Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

With all the Apple-related content popping up on this blog, I decided to add an Apple-only feed to the mix.  Now, if you’d like to follow my adventures with the Mac, iPhone, and other Apple junk, and don’t care about all the enterprise storage and general home computing stuff, you can subscribe to just the Apple feed.  Most folks are subscribed to my Everything feed, which includes all posts, and won’t need to change a thing.

So here’s a summary of my feeds:

•  All Posts - Everything I post in any category
•  Apple - Posts related to Apple, the Macintosh, the iPhone, iTunes, and the like
•  Computer History - Posts about the old computer junk I love so much
•  Enterprise Storage - Posts related to my profession
•  Personal - Posts of interest to family and friends
•  Terabyte Home - Posts relating to the proliferation of storage and computer technology in the home

Bonus points to anyone who can identify the item pictured!

Just a quick tip tonight about something that’s been nagging me.  I love my IOGear MiniView Micro GCS632U KVM, but I’ve had a weird problem since hooking it up to my new MacBook Pro.  See, the IOGear uses a double press on the Scroll Lock key to switch views.  But every time I type this while connected to the Mac, the screen dims two notches.  Pretty quick, it’s completely black!

I just solved the problem.  The old Apple Extended Keyboard, as revered by Apple fans as my IBM Model M, continued the function key mapping past F12, adding F13, F14, and F15 where Print Screen, Scroll Lock, and Pause/Break is on an IBM 101-key layout.  Then they mapped F14 and F15 to dim and brighten the screen, respectively.  See the problem?  Yeah, the IOGear hotkey is “dim dim”!

It turns out that this is easy to fix.  Leopard’s Keyboard & Mouse Preferences panel includes a tab to remap Keyboard Shortcuts.  Down at the bottom of the list is “Display”.  Expand it and you’ll see the two mappings in question - just un-check them and you’re good to go!

While you’re there, marvel at how none of the other function key shortcuts match up to their functions on the pre-2008 MacBook uses!  It’s a really bizarre oversight on the part of Apple to map bright/dim to F14/F15 and to F1/F2 on the same computer at the same time, depending if you’re using the built-in keyboard or not!  Apparently, the company shifted all the mappings around for the late 2007 desktop and early 2008 portables, too.

By the way, about that KVM - it’s pretty good, especially for the money.  I previously used a GCS62, which is a PS/2 in and out model with no audio, but the GCS632U is more suited to weirdos like me that like to use a PS/2 keyboard and mouse with a modern computer.  It takes PS/2 in but sends USB out to the connected computers, and includes audio, too.  It’s rock-solid, unlike the Belkin Flip I tried before, but I do wish the audio cable wasn’t captive to the video like it is - it’s just not long enough for the Mac.

The lowly computer keyboard is so ubiquitous that it can seem unchanging, but nothing could be further from the truth.  It is one of the most important components of any system, and has survived all assaults by new technologies from the mouse to the pen to the microphone, yet its evolution is marked by legacy functions and terminology that can leave computer users scratching their heads.  Today we deal with an issue that has faced many over the past decades:  How to use a PC keyboard with a Macintosh and vice versa. Continue Reading »

Network Appliance is no more. The company that made the second enterprise storage device I ever used, added the terms “filer” and “appliance” to the enterprise IT lexicon, and long suffered from a confusing array of names, is now officially called NetApp.

This is probably a good idea. A company needs a single name, and NetApp is what lots of people (even me) have long called the company. Plus, it’s never good to have your company name be the same as one of your products, at least when you make more than one. And NetApp has lots of different products, many of which are not network appliances…

They’ve added a new logo, too, which ironically looks like a thick blue dolmen to me, but was probably supposed to evoke a door and the letter, N. I always liked the old round peg in a round hole idea, myself… But then again, I always kinda liked yellow and purple and silver storage devices, too!

Remember the old days, when it was Apple Computer, HP still stood for Hewlett-Packard, Sun for Stanford University Network, and EMC for Evil Machine Company? (Just kidding, guys, I know it was Egan, Marino and Einstein’s equation…) But the world will end if IBM ever changes its logo!

