Lesson from the 80s: backup, backup, backup

You know what I'm talking about. The topic which makes everyone who owns a computer nervous. They look at the floor, the wall, a meek grin creeps up their face, they favor you with a non-commital shrug. It is the data equivalent of flossing. It is preventative, proscribed and yet frequently inconvenient or more time-consuming than you want to commit when you're in a hurry. I'm talking about data backups.

Why is it that most people don't have a rigorous method to be able to recover anything they've ever written, shot, videoed, installed or downloaded? We all put a pretty high price on our financial records, our family photos--nearly all our intellectual effort these days. We all know we should have backups, and most of us have suffered the pain of losing something. I'm not talking about the last bit of typing before the last Ctrl-S, but a Real Loss of a Significant Amount of Irreplaceable Data. So why do most people just not have a plan? Is it like earthquake insurance in CA? Too expensive and complicated if you ever have to rebuild? Is it like a structured weight-loss program? Necessary for good health and peace of mind, but, in practice takes too much discipline? Something you'll start after the holidays? "I'll start backing up everything when I get a new computer and have to move all my data anyway."

I count myself amongst the "most". I have a vague collection of external disks, thumb drives, optical media backups, online accounts. None of which are used in a cohesive plan which allows for recovery. I have, for example, some in-car video of a track day at Laguna Seca in 2006, my first time driving my Porsche on a race track. Tens of gigabytes of raw and edited files, as I recall. Maybe 30GB. I have it somewhere. At least, I hope I do. I don't really know where. DVD-R? External USB? Bare IDE drive in that stack over there? On one of the kids' computers? A little-used "E:\" partition somewhere? Not being able to recover from a backup is as bad as not having one at all. Its funny that I can reach onto a shelf and pick out one of more than 300 DVDs or one of more than a thousand books in my home, but finding any/all of my own electronic data--which should by all accounts be easier, not harder, is just not that easy at all. The most eggregious is really the perhaps 200 (don't even know exactly, really) collection of self-burnt CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs in a number of racks and shelves in the family room. The best I can say is that I know which rack to grab and throw out the window first in the event of a fire, but I can't really say that everything I most want is on those particular disks. I have a paper label pack, an ink-jet printer, a program that does labels. I even have LightScribe and a stack of blank (and expensive) LightScribe DVDs. Yet most of the disks are labeled with a marker. Too brief and too cryptic. "Downstairs computer, misc docs, pics, Disney trip, MP3s, 11-04". Um, okay.

It is amazing to me that here we are in the 21st century--nearly a decade in-- moreover we're 40 years into the Personal Computer information revolution, and "backups" aren't a thing of the past. Of course I don't mean not having backups, but I mean not having to jump through hoops to create, manage and use backups. That's what I mean by "backup". The "Fastback" or "Ghost" or other kind of managed backup process plus software. And I mean for the home, not the Small-to-Medium Business. Dell, IBM, all the big names are falling over themselves to service that market.

There have been some really interesting and relevant products in this arena, but it really should just "happen". I guess the closest thing to this ideal is Apple's Time Machine. But when you start thinking about real disaster recovery--I'm talking about your laptop going missing from your car or your home (God forbid) be flattened by some effect of man or nature--you need something more than just a hidden cache of files on the same disk.

Like flossing (if you don't do it already, regularly, by habit or discipline) you only hear about data backups or recovery from your professional care representative--like when you're suffering other effects of not doing it. As when you talk to the Apple Genius Bar about recovering from a hard disk crash. We recently got the soft admonition, after the hard disk was replaced under warranty, to perhaps talk to a data recovery specialist. We might get a quote on scraping any remaining data from the otherwise useless hunk of metal now residing in the antistat bag in our hands. Or learn to live with the lost data. Kinda like hearing you need to go see the periodontist for a root planing. Ugh.

But that event, no matter that it happened recently to not just one laptop but two in the space of one day (it was a very sad day at the Markham home), is in the past and I took it as a slap in the face to look toward the future. Fool me once, etc.

Some day (its always "some day", isn't it, with technology. Man's vision exceeds his grasp), we will have all our stuff in some variation of The Cloud. It may not look at all like The Cloud that is out there now, but I mean, pedantically, "off-site, anywhere-accessible, store". There's certainly a lot of work in this area, which maybe I'll ponder in a later post. But there are plenty of others pontificating about using Google Mail as a hard drive or any of the other umpty-dozen startups with whom you can trust your data in small-gigabyte chunks. Hopefully they'll still be around after their round two funding dries up. Hopefully your data will still be around. But I digress.

It is time to revisit the home NAS. What we currently have is an ancient Buffalo 160GB system, with FTP and WINS sharing, but rather poor implementations of both. It supports an external USB drive or a very short list of printers on its one port. One disk, no RAID. The web management interface is poor. It has been a sometimes network backup tool but mostly it is off. I can't say for sure, but I believe that a folder delete through the web interface led to a large data loss. User error, sure, but due to an oblique interface. To be fair to Buffalo, it was their first offering, and it appears (from the language of the user manual) that it was an OEM'ed import. So kudos to Buffalo for getting out ahead on the home/SOHO NAS, but bad on me for being on the bleeding edge.

That was at least five years ago. With the Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player (SSBRP) cum media-PC running the living room, I've decided to revisit the backup and warm-store issue. We need a place for all the computers in the house to be automatically backed-up as well as for file sharing (beyond the 1TB the SSBRP offers for music, pictures & video.

Buying a NAS means buying hard disks. Some day in the future, when we're all wearing spandex jackets and driving flying cars, we'll either have everything digital we own or use in The Cloud or on a Solid State Disk. Until that shining day (2012, maybe) we'll be using the tried-and-true (but still fragile) spinning platter magnetic store Winchester Hard Disk Drive (HDD).

Markham's two rules for purchasing HDD space are simple:

• Rule 1: Never buy disk until you can use it, because empty disk is flushing money. Disks always get cheaper and bigger.

• Rule 2: There are two price points to keep in your pocket when shopping for Disk: $0.10/GB for internal (bare) drives, and $0.15/GB for external drives. By these metrics, a "good deal" (at this writing--the price points slip by a penny or two regularly) is $100/TB for a bare drive.

But these two Rules work against each other. That's because the bigger the drive, the cheaper the per-GB cost, up to a point. Size increases with technology, so the biggest drives are the newest drives which aren't the cheapest drives. So there's a saddle point in effect at all times, which moves up in drive space over time as the saddle moves down on the price axis. For example, NewEgg currently has a 1TB drive for $0.10/GB--right at the Rule 1 Price Point--and a 3TB drive (!!) for ~$0.08/GB.

And of course, with the bigger size drive, even at cheaper $/GB at the saddle point, there is a bigger total outlay. Which is where Rule 1 kicks in: Don't buy the bigger disk until you can use it. So you may end up paying a penny or more per GB for a smaller disk, but it more likely you'll actually spend that penny on storing your data rather than just heating up your enclosure.

I may have to ammend Rule 1. Do I need 2TB (1TB in RAID/5 format) of disk? No. Do I want a terabyte of striped NAS always-on backup!? You bet I do!

This may be my new NAS RAID 2TB RAID0/1 for $220 This is ~$0.11/GB, well under the External Drive Price Point and very close to the Bare Internal Drive Price Point!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822101091

Or there's this from Buy.com:
http://www.buy.com/prod/cavalry-2tb-hard-drive-dual-interface-usb-2-0-esata-raid-external-hard/q/loc/101/206461304.html

I saw a similar at the Apple store last night for $500 and this is $100 off MacMall pricing and $30 off Buy.com

It is eSata, which the StoneSoup BluRay Play (SSBRP) supports. That does mean leaving the SSBRP on all the time, but it has some good pwr mgmt capabilities. I just have to make sure that it doesn't go completely to sleep overnight. Or test waking up the SSBRP over the network via one of the laptops with an external shared drive access (e.g., a nightly automatic backup).

All this is being driven by two (count-em! two!) catastrophic laptop HDD failures on the same day at our house Monday.

First Cheryl's laptop started issuing the "click of death" for no reason other than she uses it 18h a day. It required a disk replacement at the Apple Store (under warranty) and ~5mos of her work was lost.

