So my civil duty it is to tell my fellow new zealanders about www.bookdepository.co.uk. It’s like Amazon but it has a distinct advantage…..FREE GLOBAL DELIVERY!!!! Now that is music to a Kiwi’s ears. No more waiting until you have US$150 worth of books to order from Amazon. Get them in your post box for the price of a book. And that price being that what the book really costs – before our kind bookstores put the gold-lining on the price.

Bookdepository has a very good selection of books and is sometimes even cheaper than Amazon (depending on exchange rate). The fastest delivery (and we have already had dozens) is 4 days with 5-6 being the norm. The longest was about 2 weeks. Every book is sent separately so books that are not in stock don’t delay books that are in stock.

All you bookworms out there rejoice and order to your hearts content!

This will cause more kiwi $$$ to go off-shore and will force our bookstores out of business. But…see it from the positive side. You’re doing the country a service. You are supporting the upward trend of literacy and abolishing these ridiculously high retail book prices. Let’s force them to re-think what they are doing.

Oh and… Mr. Key you can probably save a whole lot of tax-$$$ if you start ordering schoolbooks from overseas

I have checked out the alpha and beta releases and they look spectacular. Definite improvements over 9.04. I’m also very interested in the advancement of the server side with cloud computing being the big new thing.

It costs about $370 to get a certification and another $125 every year plus a 3-yearly retest at $170 to remain certified. That is $1165 for 5 years or $2130 for 10 years. And that’s only certification. No courses to train and no materials.  Just imagine spending that money  on books! I think they’d teach you a bit more than the cert ever can. You can even specialise on your topic and not be over generalised.

Once you’ve read those books & invested the time to understand them you can’t tell me an employer won’t take you. By that time you should be a real expert in your field. Nobody will have charged for a piece of (unbound)paper and the know-how gain is all your doing. It gives you an immense sense of accomplishment. You’ll still go to training courses and conferences advancing your know-how. If that is not what you’re doing already I’d guess you shouldn’t consider yourself an interested expert in your field anyway.

I do agree that it is difficult for companies to recognise a good employee/candidate. It takes proper screening and good interviews with intelligent questions. The certification organisations  try and convince you that their cert gives you the assurance of quality and standardisation. Well….do they compensate for losses if that is not the case? If not, what is the use? Have I checked that the certification complies with the standards of my company? If not, are my standards wrong? Will that person then fit my company?

I think certifications (I do exclude product related certs here!!)  are  just an easy way out for companies employing people. They think if the cert’s there they can go and blindly employ. Of-course it is ideal for recruitment agencies and managers. You can rest assured that you’re promoting someone good – yeah right! So employing is: Person is alive – tick, has a CV – tick, can spell IT – tick and has the right certs – tick. Done. An employer that does that will only get my services if I’m really desperate (and even then I’d rather not). For all involved parties it is good to remember that employment is a two-way road. The candidate chooses the company as much as the company does the candidate.

I like to be challenged and prodded in an employment process. No cert is ever going to save me from curve-balls in real employment meetings. Only my know-how and education will (and education can be obtained by several means not only the institutionalised way. See www.buccaneerscholar.com for more detail). What an employer is/should really be looking for is engagement and interest. Without those you have a working drone (which sometimes could be what you really want but most of the time not). Where is the cert qualifying engagement and interest?

When I have people apply for a job that have an ISTQB certification for example, there are two groups that  I can discern:

1. Those that have been dragged there by their companies (and have never thought about what they are doing)
2. Those that aren’t good testers and need something that will give them a foothold

I have yet to meet someone who has taken the exam that admits to stand behind the ISTQB certification. I am guessing the same thing will happen to ITCP. Certs in my opinion are actually a qualifier for mediocre abilities and/or a disinterest in my profession. If I’m good then a certification is an insult to my abilities. If I’m not a cert won’t help me to become better it will just show that I’m as good as any other of the thousand cert-Joe’s out there. I’d be better advised to do something spectacular, amazing and outright creative with my time. No matter what it is as long as it has some relevance to my job and I can speak to it. It will get you the job.

So why do these organisations not make a course with an exam and stop calling it a certification? Then everybody who thinks this course is a good idea can take it  and those that don’t can stay away without getting a stigmata? By pushing it as a certification and even going down the path of trying to make it mandatory it just plainly looks like an IT-Tax…. I wanna work in IT so I have to pay $$$ and we’ll do an examisomething so that it has a hint of legality – yeah right!

Maybe someday someone will change my mind but I doubt I’ll ever warm up to certification. Remains the hope I won’t be run out of town anytime soon.