Update: More coverage:

• Marc Farley liked the old logo better
• Robin Harris is wined and dined by NetApp in New York - where’s my invite, guys?
• Rajeev Karamchedu thinks it looks like an IBM lego house…
• Zerowait calls it a staple and compares it to New Coke - Ouch!
• The Register is even less complimentary…

Image by Andrew Dunn courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, cc-by-sa-2.0

Techdirt’s I Learned It From Watching YOU, Big Content, pointed me to a Washington Post story, Hey, Isn’t That… about how the big old media companies have been repeatedly caught with their pants down, stealing content from us little guys.  This got me thinking again about my own similar experiences.

See, I’ve had my work ripped off by big content providers repeatedly over the years, but never could put into words why it bothered me so much.  I mean, it’s not like I was profiting from that snapshot or HOWTO document, so why should I care if someone else does?

But once you juxtapose the attitude of those same companies about my fair use rights of legally-purchased content, the grain that’s been chafing me becomes clear.  Media companies seem to think it’s ok for them to steal from the little guys (either by choice or through a lack of rigor, but they’ll come after me if I try to do anything at all with their content.  The article’s anecdote of a stolen dog photo used in a sports broadcast surrounded by ominous copyright warnings really sums up the whole situation!

The first time I experienced this was back in 1997 or so, when I received an email from a fellow Linux hippie alerting me that a recent Linux book contained a number of online texts, mine included.  The book, Linux File Systems, was “written” by Moshe Bar, better known for his work on OpenMosix and Xen, but also known as a writer for a number of other books and a columnist for latter-days Byte.  I confronted him about his wholesale copying of my LVM walkthrough in his book, and he apologized, claimed he’d run out of time (which is easy to believe, looking at the book), and blamed his editor.  The publisher, McGraw Hill, claimed the book wasn’t selling well anyway so they couldn’t offer me any compensation.  Being young(er) and foolish(er) at the time, I let it drop.

Over my later years of writing columns and articles for Storage Magazine, InfoStor, and others, I became aware of wholesale unauthorized translation and reprinting of English magazines in other languages.  A number of my articles were published in Russian magazines, for example.  Again, I did nothing but chuckle about seeing my name in Cyrilic.

So why the picture of the Saab 900 above?  Because just last month, I was notified that that exact photo was used by the German paper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, (Nov 23th 2007, page 11) without permission and in violation of the license.  This has happened to a number of my other Wikimedia Commons photos, with appearances in a number of papers and magazines that I know of, and probably more besides…

What’s to do?  I suppose I should have pushed harder when these uses were brought to my attention.  I suppose I could have banded together with others to protest.  But I did nothing.  What would you do?

Have you heard of the Optimus Maximus yet? It’s the ultimate computer keyboard (no kidding!), it costs $1500 (no, really, I’m serious!), and I’m not interested (even though I’m a keyboard nut).

First, an introduction to the Maximus: It’s a 113-key PC keyboard. But each key is actually a mini OLED display, so the user can apply custom labels on the fly based on what application is in use. This is fairly cool - the (Photoshopped) demo pictures show a specialized Quake layout and talk about Hiragana and even Quenya (for all you Elves in the house!).

So imagine a massive keyboard (most common ‘boards have 101 to 105 keys) with glowing, possibly animated, keys. One that has to be plugged into its own power supply because no USB port could handle the load. One where the layout might just change on you when you alt-tab (or command-tab - Mac OS X works, too) over to another application. One that cost you more than many desktop PCs.

Having a hard time imagining it? Well, you’ll have to because even though it’s been the geeky fanboy’s dream since 2005, it’s still not shipping. Wait ’till February, they say! In the mean time, you can get a fairly cool 3-key version (is something with just three keys really a keyboard?!?) called the Mini Three for just $150! And as if one vaporware keyboard wasn’t enough, the Optimus people just announced variants with 47, 10, and one (One?!? The space bar?!?) programmable key for the cost of a sweet hi-def digicam, a full-price TiVo Series 3, or an iPhone (plus tax)! And they’re all shipping in February! Really! Here, look at the box!

This is madness. I love keyboards, but this thing is not a keyboard. It’s a multi-display peripheral that also has keys - which is why the Mini Three is fairly cool.