Then, hours later, Karey knocked my laptop that she was using off the arm of a recliner. The case was chipped but ThinkPads of that era have an HDD shock detector. Apparently it isn't fast enough or they don't do their accelerometer tests from higher than 24". Because she asked me that evening, "It says, 'A fatal hard disk error has occured. Press CTL-ALT-DEL to restart.' I did but it keeps saying that. What should I do?" This wasn't even the BSoD, it was the Black Screen
ROM alert that You're Screwed. I spent several hours running the Windows Recovery Console off the XP install disk, and CHKDSK (wow...1982 flashback) showed, "irrecoverable errors". Swell.

So the question for me, currently, is one of interface. Choose the eSata disk, leave the SSBRP on 24x7 but have all the Windows networking stack and file sharing at my fingertips, or Choose the true NAS, gigabyte interface and a lower power footprint than the eSata host--but with an unknown quantity in the form of the web browser user interface and access control? I may have to try both and return the loser.

The important thing is to get a backup system in place, and this is the first step. After that: software.

Other spaces, other uses

Kaisa introduced me to Deviant Art a few years ago. Lots of great art there. I've had a poem in my drafts folder here since October, but this space isn't really right for it. So I made my first submission to Deviant Art today. I used my nom de guerre, "cesium356". Okay, that's actually my gamer name, but it seems like no one in the ultra-hip deviantart world uses their real name. Artists, gotta love 'em.

Stone Soup Blu-Ray -- Part 3: Windows 7 rescues us from Vista

The second installation of Vista was attempted with a bit more clarity, aforethought of planning. The entire desired software stack was present and the end-goal of the system was understood.

It is important to know where you're going before you start out. Sure, you can just go for the journey, but some trips are better with a destination in mind. To wit, The Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player (SSBRP), after much mission creep, was determined to have to meet this RFP:

1. Vista Media Center
   
   • Netflix add-in
2. Blu-Ray Player
   
   • Being able to play Blu-Ray and HD disks with the sound through the HDMI connection
   • Being able to connect the PCM-optical output of the motherboard to the home theater system and have the Blu-Ray play through it.
   • 1080p, full-screen, w/o skipping, artifacts
3. 1080p Gaming (Steam Support)
   
   • Having a network connection that can sustain GB downloads of game content
   • Support for the Logitech Momo steering wheel setup (incl. drivers!)
   • Being able to play reasonably recent driving games: GTR, Race '07 at full-resolution and with the knobs turned up to 11 (e.g. 4xAA, 8XAF, water details, long-distance rendering, etc.)
4. Hulu, Adobe Media Player, et al.
   
   • Having a network connection that can stream HD w/o skipping or pausing.
   • Audio and Video capable of said-same.
   • Did I mention that the network connection was now wireless?
   • Something you wouldn't think you would have to mention is that this sometimes web-browsing involves typing. So the keyboard has to work.
     

   Modest goals, no? Well...it's Vista. So we'll see.
   

The networking was ably handled by Comcast, as described in a previous post. In this incarnation, the system was moved from the living room to the family room. Nominally, this was to make room for the Christmas Tree, but removing the boob tube from the calm social setting of our living room has turned out to be an important permanent change for the positive. For example, I'm spending my evening writing this for y'all rather than watching another episode of "That 70's Show".

The point about Comcast being that because most of the computing happens in the living room and adjacent bedrooms, I decided to leave the wireless router upstairs (erm, our house is on a hill, therefore topsy-turvy with the upstairs being the entry and living area and the downstairs is a family room and bedroom). This also leaves the antennas well-placed for wireless connection to the now-famous "Lamb Cam" (subject of a future post). But the SSBRP loses its hardwire 8-megabit/sec connection to the world. Theoretically, switching to a 802.11g network shouldn't slow it down any, but there's these walls and floors and air in-between now.

So the one update to the hardware of the system from Part 2 was the addition of an 802.11x card. I chose Linksys/Cisco because 1.) Their drivers are good 2.) The AirLink 300N I had didn't work with Vista64 in another computer and 3.) I was tired of saving a couple bucks on a 2nd tier brand only to burn that savings in hours and hours of configuration nightmares. True to form, the Linksys worked out of the box. QED.

So once again, armed this time with a Windows 7 Beta DVD, I moved the existing C:\Windows.old directory to C:\Windows.oldest to allow Windows 7 to do its non-destructive trick. Someday I may reclaim the couple hundred Gigs I have as a double-archive of a useless Vista x64 install, but for now, it's forward and damn the disk space!

I'm not going to recount how pleasantly uneventful the Win 7 install was. This is broadly known, now 5 weeks into the Microsoft Beta for the new Operating System. What you may not know is that this Beta has a Nexus-6 feature. It times out. In August of this year 2009, my fresh installation which I will undoubtedly become reliant if not completely dependent upon (despite warnings about "not using it for production purposes") will on promise from Microsoft, become inoperable. Aauugh! The sweet promise and the real sweetness ripped out of my hands in the heat of summer? Ah, but perhaps not. Here's something that I'm betting almost all of you don't know: according to a friend-of-a-friend who works for Microsoft, you will be able to purchase a copy of Windows 7 before this beta expires. So none of that "in 2010" stuff. That's just the MS PR machine trying to avoid a Vista version 2.0 catastrophe. You know, like how they promised us Vista in 2004 or something and it was a long time coming after that. This time they're playing their cards close to their chest. But I have to tell you that the way Windows 7 Beta is being installed all over the place, displacing Vista in almost all occasions, Microsoft could release this Beta as-is for money and it would be an improvement.

So proceeding carefully from my clean, clean install of Windows 7, I first installed the Asus motherboard drivers from their "all-in-one" CD that came in the Box. This includes the nVidia v15.11 southbridge driver and the v168.something Detonator. Several revs back from most recent. But tested with this board! So caution, caution this time around. I got the Hybrid SLI working and the HDMI Sound. The Linksys drivers went in as expected, slick. Updates were now possible from Microsoft and from the other vendors (though I already had everything in C:\windows.old\install). The LG Blu-Ray firmware was still the latest and the default cdrom.sys picked it out and the Cyberlink DVD 7 bundle hooked up.

The SSBRP was back in business! I went back to my Netflix queue and switched my default media back to Blu-Ray. I popped in my copy of The Fifth Element and enjoyed.

But there were still a couple of wrinkles. The Logitech MX keyboard was still, infuriatingly, sending an "open mail" shortcut every time the spacebar was pressed. Win 7 doesn't have bundled email though (thanks, EU!) and so it merely gripes about trying to launch a DLL. A modal dialog that requires dismissal and which will open multiple times and swallow follow-on spacebars, but marginally better. But it only feels good because the hurting is less than with Vista, not because it is gone.

I enabled the audio device (new in Win 7) and could send the audio out to both the HDMI and the S/PDIF optical out concurrently. Which you can't really do because there's about a 1/4 sec delay difference between the two channels and it sounds like you've enabled "hall echo". But you can turn one or the other device's output down and it sounds just fine. Optical for the Blu-Ray and HDMI for the video games. Sooo niiice.

So back to that Logitech keyboard. I got fed up, so I decided to install my Gear Head 2.4Ghz wireless keyboard. Purchased for another computer (the predecessor and antecedent of the SSBRP) I hadn't tried it before because the driver stack looked a little sketchy. Indeed I never tried it for Vista x64. But what the hell!! All the caution, caution went out the window (pun intended) with the hubris that came from a good soaking of audio/video streams by the Blu-Ray player. Dammit, I wanted to have it all and that meant a good keyboard, too!

Now I've shopped a lot of other keyboards, and they all come up short. Either they're Bluetooth and have good range but they're fru-fru or they're IR and have crummy range. Neither are cheap. But by "fru-fru" I mean with matte aluminum and other HTPC upscale presentation features and upwards of $100. For a friggen keyboard! I wanted the WebTV keyboard. Laptop compact but with Bluetooth for the range. And no more that $60. Less than $40 would be ideal. Guess what? Doesn't exist. Hear that Logitech? You can't win in the living room unless you have a plain wireless keyboard that doesn't belong in the MoMA but has the range to reach from the couch to the screen.

