2011 September | Venkatarangan Blog

S.M.A.R.T failure of my Hard Drive

In my main PC at work where I store most of my documents and data, I have been using Hardware RAID for mirroring between two 500GB Seagate Hard drives for last 3 years. This provides me with automatic redundancy and minor performance benefit while reading large video files. All was well till last week, when on boot BIOS warned that the Mirror is broken. Having seen this happen few times before I quickly updated my backup to external drive and then rebuild the mirror. Yesterday I got into the same problem, I decided and moved to Windows (Software) mirroring. Today afternoon Windows 7 showed me the below dialog and warned me that S.M.A.R.T. data is indicating an impending failure/error in one of the drives. The warning was just about useless beyond that – no indication on which Physical drive is having the problem.

On searching for this issue in Bing!, I found this free utility called DiskCheckup which can read the S.M.A.R.T data and provide more information, which it did. I found one of the drives was having high “reallocated sector count” which was told me by few hardware blogs to be bad. But since both my physical drives were the same model their class names displayed were same, which didn’t help me in isolating the failed one. So I went to computer management and broke the mirror. Reran Diskcheckup few times (disabling one drive after another in Device Management) and identified the failed one. Since I didn’t have a spare 500GB to replace, I fixed a 1TB drive in place of the failed one. Fortunately Windows 7 didn’t mind setting up mirroring between two drives of unequal size. I managed to select the 500GB, Add Mirror to a portion (which Windows created automatically) of 1TB and setup everything, the balance space I could create another simple volume. Windows is currently Resyncing the mirror between the drives.

Thiruneermalai

Today I went with my family to have Darshan at the famous Thiruneermalai temple. The temple is dedicated to Lord Vishnu and is one of the 108 Vaishnava DivyaDesam. To reach the temple is easy, it is just about 5-6KMs from Pallavaram (few more KMs from Chennai Airport). If you are coming from Chennai Airport towards Tambaram in GST road, just after the right to Pallavaram, you take the next right (below the new flyover) to Thiruneermalai Road. There are two temples there, one is on a small hill top (Reclining Posture – Lord Ranganatha) and the other on the base of the hill (Standing Posture – Lord Rama). Compared to Sholingur and other hill temples climbing up this small hill is easy, just about 200-250 steps and took less than 10 minutes to climb up. The hill top is shown in many Tamil films. Since it was working day and morning hours, there were hardly few other devotees, so we had a peaceful darshan.

The temple seems to have been renovated recently, steps were well done, paint fresh on the Gopurams. Fine job by the HRE Board of Govt. of Tamil Nadu and local municipality. As a common theme in many tourist places in Tamil Nadu (and across India) there were the locked Bathrooms. The local municipality has build on great cost a water tank & few Toilets in the foothill (near car parking) for public convenience but they were all locked, you need approach the temple staff for the key (who surprisingly obliged on our request).

Reference: Detailed information can be found in this fine blog post.

Source Code

On my return from Seattle to India in British Airways I watched this movie “Source Code”. The movie is starred by Jake Gyllenhaal who starred in Prince of Persia and did all the fabulous stunts, Jake has done a fine performance on the action sequences in this movie as well. Source Code is about a US Military secret mission of using last 8 minutes of memory stored in a dead man’s brain and travelling to multiple timelines in that. In the movie this is used to find the bomber in a Chicago commuter train. Jake comes in as a US Army Pilot in a mission in Afghanistan last remembered to have been attacked in a fighting, when he wakes up he finds in the body of another man travelling in a train. The idea that he can replay the same sequences as many times as the number of passengers till he finds the culprit is an interesting (impossible) idea. Nice movie, can be watched.

Hanuman Thai Restaurant

Today my co-worker in our US Office with high recommendation took me to a Thai Restaurant in Kirkland called Hanuman Thai Cafe for lunch. I will be leaving to India later in the day so I was game for any (vegetarian) food. The food turned out to be good and very spicy (as I had asked). They had a Veg Combo meal consisting of Boiled Vegetables, Spring Rolls, Jasmine Rice (thank god it was not sweet) and a soup.

