreciated that turnaround — not only is he not eager to abandon his newspaper column… he relies on it to drive readers to his blog.

Gilmor made another interesting point. He described blogs as the first realization of Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of an interactive web. Until blogs, the web was a read-only medium. With blogs, it has become read-write. (Except at debris.com. But, hey, you can send me email if you like.)

Mark Pincus was asked about his ownership of the sixdegrees social-networking patent. He claimed he’d purchased the patent, in partnership with Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, to prevent other companies from using it to restrict competition. He didn’t name names, but there seemed to be some tension among the panelists.

I have to believe there will be some lawsuits around this before very long. Consolidation is inevitable. Nobody wants to have to maintain profiles and networks at, let’s see, Friendster, LinkedIn, Tribe, Orkut, Ryze, Spoke, ZeroDegrees, Ecademy, RealContacts, Ringo, MySpace, Yafro, EveryonesConnected, Friendzy, FriendSurfer, Tickle, Evite, Plaxo, Squiby, and WhizSpark. And for all the talk (during this panel) of open vs. closed networks, does anybody really believe all the industry leaders will embrace open standards so that users can export profile and network information to ease migration into a competing network? I don’t see it.

I was disappointed to see Jason Kottke abandon his goal for the year. He writes that what initially sounded like a fun project became more like a second job, and lost its appeal thereby.

Oh, do I know what he means. I set several aggressive goals for the year. Now half the year is up, and I’ve accomplished only one.

But, it was the best one.

The goal was to perform on stage, preferably with a few other musicians around me to distract the audience somewhat. (In all my music career, I believe I’ve played two drum solos, and only one of them was intentional. The other one happened at my wedding — I got talked into playing Wipeout without realizing that everybody would naturally conclude I was really enjoying performing a monotonous, cliched drum feature at my own reception.) So it’s a good thing I managed to join a band before the deadline on this goal came up.

We played at an open-mic night last month — a 25-minute set, including an unexpected encore.

Speaking of unexpected encores, I’ll be doubling up on this goal in a few more weeks. My band will be performing two sets in the square, downtown Sebastopol, on Thursday August 6, part of the summer concert series. Bring a blanket, a burrito, and a beer for the drummer. I promise I won’t play Wipeout.