But I already had the GearHead keyboard, and I had the hubris working for (against) me, so I gave it a try. Worked fine. But, um, the Blu-Ray stopped working.

I mean, not at all. The device disappeared. Trying to load the cdrom.sys interactively, I could only get the "no appropriate hardware detected" message. Which was bull because it was just working with that driver!! Auugh! What had I done!!?

Lots of uninstalls and reinstalls and trying the Vista x64 version and trying to reinstall the LG software that came on the disk.....nothing.

One of the culprits here is the lack of an uninstall for default drivers. The guids come from MS and once they're in your registry, there's no way to back them out w/o going to manual methods. You can disable them in the device manager, but that doesn't remove their registry entries. So when you reinstall....you basically have the same thing over again. I understand why it is done this way--it has a high likelihood of success and is hard to break. But when the defaults don't work for you...well, you're kinda screwed.

Unless, that is, you happen to trip onto a solution via Google. I got onto a Win 7 board, and someone there posted a Vista solution link and that person remembered something he had done back in 2003 with there being "upper filters" and "lower filters" to the CD-ROM driver guid. Remove those, specifically, manually, and all will be right with the world. And I did, and it was and I really couldn't believe it for a while. Real shock that a one-liner edit in a number of profiles in the Registry really could revive the Blu-Ray.

So for now I'm back to the original Logitech. I tried another IR Logitech wireless on loan, but it didn't work any better. So I took my lumps, but I have my SSBRP back and as long as I don't try to use the keyboard for, I dunno...writing? I'm fine. I just have to remap the "Jump" key in a bunch of games to something different. Like "R", which is next to "E" for "Use". Run-Jump is still possible, if not easy, but the Reload has to be mapped to CTRL or something. I'll get it, eventually. Half-Life 2, Episode One was a fun do-over and even better w/everything turned up to 11.

The Logitech Momo wheel drivers installed w/o error and the force feedback on the wheel works fine. Over the holiday break I was able to turn four laps at the Nürburgring in GT/R and it was pretty damned cool doing it on the big screen with a proper wheel and pedals.

The Hulu and Adobe Media Player content work famously. The 3-cable 802.11n antenna that came with the Linksys adapter is excellent and there are no dropouts due to streaming faults.

The goals for the system are largely all met. With the exception of the keyboard (not a trivial problem but also without a trivial solution, but with a 90% workaround) every RFP item was met and mostly spectacularly.

The SSBRP is alive, I've watched a number of movies with Cyberlink 7, I've had no problems other than the aforementioned mouse-menu button interface and I was even able to do a fairly good (if I do say so myself) compare between the DVD version and the Blu-Ray version of Casablanca. So it really is in use. Confident? I picked up Boondock Saints director's cut and The "20th Anniversary Edition" (oof) Adventures of Baron Munchausen (sale: Fry's $12.99) DVD replacement. I've watched Wall-E and Wanted and the gluttony of HD movies from the Stone Soup Blu Ray Player can continue unabated.

Now if it only had some help booting faster and accessing programs faster. Like maybe a Phenom 2 chip and a SAS-RAID-10 system built on 15k rpm drives? But that would mean (for "reasonably" priced HDs) moving the installed software to the "warm store" SATA disk mapped to the "D:" drive. Naaaah! I'll keep it as it is for now. Maybe I'll add a Harmony Remote, but that's a different story altogether.

Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player

[Credit to the title and concept goes to my good friend Michael. Thanks for that and again for listening to the original tale of creep, recounted here.]

It always begins with The Wanting

Ever since I made the wrong choice in the HD video disc format wars of the first part of the 21st century, I realized that some time in the future I'd have to find a means to switch horses, to get a Blu-Ray player and hence a method to continue to get HD disc content, at least until such time as the Internets pipes are big enough to handle on-demand HD to all comers. Since I'd already bought an HD-DVD player, and wasn't about to toss my couple-dozen HD-DVD disks, I wasn't really inclined to just up and buy a Blu-Ray player. I had an alternative plan brewing in the back of my mind all summer. All the plan needed was a catalyst.

Last month, as we tooled around Costco during a lunch break, my buddy Michael picked up the new Iron Man movie, on Blu-Ray. He'd been waiting for it to come out and to be able to watch it in the high-definition format. Of course, he also needed a Blu-Ray player to go with. With some (very little) urging by me, he picked up a Sony which at Costco comes with an HDMI cable. It was quite a deal at $279 before tax. Michael hadn't made the wrong turn down the HD disc aisle that I had made months ago, so it was a substantial but not painful choice for him.

And then there's my son Chad & his fiancee Heather in Las Vegas. Chad's always been a gamer, so for him the Blu-Ray was just a feature of a gaming system he was going to have anyway. The system was around $400. And that's with a full PS3 gaming rig attached.

I mention the prices of the options that Michael and Chad chose; it is important for this story. I was sure that I could come up with a Blu-Ray drive for less by upgrading the Media PC I already had. I knew, from previous shopping, that one could get a Blu-Ray player add-in for a computer for well less than $200.

I was also intent to upgrade the Media PC (aka a Home Theater PC, HTPC) to be able to see high-definition streamed video off the internet. That requirement came from the family. We had tried to watch episodes of House which were on Hulu, but which stuttered and sound-delayed on our current HTPC. So I had an inkling that this would be more than just an optical drive swap, but I didn't know how much more.

And continues with The Having

The first component to be upgraded was the optical disk. It was a DVD-R/+RW which lacked only Blu-Ray to keep its place in the New Scheme. My first (of what would turn out to be many) trips to Fry's had me leaving with a combo LG Blu-Ray/HD-DVD player. The sticker was $199, but the shelf price was $169 and at the register it rung up at $139. Big score! This was going to be the cheapest Blu-Ray player, ever. It would leave me with many tens of dollars with which to re-purchase much of my existing DVD collection. After all, how many copies of 2001: A Space Oddesey is too many?

Now, I didn't actually need the HD-DVD capacity, as I have a fine Toshiba A35 player which should serve until, well, who knows but it isn't completely antiquated yet; I just received a new software update in the mail the other day. I do, however, think the LG combo player is a coup, because it will allow me to someday retire one box from the media presentation stack in the living room. But not right away. The thing about the Toshiba? It works.

I had my Blu-Ray player to read Blu-Ray discs (which I didn't have yet), but I also knew that what would really make the Blu-Ray player "taste better" (you're catching the Stone Soup bit now) would be to upgrade the graphics card. The existing card was an nVidia 7600GS. Which was fine at the time--the time being when my son Chad put the computer together. That would have been about 2006, after he entered UCSC, and then traded it for a much more convenient and dorm-friendly laptop. Chad gifted it to me some time after that and by mid-2008, the seven-thousand nVidia card series based on the "G73" chip was getting a bit long in the tooth. What I saw this computer really had going for it was that it was PCIe-capable. The 7600 could have been an AGP bus card, but this one wasn't, it was PCIe which meant the motherboard was up to an upgrade to the most modern of GPUs.

So after not a small amount of shopping around to find that price-performance sweet spot, I settled on a 9800GTX+ from my favorite on-line vendor, NewEgg. The MSI version was a great deal and the card's specs were awesome. All I needed to do was to drop that puppy into the HTPC with the LG Blu-Ray player and I'd be watching Iron Man in Blu-Ray format. Not only that, but the 9800GTX+, with its "G92" chipset--while not quite up to the latest-and-greatest two hundred series from nVidia--is completely capable of playing all the latest games: Crysis, Far Cry 2, BioShock, etc. My old standards Half-Life 2 (and Portal--I love Portal) could be turned up to Eleven. And then there were the driving games. The latest SimBin driving games, Race'07 and GTR Evolution couldn't really be driven at full 1080p by the 7600 with its GS shaders and small memory footprint. But it would sing with the 512MB of memory on the 9800GTX+. $149 after a rebate. But look at all the "flavor" it will add to the Stone Soup Blu-Ray and HTPC..and Gaming computer.

