One of the largest computer myths today is that by plugging you computer into a surge
suppressor ($15-45 dollars depending on the brand, etc.) you are automatically protected in case the power fluctuates. Certainly the large “Insured to $xxxxxxx” signs on the boxes would have you believe this. But, what good is, say $10,000 of insurance which might get paid 6 months down the road if you lose your computer the day before a big project (work, school, etc.) is due?

Unfortunately, a surge suppressor only protects you in 50% of power fluctuation cases;
namely an under volt situation.

Living in an electrically active area such as Reno makes you very aware of under volt situations. When lightning strikes, the power can fluctuate down considerably and then jump back up.

It’s the jump (spike) that the surge suppressor protects you against. But, the truth is, damage can also be done to electrical components which are receiving some power to activate them, but not enough to fulfill their power needs.

You’re much better off spending between $99.00 and $150.00 (or more) for a UPS (read battery back up which should give you ample enough time to save your work and shut down your computer in case of a power failure) with power conditioning.

The important part of that statement is the “with power conditioning.” Power conditioning means that the device you’ve attached your valuable electronic components to (and let’s face it, while many people think to protect their computer, do they also do the same for that 50 inch Plasma screen TV that costs more than their computer?) should, if not overloaded with attached devices (i.e plugging in your TV, surround sound receiver, DVD player, CD player, mixer, PS2, PS3, Wii, Xbox360, cable box, TiVo, media center PC and your lava lamp, all into the same UPS isn’t going to protect you or the devices) deliver a constant stream of power to the devices, even in the event of a serious under volt situation.

Now, does this mean you’re fully protected?

Of course not.
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As always, common sense should rule.

1. Always save your work, not just at the end of your session, but also at periodic
intervals while you are creating said work (most word processing/business tools have an
auto save function you can enable to help with this.)

2. If the sky is giving you a spectacular pyrotechnics show, that’s a good sign that
shutting down your computer and other electronic equipment might be a good idea. The UPS with power conditioning can only do so much and, while they may insure your computer equipment, most of those policies do not cover the data which is on them.

3. If your UPS is giving off a steady stream of warnings (that’s the high pitched noise
it makes when going onto battery backup,) it’s an indication something is wrong with the
power. Once again; better safe than sorry. Save your work and shut down the computer. Just because you don’t see an active cause for concern in the sky doesn’t mean that 3 blocks down a car didn’t just take out a neighboring power transformer and now the transformer for your grid is working twice as hard to power two grids.

4. Always save your work at periodic intervals (did I mention that most business tools
including word processors and spreadsheets have auto-save functions that you can enable?) Yes, I’m saying it again and can’t stress it enough. Always save your work
periodically.

Ah, how I love Rails. Everyday it makes me happier to be a web guy and not one of those stodgy ol’ compiled code SE’s that surround me.

Today I want to list out some the Rails blogs I’ve found that help me keep current with the Rails framework and it’s related technologies. After all, Rails in itself doesn’t make you a better web engineer, knowing how to use and leverage it effectively does.

1. http://errtheblog.com/ – a couple a CNET engineers who’ve started their Rails consultancy. They post short tutorials on various Rails techniques.
2. http://blog.hasmanythrough.com/– by Josh Susser, various Rails topics but I especially like the posts detailing new features in the Edge Rails.
3. http://nubyonrails.com/ – by Geoffrey Grosenbach, who does the PeepCode screencasts and the Rails podcast interviews. His posts don’t go into much Rails details but he does have good posts on related technologies like Capistrano.
4. http://peepcode.com/ – not actually a blog, these are screencast training videos that are for sale ($9 each, or less by subscription) and they are really good stuff. I’ve watched 3 so far, they’re usually over an hour in length so you’ll need a chunk of time and if you’re like me you’ll want/need to watch some parts a few times. The newer screencasts are indexed so jumping to parts you want to watch again & again is easy.
5. http://railscasts.com/ – again, not actually a blog, these are short (10-20 minute) screencast videos going over a variety of Rails techniques. These are free, which makes it very nice and the short length and concise topic make it nice to watch as break from heavy coding.

