Friday night,  after spending a few hours playing rock band and call of duty: world at war with Trevor, I decided to install Ubuntu on the second hard disk on my workstation at home.  I had downloaded the X64 version of their 8.10 version a couple weeks ago but never got around to installing it.

I was pleased to note that installation was just as easy as it always has been, and it seems even easier to get up and running than it used to be. This could be a result of actually knowing all of the steps I need to take now (whereas with some previous versions I had to do some digging first).  

Saturday I took the time to get  World of Warcraft (including Wrath of the Lich King) up and running under wine.  That proved easy, as I had a guide to follow (that I wrote after the last time I did it).  

I also decided to see if I could get VALVe’s Steam service to run in Linux, as recently I picked up the Half-Life 2 episode pack (for $10) and wanted to see if I could play those in Linux as well (hint: yes, yes you can). 

Steam prooved to be easy to install.  I had to search for SteamInstall.exe (the steam website has a .msi, which will NOT work).   Just run the installer in Wine and poof, Steam is installed.   It was pretty easy. 

Since I already had the episode pack for HL2 associated with my Steam account, once I had Steam installed I simply had to select the game (the one I tested was HL2: Episode 1) and tell it to install.  Steam handled the rest, and handled it beautifully. 

When the time came and the game was installed,  I went to play it and…… success.    Sort of. 

It played all the way through until just after the beginning of the second chapter - direct intervention - and then began stuttering and the performance dropped dramatically.   At first I thought it was just the game acting up, so I saved and exited (which was a monumental feat by itself).   Upon re-entering the saved game it was still messed up. 

After doing some digging I found that the following registry entries resolved the issue for me completely, and gameplay has been awesome ever since.

Navigate to:  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D  (if the Direct3D key doesn’t exist in the Wine folder, as was the case for me, add it).

Under the Direct3D key, add the following String Values

OffscreenRenderingMode, value: fbo
PixelShaderMode, value: enabled
UseGLSL, value: enabled
VideoMemorySize, value: ammount of video ram your card has, in megabytes.  Mine was 256.

These settings in the registry have most certainly fixed the issue I had and I have not had any since.  The game is 100% playable (and quite enjoyable too). 

I’m happy that, for me anyways, the games I want to play I can do so via Wine and Linux.  It’s certainly not for everybody, and it’s still much easier to simply play these games in Windows.  I’m a geek, though, and oddly enough I enjoy getting things to work on platforms they were not really intended for.

A few months ago, I noticed that my friend Jason (Hi Jason!) had a Roomba from iRobot.  For those who are unaware, the Roomba is a robot vacuum that can be set to vacuum on a regular basis at a scheduled time. This seems to me to be a pretty awesome idea - a robot that can do what I don’t want to - vacuum up my cat’s fur every day.   

While out with my Fiance last night we ended up at Bed Bath and Beyond, and on a whim decided to see if they carried the Roomba.   Sure enough, they did.  With a shiny 20% off coupon in hand I made my decision to finally get one.   And so I did. 

After letting it charge overnight,  and cleaning the junk that cluttered the floor,  I pressed the button to get it started cleaning and, sure enough, it backed out of it’s dock and started on it’s way.  Except after a few seconds it stopped and gave me a “oh shit I stopped working” noise.   Pressing the clean button again gave me a message to check the “Cliff” sensors.    After a few times of this it became obvious that Roomba was having some issues. 

I decided to try it on my hardwood flooring and low and behold, it worked like a charm.  And completely avoided my rug.  

A look on the Internet yielded that Roomba has problems with rugs with certain patterns,  especially where you have dark colors next to light colors.  This causes it’s cliff sensors (the sensors that help it avoid falling from one elevation to another, as if going off a cliff) to falsely identify a cliff,  and attempt to avoid it.  

The good news is, there’s a fix.   What I ended up doing was taping some white paper over the cliff sensors.  Sure enough, Roomba passed over the carpet with nary a pause, and my robotic friend will now take over my daily vacuuming duties. 

This is a viable solution for me because I don’t have any cliffs that the roomba would fall off - it operates on the first floor of the house.  For those who have this issue with a Roomba on the second floor, or where there are cliffs,  will have to be more creative in how they tackle this issue.  A Virtual Wall might solve that problem of falling off a cliff in those situations. 

I like my Roomba so far.   Especially since he scares the ever living crap out of my cat (and seems to have a knack for heading straight for her regularly).   It was incredibly funny to me when she climbed on top while it was in it’s dock, accidentally turning it on.  Bet she won’t be doing THAT again.

