Digital Diatribe

So, for the last few days I’ve been hearing a cart alarm go off at random intervals. I thought it was just a car down on the street, as we are several floors up and it sounded faint.
So like any other time anyone hears a car alarm go off, I ignored it.
But then it happened again at about 7:30pm, when there are never any cars parked out the front of the building.
The only other guy here had music on, so I thought it might be part of the Techno Soundtrack to Working Life album he was listening to and asked him to turn it off.

After a minute of walking around and stopping to listen and looking like a goose I realised it was coming from inside the server room.
After another minute of trying to locate this alarm (the high frequency chirping makes it very hard to pinpoint) I had worked out it was coming from one of the UPS units we had.

I went away and read the manual, as by this stage the chirping had stopped again.
The manual said that this specific birdsong indicated that the battery was pretty much dead. It recommended hitting the test button to see if there actually was any charge. It assured me that if the test failed the mains power would still be up, so no machines would go down.
This was true in a way.

The next day when I heard the chirping again, I went in and hit the test button. None of the machines went down, but the Dell suddenly went into read only mode, and half the disk array started flashing bright orange. Having seen this before with the tape drive incident I thought that there must have been a voltage spike or something when the UPS switched over to mains power, and the PERC just shat itself.

I had to reboot and go into the PERC bios and force all the drives back online again. Luckily this was during lunch, so no one noticed.

But what shits me is that you go to the expense of setting up a RAID controller with mirrored drives, dual power supplies and a UPS and as soon as you get the tiniest fluctuation in voltage all the drives report as dead and you have to power it down to force them online. What’s the bloody point of all that redundancy if it all hinges around one shitty card?
A friend who is also in the IT industry suggested that Dell deliberately makes the PERC crap in order to get you to buy their more expensive SAN gear.
I’m starting to think that’s probably the case.

I just got a Sony Ericsson W810i and it’s a pretty awesome phone.
One of the main things that suprised me was just how good the included headphones are. They are canalphones, so they are like earplugs and sit right in your ear, which if you are sensitive to pressure on your eardrum, like I am, can be a little uncomfortable at times. Like when in a train, or in the lift.
But the good thingabout them is just how much bass you can get out of something jammed into your ear canal. It really is quite amazing, especially when compared to ipod headphones.

The main gripe I have with them is that they are made only to be used with the headphone attachment that plugs into the bottom of your phone, they are too short to use for anything else without an extension cord.
Why Sony didn’t just put a 3.5mm audio jack on the phone I don’t quite understand, maybe there just wasn’t enough room for it, but it means you can’t charge the phone and listen to music at the same time. At least not without buying a desk charger.
Also, you can’t use the radio without the headphones, so if you want to wake up to the radio (which is entirely possible thanks to an alarm function Apple would do well to copy [OMFG you can choose WHATEVER SONG YOU WANT TO WAKE UP TO!!!!1]) you can’t leave it charging overnight. Unless you have a desk charger.

I think Sony wants me to buy a desk charger.

The audio quality out of the device is pretty bloody good. I haven’t tested battery life, some people claim it’s shocking, but then I only ever use it for short commutes or at the gym. If I need 14 hours of battery I’ll use my iPod.
But, much like the ipod, playback is not gapless, which I find annoying. The gaps seem to be pretty massive too, a good 3 seconds between tracks, but that could be the tracks I was playing (I’ll have to check)

The bluetooth just works when you use it with OSX. It’s an under pain under windows with FMA on the macbook pro.
I have it set up in OSX as a proximity sensor, so my screen locks when I walk away and unlocks when I come back. It takes about 20 seconds, but it works really well.
Synchronisation with isync works flawlessly as well.
Downloading images and videos is amazingly simple too.

Did I mention the camera? OMFG, it’s awesome. The photos are better than any camera phone I’ve ever seen, and with a 2MP autofocus camera, you’ll bloody well hope they would be. In poor lighting conditions, the shots look grainy, even with the included light, but for outdoor shots or well lit ones, the quality is great.
Samples will appear below when I can be bothered to upload them.

The quality of the speaker is pretty good too, although I still can’t hear it at full volume if I’m outside an it’s in my pocket, but then that’s probably my overly bassy ringtone. The vibrate function makes up for that.

The keypad is the best of any Sony Ericsson phone I’ve used in a long time.

Reception is good which is uncommon in Sony Ericsson phones in my past experiences. Voice quality is also good, especially when using the supplied headset.

All up, if your after a phone that does it all, but you still don’t want 3G then this is the phone I’d go for. It’s got the best camera out of any of them.

Franz Ferdinand’s – “Take Me Out” almost directly steals the main guitar riff in Led Zepplin’s – Trampled Underfoot
I only just noticed it.
I also noticed that Pearl Jam’s – Given to Fly is almost a complete rip off of Zepplin’s – Going to California.
I wonder how many other bands get their “inpsiration” from Zepplin?