I’ll admit it, I’m terribly disappointed in myself. I’m sick with regret actually. Truth be told I haven’t done something this stupid since, well, let’s just say that writing about it in a public forum has been strongly discouraged by my legal team.

What I am talking about you ask? I made the boneheaded mistake of telling Yan that come November 16th it would have been ONE FULL YEAR since he had last posted to his blog. A year. 365 days. 1/3 of my kid’s entire life. I’m not sure how you say slacker in Russian but I’m sure it’s spelled Y-A-N.

Anyhow, because I told him this he goes off and does something silly, like making a post. This pretty much ruins my plans for a big celebration on the 16th. On the plus side I hadn’t made any plans yet so now I don’t have to bother. But still, a year. Sheesh.

In tech news I’ve got a story about what not to do when installing and configuring Leopard Server on a shiny new Xserve. First, here’s the list of things to do.

1. Have someone other than yourself haul the unwieldy beast from the FedEx pickup point to the network room.

1a. Hide in shame when said hauling person is literally half your size.

2. Get the network admin to install the rack rails and shove the (still) unwieldy beast into the rack.

3. Have the Xserve hooked up to the remote terminal so that you can sit in relative comfort from a workstation to configure it rather than stand in a room that sounds like the deck of an aircraft carrier.

4. Install Leopard Server using the settings that you tried out on an old G5 so that you know they will work. This allows things like Active Directory integration to actually integrate.

Now, more importantly, here is a list of things not to do.

1. Tell one of the product managers that things are sufficiently stable and that they can start using the new Leopard wiki software.

2. Forget to ask the network admin if the backup client software has been installed.

3. Let the Xserve out of your sight while the network admin changes the run mode from Workgroup to Advanced.

It’s that last one that is the real punch in the gut. You see Leopard Server runs in essentially one of three modes. There’s a Simple mode which is for standalone servers. There’s Workgroup mode which lets you integrate the server with an Active Directory for authentication. (Or an Open Directory if you’re one of the ten people in the world that runs a corporate Open Directory.) Then there’s Advanced mode which is essentially what everything was like pre-Leopard. By using Workgroup mode pulling users from Active Directory is so trivial it nearly makes you want to cry. We did this initially and life was good.

The problem came where the mode got changed to Advanced which has the most curious side effect of completely hosing the Active Directory integration. Authentication errors led to application errors which led to the discovery that really ruined the day:

THERE’S NO WAY TO GO BACK TO WORKGROUP MODE FROM ADVANCED WITHOUT RE-INSTALLING THE OPERATING SYSTEM.

So when you then add a re-install to items #1 and #2 of what not to do, mixing thoroughly with a dash of profanity, it equals a kick in the head to match the punch in the gut.

The lesson here as always, to channel my inner Sports Guy, is that I’m an idiot Yan’s a slacker.

The other day I got home from work and my wife mentioned something about our iBook running slow all day. I asked her if she had rebooted lately thinking that maybe that universal cure would speed it up.

Yeah, well, that didn’t quite work out like I had it planned.

It turns out that upon reboot the iBook wouldn’t, err, boot. We just got the gray Apple screen with the progress circle taunting us. Debugging a screwball computer isn’t my favorite thing in the world to do when I get home but I figured I would suck it up and see what was wrong.

Again, that didn’t quite work out like I had it planned.

After booting from a Tiger DVD I opened Disk Utility and was presented with this:

It was around this point that I knew I was in trouble. I wasn’t yet sure how much trouble but you can tell those situations that aren’t going to turn out that well. Kind of like that time in college when one of my roommates discovered a cache of fireworks that were probably eight years old. (Disclaimer: To you kids out there, don’t try this at home. We were largely untrained professionals. No one was hurt, unless we count that bush in the front yard that caught fire.)

Booting into target disk mode wasn’t showing the drive and upon review of my latest backup I realized I was about 5-6 weeks behind. At this point I was running out of options so I did what any self respected person desperate for the drive to work would do.

I put the iBook in the freezer for a half hour. (Disclaimer #2: This time I was a moderately more trained professional, but I wouldn’t recommend doing this unless it was under extreme circumstances.)

Thanks to some time sitting on frozen Eggos and chicken nuggets I was able to get it to boot into target disk mode. Some very quick firewire work later I had all my latest data and I could officially scrap the drive in the machine for a new one.

One more time, that didn’t quite work out like I had it planned.

Here is a small picture showing the major interior parts of my iBook:

Apparently in order to replace the hard drive nearly all of those parts need to be taken out. Somehow I don’t think out in Cupertino the same groups work on the Mac Pro as the iBook. One has hard drives that aren’t mounted with screws the other has a hard drive that is mounted with EVERY screw.

Thankfully I’m at the point in life where having a good job pays off since I can then pay someone else to bust out the tiny screwdrivers for iBook open heart surgery. The only problem now is I got to keep the dead drive and I find myself seriously tempted to run it through the industrial metal cutting laser at my Dad’s company. That desire for destruction seems familiar, like a time in college when we found some old fireworks…

I remember walking out of the theater after seeing Ghostbusters for the first time and thinking ( age 8 ):

1. OhmygodthatwasawesomewhenIcangoseeitagain?

2. I’ll trade anything, including by little brother, for just five minutes with a real proton pack.

A line that I’ve used ever since to indicate what happens when something once thought impossible actually happens comes from Peter Venkman:

Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria.