I’m not dead!     I am, however, VERY very busy and haven’t had too much time to keep up on here.  I hope to be able to post more on here in the near future as things calm down a bit.

This weekend I had a sad thing happen.  My smart home became an inexplicably dumb home.  Suddenly my life was thrown into disarray when I pressed a button and….. nothing happened.  I was left wondering what in the world happened. 

That’s when I looked at the control module for my Insteon home control system and noticed that the LED that indicates activity was no longer blinking.  The unit seemed to have lost the ability to detect anything.  This didn’t bode well, as while my Mac Mini is the brains behind the system, that control module is the spinal cord that allows the brain to transmit the signals… electrically… to the rest of the switches in the house.

The end result being that the spinal cord was cut and the brain could no longer talk to its appendages.

I did two things immediately.    First, I ordered a replacement and had it over-nighted – I need this control module for my house to work.    Second, I called SmartHome’s product support line to inquire about a replacement.  I did both of these because I wanted to eventually have a backup handy in case this ever happened again.     Plus, who knows if/when I will need a second control module J

When I called SmartHome I was somewhat amazed at the service.  I informed them I had a bad Powerlinc module and they were able to look up my account by my last name and billing zip code,  then noticed that I had bought the unit within the past year and issued a warranty replacement – with shipping pre-paid by them.   They had indicated that they could do an emergency replacement shipment if I needed it, but I opted to just use the normal replacement procedure where I send the defective unit and they ship the replacement when they receive the bad unit.  Since I already had one ordered to arrive early this week it just made sense to do it this way.

Until the replacement I ordered arrives a few things don’t work: My lamps in my great room, as well as my loft, don’t work.    My front porch light does not turn itself on and off,   my thermostat does not update itself daily, my morning mode doesn’t work – so my house doesn’t tell me the weather report in the morning, and various other automated lighting controls don’t work.

This is unsurprisingly annoying – after a few months of having a working smart home, it’s almost debilitating when it ceases to function.  It is, however, a good measure of how useful the smart home features have been for me.

Lessons to learn:     Avoid having single points of failure when possible, and have backup hardware available for your critical pieces. 

Traditionally, when I’m doing a reinstall of my system I’d make sure to have a full backup of my entire home directory, and then import that backup in and be up and running with no changes.  I opted NOT to do that this time, however.   Instead I backed up the things MOST important to me - my iTunes library,  my iPhoto library and my Aperture library, along with the domain file from iWeb and a few assorted documents.  (I also backed up my Adium 2.0 folder under ~/Library/Application Support/ becuase I really like how I had it configured and didn’t want to deal with reconfiguring it).  Most of this was accomplished by simply copying what I wanted to backup onto an external hard drive.  The one exception to that is the Aperture library, which I backed up by creating a vault on the external hard drive and adding my whole library to the vault.   

After that I performed a clean install of Leopard,  the patches and updates and various bits of software (iLife ‘08,  iWork ‘08, Aperture, LaunchBar and several other paid-for programs I wanted to keep).    On my OD server I created a new user account and set it up to create a portable home directory on login.  Once I had that set up and had the MBP bound to the OD server I logged in as that user and when prompted told it to create the home directory.    This didn’t take long at all since there was really nothing to sync in the initial sync. 

Once I was logged in and had the home directory created I started migrating in the data I wanted to keep - I copied the iTunes library to the appropriate place on the filesystem ( ~/Music/iTunes) and the iPhoto library to the appropriate place as well (~/Pictures/), then opened up Aperture and had it rebuild the library from the vault I created on the external hard drive.  This process took a while, and when it was finished I had to restart Aperture.   It then took a little while longer to rebuild all of the projects I had been working with,  and it had to regenerate all of the thumbnails,  but once finished everything was perfect. 

iTunes simply required launching itunes and telling it that you would import files yourself later (instead of having it search for them).    Once you do that it will take you too your library and probably display a message like “updating library”, which takes only a few minutes at worst (for me anyway) and once completed you’re up and running.  You can either authorize your computer yourself, or wait until you play something bought through itunes - it’ll prompt you to do it then. 

iPhoto required nothing special - I just started it and it worked and saw my images.   

iWeb was likewise pretty easy.  To restore it all I had to do was take the domain file I backed up (found in ~/Library/Application Support/iWeb) and put it back in the same location.    Starting iWeb then will find the domain file and it’ll be like nothing ever happened.  

Plopping Adium 2.0’s folder into Application Support likewise worked beautifully.  Adium was configured exactly how I wanted it when I first launched it. 

The documents got copied into ~/Documents,   a no-brainer to many.

So - everything was working great,  until I realized I forgot to back up some important stuff.    In particular, Things and 1Password. 