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6. http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins – by Benjamin Curtis, I subscribe the “plugins” feed, this is a place for people releasing new plugins to advertise them. This is much nicer than watching the high-traffic Rails newsgroup for ANN messages and lets me see how other people are using and extending the Rails framework. Of course, ideally you’ll see something that fits a need you have and you can leverage your work by using someone else’s free labor.
7. http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/ – also not actually a blog, these are podcasted interviews with a variety of people central to the Rails community. Different interviewers though Geoffrey Grosenbach seems to be doing the current releases. These are nice to listen to while coding.
8. http://ryandaigle.com/ – by Ryan (perhaps Daigle is his last name), nonetheless he has a really good theme of posts related to edge Rails topics.
9. http://www.softiesonrails.com/ – by Brian Enq and Jeff Cohen, they post some nice short on topic bits related to effective Rails usage.
10. http://www.therailsway.com/ – by Jamis Buck and Michael Koziarski, who are both Rails core members, they do serial posts related to best practices in Rails development.
11. http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/ – by Jamis Buck, core Rails member and developer of Capistrano among other ruby gems. Jamis knows his Ruby, inside out and backwards, his blog is a great place to keep up with Capistrano developments – which is one of the best Rails related technologies.

So that’s all I’ve got. Let me know of any other worthy sites, I’m always looking for more sources to keep on that leading edge.

The Autonomic Computing Initiative at IBM tries to do some really interesting things. The goal for IBM is to make server hardware run without much human intervention. IBM breaks the problem down into four different parts:

1. Automatically install and configure software
2. Automatically find and correct hardware faults
3. Automatically tweak software and hardware for optimal performance
4. Automatically defend itself from potentially unknown attacks

This is an ambitious goal, of course. They don’t intend to complete the project right away. #2 is the interesting one from the point of view of PC-Doctor. However, I’d like to try to look at it from IBM’s point of view. They (unlike PC-Doctor) have a lot of influence on hardware standards. The question they should be asking is “What sensors can be added to existing hardware technologies to enable us to predict faults before they happen?”. Fault prediction isn’t the whole story, but it’s an interesting one.

I’d better admit right away that I don’t know much about computer hardware. Uh… “That’s not my department” sounds like a good excuse. However, I hang out with some experts, so it’s possible that a bit has rubbed off. We’ll find out from the comments in a week or two! 🙂

Hard drives:

This is an easy one. The SMART (http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/smart.html) standard already allows software to look at correctable failures on the hard drives. If you look at these errors over time, you may be able to make a guess about when a hard drive will fail.

This is nice because the hardware already sends the necessary information all the way up to application software running on the computer.

Flash memory:

Flash memory can also fail slowly over time. I don’t know of any effort to standardize the reporting of this information, but, at least on the lowest level, some information is available. There are two things that could be looked at.

First, blocks of flash memory will fail periodically. This is similar to a hard drive’s sector getting marked as bad. Backup blocks will be available. Some errors during the fabrication of the device will also be marked as bad and replaced before it ends up on a computer. Device manufacturers probably don’t want to admit how many blocks were bad from the beginning, but a company like IBM might have a chance to convince them otherwise.

Second, you could count the number of times that you write to the memory. Manufacturers expect a certain number of writes to cause failures in the device, but I don’t know how good these measurements would be at predicting failure.
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Fans:

A lot of servers these days can tell you when a fan has failed. They might send some email to IT staff about it and turn on a backup fan. It’d be more impressive if you could predict failures.

Bearing failures are one common failure mode for fans. This frequently creates a noise before it fails completely. A vibration sensor mounted on a fan might be able to predict an imminent failure. You could also look at either bearing temperature or the current required to maintain fan speed. Both would provide some indication of increased friction in the bearing.

Network card:

Some Marvell network cards can test the cable that’s plugged into it. The idea is to send a pulse down the cable and time reflections that come back. The Marvell cards look at failures in the cable, but you could do a more sensitive test and measure when someone kinks the cable or even when someone rolls an office chair over it. If you constantly took measurements of this, and you kept track of changes in the reflections, you might get some interesting info on the cable between the switch and the computer.

Printed wiring boards:

You could do some similar measurements with the connections on the PWB that the motherboard is printed on. This might help you learn about some problems that develop over time on a PWB, but I have to admit that I have no idea what sorts of problems might be common.

Shock, vibration, and theft

Can you get some useful information from accelerometers scattered throughout a computer? Notebooks already do. An accelerometer placed anywhere in a notebook can detect if it’s in free fall and park the hard drive heads before the notebook lands on the floor.

A typical server doesn’t enter free fall frequently, though. One thing you could look for is large vibrations. Presumably, large vibrations could, over time, damage a server. Shock would also damage a server, but it’s not obvious when that would happen.

Security might be another interesting application of accelerometers. If you can tell that a hard drive has moved, then you could assume that it has been taken out of its server enclosure and disable it. This might be a good defense against someone stealing an unencrypted hard drive to read data off of it. This would require long term battery backup for the accelerometer system. It would also require a pretty good accelerometer.

IBM sounds as though they want to make some progress on this. It would be really nice to be able to measure the health of a server. Most of my suggestions would add some cost to a computer, so it may only be worthwhile for a critical server.