“A simple hint for the new Quicktime X player. Clicking the fast forward button increases video playback speed to 2x, then 4x then 8x. 2x, however, is a bit fast to watch a video.

To increment by .1x, hold down Control and click fast forward. I find 1.3x speed works well, and is very watchable. This also works for reverse.” (link)

Thought I needed to share that. Saved my day today!

What had happened was that I had tried an apt update/upgrade (something like automatic updates on Windows) on my Ubuntu 8.10 server. It didn’t go quite swimmingly. Nothing new because my installation was a little wonky anyway. But as I restarted the machine it would not let me boot anymore. I was getting an immediate kernel panic. *shock*

So I did what I wanted to do a long time ago anyway (and was now forced to do) – upgrade my system. From a good friend I got an old 2.5″ 20GB HDD to replace my USB stick with that was running my web server. Not that the USB stick was a bad idea or anything but there’s the odd thing that is made easier by having a hard drive. I chose a 2.5″ model as I still am quite stingy when it comes to power use.

So I tried installing Ubuntu server 9.04. That failed due to whatever reason. So I installed Ubuntu server 9.10 Alpha 6. Very courageous here! …which went all fine.

It was nice to see that the USB stick was not all lost and could be read by the OS. So after installing some needed packages it was necessary to install my WordPress site (i.e. this site). Now that would be a challenge I thought. Not quite so….

1. Copied the WordPress directory,
2. changed the mySQL password in the wp-config.php file,
3. copied the apache2 site config files,
4. created the WordPress database I used for my site,
5. imported the database from my weekly backup file via phpmyadmin
6. and restarted apache2.

Voila, here is the site! Easy as. *phew* …. *PHEW*

So after the initial shock it took me less than 24hrs to recover my site. There’s still quite a bit of detail work left but that I can tackle at a slower pace. Impressed by both, Ubuntu and WordPress here. And of course my lucky stars that I could still read that USB stick. I think now it’s time for regular full backups of my web server!

Now that Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) came out Rebecca and I decided to invest in the whole Apple product range we use. Meaning that we needed new versions for the OS, iWorks and iLife. We have 3 Macs so the family package (5 licenses) is the way to go.

This package costs NZ $479 in the Apple store. In the US it costs US $229. Google tells me that that equates to about NZD $330. Ok….so what’s the $109 difference ($41 is sales tax)??? That is definitely a bit much for postage. So this is pure additional profit! For what? Living in NZ??? Is this the living-happily-in-NZ-tax??? I honestly feel conned by Apple. And I certainly wasn’t going to stand for it. So here’s the trick on how to save lots of dough….

Go to Amazon US and get search for Mac OS X there. You will find the family pack advertised for $199 (!!) or even less. Get it shipped to someone you know in the US and then get them to ship it out to NZ. Voila, you just saved $100+.

Apple is a cool company and I love their products and will keep on buying them but if they think they can fund cheap US sales by conning the rest of the world then their outa luck. I think this should even get investigated by the commerce commission. Wonder who I write to there…

Over the next year I predict that I will need another 2-6TB of storage to cope with added data volumes (I intend on starting to film in 1080p resolution which is about 4GB for 15min of video). Currently the largest available drives are 2TB at a cost of about $300. The issue is not with the drive itself though. It is about how and where do I connect the drive to the network.

External USB/FW drives are too slow for real use (they are OK for incremental local backups though). So the remaining solution is some kind of NAS. My HTPC/Mac (see below) will fulfill that function. It is attached via 1Gbps Ethernet and has six drive bays available and a large power supply. The unit already sports a 250GB boot drive and a 1.5TB data drive.  The issue is that with that all the SATA ports on the Atom board are used. So the next drive will have to be attached to an extra SATA PCI card (which will have to be Mac compatible).

The new Snow Leopard also supports wake-on-use. That means the machine will wake on access of a drive. Currently I still need to wake it manually via WoL. Remains to be seen when Snow Leopard (10.6) will be “available” on the Intel Atom boards with all needed features supported.

The issues I have with data in my private home start to mirror what has been happening for quite a while in the datacentres. Not only does that mean I need ever more technical know-how at home to cope but it also means that something like the solution below gets interesting.

http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/

This is of-course too large for private use but it does solve some of the issues you might encounter when building your own NAS.

One other thing that is hugely annoying in NZ is the lack of broadband flatrates. This effectively prevents you from performing sorely needed and large off-site backups. Currently I solve this problem by storing a USB hard drive off site. This HDD contains a copy of the most important data that I have (by no means all the data!).