Then I started looking at the processor, a 2.0GHz Sempron. Single core. Ugh. Not hardly enough to smoothly run all that 1080p 24hz DTS-HD audio goodness. The current HTPC wasn't even socket AM2, so we were at a dead-end. But Fry's to the rescue! As it turned out, while I was there for an HD-DVD sale (totally different story), I was tipped to one of Fry's typically very good motherboard/CPU combos. In this case, I got an Asus M3N-HT HDMI/Deluxe motherboard, with a quad core AMD Phenom 9550. That's a 2.2GHz chip, not a big bump from the Sempron, but with four cores, obviously. A big, big jump up from the Sempron.

The Phenom CPU is great, but the motherboard is superb. It runs the brand-new 780a chipset, which has a new nVidia feature, "Hybrid SLI". This allows an on-board graphics processor, (in the case of this mobo an 8-thousand-ish spec GPU) sharing system RAM to SLI with a short list of PCIe graphics cards. And guess what's on the list? That's right! My newly acquired 9800GTX+! Woo-hoo, the soup was really heating up. I was getting a real SLI rig for gaming! W00t! And at the price of only one GPU card! Plus, the other salient feature of the Hybrid SLI which is really perfect for systems like mine--part HTPC and part gaming rig--is that when you use softare to switch to using the on-board GPU only, the PCIe slot is turned off. As in completely off, draws no power, runs no fan. And everyone knows those tiny GPU fans are noisy.

And as if that weren't enough, if you couldn't tell by the name of the mobo, it has native HDMI out. Perfect for the HTPC-out to our living room 46" LCD 1080p Samsung, and it uses the RealTek onboard 7.1 Audio without any SPDIF jumpers to get HD audio out of the HDMI. A very nice board.

Now CPU prices fall notoriously fast, especially lately as we're into another drop into the 45mm die processes. So an early-October smokin' deal may not sound as good in early November, but its a merry-go-round. You grab ahold of something as it goes by and get on. Besides, the opportunity return in having it now, rather than waiting for the price to go down is..well, in the case of a new Blu-Ray player, worth it. Or so I thought. The two hundred dollars bundled price meant the CPU was practically free. I hedged my bet with a store warranty, giving me a little bit of overclocking insurance and obsolescence insurance for another $30.

The Stone Soup Blu-Ray player was really starting to take shape now. But, um, of course the new Mobo takes DDR2 dual-channel memory. Wow, I hadn't bought DIMM memory in a long time. It is tuned now for gamers, the mobo BIOS settings allow all kinds of soft tuning for timings and they even have their own heat sinks. My wallet hardly felt the $70 (after rebate) for the four Gigabytes of Dual Channel Corsair XMS memory in two matched 2GB sticks. The motherboard can take 8GB, and I'd read how if you have a huuuuge amount of RAM you can set your swap partition to zero size and your computer will really scream. But this socket AM2+ motherboard can't set more than two memory sticks into dual channel mode. If you put in more, it will slow the d/c memory down to the slower single channel mode. So more is faster disk-wise, but slower speed wise.

Which sent me down the path of thinking about the disk. A 10k RPM Raptor was out of the question. This was going to be an HTPC and so it had to be quiet. Indeed, one of the things I didn't like about the current HTPC was that the disk was loud. Or maybe it was a case fan in front of the disk. Whatever. It was of 160GB capacity, which just doesn't seem like very much these days. Especially since I figured I could use this upgrade, when the TV set wasn't on, as our home NAS. The new motherboard was RAID-capable, after all. So a bit more mission creep was added to the Stone Soup Blu-Ray player. But I wasn't going to introduce that right away. One of Markham's Maxims of Personal Computing (apologies to Jerry Pournelle) is "Never buy disk capacity that you can't use right away, because it will always be cheaper by the time your disk fills up." So I bought a little insurance, on the high side of the "sweet spot", which was, at that time, the 750GB disk. Instead I got a Seagate 1TB disk, at a very nice $150. That's $0.15/GB, which is well under my $.20/GB classification of a "good deal". Later I'll get another TB disk and setup the RAID mirror. Then it will be ready for the family photos, Music and home movies.

I was ready to add all these "extras" to the Stone Soup Blu-Ray player and get about the business of actually using my new upgrades in the HTPC, but I ran into my first sticking point. The Asus mobo is ATX. I didn't check beforehand to find out that my current HTPC is micro-ATX. She won't fit! So that led to another few shopping trips and a dalliance with a Zalman HTPC case and other esoterica. These HTPC cases are expensive. Like an empty metal box will set you back more Benjamins than an entire Home Theater in a Box rig--and I'm pretty sure they're made up of the same metals. So that bit of kit was a bit too spicy for this Stone Soup. Instead I settled on a Antec Sonta III upright mid-tower case. It has a nice piano finish that matches the Samsung LCD screen quite well and has sound insulation and other HTPC-ish features. Plus it came with a great Antec P/S. Price was $103--less than I would have paid for an add-in power supply.

So let's recap what's in the Blu-Ray HTPC "upgrade":

$103 new case w/new power supply
$200 new motherboard
and new CPU
$ 70 new memory
$139 new optical drive (the Blu-Ray, remember?)
$150 new winchester drive
$150 new graphics card
$ 16 an HDMI cable
------
$828 That's a lot of stones in that soup pot!

And the OS. Vista? I had an extra license laying around. Its legit, it just didn't cost me anything.

What's missing? Oh. Networking. This turns out to be the next "long pole" in our current HTPC setup. It uses an Airlink 300 wireless card. Its "N" protocol, but though slogging through an Ubuntu driver setup was not completely painful, I knew that it would be nothing compared to getting that card to work with Vista Ultimate. So I decided it was time to get a speed upgrade and hard-wire the WAN ethernet into the motherboard port. No wireless for the HTPC.

So that introduced two new ingredients into the Stone Soup Blu-Ray player: Comcast cable to replace the ATT&T DSL and the aforementioned Windows Vista Ultimate operating system. Why the Vista "UE"? Because it comes with Windows Media Player for Vista. Which is where I want this PC to spend most of its waking time. I had dallied with the MythPC interface in Ubuntu, but never really got it so that it was more (or, rather "less") than a nerd's delight. To be candid, it wasn't ready for prime-time, which was when my family would be using it to watch TV!

The six-fold bump in speed from the cable networking over the DSL was as-advertised and I'll never go back. The setup wasn't completely smooth--but I'm getting ahead of myself. All the ingredients were there and ready to go together.

Assembly day was round about October 11th, as I recall. The hardware assembly was mostly straightforward, with a few Memory settings that needed some tuning. After shuffling the parts in and then out, I realized that the old HTPC was completely intact and so still is. I'll find a use for it or donate it, paying it forward as Chad did for me a year or so ago. And the base Vista OS went in along with the Asus drivers on the included CD, so picture (Hybrid SLI mode) and sound (through the HDMI with an nVidia driver) were available forthwith.

But I didn't have a Blu-Ray disk to try it out with! I couldn't wait when Michael bought his, so Iron Man was going to be the last DVD that I'd ever have to upsample. But that didn't solve my Blu-Ray test problem. So instead I used my Matrix HD-DVD disk to try out the new HTPC. It played well--after I allowed the LG player to update itself and allowed the bundled HD-DVD software player to update itself as well. Which required the networking to work, and that wasn't exactly smooth sailing.

So is this a happily-ever-after story? Of course not. This is the end of but the first chapter of my tale. What is to come, you might ask. Imagine if, in the original Stone Soup story, the soldiers got the villagers to throw all the goodies into the pot, but they didn't have a ladle or the bowls leaked, or the fire under the pot wouldn't stay lit? Pretty frustrating and everyone is still hungry, eh?

My Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player's story will contine in the next entry.

Pre-Ignition Catalytic Converter or C.R.A.P.?

It is unbelievable to me how the unscrupulous will take advantage of people and lie to try to sell something. It is only slightly less unbelievable to me that enough people are duped by their schemes that new schemes are cooked-up by these sociopaths.

Of late, it is the new ways to improve gas mileage. The Vornado, the XXX and now, the leader in the category of "if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, then baffle them with Bull$#!t! A recent addition to the art form of the latter has come upon the internet scene. I'm talking about the "PICC" or "Pre-Ignition Catalytic Converter.

