Went out to Waroona the other week with Brad, Lauren, Sera and Erika to go for a trail ride, out at Langford Hill Riding Farm. Slightly chilly at times with the breeze, but good fun nonetheless – definitely worth the hour and a bit drive to get down there and the fairly modest $55 fee. Hoping to maybe go do it again before the heat of summer kills off all the greenery.

.. if anyone even reads this. Probably not, which is probably for the best.

So, since my car is busy being serviced (again), I’ve been given a diesel Skoda to potter around in for the week, and since I lack anything better to do at this instant, I’ll write up my thoughts.

Basically, the Octavia is a Golf in drag. Cheaper, slightly tackier drag, but drag nonetheless. The interior is fairly roomy, and there’s a ton of luggage capacity (it is, after all, a wagon), but has a fairly cheap feel to it compared to the Golf family. Not really anything too bad, and featurewise it’s nearly identical to the Golf, but to put it simply, the Golf feels nicer.

The engine is a slightly aging 1.9 litre 77kW turbo diesel, hooked up to the 6-speed DSG transmission. Unfortunately, being an older engine, it does rattle a bit, and until you get into 3rd gear you’re never under any illusions about not driving a diesel. Straight off the line it’s clunky, torquey and prone to jumping a little unless you’re extremely gentle with the accelerator, and the change from 1st to 2nd is more of a lurch than anything else. 3rd gear through to 6th, however, is typically smooth and nearly instantaneous, and is a rather pleasant driving experience. The engine doesn’t change revs particularly quickly, and there’s a bit of turbo lag, so planting it to overtake requires more forethought than the excellent (and twice as powerful) 2.0TFSI in the GTI, but it’s not anything that would trouble you beyond getting used to it.

To be honest, the biggest problem is the price – the Octavia is surprisingly expensive. With the 77kW 1.9TDI DSG at $34,290 before accessories and delivery and so on, you’d have to want the extra luggage space afforded by the wagon. A 90kW petrol Golf with DSG is $28,490, 118kW with DSG is $32,990, and to be honest I’d personally rather own either of those.

Seriously.

Nearly forgot just how much fun it was.

Cheers for the reminder.

Trying out the WordPress app on my new iPhone while I wait for the unlock request to go through so I can use it as a phone. That is all.

So, my speakers are finally finished, after around a month and a half of effort. Mind you, this was a bit over a month ago – I just haven’t gotten around to posting about it until now. I’ve had to make quite a few changes to my original plans along the way.. the Fostex 208e∑ cabinet was replaced by a simpler (to construct, anyway) design, one of the G Chang variants designed by a group of diyAudio members. Instead of being a long back-loaded horn like the 208e∑ design, the G Chang is a ‘big vent reflex’, or BVR cabinet combining some aspects of both horn loaded and bass reflex cabinets.The overall aim is combine the ‘open’ sound of a horn design with the simplicity of construction of a bass reflex box.Since the G Chang was originally designed for the Fostex 207e (a magnetically shielded variant of the 206e that I purchased), a little bit of series R is required to tame the treble response of the 206e. Instead of a simple resistor, I constructed a small BSC (baffle-step correction) circuit from the guidelines found on Martin J King’s excellent Quarter Wave Loudspeaker Design site using a piece of veroboard and a handful of parts.There were also changes required in the materials themselves – I was originally intending to use Jarrah veneered MDF (unfortunately, plywood is frighteningly expensive here in Perth), but low stock levels meant that I had to look around for something different. I eventually settled on a Tasmanian Oak veneer that, while rather lighter than the Jarrah veneer, had a nice warm tone to it. I additionally chose to use veneered wood for the outward-facing sides, with a strip of veneer running along the front edge of the side panels, and black semi-gloss paint for the rest.  Where to next?Well, on a whim I bought a pair of old Altec 414-16C 12″ midbass drivers that I saw a good bargain on on eBay. They need new gasket foam, but that’s no biggie; they appear to be in rather good condition, and with the AlNiCo magnets they should sound quite spectacular. Now I just need to figure out an enclosure to put them in..