He happened to be talking about a 100 ft. tall demon masquerading as a giant marshmallow but it could have easily been a reference to this:

That’s IE7 running on Windows showing up a stand alone application on Mac OS X. Even though I had read about it I still didn’t believe it until I was able to see it for myself. It even caused a mini-gathering to break out around my desk this morning as four of us stared at it and tried to think of funky things to do it.

“Does having auto-hide set for the Start menu taskbar work?” — Yes.

“What happens if you move a Mac window over top of it?” — Just what you’d expect.

“What happens if you move a transparent Mac window over top it?” — That works too.

“Does each Windows window get its own focus on the Mac desktop?” — Nope, it treats Parallels like an app still.

“These guys must be selling a ton of these things.” — *Nodding*

“What if we bought some more licenses and then moved all our build machines to some big Mac Pro or Xserve?”

Hmmm.

That last question was fun because it made us then wonder what a fully pimped out Xserve would cost. I mean everything, leather seats, huge rims, LCD TV screens not only on the head rests but also as floor mats. No price was too high for awesomeness so great.

By default a standard Intel Xserve starts at $2,999.00. To that we had to “customize” a bit…

1. Two 2.0 GHz Dual Core Xeons would be way to slow, we need 3.0 GHz. Add $1799.
2. 1 GB of memory? Phbbt. My notebook has more than that. 32 GB is more like it. Add $23699.
3. Hard Drive Bay 1 comes 80 GB @ 7200 rpm. Whatever. 300 GB @ 15,000 rpm is either two or four times better depending on your math. Add $799.
4. There’s a Hard Drive Bay 2 — 300 GB more. Add $999.
5. And a Hard Drive Bay 3 — 300 GB more. Add $999.
6. Optical drive upgrade from a Combo to a Superdrive. Add $79. (What a deal compared to this other stuff.)
7. Expansion Slot 1, Dual channel 2Gb Fibre Channel card with PCIe riser. Add $499.
8. Expansion Slot 2, Dual channel gigabit ethernet card with PCIe riser. Add $199.
9. Gonna need two power supplies to fuel this beast. Add $199.
10. So far I only have 900 GB of hard drive space. A 7 TB(!) RAID will give us some extra breathing room. Add $12999.
11. Mac OS X Server maintenance program. Add $999.
12. Unlimited Apple Remote Desktop. Add $499.
13. AppleCare service parts kit for Xserve, sure, why not. Add $999.
14. Mac OS X Server Software Support - Alliance version. Add $49995. Sweet mother of all things good and right in the world.
15. AppleCare Premium Service and Support plan. Add $950.

Grand total (without sales tax):

I’ll tell you what, if I can get that price on a real proton pack I’ll still throw in my brother, even if he is 26 years old now.

From my last post there was a comment at the bottom from Corwin that went like this:

“You really need to upgrade to two monitors - it’s saved my keyboards’ ALT and TAB keys.”

I’d never actually considered that before, I suppose it does stand to reason though that more something gets used the sooner it will break down. I mean, just look at any of the Reds pitchers…

That got me thinking about all the times I’ve had computer hardware go bad, for any reason, not just overuse. I had a video card once that decided putting horizontal lines across the screen every inch was a good idea. There was that notebook I had for work years ago that burned out an internal battery leaving the machine unbootable. I’ve had more modems than I can count just stop working for no good reason.

(Well, unless you consider the fact that modems just suck in general as a good reason.)

My favorite of one of all time though is a 3.5″ floppy drive that got killed in college by a snack cake.

Seriously. All right, I’ll explain, but first a bit of background.

When I was in college my senior year I lived in a house with a bunch of other guys. The majors broke down something like this:

Computer science (me)
Computer science/math (Chip)
Physics/computer science (Honk)
Psychology (Cap’n)
Latin and Greek (B)

Yep, that’s right, Latin and Greek. Don’t let that fool you though, today he is some kind of computer security administrator at, well, let’s not give away the name, a giant international paper company.

Cap’n could care less about computers but he was into video games so that made him all right in our book.

Anyhow, one afternoon, for reasons that escape me, we had several different computers in various stages of pieces all laid out on the living room floor. We also had a metric ton of junk food, including the bounty of our latest Coke raid at the grocery store:

Honk was washing down his Coke with a Ding Dong when one of us insulted him about something or another. In retaliation he threw the tin foil wrapper of the Ding Dong at the insulter. Now, being in physics he should have known that something with so little weight could never actually make it across the room to hit a target. Instead it slowly floated toward the floor until it landed directly on top of a 3.5″ floppy drive that had been taken out of a computer.

And then it sparked.

*Cross heart and holds up scouts’ honor fingers* I swear it did, I saw with my very own eyes.

What followed was a chorus of:

“Did you see that?”
“No way!”
“Does it still work?”
“You &#*$(#@!”

We put the computer back together and lo and behold the drive never worked again. In fact, you could say, “Ding Dong, the drive is dead.”

Thankyouverymuch. I’ll be here all week. Make sure to tip your waitress.