Here's their website. Check it out. Put your critical-observer visor on and turn your skeptic shield up to "full"! Open it in a new browser tab or window so you can go back and forth between it and my re-information (as opposed to their disinformation!) critique.

This is Absolutely too good to be true.

I hardly know where to start to refute all these claims, but I'll start at the top.
They say,

"What if we could turn the gases you are throwing away via
your exhaust into added mileage and power for your vehicle?"

Well, there are lots of ways of doing that. A turbocharger. A supercharger. They use the kinetic energy in those gases imparted by the engine's "pumping action". A catalytic converter does
take large gas molecules and "turn them into smaller particles" (which is what happens when you burn something). They're burned in the catalytic converter, not the tailpipe. And the result is fewer "large gas molecules" and particulates are released. Somewhat "less exhaust", because some of it is converted in burning to more heat. But there is very little unburned gasoline molecules (distinct from gas, i.e., molecules in a gaseous state) in your exhaust to begin with. Dump a bunch of gasoline molecules into a catalytic converter and you quickly ruin it. They're made to deal with trace amounts, making them even more...trace. The point being, you're creating some more heat outside the engine--where it can do work--but not much. And not much compared to the heat that pours out of the exhaust manifold or is circulated out through the water and/or oil cooling system through fans and radiators. If the PICC was claiming to be able to use the excess heat that your car produces---then they'd have something! But that's not what they're claiming.

How about that in-car gasoline "cracker"? You could, I suppose "crack" formulated gasoline. If you were to try something like this--and it would have to be by some other mechanism than what is described on the PICC site, perhaps involving a catalytic reactor (that isn't driven by waste heat as your exhaust catalytic converter is--maybe Citgo has one they're not using--you might (or maybe not, my long-chain butyl chem is a bit rusty) create some energy. But the backyard mechanic really shouldn't attempt to "crack" formulated gasoline. Really, the best gasoline cracker you have is your car's engine. It does a really good job of "cracking" all the BTUs, or heat-energy out of that gas.

Chevron and Shell have done their very best to make gasoline clean burning and high octane for the price. There's admittedly little bit of competition in the market place, but there is enough so that one company just cannot afford to leave NINE TIMES the efficiency on the table. "I'll buy ABC Gas, theirs is so much worse than XYZ gas!" And if you think all the gas companies are doing it, to what end? Participate in some conspiracy to make you consume more gas? Pass up the 100MPG carburetor from the GM "vault" please!

What's next on PICC's list of BS? Well, converting a liquid to a "plasma" could only effectively be done with the magnetic resources and heat resources of, oh, THE SUN! Or, if the "liquid" in question was, maybe, LIQUID HELIUM!! Then you might be able to get transitory plasma signatures in this very weird super-state of matter. But room temperature liquids? Good luck, Einstein (or should I say..Bose-Einstein? Heh. Physics joke.)

Nearly all industrial plasmas (TV sets, fluorescent tubes, those cool "lightning globes") are created by introducing electrons into a gas, not a liquid, where it is MUUCH easier to dislodge other electrons to create the plasma at low energy levels. Output of this electron interaction with the plasma is...photons!

You're not going to be able to turn your gas-burner into Star Trek's Plasma Drive with a little box.

Then there's the final claim in the second main paragraph, "...the gasoline you pay for goes further and the exhaust is so negligible that it hardly registers." Okay, bunky. Pull out your last smog check certificate (for those of you unlucky enough not to drive a classic car that is exempt). Look at the numbers. We're talking "parts" (meaning measurable particles--usually in the micron range) per MILLION. Sometimes, on the most modern and "SULEV" or "P-ZERO" rated cars, many of the numbers are already practically zero. One part in a hundred million. I think that goes to "hardly registers" without the intervention of a PICC. Your nose is a sensitive machine, and you can sometimes smell exhaust--more when the engine is old, or cold, or needs a tune-up. But most of what you feel is carbon dioxide (C02)that is really hot. Guess what? Aside from the heat, it is really, really hard to "crack" energy out of CO2. The sun does it. Plants do it, but it takes them a long time...oh, and the sun, too. C02 is your major greenhouse gas, and there are a whole bunch of smart people trying to figure out what to do with it. Burying it in the ground is a more feasible option than burning it in your car. Really.

What about their claims for increases in efficiency? On the face of it, look at the counterfactual to those claims. There just isn't 9X the energy available in the gasoline over what our cars burn now to "crack" out of it! Think of how inefficient your engine would have to be to only be able to extract 1/9 of the energy available in the gasoline-- and that it would some how be available to be merely "broken down" or "cracked from" the fuel to be used. Here are some fuels and their BTU stores. You'd be better off burning a pound of coal than a gallon of gasoline (10% of 125K BTUs) in your car if gasoline internal combustion engines were as inefficient as these guys claim.

Looks like, if anything, they should be starting with diesels as there's more energy in #2 fuel oil than in gasoline. But there aren't as many truckers as there are desperate people with 80's cars and '08 gas bills.

As to their test of a V8 318ci engine running at 50% load for an hour at 3,000rpm. That is equivalent to a "van...traveling up a 30 degree incline for one hour"? This is Wonder Woman's Invisible Van? How much does this "van" weigh? Where does that fit into the calculations? An engine floating up a hill on its own doesn't have to pull much weight. Even so, 200mpg, or their claim of 2 pounds of gasoline per hour is absurd.

Okay, I've been throwing a lot of arrows. Here's my concrete calculation using their meager data posing as engineering, if not science.

1. Three thousand RPM in a V8 engine, is 24,000 ignition cycles per minute. Or one million, four hundred forty thousand ignition cycles per hour.
2. In that hour, they claim 2 pounds of gasoline used. That's 907 grams.
3. Dividing those 1.44 million sparks into those 907 grams of gasoline, that's 0.00063g of gasoline per spark. Wow. That's a really small number. Sixty three hundred thousandths of a gram.
4. Hmm.. Or about 2 parts in a MILLION per GRAM! You know, that's less than the amount left over in the exhaust? Wow. These guys are good. They're not just getting all the energy out of the exhaust, they're getting more energy than is in the exhaust! Maybe its nuclear. wow.

1. Okay, that last was a bit snarky and unscientific. Back on the beam, we check our table of energy in gasoline, and have to do some more math to convert teir BTUs from 125k/gal to something per gram. That's a volumetric gallon, and our fuel gram is a weight. So it depends on the density of gasoline. Assuming 60 degrees F., these folk in England tell us that's 737.22 kg/cu.m or 0.073722 grams per ml.
2. (Getting there, bear with me.) A gallon is 3,785.41178 ml. So a ml of gas has 0.0302832942
BTUs of energy.

Multiply that by #2 results and you get, out of each spark in that super-dooper
(de-dooper-de-booper!) engine, 0.00223254502 BTUs of energy. Let's round, okay? I'll be REALLY generous and round to twenty-three ten-thousandths.

My friends, you're going to have to take my word for it (but I'm happy to continue down this rabbit hole) that 23/10,000 of a BTU is about 1.2 ft/lbs of energy. To frame it another way, a horsepower is approximately 2,544 BTUs an hour (they did this for an hour). A horsepower is thirty three thousand ft-lbs/min. Or 500 (more or less--we can start really rounding now) ft-lbs/hour. A Chrysler 318 engine has nominally 180hp, but can make much more. We're interested in economy, so that's a good starting point. So that's 9,000 ft-lbs/hr.

What did we calculate? 1.2ft/lbs? But a 318 cubic inch engine should be making FOUR THOUSAND TIMES that amount of energy. Basically, the light wouldn't stay on in the engine. It couldn't get out of its own way, even tethered to an invisible van! It can't be done. There isn't enough raw energy in 2 lbs of gasoline to run a V8 motor at 3,000rpm for an hour. You'd need something that would get you a 4,500% improvement on efficiency. Can't be done. QED.


Then they ask a real relevent question:

"What does this Mean To You?"

Here's what it means: this website and their claims are snake-oil. They're trying to hide it in pseudo science meaningless graphs and "testimonials" and mumbo-jumbo. BTW, I love how none of their mechanics quotes actually have names attached to them. I wonder if an ASE-certified mechanic could lose their license if they really put up something like this? More likely, the quotes were just made-up. I hate to think certified mechanics would be trying to pawn this crap off on their customers.