Now, after I’ve written the whole thing, I’ll have to ask around PC-Doctor and see if anyone here knows what IBM is actually doing!

You might be asking yourself, what’s this net neutrality thing I keep hearing about? Well, I asked myself the same question and decided to educate myself on the topic so that I could form my own opinions on the matter. So, what is net neutrality?

Network neutrality is a principle of internet regulation with particular relevance to the regulation of broadband. It suggests that (1) to maximize human welfare, information networks ought be as neutral as possible between various uses or applications, and (2) if necessary, government ought intervene to promote or preserve the neutrality of the network. – Wikipedia

Let’s dig deeper into net neutrality. See, we’ve come to expect that what’s delivered to us on the internet, regardless of provider, comes unaltered. This means the cable and phone companies providing us our internet access are “neutral” when it comes to the information we request using our leased internet connection through them. However, the telecom giants want to begin charging the companies that provide us information via the web, stating that it’s “just offering another tier of service”. Right! Do we buy that? If you ask me, had the forefathers known about the coming technological revolution and birth of the internet, unfettered internet access would be a God-given right scribed directly into the United States Bill of Rights, as part of the first amendment.

Currently, there are no legal restrictions placed on the telecoms when it comes to neutrality. However, our current system is that of full network neutrality, but due to some of the ramblings by some of the largest telecom companies (AT&T!), many are getting worried. AT&T Chairman Edward E. Whitacre Jr. recently complained stating “They don’t have any fiber out there. They don’t have any wires. . . . They use my lines for free — and that’s bull,…For a Google or a Yahoo or a Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes for free is nuts!”

As you can imagine, Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, and many other large internet companies don’t like the rhetoric spewing from Whitacre. Proving my point, Google has created a Google Help Center page dedicated to this topic alone. There’s even a link to an open letter from Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, Inc., on the page. Due to the importance of this issue, and the fact that congressional hearings are ongoing in this matter, I’ve decided to include Eric Schmidt’s open letter in this blog.

A Note to Google Users on Net Neutrality:

The Internet as we know it is facing a serious threat. There’s a debate heating up in Washington, DC on something called “net neutrality” âÂ?Â? and it’s a debate that’s so important Google is asking you to get involved. We’re asking you to take action to protect Internet freedom.

In the next few days, the House of Representatives is going to vote on a bill that would fundamentally alter the Internet. That bill, and one that may come up for a key vote in the Senate in the next few weeks, would give the big phone and cable companies the power to pick and choose what you will be able to see and do on the Internet.
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Today the Internet is an information highway where anybody âÂ?Â? no matter how large or small, how traditional or unconventional âÂ?Â? has equal access. But the phone and cable monopolies, who control almost all Internet access, want the power to choose who gets access to high-speed lanes and whose content gets seen first and fastest. They want to build a two-tiered system and block the on-ramps for those who can’t pay.

Creativity, innovation and a free and open marketplace are all at stake in this fight. Please call your representative (202-224-3121) and let your voice be heard.

Thanks for your time, your concern and your support.

Eric Schmidt

Do you now understand the importance of this issue? The lack of net neutrality will not only stop innovation in its tracks, but change the face of the internet as we know it. In order to get to the top, a companies’ primary goal will not be to provide a great service, but how to negotiate with the telecoms for that top spot. The internet is an integral part of not only the U.S. infrastructure and economy, but is partly responsible for the hyper world economy we’ve experienced the past 10 or more years. Changing the way we access the information on the net could have a devastating ripple effect throughout the world economy.

Further evidence that net neutrality is becoming more of a critical issue is a recent article, one that landed on the home page of Digg, from Ars Technica titled Pearl Jam censored by AT&T, calls for a neutral ‘Net. The article is in response to another open letter, from Pearl Jam to their fansâÂ?Â?a letter in which Pearl Jam railed against media and ISP consolidation and called for readers to support network neutrality. You can read the letter here.

There’s only one way to protect the internet and force net neutrality, and unfortunately that’s through effective governmental legislation. I cringe at the thought of government control, but the telecoms leave us no choice. When an issue relates to infrastructure that’s depended upon by hundreds of millions and is an integral part of the world as we know it, action must be taken. What action can you take? Contact your elected representatives and send them a message telling them that this is an issue you care about. Congress.org’s Congressional Directory is a great place to start.

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We all have or will come to a point in time where we will notice that our computer just isn’t running the same. Either the system will unexpectedly crash and reboot, or we will just notice that our computer is running much slower than before. The average person will just unplug their computer and take it to the nearest “corporate” service center. However, the more tech savvy person (the anti “corporate” techie who refuses to pay $300 for a system restore) will try to fix it himself and save money. Here are some tips to help the inquisitive take the first leap into joining the anti-corporate masses and join the “Club”.