So at long last management has agreed to purchase some proper servers, finally laying the groundwork to rid us of the nasty whitebox plague.

At this stage for storage the likely candidate is the Dell PowerVault NX1950 Integrated NAS Solution which is pretty much just a big wanky name that signifies it’s a standard Dell 1RU dual Xeon running Windows Storage Server, hooked up to an MD1000 (actually, up to four of them) packed full of SAS or SATA disks. Total capacity is anywhere from a couple hundred gigabytes right through to around 44 terabytes (11.25 terabytes per MD1000, based on filling them with 750GB drives). We don’t need even remotely near that amount of storage, but the expandability is certainly nice to have.

Also on the agenda is at least one server for running VMWare – a 2RU dual quad-core Xeon with 8GB of RAM and a few hundred gigabytes of fast 10,000rpm storage seems to be the go here.

List price on both these items is quite reasonable – the VMWare server comes in at similar prices to similarly configured IBM or HP machines, and the NX1950 is actually considerably cheaper than many other options – each MD1000 is only around $3000 base price, which means scalability is quite cheap.

We’re also shopping around for package prices for new PCs; building them individually is getting tiring.

If all goes to plan, within a month or two we should have replaced about six or seven increasingly crusty old servers with a trio of nice matching rackmount boxes.. I can’t wait. Yes, I realise how nerdy that makes me seem.

Also in the semi-nerdy stakes, got my three days of annual leave approved for a couple weeks from now to build (or at least begin the building process of) my speakers. I’ve more or less settled on building a two-tone cabinet from the Fostex FE208e∑ plans (the speaker itself is only the FE206e – however, the 208e∑ cabinet is a superior design for this driver than the stock FE206e cabinet), with the side panels (and a strip around the front/top to match) in a dark stain Jarrah veneer, with the remainder being painted a matte black. Doing it all in Jarrah veneer would be extremely time-consuming due to the fiddly nature of the cabinet (to be detailed in a later post), doing it all in black would look okay but to be honest I rather like the look of the wood veneer. The two-tone finish should be a suitable mix of looking nice and being straightforward to finish, I think.

Still need to get myself some damping material for the inside of the cabinet, as well as turning a pair of Jarrah wood phase plugs and performing some surgery on the drivers. Also need to decide upon what sort of binding posts I want as speaker terminals (I’m thinking the copper finish Cardas CCGR), and what to use for interior cabling (leaning towards a single twisted pair extracted from Cat5e UTP to add a small amount of series resistance to raise Qts and thus improve bass response slightly).

And then I need to build my pair of power amps to drive them… and then a preamp to drive those.. should be fun.

Well, not directly. Finished Spook Country yesterday. Overall I like it, but not as much as the Bridge trilogy or perhaps Pattern Recognition. I’m not sure why, exactly; I guess it was, if anything, the sense of realism, as dumb as that sounds. Still a good book, mind you.

Next up in my list of things to read is Philip K Dick‘s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

Leopard comes out tonight, and being a nerd, I’m naturally looking forward to it. Shame my Powerbook’s DVD drive is still busted – I’ve still got a whopping 2.5 weeks of Applecare left though, so I’ll get around to it on the first day I don’t need it for work, whenever the hell that’s going to be.

Found out that Gran Turismo 5 (and the GT5:Prologue uber-demo-that-you-buy-or-something) will include a ‘GTTV’ system where you can buy and download episodes of motoring TV shows in-game and save them to your PS3. Naturally, this includes 70 episodes of possibly the greatest non-fiction TV show ever, Top Gear. Not only that, but the game itself will feature (either built-in or as a purchasable download) the Top Gear test track and possibly even allow you to compete against the Top Gear top lap times (from The Stig)! Is that pure awesomeness or what? (protip: the answer is ‘pure awesomeness’)

Of course, Polyphony being Polyphony and all it probably won’t come out until 2015, but I don’t care.