So, what have you done for your backup today?

Matt Mansell’s (DIA) talk about Growing Great Test Analysts contained one comment that really struck a chord (not that the rest of the talk wasn’t excellent). He said (my own interpretation) that calling us testers is really putting down our capabilities and our profession. Instead we should make a point of calling ourselves Test Analysts. We ARE analysts and good testing is learned the hard and painful way. We are not monkeys or Business Analysts in sheep’s clothing.  I am as guilty as are most. I will in future make a real effort in using the proper term of  Test Analyst. It is a small but vital step in the right direction.

Stanz 2009 fltr: Julian Harty, Karen Johnson, Lee Copeland, James Bach

And the above really highlights what Stanz is all about. We go there to get reminded that we are in a testing profession. The speakers entice us to learn more, to read more and to get off our complacent derrierès. The 2009 Stanz definitely had the right set of speakers for this. I again enjoyed the quasi familiarity of the event. I doubt there are many places in the world where the attendees and speakers can get so up-close and personal to exchange ideas.

The effects of the recession were visible but that was to be expected. Even so I’d say the attendance was good and it was nice to see all those familiar faces again and meet some new ones.

Who knows, 2010 might be the year I switch sides from listening to talking. We’ll see…..

[Update] With the upgrade to 10.5.8 the sleep mode breaks. There is currently only a fix for Voodoo kernels but not the plain Vanilla ones. Very annoying this is. Maybe I’ll have to re-install.

[Update 2] I have re-installed to 10.5.6 because that gives me sleep and Atom 330 Hyperthreading. I’ll then wait & see what Snowleopard brings…

You’ll have either 5,10 or 20GB cap. So that only means that you’ll reach your download limit on the second of each month and not the fourth! What is it with peoples craze for speed? It’s the same stupidity as with the fiber-optic cable to the curb. We don’t need any of that if we’re going to d*ck around with these outdated data caps. What needs to go is the Telecom bottleneck-monopoly of the Tasman cable (Kudos to Kordia for wanting to install that 2nd cable).

If we had free market conditions on the international data highway we’d have no caps, it would make sense to up the bandwidth and private companies would invest in infrastructure.

But we have a Telecom controlled monopoly so nothing happens and now taxpayers have to cough up $1.5bn so that we can get some cables in the ground only to find out that they won’t solve any of our issues.

So go Telstra! 100Mbit will not really bring us any advantage. Give us a flatrate and keep it at 10Mbit!!!

As a result they lost my business as I have now ordered directly from Apple (which I would have done anyway if I had anticipated that they’d sell it too). It’s even $30 cheaper from them.

So Apple has come through again and Vodafone proved it can’t really come to the party. The sad thing is Telecom isn’t an option either they’re just as pathetic. Wonder when we will really get a choice in this country.

As I said in post 1 I got my first inspiration from here:

http://www.osnews.com/story/21564/Building_a_Hackintosh_Apple_Can_t_Sue_You_

Basically the interesting part being able to use the standard OS install. I pretty much followed the instructions on that page. But here I’ll also give some additional hints that might make your life a little easier.

So with a USB stick, a freshly burnt boot-132 CD and the Mac OS X Leopard DVD (10.5.0) I ventured to my new Atom powered sleek SilverStone Mac (or do I call it a PC?). Before I started though I had deleted all partitions off the hard drive so that the Mac OS X installer would not have any issues trying to delete Linux or Windows partitions. This I did with a Live boot CD running Ubuntu 9.04. The Partition Editor under the System menu did the trick.

That done I inserted the boot-132 disk and started the HTPC. As promised it came up with a prompt and after exchanging the DVD the new OS was happily installing. Note to partition the drive correctly before installing though.

The install took about an hour. Create your user & stuff and you’re ready to reboot. You will still need the boot-132 CD to start into your partition until you have installed the bootloader Chameleon.So reboot now and see what happens.

*TaDa*

You have your first OS X start! Probably you’ll only see a 1024×768 resolution but that’s 100% OK.First install the 10.5.7 combo installer from Apple. You might run into a system crash when you reboot. This is due to problems with hyperthreading (HT) on the Atom CPUs. This is probably due to the processor not being interpreted correctly but I did not yet figure a way of fixing that. Maybe someone out there has a clue. To get it running you therefore have to turn off hyperthreading in the BIOS.

Now start executing all those steps in the link above. You’ll need to install Chameleon, Kexts and the other goodies. One thing the documentation sort of misses is the fact that you manually have to set the Mac OS partition to be active if none of the tools has done that for you. Details for this can be read-up here.