It all begins with the question “Hard or Soft – Where?”

[Tyler steps up to the computer while looking around for spies]
I just wanted to point out to all you techies. You know who you are. [Tyler winks] You know you ask yourself this question, in your head, this exact way. Think about it. ‘Hard or Soft – Where?’ Take the time to Digg this and let me know if you do or if you don’t or if you think I’m Tyler Durden. [Tyler winks again and steps away]

Thanks T. That’s right. The first thing you should do when encountering a computer problem is to ask yourself, “Where is the problem – is it in the Hardware or Software?”

[Turns to Tyler] Isn’t that right, Tyler? [pause] Tyler says that’s right. Wait, Tyler wants to say something.

[Tyler steps up] Everything you do, you do at your own risk. We cannot and will not be held accountable for anything that you do to your computer. The thoughts expressed here are our opinions and not that of PC-Doctor or its affiliates. Try this at your own risk. [Tyler steps away]

Thanks Tyler. Now where was I? Oh ya!

To determine if it is a Hardware or Software issue, you should do the following in this order.

1. Does the computer power on? Yes, goto 2. No, goto 42.

2. Now that we know the power turns on. Can we access the BIOS? On most computers, to access the BIOS, you press delete. Some machines require F2 or F10 or F12, but if you watch carefully, the Splash screen you see while booting may tell you which button to press. Were we able to get into the BIOS? Yes, goto 3. No, goto 42.
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3. Now that we are in BIOS, check the settings. WAIT! [Turns to Tyler then back to computer] Tyler says to check the settings, but don’t touch anything. Tyler says that you should change all the settings to AUTO and if there is no AUTO as an option for that setting, then don’t touch it. Tyler says AUTO Good, AUTO is your best friend. So did you turn everything to AUTO? Yes, goto 4. No, goto 42.

4. Now go to the exit and choose “Save and Exit” The computer will reboot. Let it boot to the operating system. Let it finish loading all its auto start-ups. Is your computer still running slow or crashing? Slow, goto 5. Crashing, goto 42. Works perfect, then you’re done and you successfully fixed your computer – you’re in the Club.

5. Now we must find out why your computer is running slow. If your computer is set to automatically log on as administrator, then goto 6. If not, then login as administrator and then goto 6. If you do not know how to login as an administrator, goto 42.

6. Usually the cause of a slow running computer is that precious memory is being used by programs running in the background. Many of these unnecessary programs, namely Amerikan Off L, ugh![Tyler giggles] or even viruses or is it viri? [Tyler chuckles] They create an entry in your bootup configuration file to start the program when the computer is turned on. Let’s check if this is the case. Click on the Start button. Choose Run. Type msconfig. Hit enter. A box will appear. This is Microsoft’s System Configuration Utility where you can see what services and programs are set to run on bootup. Typically, viruses will show up under the Services Tab or the Startup Tab and will be a noticeable entry by having a very random name that makes no sense. (NOTE: Anything you do here, you do at your own risk.) Choose the Services Tab and uncheck any services that you feel are unnecessary. Do not uncheck anything that says Microsoft and do not uncheck anything that you know is a legitimate service. Now choose the Startup Tab. Uncheck any programs that you feel are unnecessary to automatically start at bootup. Did you uncheck all the Services and Startup programs you deemed were unnecessary? Did you find any viruses? Or are you too scared to continue? If you unchecked all the items you needed to and are confident, goto 7. If you found viruses, goto 42. If you are scared, goto 42.

7. Well, good for you! That’s the way to face fear! [Tyler applauds] Now click on the OK button and you will be prompted that your system needs to be restarted. Click OK and let it reboot. There is no turning back now, you must goto 8.

8. This one is obvious. Did your system die, or did it boot to the Desktop? If Desktop, goto 9. If dead, goto 42 (nice try, but we can’t all be tech savvy).

9. Okay, the system rebooted and now you should be back at your Desktop and a notice will state that the Configuration Utility is open do you want to close it, click yes, or is it OK? [Tyler shakes his head disapprovingly] Now, do whatever you need to do to check and see if there is a difference in speed. Is the computer running faster or better or poorly still? If faster or better, then you’re in the Club. If poorly, goto 42. Either way, you are now done.

42

Why 42? The answer is …

[Tyler Durden runs toward the computer and pushes the Narrator aside]

The first rule of Fix Club is don’t talk about Fix Club.
The second rule of Fix Club is DON’T TALK ABOUT FIX CLUB!