Turns out I didn’t need to - my iPhone saved me.  I fired up both app’s and synced them with their counterparts on my iPhone and *poof*,  everything is restored on both.  Beautiful. 

So now I have a system that has all of the files I wanted to save, and none of the cruft I wished I could be rid of.   It’s backed up to the server and everything FINALLY seems to be operating properly.  

Sure, it was a time consuming process but well worth it in my estimation.  I applaud Apple’s ability to make transitioning to new machines as easy as importing your user accounts,  but eventually you get to a point where your account is bloated and needs to be slimmed.  I probably COULD have gone through and tried cleaning a lot of this out by hand, but this seemed to be a much simpler approach.  

[edit 9/9/08]:  I want to note, because it wasn’t clear in my post, that I had (and still have) and maintain full and complete backups for the system and my files. Should any of this have NOT worked I could have recovered easily.  I strongly encourage the use of backups.   

First it was AFP,   it kept locking up and requiring a restart of the process - this in turn caused all sorts of problems with my portable home directory on my Macbook Pro.    Eventually syncing just completely stopped working and nothing I did could get it to work again. 

That’s about when I gave up trying.   

Then I moved, and moved the XServe with me,  and decided to wipe the machine and give it another go - figuring the problem to be something corrupt with the installation.   I did that, and at first things seemed to be running fine.    The next morning, though, I realized I was wrong. The system had locked up hard and required a hard reset.   Over the next few days I experienced random lockups, kernel panics, and services dying.   Then the boot volume raid array (raid 1,  software,  and yes I am aware it’s generally not considered good form to use a RAID for your boot volume - I don’t care about good form) degraded.  It was listing one of the drives as “FAILED”,  but the drive hardware itself was listing itself as fine.  I opted to wipe the drive and try rebuilding the array.    I did that and after a few failures during the rebuild process it finally took.     Then degraded a few hours later. 

I looked through the logs to see if I could find a cause for the degraded array (and the failed rebuilds) and was somewhat surprised that the reason was an I/O error reading from the “good” non-failed drive.  Interesting.   

I replaced the “FAILED” drive with a known good drive of the same capacity, and tried another rebuild.  Again it failed - same error message.  Aha!    I have the culprit!

It turns out that the problem was on the supposedly good drive in the array,  and not the ones showing up as failed (like you’d expect).  I replaced that drive and did a full clean install of the OS (I hadn’t spent much time populating OD or anything since the system had been so unstable) - the install took a LOT less time than it had on previous attempts and the system itself is behaving a lot more stable.   AFP has yet to crash, syncing works fine for the most part (though I don’t recommend doing it over a 54 Meg wifi connection

Also as a side note:  Apple’s XGrid Administration and High Performance Computing guide has great instructions on building a gateway device (look at the section for “Setting up Cluster Controller”,   but there’s one thing you really should change from how they do it - use AFP instead of NFS for home directories.  NFS caused all sorts of problems for me (logins would not work) while AFP worked perfectly (and solved the problems).   Otherwise it’s a pretty good guide to follow,  though I made some modifications to my approach (given that I’m on a dynamic IP address, instead of static.     If you want to know how I got kerberos and OD to work with that email me). 

This past weekend, and over the past couple of days,  I’ve changed the network topology quite a bit - setting up one of the XServes as a gateway device with NAT, DHCP, DNS, NFS, Open Directory (with Kerberos) and XGrid - the last one not currently being used, but I am contemplating a few uses.  I then set up the second XServe to serve as a media server housing all of my digital media - music, movies, tv shows, etc.  This server isn’t yet, but soon will be, linked to my AppleTV in my media center (via gigabit ethernet) to sync my movies and shows across.

I’ve got a few things left to accomplish to make everything run smoothly, but for the most part things are looking great and working well. 

OS X Server 10.5.4 runs incredibly smooth and has been a joy to use (as opposed to my previous experiences with OS X Server which had issues, though I believe that to have been a corrupt installation or something.).   I was able to get the gateway device setup pretty easily following instructions found in Apple’s X-Grid clustering and advanced computing guide (available on their site). 

I’m still waiting for my iPhone 3G - I made the mistake of doing a direct fulfillment from AT&T (apple’s store here was out of stock and I was impatient).  Unfortunately AT&T has been slower than an elderly woman with a broken hip when it comes to actually doing the fulfillment.  It’s been two weeks and still no iPhone.  Way to drop the ball AT&T.

