DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Colorado gets much nicer clouds than California. These appeared on the Old Ute Trail.

More clouds, looking east from the Continental Divide.


And these inocuous clouds, surrounding the Bear Lake trailhead, turned into a thunderstorm about an hour later, sending my hiking party scurrying for cover.

(If there are any meteorologists in the audience, I’d be curious to know what kind of clouds these are. I found some classification guides here and here but those Latin terms are all Greek to me.)

Hiking the Old Ute Trail in the Colorado Rockies, we ran into a family of elk. I had no idea at the time whether elk tend to be aggressive, and the rack of antlers didn’t look like it would feel too comfortable embedded in my abdomen, so I marched past quickly.

The upper trailhead sits at about 11,600 feet, just above the timber line. The panoramic views were breathtaking. Of course, hiking in the mountains with 20 lbs of baby strapped to my chest was also breathtaking.

On the return, I got a closer view.

Then, back at the car, we saw another beast with big horns.

Rawstock III - Raw Ecstasy Jamboree
August 26-29 at Macdonald Farm
5730 Ross Branch Road, Sebastopol, California

The world’s premier raw food lifestyle festival! The pure health empowerment weekend celebrating eco-regeneration, musical ecstasy & raw food delight.

Everyone is required to bring 5 lbs. of organic raw fruits or veggies PER DAY.

PLEASE DO NOT BRING APPLES OR CARROTS

Ahh, I so love west Sonoma county.

The apple/carrot restriction is funny — a lesson learned the hard way, I’m sure. This time of year, coming up with 5 lbs of apples is as easy as pulling to the side of the road and picking them. Everywhere you don’t see a vineyard, you’re probably looking at an apple orchard.

Carrots are only slightly more expensive and difficult to find: $3.79 for a 5-lb bag at every local supermarket.

It’s a CD player with eight high-end D/A converters, 12 high-end op-amps, and four vacuum tubes. Shanling is manufacturing a limited edition of 300.

You can buy it at Audio Advisor for $4995 (but they’ll sell your shipping address).

Or you can save $4981 and buy a copy of ELO’s Greatest Hits, remastered, although admittedly the ELO disc will sound a lot less good than the fancy CD player.

Unfortunately, the record company has pressed a lot more than 300 copies.

I needed a benchmark to determine just how fast my striped SCSI RAID subsystem really was. I found xbench.

First I tested my local applications partition, expecting serious fireworks. But the results were underwhelming; for a pair of drives that are each capable (theoretically) of delivering 80 Mb/sec, this was pitiful:

Sequential
  Uncached Write    0.63 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Write   22.27 MB/sec [256K blocks]
  Uncached Read     9.05 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Read	   23.92 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random
  Uncached Write    0.86 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Write   13.16 MB/sec [256K blocks]
  Uncached Read	    0.45 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Read	   12.52 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Next I tested the stock boot drive in the new G5:

Sequential
  Uncached Write   33.66 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Write   44.66 MB/sec [256K blocks]
  Uncached Read    31.85 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Read    53.29 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random
  Uncached Write    1.82 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Write   34.45 MB/sec [256K blocks]
  Uncached Read	    0.64 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Read	   24.92 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Well, OK then. No wonder Apple used SATA.

I still needed a RAID solution for data safety — RAID-1, mirroring, writes every file to N separate devices. In this case N=1, because that’s all the room there is in the case.

Adding a second SATA drive to the G5 took 5 minutes. Apple provides the screws and cables. Like everything else about the physical layout of the G5, the drive bays deserve a feature in Architectural Digest.

Initializing the drive with SoftRAID took a few more seconds. And then I used SoftRAID’s “convert to mirror” feature to turn the original boot drive into a RAID-1 array. This took all night, as every byte (even the free space) was copied to the new drive and verified.

Ironically, my xbench scores dropped after this operation. So much for improving performance via striped reads.

Even so, overall the SATA RAID still a whole lot faster than my current setup — conservatively, it’s twice as fast by most measures, and subjectively about five times as fast. It’s also simpler because there’s no aftermarket SCSI interface, no 3rd-party driver software, no additional cables, no terminator hijinks. And it’s quieter, both because modern drives are less noisy than vintage components, and because I have only two of them, rather than three.