Solipsism Gradient

Since the beginning of the year (or, perhaps, more germanely, the beginning of the hot season) the hard drive in my iMac G5 would have a little clicking fit. This is usually the first sign of impending drive failure, but as it usually would stop and get back to work in a few seconds I did nothing except resolve to backup more often than I usually do. Just FYI, it’s a 20″ iMac G5, the last series before the iSight model, with a 250GB Maxtor SATA drive.

The last few days it’s been hotter than usual – often around 33C during the day – and around the middle of last week the clicking started to happen more often, and it would sometimes take minutes to recover… this only happened when I was booted from a certain partition, and never when booted from the other partition, so I tended to spend more time in the latter situation. I also installed Marcel Bresink’s excellent freeware Temperature Monitor, which told me that the iMac’s built-in hard drive temperature sensor showed 54C, while the drive’s own SMART sensor said it was at 70C. Which of course is somewhat beyond the usual rated operating temperature of 60C…

I finally got some free time to actually do something about it and proceeded to do a full backup of my home folder and of selected other folders to an external hard drive. I then tried to do an erase-and-zero-data operation on the internal drive, which (after 10 hours!) failed with an I/O error. And the drive temperature went up to 72C while the external sensor still said 54C! Something was very wrong.

Well, clearly this meant the drive was no longer reliable and I proceeded to find a replacement. Only a few months earlier I’d phoned around to find a larger backup drive, finding out that nobody had anything larger than a 160GB IDE in stock, and that an exorbitant price. SATA drives were “about to come in”. This time, too, the first stores I tried had no large drives available, until the nice people at TecMania pointed me at WAZ, where I promptly found a 320GB SATA drive for about US$210.00, not too bad for someone in a hurry. So on Saturday I was the proud owner of a new Western Digital WD3200KS, and gained several dozen GBs space, not too bad.

The new drive’s power consumption specs were about 20% lower than the old Maxtor’s, so I was reasonably confident that it wouldn’t overheat as badly. Still, after installing it, I looked closely at the way the temperature sensor was mounted on the drive bracket. It turns out that the bracket on that side is a thin metal strip fixed to the drive with two mounting screws, and the sensor is glued on near the middle. However, even with the screws properly tightened, the metal strip arches out a little in the middle, so that there was a small air gap between the sensor place and the drive itself – clearly not a thermically optimal solution, and this might explain the huge 18C difference between the internal and external temperature readings.

I googled around and some people had indeed run into the same problem. A few had mounted external fans onto the air inlet and/or outlets, and some had even cut into the iMac cover to do so! This seemed a little radical to me, especially as it would drastically cut resale value. Another user recommended cutting off the sensor and re-gluing it onto the drive body itself, something which I actually considered doing, but I found the sensor cable would be too strained if I did so.

The actual solution I implemented is shown here:

I added the round-headed Philips screw in the middle of the mounting bracket, which goes into the center (previously unused) hole on that side of the drive. I also spread a thin layer of thermal heatsink paste onto the mounting bracket, in the space between the two holes on each side of the sensor. The air gap was completely eliminated, and indeed after I fired the system up and restored my backups, the temperature gap between internal and external sensors was reduced to a much more reasonable 4C.

This means that the drive peaks at about 58C; still within the nominal operating range of 60C max, but uncomfortably close to the upper limit. By coincidence while I was doing this, I became aware of a Google paper (pdf) about disk failures. Very interesting; they investigated an awful lot of drives, and concluded that elevated temperature wasn’t necessarily a factor; then again, their operating temperatures were below 50C.

Meanwhile, I’m monitoring the drive closely and think of alternate methods to make the sensor’s temperature track the drive’s temperature more closely (which would make the cooling fan kick in a little earlier). My first attempt, putting a piece of tape over the sensor to take it out of the fan’s airstream, didn’t make any appreciable difference.

Update: Another paper on disk failures just came out. Also very interesting.

I’ve always been extremely skeptical about speech recognition. Like machine translation, it’s always been one of those technologies that for some reason is the “coming great thing” for a certain group of tech pundits, while not getting any closer (or even steadily receding) when you look at actual implementations. Here’s a particularly hilarious example. More here.