.. and at moderating comments – I was kinda forgetting how retarded and annoying comment spam was until I got around to looking at the moderation queue – 362 comments, every single one spam. Not that I’d expect any actual comments since pretty much nobody really knows I even have this blog set up.

Actually, that raises the question of how the spambots found it. Probably just trolling domain names and appending /blog/ on the end, in this case.

Work continues unabated – I should probably take a holiday at some point, but the way the system is hanging by threads (from my perspective, anyway) I don’t really want to leave it. Give it a few months and we’ll hopefully have expanded into another office, which means I’ll probably get my request for a few beefy VMWare boxes approved, which in turn will mean the question of hardware reliability should become moot. Once that’s done, it’s just a matter of software, and with VMWare and the ILO management on the beefier servers, I should be able to remotely manage pretty much everything, which makes me less nervous about going away. We really need more IT staff. Even just another person would be nice – that way in the not entirely unlikely event that both of us are either sick or on holiday or simply busy on site or at the Rockingham or Bunbury offices we’re not running with no IT support staff.

We’ll also be taking over the rear portion of the office at some point in December or January to create a proper IT section, which will be absolutely fantastic – building a small server room with 24/7 aircon for the server rack, and sound insulation so it’ll stop wrecking my hearing.. I can’t wait, even if it means having to shift a rather damn heavy rack around the office again.

I’m halfway through William Gibson’s new book, Spook Country, and I’m rather enjoying it. Certainly a pleasant change from more traditional SF fare as it incorporates elements from a few other genres. Don’t want to comment too much on it until I finish reading, though. Actually, this reminds me that I need to pick up Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive at some point to complete my collection of Gibson novels. It also reminds me that there’s another five or six months to wait before Greg Egan‘s new novel comes out.. I don’t want to wait, I want it now

Going go-karting on Saturday with work, should be fun.

Turns out we might not have to replace it after all; looks like it’s just a badly bung SATA cable (whether power or data, I’m not too sure) on port 1 of the IS-100. This just goes to remind me of how much I utterly detest SATA connectors – while the whole ‘tiny thin cable vs IDE’s huge parallel cable’ thing is nice, the connectors are way, way too unbalanced.

I mean, the socket on the motherboard/device is about 5mm high and 1mm thick, and is usually made of plastic with very thin metal connectors, with a typically stiff cable featuring 2-3cm long connectors at each end. That’s a lot of leverage on the socket, and nearly every ‘bad hard drive’ I’ve had in the last few years that wasn’t genuinely a dud drive was a case of a SATA drive where the cable was putting too much pressure on the connectors and making an intermittent disconnect.

I much prefer the Intel branded cases where the hotswap drive bays are cable-less and connect via hard, board connectors directly to the edge of the motherboard. Actually, those cases are entirely cable-less when assembled correctly, which is an even bigger plus.

This brings me to the next point – why do the iShared boxes lack hotswap bays? Or even just non-hotswap bays.. as it is, if you had a rackmounted iShared box and a drive failed, you’d still need to shut it down and pull it from the rack to be able to remove the top panel and the screwed-down hard drive cage inside. I mean, come on, you can get a 1RU dual-core Xeon system with hot-swap RAID-1 for less than AU$2000, and yet the iShared boxes come in fairly plain-looking 2RU boxes with no drive cages and an old Pentium 4 for upwards of AU$8000. Sure, the software retails for $6000, but that leaves you in a mighty good position to buy the software and get your own, quality server and end up with a fairly similar pricetag; the meaningful difference between the IS-100 and IS-300 is the RAM and size of the hard drives, certainly not $2000 worth. Plus, building your own means selecting your own cache size, in case 300GB isn’t enough for you.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love the iShared WAFS software, but the hardware leaves a little to be desired. At least when it is working, everyone in the remote office seems to think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, and the bandwidth figures for general use seem to hold this claim up – the vast majority of file use is MicroStation auto-saves, amounting to maybe 30-60KB of actual data changed in a 500KB-3MB file; coupling that saving with compression and delayed writeback to the head office has vastly improved performance for the remote guys. If only they could follow that up with equally polished and seamless hardware.