Jimmy's Blog

The monsoon in Mumbai. I’m in Bombay (Mumbai) for a few days on a business trip. As expected this time of year, the monsoon rains come every day and the whole city is lush and green. It’s a nice change from the heat of Dubai, though it’s pretty humid here as well. Getting broadband Internet access is still non-trivial and I’m using a 128k ISDN line now.

I am in Dubai now, enjoying the heat and humidity. It’s taken a while to get over my jet lag (11hrs), but I’m pretty much adjusted now.

In between the craziness of trying to get into the swing of things here, I’ve managed to find time to pick up the beginnings of my home theater. I bought a Sony VPL-HS10 projector which will be the primary display device. I am also getting MartinLogan speakers, but those will take a while to be delivered. I still need to decide which screen, amplifier, pre-processor, furniture I’m going to use.

The city is a giant construction zone. Emaar is busy completing the initial stages of Dubai Marina, Emirates Hills, and their many other projects. They will also soon break ground on the world’s tallest building. Other projects like the two Palm Islands are also in full swing. These will be the two largest man-made islands in the world each boasting over sixty kilometers (38 miles) of beach front in the shape of a palm tree. The first of the two islands is almost completely been raised out of the sea and construction on the homes and hotels will start later this year. The Palm is already attracting the interest of some celebrities. This island is just off the beach my parents house is close to, and you can see all the construction ships at night from their roof.

Most of the items mentioned below have been sold. I still have:

• Dining table with six chairs
• 72 gallon salt water aquarium (with fish, shrimp, crabs, corals, live rock, protein skimmer, sump, UV filter, heater, 1/4 HP chiller, etc.)
• Anthro computer desk with lots of extras

I’ll post updated pictures and details later today.

Since I’m moving out of the country, I have a bunch of furniture I’m selling. I’ve got the following available:

• Natuzzi (Italian) leather sofa set (sofa pictured below)
• Omar’s super-cool coffee table (those of you who have seen it understand)
• Nice expandable dining table with six chairs
• Matching sofa table
• Bedroom furniture (queen bed with headboard and footboard, night stand, and tall wardrobe)
• Sealy Posturepedic Messina plush pillow-top mattress with box-spring
• Omar’s tall computer chair
• Ikea bookshelf

Click on the picture below to see pictures of these items. I’ll also be selling my 72 gallon salt water aquarium complete with almost 100lbs of live rock, fish, shrimp, hermit crabs, snails, mushroom polyps, protein skimmer, sump, pumps, chiller, heater, etc. I haven’t got those pictures ready yet, but the should be there by Monday.

I’ve been thinking about finding a good way to store all of my media content at home. This would include all my DVDs, music, pictures, data backups, etc. I started planning and building a large network attached storage device a couple of months ago, and it’s finally done. Here are the specs:

• 1 terabyte of storage
• Gigabit ethernet (data reads are up to 100 GB/s)
• Supports SMB, AFP, WebDAV, and FTP
• Costs less than $3,000 and uses off-the-shelf parts

I wanted this server to be cheap, fast, and reliable. The first decision I made was to use IDE storage rather than SCSI. I selected Western Digital 200GB drives which I purchased over a period of three months at Fry’s Electronics combining various rebates to pay about $150 for each one. I purchased seven drives in all for a total of 1.4TB of raw storage capacity. RAID-5 was the logical way to combine these drives in a way that was reliable and maximized storage space. My biggest problem was actually getting the RAID setup.

I had initially planned on using the software RAID-5 implementation in Windows 2003 Server, but that failed. The problem wasn’t Windows, it was the IDE controller cards. These drives came with Promise Ultra100 TX2 IDE/100 controller cards. I used three cards with two drives connected to each card (the cards have two IDE interfaces each), but I could never get Windows to successfully build the RAID and kept getting errors in the system Event Log when trying to read/write from the drives. Finally, I called Promise and they told me that they don’t support having more than one of their cards in one machine. Uggh. I even searched their website and the included documentation for any such limitations, but found none. Back to the drawing board.

