Agave Mountain

Two years ago, I purchased a Mac Pro for development.  In the first few months, I had problems with the Mac Pro waking up from sleep.  Randomly, the PC would not have video on boot.  I took it in for service and was totally unimpressed by Apple's technical support. 

Publicly, Apple claimed that there were no problems with the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT card, even though people like me have continually and consistently reported otherwise in various Apple support forums.  Horror stories abound about people taking in their Mac Pros under warranty and being given a defective video card multiple times.  Most give up and opt to purchase an "upgrade" video card to make the pain stop.

As a work around, I disabled sleep and only rebooted sparingly when I had to.  Some later firmware updates made the system much more stable, provided I didn't try to force it to sleep or reboot.

Well, last week, after I installed Snow Leopard, the video card in my Mac Pro, the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT, finally died.  No video on boot, no matter how many boots I tried.

I purchased a new video card and no more problems, in spite of what Apple's "technicians" have told me on numerous occupations.

Posted by Joe Turner at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments

George S. Clason's classic book entitled, The Richest Man in Babylon is one of the personal finance classics recommenced by many financial gurus.  Dave Ramsey regularly recommends the book on his radio show.

The book, originally written in the 1920's, is a collection of financial parables set in ancient Babylon.  Each of the seven short stories relates the adventures of the characters as they are taught how to amass wealth.

While the language is strange due to the author's attempt to make the stories seem like they came from ancient days, the stories repeatedly hammer home the basics of personal finance, although sometimes in an awkward and repetitious manner.

The two main tales that I like best are the "Seven Cures for a Lean Purse," and "The Five Laws of Gold."  The rest seem to repeat and reinforce the advice given throughout the book.

Seven Cures for a Lean Purse

The tale, "Seven Cures for a Lean Purse" follows the main character Arkad, who is requested by the king to teach a class to build wealth.  The class was seven days long, and each day a topic was taught.  They are (translated into modern English and summarized):

• Take one-tenth of what you bring in and save it for the future.  This was brought up again and again.  Save 10% of your income before you pay your debts or spend.  This was repeated throughout the book.
• Don't buy frivolous things even if you have the money to pay for them and live on less than you make (after saving 10%). 
• Once you save, invest to make "your gold multiply."  Conversely, if you don't invest you won't get wealthy.
• Don't invest foolishly; you should only invest in things where the principle is safe.
• Own your own home.
• Insure a future income for your family after you pass on.
• Increase you ability to earn by working hard, looking for opportunities, and educating yourself.

The Five Laws of Gold

• You should save at least 10% of your earning to create an estate for his family's future.
• If you invest well, you will make money.
• Be cautious in investing.
• Only invest in businesses or purposes that you know.  If you don't understand you could loose your money or get swindled.
• Avoid investments that promise absurdly high returns (if it is too good to be true, it probably is).

I thought the audio book was reasonably good and it would be perfect to use to teach children about financial topics. 

However, if you easily bored with stilted old English phrases or repetitive teaching methodologies, you might want to pick another book to read. 

Labels: Reviews

Posted by Joe Turner at 11:06 PM | Permalink | Comments

I am constantly scribbling notes on paper and post-it notes.  As I age and my memory grows shorter, it is the crutch that I a lean on most to keep my productivity up.  I still rely heavily on the my nearly unreadable scribbles to get me through the week.

As a result, it doesn't take much to convince me to purchase a new writing instrument; I'm always looking for a good one to add to my collection.  So when I saw the Levenger Graphiti Grip 2mm Mechanical Pencil on sale for half price ($14.95, discounted from $38.) I decided to take a risk.  I mean, how bad could it be? 

Pretty bad, I later found out.

As I opened the undamaged cardboard box, I immediately noticed the metallic silver zippered tin case had been crushed.  Because the shipping box was undamaged, I suspect it must have been damaged before it was shipped.  The pencil was undamaged, so I tossed the dented case aside. 

The pencil writes well and is evenly balanced.  The cherry wood barrel and matte chrome finish make it a beautiful pencil and the size of the pencil makes it comfortable to write with.

There is no sharpener included.  You will have to purchase a separate pencil sharpener that will sharpen the 2mm lead (or use a pocket knife).

The cap is cheap and often pops off with the slightest jar or friction.  If you drop the pencil, you will have to guess what random direction the end cap traveled.  Also, when advancing the graphite led, the wood barrel slowly works itself loose.  I found myself constantly having to re-tighten the barrel.  This appears to get worse over time.

Hands down, this was the worst mechanical pencil I have ever owned.

Labels: Reviews

Posted by Joe Turner at 10:29 PM | Permalink | Comments

It just got a little harder to be a freelancer in India, as PayPal is currently the payment processor of choice for Indian freelancers.

As of January 28th, PayPal has suspended personal payments to and from India and transfers to local banks in India.  Today, Anuj Nayar explained the reason behind the suspension -- regulators are questioning whether the transfers constitute remittances to India.  Therefore, PayPal has stopped processing personal payments to India.

That leaves thousands of freelancers with money in their PayPal accounts, but no way to withdraw the money and a resolution that is months away.

Posted by Joe Turner at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments

I've been insanely busy lately, but here are a few announcements:

We're Moving.  We are taking advantage of an opportunity to move into a bigger, more comfortable place.

Blogger shutting down FTP Support.  We are currently utilizing the Blogger platform to maintain this blog.  We currently push the blog to our hosting account via FTP.  However, in the near future Blogger will be discontinuing their support of publishing via FTP, forcing us to make a choice between Blogger's "Custom Domains" or WordPress.  Goodbye Blogger, we will miss you.  Links will probably become broken during the transition.