Should you have more than one partition the boot manager will also come up every time to ask you where to boot from. If you don’t want that read up here how you can change on the boot loader. For me it were the entries…

<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string>rd=disk0s2</string>
<key>Timeout</key>
<string>4</string>

…in the com.apple.Boot.plist file.

One thing to note with the Intel D945GCLF2 board is, that the Realtek NIC is not fully 100% supported and the above description does not mention that. Get the Kext from here and install it with the OSx86 tool. All networking now works like a charm.

Finally repair disk permissions and install

If you have done all of the above you should be able to recreate this screen:

The important detail being…

If you do have the good fortune of having a SilverStone case with a display you will now need to get the display to work. the easiest way I found is by using the linked installer for LCDproc from here:

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t83598.html

I also recommend Plex for the movie experience (or just stick to FrontRow for now). Perian is also a valuable asset to have for those video codecs. XSlimmer (see below) can also help with cutting down the space used by applications a bit.

The set-up has now been running a couple of days and I’m very happy. Two things remain to be done:

1. I need to get 5.1 audio to work. So far no luck (or figure out a way for the on-board digital out to work)
2. Find a way to activate the buttons and volume controller from the SilverStone case.

Although the latter is not that important to me. I’m content and am totally amazed at how well this has worked. The Atom is also a lot faster than I would have expected. It probably isn’t as fast as a Mac Mini but then I wouldn’t have expected that but it is a heck of a lot faster than my 1.42Ghz Mac Mini I had before (even with a 250GB 5400RPM drive upgrade!).

So the experiment was a success and I can now attack the final little nigglies.

From what I read this chip still holds a lot of reserves at this point in time. So the iPhone 3G [S] will certainly be equipped with more functionality as time goes by. Now the only thing left to find out is the actual CPU speed and confirmed internal memory amount. All other new features are of course cool as but for me the speed is the critical thing. I found the “old” iPhone 3G just that tiny bit too slow with its 400Mhz core. I so hope they have fixed that. From the Keynote it looks like they did but I need to wait for an official confirmation.

I think this is finally the iPhone for me.

First we need to put all the hardware together. Well…actually we first need to take it apart. The case that is. And that then looks something like this:

The case has lots of space and the mainboard can be easily accommodated. You really start to wonder if you can put two Atom boards in here….

The power supply (PSU) that came with the case has a whopping 450W which is about 4-5x what I’ll probably need. And although it is a high quality-low noise dual fan PSU it still contributes quite substantially to the noise level. I will definitely be looking for a fan-less supply in the sub 200W class. If someone has any ideas where to get these please let me know. At the bottom of the case you can also see two additional fans that can be connected up to a mainboard. They are nice and quiet and turn at about 1700RPM. For this PC though they are just not necessary.

So next step is to get the mainboard in…

Now that definitely looks like a waste of space! And if I can redo that PSU I can really fit two.

The board fits nicely and is no problem getting in but as you can see above I have a hydra problem. LOTS and LOTS of cables to connect. Since I haven’t built a PC for years now (at least nothing later than a Pentium III) I was surprised how much more cabling there is.  So here’s the shot with all cabling and drives in:

I know this isn’t the cleanest of cabling but this is kinda a first attempt.So maybe I’ll visit this again at some latter point.

One thing to mention though is the Intel mainboard fan. It’s there to cool the chip-set and not the CPU! This is THE most commented on feature of this board. Why pair a 4W processor with a 20W+ chip-set?! And the fan is annoying. It is loud and should be replaced. I’ll have a look if I can tunnel one of the back fans to it. They’d be perfect and do a quieter job of it.

Up top you can see the installed DVD drive and the HDD on the right. There’s still lots of space left for more goodies. And the final product….

Looks good and is just what I wanted. A lot bigger than the Mini but hey, this is something totally different. The next challenge is installation and getting all the fancy stuff to work. The old DVD player will also lose it’s place once I get 5.1 sound to work. On the lower left corner you can already see the blue power light. I tested the whole hardware installation with a Ubuntu Linux Live CD.

Noise levels are low but perceptible when the room is quiet. Running are the mainboard fan and the two fans from the PSU. When anything is playing the noise level gets easily drowned out. If I can re-jig the mainboard CPU and install a fan-less PSU the noise level should be less than that of the Mac Mini.

My HTPC hardware is now all working and ready for the next phase. See Part 3 in the next days.