The only solution was a hardware RAID controller card. After doing some research, the 3Ware Escalade 7500-8 turned out to be the right choice. It’s compatible with Windows 2003, supports up to eight IDE drives, and has a very fast hardware RAID-5 controller. It was a breeze to setup a six drive RAID-5 volume with one additional drive as a hot spare using the bios on the card. The formatted capacity of the six drive RAID-5 volume was 931GB.

The rest of the system is comprised of the following components:

• SuperMicro 742i-420b rack mount 4U case with seven internal IDE bays and a 420W power supply.
• Intel D875PBZ motherboard (800MHz bus, Serial ATA, gigabit LAN)
• Intel Pentium 4 2.4C processor (2.4GHz, 800MHz bus, Hyper Threading)
• Western Digital Raptor boot hard drive (36GB, Serial ATA, 10,000 RPM)
• Sony CDU5211 black internal CD-ROM drive
• Floppy drive (crucial for drive/controller bios upgrades)
• ATI Radeon 7000 graphics card
• LinkSys 5-port gigabit ethernet switch

That was all the involved hardware. There are a few things to note if you intend to build a similar system. Most of the Western Digital drives on the market today need a bios upgrade to work reliably in a RAID. You need a floppy drive (have too boot into DOS) to do the upgrade. It’s better just to make sure you bought a drive that was manufactured after March 25th, 2003. Also, Intel’s drivers for their desktop boards don’t seem to support Windows 2003 Server.

I’ve got a about 200GB of content on the server now, mostly recorded HDTV shows that I haven’t had time to watch yet. I’ll also be backing up my DVD’s to this server. My client machine for browsing/viewing all the content stored on this server is a Windows XP Media Center Edition PC. It has an incredibly easy interface for watching/recording TV, viewing photo albums, listening to music, and playing DVD’s. There are also many cool innovations planned for future updates of this version of Windows!

Well, my photo album is off line…and it’s my fault. I made the mistake of using Panther, the code name of Apple’s next major release of Mac OS X, on my PowerBook. It has a feature which maintains a local copy of your iDisk…and somehow it managed to wipe most of the data off the iDisk including the pages and pictures that make up my photo album.
I have most of the pictures on my computer, but I don’t have the energy right now to rebuild the page. Maybe in a couple of weeks when I’m bored I’ll rebuild it. I’ll also have to remember to back it up this time using my trusty PC.

Today was my last day at Microsoft. I’m not very good with change, but it’s time to look forward now. I’ll post more details about my future plans later this summer once I’m in Dubai, but for now I’m going to enjoy my last few weeks in Palo Alto and finish packing up my stuff.

In 1999 I had to choose between working for Apple or Microsoft. Probably the most difficult decision of my life…but I made the right choice. It’s easy to blame Microsoft for the world’s problems, but everyone knows that’s not true. I can see how people get caught up in the hysteria…and Microsoft is not without blame; but in the grand scheme of things the world has far bigger problems than Microsoft’s treatment of its competitors. I had the pleasure of working with some of the smartest people in the world. I’m glad I was able to leave on good terms.

I also want to end any rumors about the future of Mac BU. I’m not leaving a sinking ship, just one that’s heading for new destinations. Omar is hard at work on Virtual PC, and I know he’s going to do great things with it. Office is also on course for great things. Microsoft has been producing Mac software for twenty years, and as long as Apple is in business you’ll probably see Microsoft products for the Mac.

I am attending Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference this week in San Francisco. At this event, Apple previewed the next major release of Mac OS X, code named Panther, as well as their new PowerMac G5 which is based on IBM’s 64-bit PowerPC 970 processor.

I just recieved my Harmony remote which is made by Intrigue Technologies in Ontario. It’s a great home theater remote for people who like remotes with real buttons and don’t have the patience to program a Pronto. I’ve had this remote for a few days now and I think it’s a real winner. Within a few minutes it was able to produce macros that would have taken hours to get right on a Pronto.

After President Bush’s well publicized tumble on a Segway HT, I thought I’d post another picture of Presidents Bush Junior and Senior going for a spin on Segway HT’s this past weekend. My mom has become a big fan of the Segway HT and rides it around the house a lot (it’s too hot in Dubai during the day to ride one outside). Picture courtesy REUTERS/Jim Bourg.