Understanding spoken language is a problem even for people. I listened carefully and, frankly, didn’t quite catch several sentences spoken by the operator in that first video. Even though he tries to avoid running words together as he would probably do when speaking to another person, he’s prone to leaving vowels out (“c’rrect”, “d’let'”, “cap’t’l”). Personally I’m able to misunderstand people in several languages, which actually adds to the problem – before decoding the words, I have to identify the language. Great fun on trips.

I’ve been getting some positive feedback lately about my “Interesting Times” articles, so I thought I’d repost some pointers to them. The column itself is, sadly, now defunct, but new material crops up now and then; I’ve decided to post it here instead. In retrospect, the way this blog/forum is organized could use a few revisions, but that’s not likely to happen very soon.

So, “Highly Advanced But Obsolete” talks about the QI900, which was an 8-bit CP/M-based computer I helped design in the middle-80s:

…the Z80 was too slow for a fully graphical interface, and we hadn’t the mechanical know-how to build a mouse.

…here’s the final result: the QI-900 had menus…

…and moveable windows…

…and, even better than the original Macintosh, it had preemptive multitasking – or rather, multithreading inside the same application.

I promised a follow-up article with more details, but never had the time to do the necessary research. Maybe later in the year.

Everybody’s favorite seems to be, however, “This Internet isn’t worth anything…“, where I tell some stories about setting up a commercial ISP in the early 90s:

(At Embratel – that was the government’s telecomm monopoly)

Me: “I want an Internet connection.”

Embratel Salesman: “OK. I suggest a 2400 or 9600 link, the price will be X cents per packet. That’s 20% of what it costs to send a TELEX. Isn’t that revolutionary?”

Me: “A packet means how many Kbytes?”

Embratel Salesman: “What? It’s 64 bytes per packet!”

Me: “And if a user decides to download a larger file, say, 500 Kbytes? It’ll cost hundreds of dollars!”

Embratel Salesman: “Don’t worry, that will never happen!”

I just heard the news; it seems the rumors were right. This year’s WWDC is now officially set for June 11 to 15, 2007. As I said below, this further reinforces my belief that the availability of Leopard and of the iPhone will be announced simultaneously by Steve Jobs at the keynote – June 11 – and, very probably, that the Leopard DVD will be distributed to every developer after the keynote. Let’s hope an iPhone developer’s kit will be thrown in… and that I will be able to attend.

It’s been some time since I did a test, so here’s one: Which science fiction writer are you?. I seem to be Hal Clement, whose work I’ve enjoyed a lot (especially the Mesklin stories):

I am: Hal Clement (Harry C. Stubbs) A quiet and underrated master of “hard science” fiction who, among other things, foresaw integrated circuits back in the 1940s.

Recently, Colin “Hairy Eyeball” Brayton (also known as the Gringo Sambista) pointed me at a post by Marcelo Tas called “The First Networked Brazilian”. Unfortunately there are no permalinks on that blog, so here’s a link to the story with translations.

(in 1988…) Look here, Dr. Big-Shot, I say, the Internet is a giant network that’s going to link up all the computers in the world. Computers at home, computers in big companies … Everybody’s going to be able to swap messages instantaneously from any place in the world without leaving home or getting up from their desk! A long silence indicates that the businessman is not much taken by my fancy tale. Lunch ends, the desert arrives, followed by the coffee … As we’re leaving, I slink off without another word. As soon as he’s alone with his subordinate, the boss turns to my friend and says: The next time you waste my time on one of your dope-smoking artist pals, you’re fired!

The idea of a world-wide network really took some time to be understood, especially here in Brazil. Around the same time (1988), my ex-colleagues at UFMG (the Federal University of Minas Gerais) kindly offered me an Internet access account. At that time, the Internet was intended solely for academic and military purposes; Brazil had only two connections to the rest of the world – one at 9600 bps (bits per second!!) in Rio de Janeiro and a double-9600 bps connection in São Paulo. A year after that, the RNP (Rede Nacional de Pesquisa – National Research Network) was formed, with a 64 Kbps link.

