• Motherboard: ASUS M4A88TD-M ($99.99)
• Processor: AMD Athlon II X3 450 ($77.99)
• RAM: G.SKILL Value Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) x2 ($99.98)
• Drives: SAMSUNG EcoGreen F4 HD204UI 2TB x4 ($319.96)
• Drive enclosure: SANS DIGITAL TR4M+BNC JBOD ($104.99)
• eSATA card: Rosewill RC-218 ($69.99)

The master plan is to put all four drives into the external enclosure and hook it up the the new hardware via the eSATA controller card. That card (the RC-218) has port-multiplier support, meaning multiple drives are supported over a single eSATA connection. Without that support, only the first drive in the enclosure is available to the computer. After I started looking at this enclosure for my personal use, we bought one for the office to house a couple of new drives intended for backups. It looks pretty solid so far and any concerns I had when trying to settle on a model have been soothed. I decided to go with an external drive enclosure for a few reasons. First, it allows some portability in that I can move it to a new computer should I have a hardware failure. Second, it will eventually allow me to downsize the computer it is attached to. My ultimate goal is to find something much smaller than my current case and that’s hard to do if I need to be able to house four or five 3.5″ drives. And finally, because I can.

The four drives are only 2TB each. Not quite the bleeding edge of storage density, but plenty adequate for the moment. They also are only 5200 RPM, but I’m not building a storage cluster for pure performance. I’m planning to set up a RAID10 set that will leave me roughly 4TB after the mirroring. After some previous experience with losing disks in a RAID5 set, I don’t think I’ll be skipping the mirror in the future. I intend to run FreeNAS and use ZFS for the filesystem assuming that all the hardware is properly detected and supported in FreeBSD. I believe that I’ll be okay on that front, but I can always fall back to my current method of Fedora with mdadm for software raid and ext3/4 or even ZFS (which I haven’t tried to use with Fedora yet). It sounds like ZFS has many advantages on large filesystems and I’d really like to take advantage of them if possible.

My understanding is that ZFS likes to have a lot of RAM available. The linked article says it typically requires a minimum of 6GB of RAM all to itself. Since the OS and such will want some for its own use, more than 6GB is recommended. It turns out that memory is pretty cheap right now. Actually, very cheap. So I decided to go full out and use the full 16GB this motherboard supports. Even that much will only set me back $100 total. I went with the slightly slower RAM (DDR3 1333 / PC3 10600) to match up with the motherboard, not because of price, and stuck with a reputable name and model that had solid reviews on Newegg.

Speaking of the motherboard, I decided to go with one that Ars Technica recommended in the March 2011 System Guide. It has excellent reviews, supports USB3 and the amount of RAM I wanted, as well as having the proper expansion slots, onboard VGA, DVI, HDMI, and audio. If the onboard NIC is problematic, I have a gigabit card in the current machine that will easily move into this one. Also, this is a MicroATX board and, while not the smallest form factor available, there are a significant number of smaller cases that will handle it if I ever find the right one. Since the server will be headless for the most part, the video outputs don’t matter too much, but if I ever want to hook it up directly to a TV, the HDMI capability will come in handy. I think, though, I’d rather have a small dedicated device that can be hooked up to the TV if needed and pull content from the storage machine.

The processor selection was mostly an afterthought. I don’t need anything screaming fast for this machine, but it’s hard to find anything in the x86 line that mixes low power consumption and moderate performance well. You can get reasonable power consumption (this one’s 95W, and there are others in the 65W range), but you don’t really save anything on the cost of the processor. So I went for the middle ground and selected the Athlon II X3 450. More cores and performance than I need, but it’ll do.

So, that’s the plan for the new stuff. It’ll be replacing a machine that I built in February of 2005 that’s currently running Fedora 13 (yes, it’s quite out of date). The drives have been upgraded a couple of times since I originally built it, but that’s the same case and other guts that I’m running right now. The current drives are two 1TB drives mirrored and two 500GB drives mirrored leaving me with somewhere around 1.5TB of space. The trick is going to be migrating the data off the current disks and onto the new array. FreeBSD, and therefore FreeNAS, does not support the current software raid and filesystem that the arrays are using, so I cannot fire up FreeNAS and just copy everything over. I may have to set the new enclosure up on a different machine, copy everything over the network (at least it’s a gigabit switch), and then move the enclosure to the new machine. There’s still the option of buying a new case and just building a whole new machine in parallel, but I wanted to hold off buying one until I could find something smaller that I really wanted to hang onto long term. If everything goes well, I may pick up a second enclosure and move my existing drives over to it and eventually add them into the ZFS pool as well.