Me? I’ll stick to my beloved 1987 IBM Model M - a keyboard that has served me for nearly two decades, attached to a dozen different PCs. A keyboard that people can truly wax enthusiastic for, since it’s a keyboard not some multi-display monstrosity. A keyboard that you can type 90 words per minute on. A keyboard that can handle a coffee spill. A keyboard that makes people on the other end of conference calls say “what is that noise?” A keyboard you can still buy (new old stock) for under $100!

Though I do miss the programmability of the Gateway AnyKey sometimes…

The stock market was alive with rumors that Seagate might be bought by an unnamed Chinese company, as reported in the New York Times, among others. This comes after a week of insider whispers about a possible tieup between Seagate and memory-makers, Micron or SanDisk, itself a Seagate spin-off. It seems that the hot disk drive and flash memory markets are shaking as sales heat up and margins thin out. Note that this is far from a done-deal. Rather, Seagate CEO, William Watkins, was merely noting in an interview that there was such an inquiry.

To my eyes, a Seagate buy-out would be little different from the sale of IBM’s disk drive operations to Hitachi back in 2002 or their sale of the PC group to Lenovo two years later. Seagate is a component maker, and although it is a critical piece of the storage industry it is not really a strategic entity. Certainly, the company’s contributions to standards like SATA, SAS, and (yes) hybrid drives are worthwhile, but apart from evault, the company contributes little to the value-added services landscape.

Still, if a buy-out softened scrappy Seagate I would miss the healthy contribution between them, Western Digital, Hitachi, and the other disk vendors. And it would be an end of an era, with Alan Shugart’s old company going the way of MG Rover and the rest.

Beth Pariseau over at SearchStorage.com has another great interview, this time with “Mr. SCSI”, Larry Boucher of Alacritech. Despite being early to market with TCP offload engine (TOE) Ethernet NICs, and iSCSI HBAs in particular, the company has been less successful than many would have expected. This is probably because most folks just didn’t use ‘em - iSCSI works fine with a plain-Jane gigabit NIC on today’s modern computers.

Boucher suspects (as do I) that 10 Gb speed will make TOEs much more critical, and he expects Alacritech to be well positioned to take advantage of this shift.  He sees TOE becoming integrated with future PC chipsets, and not just for storage.  Asked when he expects “the year of 10 gigabit” to come, Boucher estimated 2009.  Sounds reasonable to me!

I’ve decided to add additional sub-feeds to my blog for those who don’t care about one topic or another. If you’re currently subscribed, this means nothing to you since the current feed is a super-set containing all posts. But if you want just a subset, read on!

There are now five Foskett feeds!

1. All Posts (the superset of the following)
2. Computer History - mapped to the Computer History category and containing posts about this history of computers and other oldy moldy topics
3. Enterprise Storage - mapped to the Enterprise Storage category and containing lots of industry news and opinions
4. Personal - mapped to the Personal category and containing posts of interest to friends and family
5. Terabyte Home - mapped to the Terabyte Home category and containing posts about TiVo, iPhone, SoundBridge, home NAS, Windows, and the like

There will be much overlap between categories (see the posts in the current list) but I thought this might help folks not have to listen to so much that they don’t care about. Just call me Fox News!

Garth Gibson, author of the seminal paper which presented the redundant array of inexpensive independent disks (RAID) to the world, has a nice quick interview over at eWeek. It’s worth a read, since Gibson’s long been on the forefront of storage tech.

He talks about how parallel NFS (pNFS) is set to trickle down to the enterprise from the high-performance compute labs. It’s always amusing to me to think of things trickling down to the enterprise storage market, but in this case he’s right - massive clusters (and Panasas for that matter) have yet to make much of a mark on the enterprise computing world.

He goes on to talk about how escalating disk capacity has lead to unacceptable rebuild times in RAID sets. You tell ‘em, Garth! Apparently, he’s been beating the multiple-parity drum since 1989 (!?!) - I hadn’t realized that RAID 6 was that old, since it’s not in the paper, but he claims they invented it, too, way back when. Who am I to contradict the Bob Metcalfe of storage?