I logged in over a single external phoneline that traversed the university’s archaic PBX system and entered a 2400 bps modem. A Unix prompt came up and I could access e-mail, FTP servers, Gopher and WAIS. As the line rarely remained stable for a long time, I would copy everything to a local file and read it later. On my side, I ran a terminal emulator called ZTerm on My Mac SE, together with a Supra modem. In 1990 I actually donated a 14400 modem to the university, but they gave it back a few weeks later, saying it was incompatible with the 1200/75 baud modems used by some other users…

Remember that all this was before the Web was invented. In the early nineties, in the USA, everything was somewhat fragmented. Even academic and research institutions were divided between Bitnet and the Internet. There were lots of BBSes, which were organizing themselves into networks like Fidonet, there were Usenet newsgroups, Apple already had its AppleLink network, and there even were some commercial networks like Byte Magazine‘s BIX, The Well, Compuserve and MCI. For me, the most rewarding were the e-mail lists. The two I found most interesting were the Computer Underground Digest and UNITE (User Interface to Everything). The latter list discussed what would be the preferred user interface for the Internet in the near future; one of the participants was Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web.

I actually tried to sign up to be a Web beta-tester, as a version of the Mosaic browser had just come out for the Mac, but unfortunately my 2400 bps link was deemed insufficient. I started investigating options such as leasing a commercial Internet connection, or even set up my own Internet provider. Here are some tidbits from those years:

Me: “I want to set up a commercial Internet provider.”

University employee: “That’s absurd! The Internet is reserved for research institutions, we’ll never let companies use our infrastructure!”

(Embratel was the government’s telecomm monopoly)

Me: “I want to set up a commercial Internet provider.”

Embratel VP: “What’s an Internet?”

Me: “The world-wide computer network, it interconnects all other networks!”

Embratel VP: “Never heard of it, but I’ll investigate and have one of our people call you.”

(Some months later…)

Me: “I want an Internet connection.”

American ISP: “OK, that’ll be US$15000 for the installation of the parabolic antenna infrastructure and US$6500 per month for a 128 Kbps connection.”

Me: “Gulp!”

American ISP: “But, for Brazil, I hear a company called Embratel has a monopoly on that sort of thing!”

(Some more months later…)

Me: “I want an Internet connection.”

Embratel Salesman: “OK. I suggest a 2400 or 9600 link, the price will be X cents per packet. That’s 20% of what it costs to send a TELEX. Isn’t that revolutionary?”

Me: “A packet means how many Kbytes?”

Embratel Salesman: “What? It’s 64 bytes per packet!”

Me: “And if a user decides to download a larger file, say, 500 Kbytes? It’ll cost hundreds of dollars!”

Embratel Salesman: “Don’t worry, that will never happen!”

Around the end of 1993, RNP officially opened up the way for commercial providers in Brazil. Here I go again:

Me: “I want an Internet connection!”

Embratel Salesman: “OK. I suggest a 2400 or 9600 link, the price will be X cents per packet…”

Me: “Hey, let’s not repeat that again, I want a fixed-price 64 Kbps link!”

Embratel Salesman (after several phone calls): “OK, it seems to be a new service, that’ll be US$4000 per month. Next month we’ll install it for you.”

Me: “Gulp! OK. Where do I sign?”

Me: “I want 12 phone lines!”

Phone Company Salesman: “What model is your PABX?”

Me: “There’s no PABX, it’s for Internet access!”

Phone Company Salesman: “Never heard of it!”

It took some time, but I finally succeeded in establishing MetaLink, first as a BBS in 1993, then as an Internet access provider in 1994. We bought a dozen 14400 baud modems, a Cisco 2511 router and a Mac Quadra 900 as server. After N+1 problems with the phone lines, with the router connections (I had to import a connector and solder an adapter for the “Embratel Standard” modem), with overheating equipment and so forth, we were on the air. We started closing deals with companies in other states to export our provider model as a franchise. End of all problems? Did I become a dot-com-millionaire? Far from it. Hear this:

Me (on the phone): “Hello! Would you like to install the Internet at your company?”

Company Owner: “No. What’s that?”

