This fall I am raising money for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society by participating in the BikeMS 150 – a one-hundred and fifty mile bike ride which raises money to support MS research, programs and services dedicated to improving the quality of life for individuals affected by MS.

I’m asking you for a small donation to help support the cause. If you’d like to know more about where your money will go, you can find out more here. Any amount you can give will help.

My donation link is here: give to support Kevin and Team Microsoft.

Many thanks, in advance!

Kevin

Dancing Pigeons - Ritalin from Blink on Vimeo.

(via dishwasheronmars, via reddit)

M and took our first day trip on the Sportster today out to Poulsbo and then Port Gamble out on the Kitsap Peninsula. It was the longest either of us have ever been out on the Harley (a little less than 60 miles round trip). We both really enjoyed the trip – we set out with no plan other than to get food in Poulsbo and to find our way from there. We took off around noon via the Bainbridge ferry and headed straight to Poulsbo.

View Larger Map

Poulsbo is this tiny little town that bills itself as “little Norway”. It’s cute – right along the waterfront with plenty of crafty (if not tourist-trappy) little shops to kill time in. We had a massive (and great) meal at Tizley’s Euro Pub.

This is a picture of our massive pork shank (Schweinshax mit kraut). And, yes, we did finish it. :) The kraut that was with it was awesome. We also got to stop into the Poulsbohemian Coffeehouse where Margaret contributed at least two lines to their effort to produce "The World’s Longest Scarf" (they still have several miles to go before they beat out some old Scottish ladies who currently hold the record).

After Poulsbo we headed up to Port Gamble to grab dessert at the General Store. We then took a quick, scenic drive over to the Kingston ferry.

Having to do it over again, we probably would have drove back down to the Bainbridge ferry vs. taking the Kingston back over to mainland. Margaret didn’t care much for riding the bike on the interstate, and we probably could have had some much better scenery on the way back home. All together, it was a great way to spend a Saturday.

In the immortal words of Bill Murray, ‘We Came. We Saw. We kicked it’s ass!”

Yet another year of spectacular fun & another awesome team. We might not have been the fastest. We might not have been the most well trained…

… but you can be damn sure we were the most fun!

I can’t say I hit any PRs or did anything close to my best running this year, but that’s not what Ragnar is really about anyway. :) It’s more about the dancing…

… and maybe some doughnuts.

Probably the best part this year was the team of 13,15,17…43 year olds that we spent most of our second day racing with. They were a blast. I got to race their 15 year old girl to the finish line of my last leg. She even patted me on the head and told me “good job” when we were done. :P

The full photo story is here.

It’s 200+ miles from Seattle to Portland by bike. It’s fun. It’s kinda insane. And I definitely want to do it again. The Cascade Bicycle Club does a great job putting on this event – particularly considering the 10,000+ riders participating. It went really well, and had a great time riding with my Windows crew.

It was a challenge to keep up with my group on several of the stretches (particularly the up hills!), but I was impressed with how fast we could get going as a group drafting off of one another. We had splits where we averaged 17.7 MPH across spans of 2 hours!

We split our ride into two days, stopping at Castle Rock at the end of Day 1:

Day 1 – 135+ miles, about 8 hours in the saddle (16.1 MPH Average)
Day 1 GPS Tracks Here

Day 2 - 65+ miles, about 4 hours in the saddle (16.9 MPH Average)
Day 2 GPS Tracks Here

Given those numbers, I’m tempted to try to do the whole 200 mi in one day next year. I think if we keep our stops to a minimum (we stopped for a total of 4 hours on the first day) we could make it happen.

Backpacking trip in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest along the abandoned Suiattle River Road, with day hikes along Downy Creek and Sulfur Mountain trails, into the Glacier Peak wilderness.

Andy and I took 3 days to hike along the Suiattle River Road this past weekend. The weather was mostly cloudy and spitting rain for most of the trip, but we lucked out on our second day and ended up with at least a little sunshine and a dry sky to enjoy our campfire under.

Day 1: While the company was great, the hiking was not the best. Day one we hiked 14 miles total, but 8 of those miles were along the very boring Suiattle River road. We knew it would be this way – such is the price you pay for seclusion – but I can say that it wasn’t worth the monotony. We found a pretty sweet campsite at Downy Creek, set up our tent on the sandy banks, and headed out for the Downy Creek hike. The 3mi one way trip was pretty & lush & uneventful. We ended the day after 14mi of walking by passing out before sunset – I blame the Makers Mark and the Beef Stroganoff.