Anyone have any thoughts on the hardware, software, or overall plan? I’ve gotten a little more cautious about hardware lately and it’s hard to make the decision, click the pay button, and wait for the stuff in the mail. RMAs and returns are just so much of a pain that if someone local had what I wanted (I’m looking at you, Fry’s) and could match the price or come close, I’d be happy to do business with them. It’s nice to be able to drive to the store to deal with bad hardware instead of dealing with shipping and delays.

STEP ONE: Someone claims to be deeply offended that members of some minority are being treated just like members of the majority are. Equality under the law is portrayed as an attack on the majority, an insult and an affront to their way of life.

Left-handed children need to assimilate. Our schools are bending over backwards to accommodate these children and America can’t afford to do that. My family, like most real Americans, is right-handed. I don’t see why our taxes should be increased every year to pay for special desks and scissors for these deviants.

[…]

In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American … There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag … We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language … and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people. […]

Well said Mr. President; well said.

A little over a year ago, we released an early preview of Google Voice, our web-based platform for managing your communications. We introduced one number to ring all your phones, voicemail that works like email, free calls and text messages to the U.S. and Canada, low-priced international calls and more—the only catch was you had to request and receive an invite to try it out. Today, after lots of testing and tweaking, we’re excited to open up Google Voice to the public, no invitation required. […]

I personally love the service. I have the voicemail from my iPhone forwarded to Google Voice so that all my voicemail is in one place (and I can get them as text messages). The Google Voice number is the only one I give out any more since it is trivial to screen calls, block numbers from ever calling you again, and generally masking where you are (one number can connect to many phones) at any given point.

We need more silly stuff like this slide Volkswagen built in a subway.

Both AT&T and Apple have sent out statements Wednesday acknowledging yesterday’s iPhone 4 preorder meltdown. According to AT&T spokesperson Seth Bloom, preorder sales for the iPhone 4 were 10 times higher than the first day of preorders for the iPhone 3GS last summer. Apple has also publicly acknowledged that things did not go smoothly, apologizing to would-be customers who weren’t able to get an order in before the iPhone 4 sold out.

Apple said that it and its cell carriers worldwide took more than 600,000 preorders for the iPhone 4 yesterday. This was the “largest number of preorders Apple has ever taken in a single day and was far higher than we anticipated, resulting in many order and approval system malfunctions,” forcing many customers to abandon their attempts to complete an order. […]

600,000 preorders in a single day! I can’t say I would blame AT&T or Apple for system failures under that scenario. They planned for the loads they saw with the last model (and then some I’m sure), but were swept under by unexpectedly large demand to the point where Apple called it quits due to production availability concerns. You can only prepare for so much demand.

SCO was dealt yet another blow in court today when District Judge Ted Stewart rejected the company’s motion requesting a new trial or judgement of law. In a ruling issued today, Judge Stewart sided with a jury that issued a verdict against SCO in April, finding that Novell was the rightful owner of the UNIX SVRX copyrights. According to Judge Stewart, SCO failed to demonstrate that the jury’s verdict contradicted the evidence presented in the case. […]

One more step towards stopping the madness. It’s about time.

But the landscape is shifting, perhaps more quickly than we might like. Mobile browsing is expected to outpace desktop-based access within three to five years. Two of the three dominant video game consoles have web browsers (and one of them is quite excellent). We’re designing for mice and keyboards, for T9 keypads, for handheld game controllers, for touch interfaces. In short, we’re faced with a greater number of devices, input modes, and browsers than ever before. […]

This article couldn’t have been timed much better. I was just looking into what it would take to create a basic site theme that could handle the mobile browsers without browser sniffing and server-side nonsense. I strongly believe in progressive enhancement on the Web and approaches like this where the system can adapt on the fly to your device’s capabilities.

I was a little concerned about Mocha’s behavior at the vet. He has been so much trouble in the past that they have occasionally been forced to partially sedate him. That was not the story today. Other than not wanting to come out of the carrier once we were there, he sat quietly and rather passively while the vet did what needed to be done. Mocha got away without having any shots. Spot was not so lucky.