Here's a good one.

"we believe...you will be evaporating fuel out of
your tank faster than you are using it for your travel."

Uh. Meaning...you "believe" that you're going to eat a hole in the bottom of my gas tank with your crappy "covalizer" agent? Or, in a more mundane interpretation of "believe", that you
actually have no facts nor evidence to back up your idea, so your claim can only be a "belief".

And on that "covalizer". Wow, they should just trademark that name. Someone is going to want to buy that from them when we are all driving electric cars. I mean, "engergizer" is taken, so you've got to have something that sounds scientific.

The videos on this site are really just too absurd to take on point-by-point. Just suffice to say when they say things like, "mechanically, it is just like your car engine", they're not lying--COMPLETELY. What they're using is a Sterling engine. Which has some mechanical similarity with your car engine--and about the same mechanically as a 1900 train engine. A sterling engine will make mechanical energy out of anything that will burn and has enough water to make steam. That's why they're in use in the third world. Low-grade fuel sources and you can still make power and it won't ruin the engine. It'll be hell to clean up afterwards, but it can be done.

We won't even go into why they put this absurd video on this PICC site. I didn't see a demo of any of the products (okay, I could only stand it until 5:30) wearing a tie or being in a garage doesn't make you an expert nor a mechanical nor fuel engineer. More evidence of snake oil.
Oh, and water injection into engines for cooling has been done for a long time. No magic, but that doesn't mean you'll get the same power as if you were running 100% gas, rather than 60% gas and 40% water. I'm guessing you'll get something like 62-63% of the energy.

Perhaps the only "real" thing on their website is the "HAFC Optimizer". Sure. I could probably make one of these--or at least buy it somewhere else on the internet. It could very well be a module that remaps your ignition and injection. Most people who get these use them to get more power (and attendant LESS gas mileage) out of their performance cars or work trucks. It's not hard to do, as the manufacturers have to balance between fuel mileage targets and the market place of horsepower and speed claims. But the "UCSA" (Mitchell Enterprises of Clovis, CA) will probably set it up to put the car's computer into super-lean-almost-knocking mode all the time. Better gas mileage, sure, for a while. Because a super-lean firing will destroy your car's power and destroy your engine in no time.

But I concede you might see some percentage (maybe even double-digits, if your car is out of tune) increase enough to be sold on their snake oil and to spread the word for them. They'll be long gone by the time your engine goes, "KA-BLAMMO!"


What about that evil catalytic converter that the auto industry was forced to put (thoughtlessly) downstream of your engine's combustion, rather than upstream where the smart people of PICC would put it?

Maybe the converter used to do a great deal to combat smog, but its role has been reduced, though not eliminated. It is still an important step, the last one, to destroy all the smog left in the exhaust gas as possible. The catalytic converter of 1971, around when they were widely introduced, was grossly inefficient compared to today. Today there is so little non-combusted material due to hyper-efficient combustion chambers (VVT, hemispheric chambers, multiple valves, multiple spark) that catalytic converters can be the last link in an emissions control chain to put out "SULEV" emissions. Which is practically zero. As low as 0.1g per mile. Less than
1/2 oz. of NOx per 100 miles!!! See this EPA chart on outputs from different "classes" of vehicles.

There is some great wastes on Internal Combustion Engines. Some inefficiencies that someone (not likely the UCSA) will figure out how to exploit. For instance, figure out how you can retrieve the up to 50% of engine energy wasted as heat, and turn that into kinetic energy. Then you've really got something! Maybe a stirling engine run off steam created by the excess heat generated by the gas motor? Just an idea. That many have had.

Other charlatains, other pitches.

These aren't the only guys that are trying to separate people from their money faster than their right foot which is attached to the gas tank which is attached to their wallet.

There was this article in the paper the other day about some guy in Pleasanton who was putting some wires in a PVC pipe, along with a cathode and an anode and some attachment plumbing. About $30 in materials. Then you hook one end to your car's alternator, the other to the air inlet and fill it with water.

"The first time I use Pelligrino. After that, you can use your Aquafina bottled water." Actual quote. Sheesh.

The purpose of this contraption was to create (or should I say, "crack"!) hydrogen and oxygen out of the water in the pipe and feed it to your car's engine as "mixing gases". Too bad the second law of thermodynamics says that the energy needed to produce the electricity at the alternator to convert the water to gas will greatly exceed the energy you could get out of that same engine by feeding the gas back into it.

They are charging $1,000 each for these things and claimed they had sold 2,000 units.

P.T. Barnum was right. Don't be another one.

However, to be fair, I should point out that if the engine is inefficient, as in a DOT test on "older diesel engines", you might get some increased burn efficiencies out of oxygen injection. Four to seven percent in their tests. Good, but not hardly enough to spend $1000.00 on. If you were spending $20,000 on gas, maybe.

I think I'll wait for a real fuel cell. It uses gas, but zero emissions as it uses the _energy_ created in the fuel cell, not the gases directly to run an electric motor. There's a lot of interest in cars and technology using this idea.

It is very much worth investigating the real thing. Real science. Real applications. Not pseudo-science, wild claims and "see how you can become a dealer" marketing schemes.

To quote a wise friend of mine, "Check your tire pressures and add a pound or two. You'll save more gas than any of these stupid gadgets!"

Last of the Air-Cooled Porsches DO command a premium

Tipped recently to the Craigslist Index site, I couldn't resist taking a look at how my favorite car's stats are doing. And here's the graph they so generously provide:



The label appears elsewhere on their page, but this is for "Make: Porsche". I love this graph. My current favorite Porsche (besides my own Legs) is the 1996-98 911. Cognescenti know this car as the "993", the internal project number for the car. The 993 was also made in 1995, the changeover model year from the previous "964" project. But that '95 911 has slightly less HP do mostly to intake manifold changes. No surprise, Porsche is known for Continuous Process (and Product) Improvement.

So look at the graph. I don't think Craigslist has that bump in the Avg. Price for the 1997 Porsche because its my favorite. And the slight dip in the 96 and 98 relative to the typical aging trend is interesting, too, eh? The 1999 911 was a new model, the "996", and it had some growing pains which explains the further drop in Avg. Price even though the volume trends up.

What is happening for 1997 is that I'm not the only one who claims that year/model Porsche as the favorite. But there's one more deeper thing going on here, which might explain the 1996 price drop and the big volume pop in the same year.

Of course there's a relationship between volume (availability) and price, but I think it has to do with the introduction of the Boxster (986) model that year, sold in 1996 as a 1997. The Boxster was a cheaper car, and as it has had benefit of Continous Process Improvement as well, the first cars are relatively less-powerful, less comforatable, less-reliable and therefore...cheaper! Which, blows the curve, as they say, for the 911 prices.

The relatively lower pool of cars for sale for the 1997 year (as reported to Craigslist), and the commensurate raise in price, shows that the demand is up, the availablity is down--fewer lovers of the car putting their baby on the block and so the price jumps.

The 1998 drop comes from the fact that there was very little 993 production for that year. It was a "short" year, with Porsche wanting to introduce the brand-new 996 model. Volume is up because the 1998 996 sold very well, but price is down because the new 996 suffered many of the teething pains that the 986 did in its maiden year. But all is well with Porsche, as the trend is up-up-up since then.

Putting aside the absolutely ghastly depreciation hit these cars take in their first year (look at the 2008-2007 cliff), I see an interesting trend in the most recent years. 2005-2006 price spikes, but volume drops. That would be the introduction of the next 911, the Projekt "997" car.

Not enough samples for 2009 cars--I presume the drop is due to "lease escapes" and the economy. Two Thousand Nine is another year for the 997, but there are Very Significant Product Improvements in '09, and it will be interesting to see this graph in a year.

In the meantime, it doesn't look good for the shoppers of 1997 Porsche 993s. Lucky sellers, though.