The biggest problem I see for the App store, at least for the time being,  is that it’s slow to push out updates provided by developers.   As a Mac user for several years now, I’m used to developers pushing out updates to their products very fast,  generally as fast as they can get fixes done for the bugs.   With the App store, a developer can push an update that fixes several critical crash bugs and it isn’t made available to the end user for several weeks - a delay that can potentially kill some promising piece of software.  This is an issue that has many a developer frustrated.

Beyond that, there are some apparent bugs with the update mechanism used by the App store - some users are reporting data loss in applications after they are updated.  Others are reporting no issues when updating the same applications.  From what I’ve read there is no easily discernible common thread to it - some did the update via itunes, others via the phone itself,  with success and failure with both methods.  I’m one of those affected by this particular issue,  with several applications causing data loss when they were updated.  Other applications updated fine with no data loss.   It seems pretty hit and miss.

The last issue,  and it’s fairly minor compared to the first two in my opinion, is that the update feature doesn’t always accurately reflect whether or not there’s an update for a particular app.   Many times my phone will tell me there are no updates available, but itunes will say differently - or vice versa.    It seems kind of strange that there’s this disparity,  but it is mostly a minor annoyance.

Despite all of these things - I still love the App Store.   It’s new and as with most new things there are bugs and kinks that need to be ironed out.   No amount of testing will accurately reflect real world demands.  If Apple can adapt and resolve these issues fast then I doubt there will be any long term repercussions - if they are slow to address the issues, though, there may be some long term bad blood between Apple and developers,  and I really hope that doesn’t happen.

The problem I have is that while they gave me a Blackberry,  they don’t have a Blackberry enterprise server, and thus no push email,  or over-the-air sync of data from exchange.  Why is this important?  Simple: I get dozens, if not hundreds of emails a day.  If I read them on my computer, my phone has no idea.  Since I read from my computer ALL THE TIME, my phone annoyingly shows several hundred unread messages.  To get rid of them?  I have to delete them one at a time, or reset my phone.  Removing the mail account they came in on leaves all of the messages.

Yes, you could call that “annoying”.

Yesterday I got so fed up with the Blackberry and decided to see how the iPhone (2g, 2.0 software) would fare paired up with Exchange and ActiveSync.  Turns out it fares surprisingly well.

Hooking it up wasn’t a problem - I put in my user info and let it auto discover the details.  Since we’re using the latest version of Exchange auto-discovery worked like a champ.  Older Exchange versions don’t have this issue.   

Once hooked up it was only a matter of a few seconds for the sync to start up and all of my data was pushed to the iPhone.  I could see ALL of my mail (not just my inbox, as on my Blackberry),  see my calendar and my contacts.

It pulls data from exchange, including the whole of the company directory - available in the contacts app.   

It supports multiple (color coded) calendars as well, helping me keep home and work separate - but also seeing both at the same time.

OTA push works like you’d expect - emails, calendar and contacts are all synced as they should be.

Overall I’m fairly impressed - it works well and manages to look polished and highly usable - something my Blackberry just isn’t capable of pulling off.

I’ve been waiting for it simply so I could have a method of bloging on the go, wherever I happen to be when an idea strikes me.

I’m giving it a shot right now, in fact, and think it’s pretty sweet for what it does. It won’t let you manage the blogging platform, but you can create and edit posts - which if you ask me is plenty for a mobile app. The rest I can wait to be in front of a computer for.

Another App I am anxiously waiting for is the highly anticipated 1password - I’m a huge fan of the desktop version and am very excited for the iPhone version.

Both apps are ( will be ) free downloads to boot.

I got ahold of them earlier this week and they claim they left me messages (whether or not I believe that claim I will keep to myself),  and said they could do the install Thursday (yesterday).   I reluctantly agreed - but mostly because I wanted it done, and preferred it be done before this weekend (when I’m moving my servers in to their new home and finalizing that portion of my home network).

This time they actually DID show up, and I took the installers around to the various locations where I wanted the drops.   They asked for attic access, which I provided, and they took a look up there.   After a couple of minutes the guys came back and said the job would be straight forward and easy enough,  and proceeded to get to work.   I was busy with various conference calls for work and didn’t follow their progress closely, but after a few hours they reported that all four drops were done and a quick inspection showed that they were, in fact, done.    And you couldn’t even tell they had been there.  Excellent.

They even went so far as to install the patch panel for me in my garage - very nice.  Now all I have to do is plug everything into it and I’m “good to go”

After they finished with the network install I asked them some questions regarding my home theater setup.  They gave me some ideas for how I could proceed with it that would minimize buildout requirements and get me a nice little home theater setup.  I’m keeping it all in mind as I look towards the future of my layout, and despite the issues last week would probably use this company (Technology Interiors) for my future buildouts - the quality of work was great.