Spot has some sort of skin irritation that makes him scratch all the time. A lot. No, really, a lot. He’s been treated for it in the past, but it is a temporary solution each time. He’s been scratching enough lately to actually pull some fur off his stomach, and that had me a little worried. So, today he got two shots: one in the back leg and another up near his front shoulders. No whine, no whimper, no growl, hiss, or spat. He was great about it. Getting him back into the cage was much easier this time. All I had to do was open it and he made a hasty retreat into the back corner.

Neither cat wasted much time climbing out once we got home. I figure they’ll forgive me some day. Maybe.

Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking sites have reportedly been passing very granular user data to advertisers without informing users about it, in violation of their own privacy policies.[…]

Color me surprised. Just glad I made the decision to leave. This could still have affected me to some degree, but it cannot any more.

(Typekit is on board with it and sounds somewhat excited to see Google join in.)

Google’s long-awaited open-sourcing of the VP8 video codec has finally happened and both Mozilla and Opera are on board with it. The new codec and container combine decent quality with open source licensing and royalty freedom. Might this be enough to topple H.264 as the Web video codec of choice? […]

Glad to see Google, et. al., making strong moves to ensure that the preferred video format for the Web is open and free. It was refreshing to see Adobe even signed on and will support the codec inside Flash.

(We’re on the right track for it to take the next 100 years to migrate over to IPv6)

Students who were photographed at home by the Lower Merion School District IT department will have the opportunity to see the photos thanks to a court order issued Friday. The students will be able to view the images with or without their parents, and request that the court block their parents from seeing “sensitive” photos if they so choose. […]

Facebook’s decision to open up more of my content and information to the general public, by default and in some cases inexorably, was perhaps the final nail. I’ve done my best in the past to fix the settings in their most restrictive positions, but when Facebook decides to move those settings around without my permission, my only recourse is complete withdrawal. I won’t go into any detail about those changes as I expect you are already aware of them if you really care, but if not there’s a Wired article that does a pretty good job of summing it up.

I still plan to post stuff here, on my blog, but it will be up to you to seek it out if you care (there is a RSS feed). I’ll miss the interesting updates, photos, and links you all post on Facebook, but hopefully email, IMs, and even blog comments can pick up the slack.

Oh, do me a favor and stop tagging me in photos.

I had to report to the assembly area by 8:00 AM on Tuesday. I ended up arriving early which gave me time to pre-pay my parking and get settled by about 7:45. Nothing much happened until 8:30 when they closed the outer doors, took up our summons, and played a video for us talking about jury duty. Once that wrapped up, they began calling number ranges (we each had a number assigned on our summons). I got called as part of a group of sixty-five folks for criminal court. Let me just establish right here that I was actually a bit hopeful that I would get selected for a jury, and if I was going to do it, I’d rather see a criminal case. So that perked my interest, as did the size of our group.

After heading downstairs, meeting our bailiff, and getting a new number assigned we headed over to the correct building. I pity the bailiff. It’s like dealing with an kindergarten class sometimes. The court we were assigned to was District Court #338 on the 15th floor of the criminal building. Let me just say, metal detectors are stupid. Their operators even more so sometimes. As it turned out we had plenty of time to navigate security. We were asked to wait in the hallway outside the courtroom until we were called in. So we waited. And waited some more. And … waited more. Finally, after about two hours we were lined back up and marched in to sit on perhaps the most uncomfortable benches known to man.

Judge Jones, who is even now presiding over the case, introduced herself and launched into a rather haphazard-feeling government and law procedure crash course. She outlined the various stages of the trial, defined a few terms, and read the indictment. I’ll save you the trouble of searching her docket to find the relevant case. She had a number of questions for us as a group as well. Mostly dealing with the punishment phase of the trials, and whether we would be able to “abide by the law” and consider the full punishment range. In the case of this felony (Aggravated Assault with a deadly weapon [firearm]) the punishment range, if found guilty, is two to twenty years in the state penitentiary and up to $10,000. She had each of us affirm, or deny, that we could deal with that range. Then she went through the entire group again specifically asking about the lower range, then again for the higher range. I guess it was an attempt to ferret out what the problem was if we had objected to the overall range. This punishment range question took at least twenty minutes to get through, but that’s not all!

If the defendant has a prior felony conviction, the punishment range changes according to Texas law. With a single prior the range shifts to five to ninety-nine years to life and the same $10,000 fine. The judge went around the room again asking if we were okay with the range, with the lower bound, and with the upper bound. This part took even longer since a potential life term was involved and folks were beginning to smell a possible exclusion from service. But that’s not all!