Car Week

It is Monterey, where else? Thanks to Greg Wootton, I was able to see the last few races on Saturday. I'll have some pictures to post soon. But as I was browsing today's 356Talk posts, I was led to a slideshow of the Pebble Beach Concours Tour, a driving event for entrants in The Concours. There are no points awarded for the tour, but in case of a tie, a tour participation could break it.
But that's not why I'm writing about it here. The reason is Porsche decided first to enter 356-001 into the PB Concours Preservation class, and then, to add honey to the cracker, entered it into the tour!! Charles Rollins of Bench Racing.com posted this most excellent gallery.


"The Tour" Pebble Beach Concours Driving Event

I really can't top this with my own pictures, but I'll post them as soon as I'm done drooling over Charles' shots.

Ferrari Precedes the PreHistorics

During Monterey's internationally famous Car Week (August 11-17) the "best kept secret" (one it seems which everyone already knows about) is actually a prelude, a rehearsal, that has been open to the public for years, but little talked about outside the outer rings of the Inner Circles. I'm talking about a non-event which has come to be called by locals as the "Pre-Historics". No, its not racing by Fred Flintstone and Barney rubble, it is literally the arrival, staging and practice races for the Big Event, the Monterey Historic Races. I don't need to say that the Historics is a must-see-in-your-lifetime event for any car buff. You already know that. But what you don't know is that the weekend before The Historics, all the big trucks hosting the "arrive and drive" museum pieces and many of the individual entrants arrive to sort out their cars.

What you get in this "dress rehearsal" is 80% of the show, at %5 of the cost and only 1% of the crowds. The reason for this apparent anomaly during what can be a very costy car vacation (3-day tickets run $145) to the Historics run is that there is no event. Its just practice. The Laguna Seca track is within a Monterey County Park. Open to the public. So you pay your $6/car parking fee and you've got a literal front-row seat. Or turn 3 seat. Or corkscrew seat.

Up until this year (no idea what may happen in years hence) you also had full access to the paddocks. Paddock access is one of the great lures to The Historics. You can walk up and peer right into the cockpit of millions of dollars and decades of history worth of racing cars. The cars trundle through on their way to and from the grid around your knees. The smells and sounds are right there. Engine covers open, wheels off. If you're a car tech geek it is nothing less than pornography.

This Year, a pre-Game Show: Ferrari

Sadly, this year, the Ferrari North America "had the track for the weekend" as we were told by many yellow-shirted "Hospitality" guides (all of which looked like they were daylighting from their bar bouncer jobs). One had to have pre-registered with the Ferrari Club to get the appropriate badging and wristbands to raise one above the hoi polloi. Or you had to be on a "driver's list". Meaning a Historics registrant had to have put you on the equiv of a nightclub "guest list" in advance. It would appear that our impromptu tour of the automotive eye candy was at an end.

With the Ferrari Club holding court, and my friends in the 356 Club having not arrived, we were relegated to outside the paddock fencing. It was a small loss, as the entire track, including all the grandstands, the souvenir store and even the track burger grill were open to us. And by "us" I'm talking about several hundred (not thousands--hundreds) of spectators. Most of whom were there to watch the Ferrari club.

Not Impressed by Ferraris? Try this out.

While I appreciate Ferrari, I'm not a fan. They are, to me, unapproachable. I may feel different after my first million (I once read that the average Ferarri owner has a net work of about $5 million--but I wonder about the standard deviation from that figure), but there's just nothing middle class about Ferrari. I can, from the middle class, approach a car that retails at $100k, but to consider $250k and above is to say that my retirement and family's need to eat, oh, and our medical insurance, are all secondary to the siren lure of the Maranello 12cyl. Seeing them in the parking lots left me.....ehhh? I saw a Nissan GTR, my first in-the-wild spotting of this distinctly middle class supercar. That was worth two pictures. The '85 Testarossa and the '06 Scaglietti which bookended the Nissan barely rated a second look.

That said, you cannot be unimpressed by Ferarris on the racetrack. They put on a pretty good show when they're moving, and then there's the sound. Have to admit, there's nothing like it. I'm not seduced by the Siren's lure, but it does turn my head. For our entertainment, there were two heats of a cup race that appeared to be run by a flock of F430 Stradale. I call them a flock because they were much to civilized to be called a "swarm". I expected them to be both buzzier and louder. The sound restriction (92db) was lifted for the weekend, but these cars sounded like they could roll down Highway 1--their clear race livery withstanding.

Above you see a Ferrari pace car leading a couple other Ferrari into the corkscrew. My favorite of this flock of F430s was the one painted in Wyler Gulf-like colors, compleat with a Porsche 908/03 "flounder" spyder arrow (Targia Florio paint scheme). Compare Dan Watkins' reproduction 430 paint with the original 908/03 from a bit north of the Scuderia:

Next up were the very impressive Ferrari Enzo FXX race-prepared models. The FXX is Ferrari's top of the top-of-the-line Enzo series. It is a very exclusive club, numbering only 30, whose members include none other than Michael Schumacher hisself.

So imagine our surprise to find not an Enzo, but SIX! Enzo FXX models on the track and racing at song. Quite a treat. Below is a PhotoShop Express album of the nineteen pictures I took of these spectacular cars.

But that's not all.
Like a multi-gazillion dollar Ginzu commercial, the Ferrari kept coming. After another Challenge round which was unfortunately greatly abbreviated by a number of full-course cautions, on lap one and lap seven, a spectacle that could top even the mighty Enzo FXX took the course. What is at the very top, the pinnacle of the Scuderia food chain? Why, the F1 cars, of course. I was only able to identify two of the three "F1 Corse Clienti" cars. They were F2002 models, Vodaphone livery. They were fast, and gloriously pitched.

The below picture is by Andrew Wong and is very nice. Click the image to go to Andrew's Flickr album of the event.

After that, the Ferrari were done. Oh, there was another round of the "FXX Program", but as one of our party remarked over hamburgers consumed at the outside of the 3-4 chute, "Oh, we're having lunch and there go some Ferrari FXXes. Ah, but we've seen that before, so we'll just keep on with our lunch." And it was rather like that. After seeing the F1 cars, even the quite amazing FXX is slightly mundane. Perhaps that's the alure. Perhaps when you're driving a Ferrari, every other car is slightly mundane. Perhaps some day I'll find out if that's true. Perhaps I hope I don't.

The Speed of Obscurity

Mac OS X has, in its disk utilities, a disk formatting tool. Interestingly, it has the facility to do a "Secure Erase" 7-pass option that claims to meet DoD requirements.

I inherited an external drive that I'm going to use for my "Time Machine" (another Mac OS X tool, for on-going incremental backups) volume. Because the drive came from someone else and clearly had some of their business-sensitive data on it, I decided to exercise this Secure Erase option.

It is a 2003, USB-2, 7200 RPM Maxtor 5000LE disk with 81GB of total capacity.

The utility is estimating this wipe (x7) and format operation will take seven hours. As a point of comparison, I set up a Win 2003 Server yesterday, with a 200GB internal disk. Formatting from blank to NTFS (default 4k sectors) took about 20 minutes (un-timed, but it was about that).

I have to guess that because the Apple secure wipe does write random bits to the disk, that there's considerable traffic over the USB--enough to absolutely fill the disk seven times. To get 'er done in 7hours, the Mac will have to spit/read 12GB/Hr, or 200MB/m or or 17.3Mb/sec. This is at the high-end of the "Full Speed" 12Mb/s for USB 1.1/2.0 spec (but well below the 480Mb/s for "Hi-Speed").

Which makes me think that the Apple & Maxtor USB implementations are very good, or, more likely, that the utility has done space/spec math on the USB xfer rate and posted that as the time estimate to be able to finish formatting the disk.

Maybe I'll get some "Hi-Speed" out of the Mac interface. The Maxtor specs say the 5000LE supports it, and the disk is 7200, as printed on the case, regardless of what the PC Magazine article says about only the 120G versions having the higher-speed spindle.

Ah! I just glanced over and whilst writing this post, the timer has fallen to an estimated 6hrs remaining for this task. Faster than spec, indeed.

