Steaming Turd

Terence over at Fluggart recently wrote about using Sirius Recorder to record programs and music from satellite radio.

He may be interested in reading up on the PERFORM Act, which would largely restrict the ways in which you can record from satellite and broadcast radio, not to mention Internet webcasts of music. You can contact your representation in Congress through this web form at the EFF.

I just got a new laptop. The thing is frickin’ sweet - it looks like what Darth Vader might use to surf the web when he’s sitting on his shiny black Dark Side toilet (I’ll post my own picture as soon as my rechargeable batteries recharge). With options, it cost a bit over $800, and came with one of those free printer/scanner deals (although I already had one of those).

I was originally considering trying to get a Mac whenever I finally replaced my old dinosaur Celeron 500-based laptop that I got six years ago for over $2000. However, I ran into concerns, because my new job will involve writing PDA software for a particular purpose, and I’ll be using Bluetooth extensively in my development. While you can boot Windows on the new Intel-based Macs, my understanding is that there are driver issues for some of the Mac hardware under WinXP. Between that and the price, I ended up just getting another Windows laptop, this one with an AMD Sempron 3400+ in it, which means it’s vying with my desktop machine right now for fastest hunk of junk this side of the Rio Grande.

Anyway, much as I like this laptop, it has its problems. For one, it’s laden with HP-installed crapware, and I’ve spent a few hours now uninstalling the stuff I’m sure I don’t need and installing the stuff I’d rather have. If they had given me a plain WinXP CD, I’d just nuke and reinstall, but all they give you is an OEM-modified version that just reinstalls all the crapware when you use it. You’ll get that with pretty much any laptop you buy today, though.

But the one that’s really getting me (and that’s got me stumped) is an issue with a repetitive hard drive access while it’s sitting idle. Every four or five seconds, the hard drive LED (a gratuitously blue one) blinks and is accompanied by a “click-a” as if the drive heads are doing a full seek, writing something to the drive, and seeking all the way back a quarter second later. When the hard drive is busy, it makes normal quiet hard drive noise, presumably either because the drive heads were out in the middle of the platter and therefore aren’t going as far, or because when the machine is idle, the drive heads go into a particular position such that it makes a click noise when they leave and return. This particular click is a good bit louder than the normal hard drive noise, and when I’m working on my desktop machine right next to it, it bugs the crap out of me.

I’ve managed to track this down to the journaling system used by NTFS - every few seconds, Windows writes its journal information to the drive, which it can use later to assist in recovery in the event of file system errors. This seems silly to me, because there’s no other hard drive access in between a lot of these clicks, and therefore no reason for the NTFS journal (or logfile, as they call it) to be updated. I mean, I ran into this issue when I had ReiserFS on my PVR’s hard drive, but in that case, it only made the annoying clicks when it did a seek to write to the journal while it was busy recording, and was nice and quiet when it was idle. My solution there was to use ext3 instead of ReiserFS once I got the opportunity to change filesystems, but I don’t think switching the primary partition to FAT32 will be an option on the laptop.

I’ve done various Google searches to figure out how to change this particular behavior of NTFS, and I’ve come up with jack. Most likely, it isn’t possible, but I’m hoping there’s some really obscure registry value somewhere that I can add or change to make it either write to the journal less often or only write when there’s actually been normal hard drive access in the interim. If anybody knows anything about this, please leave me a comment before this clicking noise drives me up the wall. :/

I’m off to sniper-infested Indiana again for some quality time with my advisor. Here’s hoping nobody scores a head-shot on me.

She’s got twice the teeth of three ordinary Miss Universes.

(Click the first small picture in the Photos box after following the link to see.)

Just got back today (well… Pacific time, I suppose) from Monterey, California, where I spent a week and a half working with some folks from the Naval Postgraduate School in connection with my new-ish job. Great folks there - most of the folks in that lab happen to be Marines, and some have been deployed within the past couple of years (one captain to Iraq, and a major to Afghanistan). Students at NPS aren’t so much like students at other graduate schools. There’s none of this “professional student” thing going on - they come in, take classes, do their research, write their thesis, and get out of there within a couple or three years.

The temperature in Monterey in July is generally in the low-of-50 to high-of-70 range, with thick fog late at night, sometimes extending well into the day. (In the winter, it doesn’t actually get much colder than that, either.) Compared to the stinking hot wetness of Cleveland, it was wonderful, though it does mean that the beach (yes, a real beach with real sand and real Pacific Ocean water) isn’t nearly as much fun as in hotter climes. However, we went for a trip south along the Pacific Coast Highway at one point during my stay there, and it’s really spectacular. People actually live along the coast, claiming for themselves a piece of a truly beautiful vista. There are several restaurants through that way, and while the food is average-but-overpriced, the view draws in tons of tourists.

Sadly, I didn’t bring a camera with me.

This column features a bunch of completely out-there stories compiled from various sources on a regular basis. But a special bonus was included in this one. The headline, “Cold Sweat Ice Cream Tastes Like Burning” (or, as in the RSS feed, simply, “Tastes Like Burning”), sounds like something Ralph Wiggum might say. And guess what: he did.

Edit: I sent the column editor an e-mail to chuckle about the reference, and got the following back today:

Barry,

You are awesome. We KNEW someone would get it. The Simpsons are the best! Thanks for reading!!!

I wasn’t expecting to have a file named “juryduty2.jpg” for at least a few more months. Oh, well.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,202180,00.html

It’s an article about efforts to teach kids a simplified English spelling system. The article shows why this is a bad idea: those of us who learned to spell correctly in school would be totally lost.