If the defendant has two prior felony convictions, the punishment range shifts to a minimum of twenty-five years and a maximum of life, with the same $10,000 fine. Of course we repeat the questioning phase, and of course it takes even longer. I don’t know if some of these people were being honest, or just trying to get out of jury duty, but it got ridiculous really quickly. One of my fellow citizens said “life isn’t enough.” Many folks simply failed to grasp that the range is established and we would have to choose within those bounds if the defendant was found guilty. They wanted to set their own boundaries, including I suppose, a death penalty. *sigh*

EDIT: I forgot to point out that, if I read the Criminal History correctly, it appears the defendant in this case has at least two prior felony convictions on his record. That certainly shines a different light on the whole questioning process. During our lunch break, that line of questioning and the extent to which it was detailed made most of us believe that he had priors, although we did not yet have access to that information.

By about 12:45 we finished up that part and we were released for a lunch break. One cafeteria stop later and I was back to waiting in the hallway outside the courtroom. A little after 2:00 we were ushered back in and seated. Now the attorneys had their chance to address and question all of us (we were not separated and questioned individually or in smaller groups).

The prosecution went first and seemed to focus on witness credibility. He asked us to explain what tools we would use to assess the credibility of a witness. I think he was more than a little flustered by some of the responses, but he did his best to remain looking upbeat and positive. The first real warning bell that went off for me was when he asked if we would automatically assign higher credibility to a police officer. After harping on that for a while he asked if we could simply start every witness off on an even level and go from there after hearing the full story. There were a few mixed responses that led to a rephrasing of the question. Really it was a completely new question, but I could see the link he was trying to make. We were asked what we would do if the prosecution had just barely failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt their case, a police officer was a witness, and if after lending the officer’s testimony just a little extra credibility due to their position would we find the defendant guilty. (Hope that made sense.) About half of the group ended up raising their little juror numbers indicating they would (which is not what the prosecutor wanted to see). There was a little frantic scribbling of numbers on the notepad and his time was up.

The defense reiterated a few of the same points, but largely left witness credibility alone. She, instead, focused on the indictment itself. What if, she posited, it was proven that a firearm was not involved at all? What if it was shown to have been a knife? Would we convict? You might call it a technicality, I sure would, but according to the letter of the law, we as a jury would have to find the defendant not guilty of the charges. The ensuing argument, clarification, argument, pointed questioning, “three strikes and you’re out”, and so on took most of the remaining time. She was left with enough to kick up another firestorm when we were asked about personal involvement in an aggravated assault. Some rather amusing stories were told about bar fights and one rather gruff Vietnam reference: “Yes I had a gun pointed to my head and I had one to his. How did that turn out? Well, I’m sitting here right now and he’s not.”

Thankfully the end was in sight. The attorneys gathered with the judge at her bench and began their whispered striking of names from the list. I’m not sure how many were eliminated in that round, but I’d have to estimate twenty to twenty-five based on what we could overhear and how the rest played out. A couple of people were called up to the bench for “clarification” on something they had said earlier, but the questioning never took long. Overall it took about 15 minutes for them to sit back down. The judge then explained that the prosecution and defense each would now be able to strike ten more names from the list without reason (although the standard non-discrimination laws limited them a little). We we told that when they had finished, the first twelve people remaining (by juror number) would become the jury. Remember, there were sixty-five of us in there and I was number thirty-eight. I didn’t figure they would get down the list far enough to be in striking distance of me. Oh how I was wrong.

The list was compiled, names struck, and a final list drawn up. The first person selected was number … thirteen. Holy cow! Suddenly the possibility that I might actually get selected was increasing dramatically. Remember that I didn’t consider that a bad thing either. A few more numbers were called out in the twenties and then they skipped to thirty-five. Maybe five people had been picked at this point. It was all but guaranteed that I’d be on the list now. The next number to be called was something like forty-seven. They’d skipped most of my entire row, including me. To show just how many people had been cut in one or the other rounds, the final juror selected was sixty-three or sixty-four out of the total sixty-five available. They had dug deep.

We were dismissed pretty quickly after that. Most everyone was pretty pumped up over not being picked. For me it was a mixture of relief and disappointment. Relief that I wouldn’t have to deal with downtown traffic and parking for the next few days, but a little disappointment over not getting to see and participate in the next stages from inside. I suppose I’ll have my chance eventually. All said and done, I’d been away from the house for about ten hours. A roughly normal length business day for me, but I was certainly more drained than normal.