P2P begets C2C

The next step in automotive control is coming, and a sign of it shows up in the product of a small Mt. View company named Dash. Dash has been selling on Amazon.com since the end of March. Their first product, a GPS unit that has C2C (Car to Car) communication capacity. The C2C is actually buffered through the company's central servers which aggregate location and speed data and send that back in terms of traffic updates. This is more immediate and accurate than getting feedback filtered through municipal traffic sensors. Getting info from the municipal sensors is called "C2I", or Car to Infrastructure. That's part-and-parcel of what the US calls "Vehicle Safety Communication", or VSC, which is nowhere as cool as "C2C".

I spoke with a company representative last year before the product went public. She said that the C2C wouldn't be part of the initial product, but would be built-in and once there was a critical mass a software update could be delivered to allow C2C and/or C2I functionality to be rolled out.

Though the Dash has some high hurdles to overcome in that there needs to be a critical mass of C2C-enabled cars for a lot of it to work to its potential. Less so for C2I--much like a "Flash Pass" it could be sold by municipalities as a premium commuter service and increase ROI for C2I's infrastructure-side improvements, to build a cycle of improvements.

How you get to that critical mass is beyond my ken, but Dash told me that their exit strategy was to sell this to a car manufacturer, or, if they had interest from more than one, to license it to many, and become like EDS. Do that and hey'll have a big enough network. Of course, On-Star and the european consortium "EURCAR" is working on a similar agenda, and they've chosen to call their initiatve C2C. They're cleary the cool kids on the block (which includes Audi, BMW, Damlier, VW, Fiat, and Renault--notice the absence of The Big 3 and Nippon Co's?)

One of the first things to work out is the spectrum on which all this will happen, right now they're talking about the 802.xx technology in the 5.8Ghz, at the high end of that. But of course it has to be unfettered, not-noisy, and relatively secure (more potential for mischief than hacking an ATC center).

The thing about this initiative and the potential hinted at by The Dash is that I believe the future of accident avoidance and really the next phase in automotive control (now that we have ABS, ESP,PASV, TCS, lane-change notice and auto-parking) in C2C is direct communication to alert surrounding cars to lane changes, braking, erratic steering as well as general traffic speed for congestion alert. Enabled with nearest-neighbor information, the car can know in advance of its position when another car is planning to change lanes or is slowing--without the driver having to notice lights, guage deceleration rates, move their foot, etc.

If MB has a brake system that will buy you a 1/4 sec. by "pre-positioning" its brake pads when you lift off the throttle immediately, imagine what gains you could get by electronic inter-car communcation. Take the slow wetware out of the loop. Um, that's you and me, pal. First enabled for freeway/highway travel and filtering down to urban traffic, there are difficult but not insurmountable problems to solve, but it is clearly imaginable at this point. For rural and suburban roads the challenges are harder. We'll leave that for now in the hands of the DARPA Challenge folks. Handling anything, anywhere, anytime from behind the wheel is currently a job for the slower but much more adaptable wetware between our ears.

If we invest in some relatively small additions to C2I infrastructure in urban settings, the car could know well in advance when lights will change, speed limits, etc. Add that up and you really have the makings of great efficiencies in auto traffic and not just safety.

[above image from the Renault presentation "Avoidance and Action in a C2C Network". ]

Coming Into an Intersection Near You
Imagine for a second that all cars were equipped with C2C. Or, in the closer future, imagine that a majority do. You're overlooking a major traffic intersection (don't know why, but I'm thinking of DeAnza Blvd. and Stevens Creek Blvd. Let the Apple employees be the lab rats). It's about 9am on a weekday and traffic is pretty heavy. At some moment, without drama, the C2I detects that all cars within 500yds of the intersection are C2C equipped [unequipped cars can be "ratted out" to the intersection by their equipped neighboring vehicles. "I can see you, but I can't hear you!"]. At a synergistic moment, the traffic lights begin to blink all their colors in all directions, alerting drivers to the upcoming thrill ride. At the edges, all pedestrians and cyclists are signalled to stop. Inside the cars, the C2C system alerts each driver, "Automatic intersection ahead, yield control to me in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1....I have control of your car. Control will be returned to you shortly. Listen for the countdown."

The car can take on the very simple task of steering a little on approach to keep in-lane stability. This is much simpler than the auto-parking mechanism of Lexus and others. Carnegie Mellon and Stanford have been running cars around their campus on autonomous control for years now--well-defined lanes, low speeds, no traffic. Lane change attempts are suppressed. Remember, that all the cars have "immediate radius destination" signals being sent out, so early moves into turn lanes and lane adjustments for speed (slow to the right, enforced by the cars themselves! Heaven!) have already been made. Then every car gets locked into a steady state on approach to keep the real time planning as simple as possible, Drivers basically don't have control over their pedals.

In all directions at the same time and all the cars just go through the intersection without any drama.

The cars interleave themselves with as little slowing as possible; the system creating the following distances necessary to get all the cars through the intersection in a basket weave. Little wasted gas, low chances of accident. It is Atari Frogger on a grand scale and everyone makes it across.
As non-equipped cars approach the intersection, it goes back into human-interface mode, the signals go back to normal, the audience of appreciative pedestrians whistle their awe...and maybe the whole thing happens again in a few minutes.

It occurs to me that perhaps motorcycles will be the most difficult to bring into this fold. But that's an off-the-cuff observation and would need more thought. This would be fun software to work on, bordering on "AI". Certainly some "hive think" and "emergent behavior" aspects of it.

When could this happen? Within 20 years, easily. Within my lifetime, certainly.

Other resources.

http://archive.thestandard.com/internetnews/000765.php

Acronymicon

I don't think I made it to be the first on the web with this, but the new Indiana Jones movie, "Indiana Jones and the Cave of the Crystal Skull" is a mouthful. So I condensed it to the acronym: IJatCotCS. Google it. Anyone besides me? I have to say though, that IJATCOTCS is either an acronym for a joint DEA/FBI operation, or a new JAVA/CSS conversion API. Or something from the Pentagon. Yep. That's it. It's a Pentagon acronym. Trebly-embedded. Which reminds me. Is it really true that "JAVA" stands for "Just Another Vacuous Acronym"? If it doesn't it should.

Dancing With the Stars, courtesy of Jib-Jab

You remember "This Land is Your Land" from the '04 Presidential election. Do you think those guys over at Jib-Jab have been asleep since then? They haven't and here's the proof. Nominated for one of the best Flash applications on the 'net.

Smart NAS<->USB Copies

I was looking at NAS solutions again today, as 1TB drives external get to my arbitrary but magic pricepoint of <$0.25/GB, and found this nice LaCie item.

What surprised me was buried in the comment by the second reviewer. He wrote:

"Also I had another USB external drive that I wanted to copy the data from to the NAS so I connected it directly to the NAS and mapped both drives on my laptop (which is wireless) to do a copy and it ran super slow, for some reason it did not just copy from drive to drive but it was transferring across my wireless."

Wow.
This is why we need basic computer "science" (really, a practicum that isn't focused on using apps) as a part of the general education. More English education needed to combat run-on sentences is also indicated in this case--but I digress.

Looking deeper into his situation and confusion, wouldn't it be cool to have devices smart enough to figure out what this user wanted (and expected) to do? I.e., the computer looks at the source and destination targets and sees that they're on the same IP and so hands them (maybe the source drive) a signal to check for routing optimizations, which might include looking for all USB hosts and clients for some matching target credential.

Or in this particular case, couldn't the NAS figure out what is going on, since it is receiving both the source and target destinations and spoof the client computer into thinking that the transfer is beginning, continuing and then ending as long as it takes to make the USB xfer? The user gets all the "flying folder" feedback (or spinning beachball for you Mac'ers) and for the appropriate time whilst the USB does its thing.

If Cisco and Comcast can spoof to interrupt Torrent copies, it can't be that hard to sniff this out. And for that matter, if the NAS kernel is Linux (as it surely is), couldn't you stuff some iptables rules that would handle this "feature"? Allowing this could be as easy as a feature in the web interface that, on detecting a USB drive, enables a checkbox that says, "allow disk-to-disk copies between by networked clients"? Defaulted to "on", of course. You might want the files to fly through your CPU/OS stack, because you might have antivirus checks to apply, Google desktop, or other benevolent (or, yes, malevolent) spyware to apply. Hmm... off by default then?

Surely I'm not the first to have thought of this (sm).