Goodbye ComCast/Xfinity.  Seriously, I still chuckle every time I think of the ComCast customer service agent who tried to talk me into using their phone service but only after: 1) arguing that I didn't really have an outage; 2) telling me to buy a new cable modem from BestBuy; and 3) finally telling me the earliest they could send out a technician was next week.  Goodbye ComCast, you won't be missed. 

And lastly, we are considering consolidating and bringing our web sites back in-house.  We are doing this for a variety of reasons, including security, faster responses to customer issues, and quite frankly we simply aren't happy with the shared hosting we've received from a number of vendors.

In any event, this is shaping up to be a interesting year so far.  Hopefully, it will be better than 2009. 

Labels: Announcements

Posted by Joe Turner at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments

For a while now I have been searching for a NAS (Network-Attached Storage) appliance for my home office -- one that is inexpensive, supports CIF, AFS, Subversion, and above all, is quiet.  I didn't find one, so I built one.

For a while I've been starting to bump into the upper limits of my disk storage.  The storage needs of my paperless home office was quickly outgrowing my current disk capacity, causing me to be constantly trolling for files to delete.   The combined with multiple subversion repositories, VMWare virtual hard drives, developer kits, SDKs and operating system distribution ISO images was quickly consuming my local hard drives resources.

Still, I resisted the urge to throw down the cash for a NAS appliance.

However, when my quirky 1TB SimpleTech USB drive (I do not recommended purchasing SimpleTech's external drives by the way) started throwing I/O errors, and I couldn't get it to format, I knew it was time to start searching for something better. 

My critical data was safely stored on RAID-1 array, but I knew from experience RAID sometimes provides a false sense of security.  With a sense of urgency, I again started looking at NAS appliances. 

At first, I looked at a variety of 4-bay NAS appliances.  The least expensive 4+ bay NAS (Promise NS4300N SmartStor) was priced at $292.99, and the most expensive was the ReadyNas 4TB was priced at $1479.99.

What surprised me most was that the reviews of these appliances have an average three stars (out of five).  Furthermore, in every model I investigated there were complaints about quirky firmware issues, extraordinary disk format times, poor tech support, and above all, poor performance.

Clearly, there had to be a better way.

I ultimately ended up salvaging parts from various dead PCs to create an inexpensive "Junk Yard NAS."  I junked a total of 3 PCs and kept the most modern -- the Althon64 (3800+) powered HP Pavilion a1510n.  The Athlon 64 3800+ came out in 2004 with a frequency of 2.4GHz and 512KB of L2 cache.  Clearly, we aren't going to win any races here.  I also purchased two (2) 2TB drives for an all in cost of $400.

Take 1: Gentoo (Goodbye RAID, Hello Nightly Disk to Disk Backup)

First, I installed Gentoo.  Within a few hours I had a fully functional, but minimal system.  I installed Gentoo on the first drive and broke the 2 TB drive into three partitions: a boot partition, a swap partition, and a data partition. 

Next, I started to make a  clone of the system drive.  In the event of a drive failure, I could just pull the drive and use the backup as a boot drive.  This would be especially important when the second drive was in a removable drive tray I could take with me in the event of a fire or other disaster.

   1: dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

Unfortunately, I quickly figured out that doing a nightly disk to disk backup (with the dd utility) of a 2TB drive would take weeks at 20MB/second.  A nightly disk to disk backup would be impossible.

Take 2: Gentoo (Goodbye dd, Hello rsync)

Next, I used fdisk to parition the second disk.  For convenience, I copied the boot partition:

   1: dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1

Next, I formatted the data partition, mounted the second disk and then used rsync to copy the contents of the root directory to the second drive:

rsync -ax --delete --force --exclude /mnt/mirror / /mnt/mirror/

Lastly, I setup a nightly cron script to copy the system disk to the backup disk.  It worked flawlessly for several weeks until I decided to try out FreeNAS (see the next part).

Labels: Gentoo, Linux

Posted by Joe Turner at 10:39 PM | Permalink | Comments

Money Market accounts aren't as safe as they used to be.  The SEC voted today to allow Money Markets Funds to suspend redemptions from Money Market accounts:

Zero Hedge discussed a month ago the disastrous prospects of what would happen if the new proposal contemplated by the SEC, which would allow the suspension of redemptions from Money Market Funds, were to pass. Well, in a nearly unanimous vote, Money Market Funds now have the ability to suspend redemptions, courtesy of the SEC's just passed 4-1 vote. This explains the negative rate on bills: at this point, should there be another meltdown, money market investors will not, repeat not, be able to withdraw their money purely on the whim of Mary Schapiro. As the SEC noted: "We understand that suspending redemptions may impose hardships on investors who rely on their ability to redeem shares." Too bad investors' hardships considerations ended up being completely irrelevant. (Source: ZeroHedge).

In layman's terms, a simple example: you have a money market account and faithfully deposit money in it to save for a house, college, or for retirement.  When it comes to take the money out the money out, the bank can say sorry we have suspended redemptions.  We will give you the money... someday.  The question is will someday ever come?

Don't think it can happen?  There have been a rash of hedge funds that have suspended redemptions, only promising that someday they will return the money.  In some cases investors have been locked out well over a year. 

Labels: Personal Finance

Posted by Joe Turner at 3:48 PM | Permalink | Comments