Since I have a Mac OS X Leopard family license with two licenses left unused I thought this might really be a good idea. If it is legal I’m not sure (am no lawyer). I do know though that Apple earns on average $2000-$3500 from us every year in software and hardware. I think that warrants me going a little astray for the fun of it.

In the end I just love the tinkering. I think it’s the same genes that are responsible for grown men to play with toy trains.

So what did I do…. firstly I had to get all the components.

1. Intel Atom 330 Motherboard D945GCLF2 (from Paradigm PCs in Wellington – not the cheapest but reliable & quick)
2. 1GB Ram DDR2-5300 (had that already)
3. WD 250GB 7200RPM HDD (had that already)
4. Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-110D (had that already)
5. SilverStone LC16M HTPC case with a Task 450W low noise PSU

The SilverStone case was a stroke of luck. I got it cheap off TradeMe and it was exactly the thing I was looking for. Eventually the hard drive will be exchanged for a 1-2TB drive(s) but I am waiting for the big drives to come down in price a little and for this experiment to work before spending more money. So far I have now spent just over NZ$400 for the set-up.

The  Intel D945GCLF2 mainboard with its dual core 1.6Ghz Atom 330 processor is a sweet little thing. It definitely has its drawbacks. It only has Intel GMA950 integrated graphics, 2GB ram max, only 2 SATA ports, only one PCI expansion slot, no Firewire and the chipset could be more efficient. But it is very compatible with Mac OS X, has a plethora of USB ports (4 x front & 4 x back), is available and is dirt cheap. My research on the Internet said that it definitely wouldn’t do 1080p. Since our TV is 720p/1080i only I wasn’t too worried.

I would have liked to get one of the new Atom + Nvidia ION chipset mainboards but there’s none to have in NZ for a while and their compatibility with Mac OS X isn’t proven yet. I also anticipate them costing NZ$350 and more.

So by last Friday I had all the parts sitting right in-front of me.

(LtR: DVD, HDD, Mainboard, RAM and USB stick)

and the case…

And I must say the case is absolutely divine. It is just the right size. Has space for (at least) 6 hard drives and can be fitted with fans left-right and center. It is solidly built and the front is really nice aluminum. So I set about setting it all up. It would be a challenge to get all the switches, display and other gadgets to work under OS X.

More tomorrow….

After a lot of searching and reading I stumbled across Carl and his ledstuff.co.nz website. He really helped me select what LED lights I needed and has been very helpful. After sales service was also excellent and no-fuss-quick. So if you have any LED lights drop by his website and see what he’s got. Even if you haven’t thought about using LEDs before have a look. I think you’ll be amazed at what can be done today.

Also a good address for LED torches for that earthquake bin.

http://www.elmoto-cycles.com/

Inventors from Stuttgart in Germany have crossed a mountain bike with an electric scooter. Looks great and should be the ideal thing for Kiwis. Goes 45km/h and has a radius of over 60km. Costs about a $1 per 100km. This is something I could see myself on. Probably even good for off the road. Have a look at the pictures and videos on the site. The concept is sound by the looks of it. Currently still a bit pricey at $8500+ but that’s bound to drop.

The constructors seem to have really splurged on good quality parts and got the design right. Remains to be seen what kind of vehicle class this would be in NZ. Could be all you need is a cycle helmet…

Bill English said today something like “the downturn is worse than even the worst prognosis and therefore the tax cuts cannot be upheld”. Basically either he is lying and National has pulled the election coup of the century by buying the election and then not paying up with full intent or he is admitting that the oh so financially competent National Party has no clue what’s happening on the world markets. Please Mr. Key take a pick! I do feel sorry for the 45% (minus the few super-rich) that have voted for National. You’ve just proven that you’re politically gullible. Hope this will teach you a lesson in believing in what politicians say.

As for cutting investments into superannuation, the second idiotic thing in the budget, it’s just typical behaviour. Pray on the future which someone else will have to deal with. They made it look as if there were only two options: no investment or an unsound investment. I really can’t believe that a “financially highly capable” National Party cannot find an investment that cannot return a good return. I’d even say that money could have been invested into NZ and have directly created jobs! How shortsighted.

There seem to be only two good things that came out of the budget.

1. Insulation for homes. Thanks Greens and Maori Party!
2. Luckily not even more headless damage. Thanks National Party for being a bit lazy or afraid of the backlash.

Point to note is the absence of Labour in this post. I think they have to step up to the game a bit if they want to have a chance in the near future.

Sorry for the political rant but it’s hard not commenting when given such an invitation. I do hope the feeling is mutual.