Lofts in Downtown LA & Curry House

Last Sunday I was in Los Angeles area and I visited one of my college classmate after nearly a decade. He works in Downtown L.A. and moved there from Pasadena (CA) for shorter commute (bicycle) to work. I was under the impression that Downtown in L.A. was not so safe a place and very few Desi Indians lived there, especially due to lack of good school districts. But here was my friend living here and he says he is enjoying the time saved due to zero commute. He has rented an apartment in Downtown and he told me the one he has rented is called as Loft’s here. Loft for me in India meant a shelf or chamber provided for storage in a raised position in a building. Here Loft means open floor space rented for residence as un-partitioned floor area, which you can divide into rooms any way you please. The walls were not plastered, AC ducts were open and visible. But the place had a serene, natural feeling to it.

Late evening when we walked few blocks away from his apartment for dinner, we were approached by at least half a dozen homeless people living in the streets for money (change). When travelling in USA, I normally ignore these people for fear of my safety and keep walking away. My friend said he feels it is more humane and safer as well to just acknowledge them, say sorry or I have no money and keep walking. You learn something new everyday.

He took me for dinner to Curry House restaurant in Little Tokyo. I presumed Curry House meant Indian food but it turned out to be a popular Japanese chain. I was happy I got vegetarian meal complete with Soup, Starters and a spicy curry to go with Rice. I liked the food, it was tasty and I have added this to my list of (vegetarian) cuisines I have tasted so far & liked.

Windows 8 Samsung Tablet

Just like the other 4999 attendees of Build Windows Conference, I am too happy to have got a test Samsung Tablet running “Developer Preview” of Windows. Having got a touch netbook previously in PDC 2009 towards launch of Windows 7, I should say I was expecting something like this.

The tablet looks great, feels a little heavy compared to iPad but has a USB port, plays all media formats that Windows Media recognizes (and for those it doesn’t you can always run VLC Player) and starts up in less than 2 seconds (awesome).

The machine specifications were impressive too and ships with SDK & Visual Studio to develop Metro style Apps.

And I was surprised to see some “Humour” in Microsoft EULA for the tablet. When was the last time you read anything in a Microsoft material that you can understand?

Day 1 of Build–Metro Style Apps

In this post let me write about some highlights about Metro UI that I saw in the Big Picture sessions of Day 1.

(Update: You can watch the entire keynote here )

The default templates shipping in Visual Studio whether it is for C++ or C# or JavaScript, they all do a great job in handling all the layout complexities and do the heavy lifting for building Metro UI

Microsoft has done lot of user study to see the most ideal and convenient position in the screen where user’s thumb can reach and they are in the edges. As a result it is good practise to put frequently used interaction surfaces near the edges

When you are porting your existing Windows Apps UI to Metro, best is to start from scratch, when you can’t even simple things make a lot of improvement (like removing the lines and borders, more spaced out, large icons and so on). See in these four steps from left to right:

Touch is direct, so performance issues are felt more directly and viscerally. Animations when content is appearing of changing helps a lot in the feeling of fluid to the users. Metro Apps require assets in 3 sizes (100%, 140% and 180%) and better still you can provide them in vector formats (SVG) or CSS primitives or XAML.

Your content needs to adapt to multiple screen sizes and orientations:

Contracts are the glue that bind Metro style apps together and to the system UI. There are many contracts, but the three of the most fundamental are Share, Search and Picker.

There are many styles of Live tiles. You can choose the one that suits your app. Live Tiles are updated using your “Local” logic, Scheduled or Push using Windows Push Notification Service (WNS)

In-box controls that ship in Windows 8 for Metro style apps are shown below:

Metro style apps when making calls to WinRT those calls go directly to Core OS or though a broker (only on select cases). All running Metro apps are suspended by the OS when the user switches away from it, this is done to preserve the battery live and give maximum performance to the foreground application. This means Apps get about 5 seconds to save their state before the OS puts them on Suspend. Apps when in Suspend are still in memory but no CPU cycles are spent and Windows kernel never schedules those threads. Apps are also terminated when there are low resources, in those cases Apps never notified at all.

Five main design principles of Metro style apps are

Pride in craftsmanship
Be fast and fluid
Authentically digital
Do more with less
Win as one

Day 1 of Build–Windows 8

Let me begin by saying this first, I am blown away. What got announced in the Keynote today morning by Steven Sinofsky, makes it absolutely clear that Windows8 is a big bold step by Microsoft and as been repeated many times it is an OS that is definitely “reimagined”. You can download the Developer Preview bits of Windows 8 and SDK for free from here.