Me: “You’ll be able to communicate with your clients, publish your catalog…”

Company Owner: “The clients should come to us, and our catalog is confidential! Bye!”

Me (on the phone): “Hello! Would you like to install the Internet at your company?”

Company Owner: “Hmm… well… maybe. How much does it cost?

Me: “X per month for a basic account. This doesn’t include your phone costs, of course.”

Company Owner: “What, that expensive and I still have to pay for a phone??? No way! Bye!”

Me (at a company): “Hello! I’m here to install your Internet connection.”

Company Owner: “OK. Install it in this computer here.” (takes me to a computer in the middle of the room.)

Me (looking around)”: “Hmm, I can’t see any phone around here…”

Company Owner“Phone? Whatever for? My employees have more important things to do!”

Me (looking at the computer): “To connect to the modem, of course… but this computer doesn’t even have one!”

Company Owner“And it won’t have either! I don’t want this Internet thing anymore! Bye!”

Me (on the phone): “Hello! Would you like to install the Internet at your company?”

Company Owner: “Yes!”

Me (wary): “You’ll need a phone line, a computer with a modem, and the phone line charges are not included. Do you still want it?”

Company Owner: “Of course, I’ve got all that. You can come and install it.”

At the company, I see an old-time Parks 1200/75 modem, the size of a VCR.

Me: “Look, this modem is obsolete. You’ll need at least a 14400 bps modem!”

Company Owner: “You’re nuts, I’ve been using this modem to communicate with my bank for 5 years, it works very well and I won’t change it! Bye!”

Client (on the phone): “Your Internet isn’t worth anything! The connection drops all the time and often doesn’t even start!”

Me: “Under what circumstances, for example?”

Client: “You want to see? Just look!!” (noises of a dialing modem)

Me: “Ah, but while someone’s on the phone the modem can’t communicate, that’s normal!”

Client: “That’s absurd! You want me to buy another phone line, is that it? You can cancel my subscription to this @#$%^!! Bye!”

Client (on the phone): “I deleted your software because it was taking up too much space, and now I can’t get onto the Internet anymore! That’s absurd!”

And so it goes… for some years it worked reasonably well, but user support started using up more and more resources and the operating costs weren’t falling as fast as I had thought they would. Finally, when large companies such as banks and newspapers started to build access providers with hundreds of lines, I redid my spreadsheets and deduced that there was no more money to be made with dial-up access providers. I sold my stake. MetaLink still went on for some years until it was absorbed into a larger company. But it was fun while it lasted…

(clique aqui para ler este artigo em português)

Seems that rumor sites are saying that this year’s WWDC will happen June 10th-15th. June used to be the standard month – the Great Intel Switch was announced June 6th (my birthday!), just 18 months ago. Last year it was August, and the consensus is that the delay was to allow the first Leopard seed to be ready… and a good thing it was, too.

Now, the rumored dates are coincidentally still unbooked at the Moscone Center site. Apple is, so far, mum on the subject but insiders say that an official date might be announced in February. Currently, my feeling is that June 10-15 might be accurate, and if it is, very possibly Steve Jobs will officially announce the availability of Leopard and of the iPhone at the keynote. And that may well be the first time that the rumored new Leopard GUI is shown in public; unless my suspicions that the iPhone interface was a preview of one of Leopard’s UI modes are confirmed, of course.

Other rumors speak of a “special announcement” in the second half of February, and some say specifically that Leopard will be shown then, and that it should be out in late March. I’m under NDA about details of course, but I frankly don’t believe Leopard will be sufficiently stable in March, and so, if any special event happens, it will be used to introduce new Mac hardware. Any upgrades to iApps will of course use the cool new Leopard technologies and so won’t be available before the big L ships.

I really hope to make it again to this year’s WWDC; the last two were great. We have a Scandinavia/Baltic trip starting in late June so we might even join the two trips.

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Nada de Java no iPhone

A notícia de que o iPhone não terá uma máquina virtual Java tem deixado a comunidade adepta do cafezinho de cabelo em pé. E, para piorar, o próprio Steve Jobs declarou que “ninguém mais usa Java”…

Discussões inflamadas à  parte, um ótimo motiv