Steven Sinofsky in his keynote mentioned some interesting facts about Windows 7:

Approaching 450 million copies of Windows 7 sold
Windows7 consumer usage greater than Windows XP
1502 non security product changes delivered since Windows 7 shipped
542 Million people signing into Windows Live services every month

Everything that runs in Windows 7 runs on Windows 8. Sinofsky demoed a 3 year old Atom Netbook running Windows 8 just fine, same machine actually used less CPU, Memory and Number of processor than Windows 7. Windows 8 now has great Multi Monitor support (finally) even when you are remoting, Task Manager Application improvement, Windows Explorer improvement (long due).

In the keynote he demoed several apps built for Metro UI. Interestingly these were build by college interns. There were 17 groups of them, 2-3 people in each team and worked over 10 weeks time.Quite impressive considering most of them were new to Windows and were working on moving builds of Windows8.

Steven Sinofsky pulled a good one on competition (Google Chrome) when he said “Chrome”less content when he was showing off that Metro apps are full screen with no Titlebar or Windows. Obviously he didn’t say “Window”less that would have minimized Window brand.

There are lot of great stuff shown here, instead of repeating everything I will just cover few highlights:

Metro UI, the new UI in Windows8 is fresh, innovative & futuristic. I liked the Semantic Zoom feature (that shows a reduced view of tiles when you pinch in) that makes it easy to quickly navigate the start screens. Windows8 touch language is certainly a new thinking brought by Microsoft into this space, shows they are not simply copying from others. By being late to the game Microsoft has benefitted from preceding works and learning from them.

Windows 8 has a new App Model that is restrictive (Windows Store distribution only, no app side loading) but one that ensures security for users preventing rogue apps. What I liked in the Windows Store it supports trial mode. Store manages (as now common with iTunes, Android App store and so on) all the security, authentication, payment, delivery, rating and so on. Current Windows Apps (Win32, .NET) say like Quicken you can still list them in Store, but it will only show a link to your website, you will not get any of the features of Store for that app.

Windows 8 has a new Runtime called WinRT (common runtime available for C++, C# or VB, JavaScript) that is a sibling to aging Win32. This is not a layer on top of Win32, but a first class native runtime

Metro Style Windows Live applications like Mail & Photo Gallery are all in development and not made available now but was previewed. What I liked was the Skydrive powered access to drives & folders in remote PCs, a super cool feature through which you can get the files in your office/home PC remotely from any Windows8 PC without syncing or anything.

As a side note I couldn’t help noticing a difference between Apple’s Launch Keynotes (yes I know, Steve Jobs is a legend here) & Microsoft’s launches. Apple focus on lifestyle & experience and technology takes an important but back stage, but Microsoft keynotes are more about technology. Though Windows8 is about touch and new form factors there was no mention on Music, Movies, Games (except one demo) and communication.

Build Windows–Windows 8 is here

I am here this week in Anaheim, CA for Build Windows conference. Weather is just fine and Disneyland near-by but I am here doing this post Smile .

Last few years Microsoft has been criticized for not doing enough in embracing “touch” and modern OS concepts pioneered by likes of Mac OS/iOS and Android. There is lot of anticipation on Windows8 leading up to Build Conference today.

Amtrak California

I am here in LA region this week for Microsoft’s Build conference. Today to get from Simi Valley to Anaheim (where the conference is going to start from tomorrow) I decided to take the train. Yes, I said it right, Trains do run in USA and they are pretty good and frequent especially in California around Bay Area and Los Angeles. Any day I will prefer to do this in USA than to sit in a car for hours seeing nothing but Tar roads and concrete falls on side of Freeways. In my last visit to USA I had travelled in local metro train in Bay Area (from Cupertino to Downtown SFO) and they are the cheapest (costs around $10 compared to $120 by Taxi for the same journey) and some times faster (due to traffic in peak hours in roads) mode of transport. Previous to that in 2007 I had travelled in Amtrak from Seattle to Vancouver, Canada.

The travel by Amtrak from Simi Valley to Anaheim (CA) took about 2 hours (starting at 10:51AM and arriving around 1:05PM), took a 20 minutes stop in LA Union station. It was convenient, I could seats easily in Unreserved cabin itself, there was power sockets to charge your laptop or iPad and costed only $22 per trip.

Venkatarangan Blog

Categories

Archive