Day 2:  We headed out for our hike up Sulfur Mountain looking forward to some actual vertical elevation (4000ft) and decent mileage (10mi round trip). The f0rest was absolutely lush, and we certainly got our fill of the greenery as we wound our way up, up, up into the clouds and eventually snow. The snow level kept us from continuing on at the top of Sulfur Mountain, where we had our lunch and turned back the way we came. 

We ended the day by taking a quick day hike up Sulfur Creek hoping to find the hot springs that our Green Trails maps eluded to. While Sulfur Creek lives up to it’s name, we did not find the source of the stink in the form of warm pools of bubbling water. We found a cairn at one fork in the trail that lead to a great view of the creek, but no hot springs were to be found. After scrounging up some firewood, we headed back to camp and enjoyed a nice long evening by the fire. All told, we put in about 16mi on Sunday.

Day 3: Our last day was nothing much to speak about – a long hike along the 8mi Suiattle River road back out – but ended fantastically at the Darrington Burger Barn.

Pictures uploaded Here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/kmwoley/20100529SuiattleRiverRoad#

I am super excited about my brand new 2009 Kona Sutra. I took my first ride on it last week to work and back, with a detour up to Naked City Brewery/Taphouse for Alex’s surprise birthday party. But today Andy and I took our bikes out for their first _real_ ride. The picture above is over looking Mt. Rainier from the I-90 bridge.

We did a big loop around (most of) Lake Washington from Capitol Hill, up over the north end of the lake and then over to the Microsoft campus. From there we headed south to go over I-90 and back home for a total of 46 miles. We took a break in there for lunch at the Matador in Redmond, which has an amazing pork BBQ sandwich.

The GPS tracks are here: http://connect.garmin.com/activity/22019770

Altogether it was almost a 4 hour ride – not including the hour or so that we stopped for lunch. The fastest I got the bike up to was 41 mph, which was a blast! Just like skiing, I love it when gravity works in my favor. :) The disc breaks which worked really well; I could really feel the stopping power. But I will say that both Andy and I had a tough go of some of those hills. Also, there’s got to be an easier way to get back from Madrona than the way we took – those hills were just ridiculous!

I can already see that our training for the Europe trip is going to take some serious work.

This past month I’ve realized the simultaneous need to add more hard drive storage and decrease the probability of losing the data stored within. While I fully realize that redundant hard disks are not a substitute for a backup, I do want to use a RAID array to reduce the likelihood that I have to restore that data from a backup. Also, I plan to put data on that disk that I would be annoyed to lose, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world (i.e. music, movies, etc.).

Disk drives are cheap (1.5TB is currently running around $100), but industrial-grade RAID controllers are not. Being that I’m cheap, have an old (4 years is old, right?) system, and just need a bare-minimum amount of reliability I’m looking for the cheapest way to add a couple of mirrored drives. That basically means that I use a “fake RAID” hardware controller or a solution managed completely by Windows. There are various pros and cons to each, but I’ll tell you up front that Windows 7 software RAID was what I chose because of performance & trust. After the break I’ll get to the details as to why.

RAID Options

There’s plenty of advice around on what type of RAID you should use for your particular application. I recommend this Tom’s Hardware Guide write-up, and this one is also pretty good. In general, hardware RAID is better than both software RAID and so-called “fake RAID” solutions which rely upon a combination of hardware and software. But hardware RAID is expensive and overkill for my needs.

As someone who is not willing to spend the money on a hardware RAID solution, I wanted to determine the performance implications of choosing between the cheap RAID 0 (striping) and RAID 1 (mirroring) options available to me, along with the other advantages/disadvantages of each option. If you really want to get into the pros and cons of the solutions below, check out:

• http://www.techimo.com/articles/index.pl?photo=149
• http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/which-one-is-better-software-raid-or-hardware-raid/

Option 1: Microsoft Windows 7 Software RAID

Windows has built into the OS the ability to RAID disks (since Windows 2000, I believe). The biggest advantages are that it does not require special hardware or drivers as it is completely managed by the Windows OS. This is good because if your motherboard or hard disk controller goes out, you can put those same disks in another Win7 machine and not worry about if the hardware is compatible. Another advantage, if this is important, is that you can RAID at the disk volume level – the entire disk does not need to be dedicated to a RAID (so you can make good use of unmatched disks). I particularly liked that the management of the disks is built into the Windows “Computer Management” management console.

Option 2: Hardware-Software RAID (a.k.a. Fake RAID)

Hardware RAID is exactly what it sounds like – a special hardware controller card manages the disks to provide the striping and/or redundancy. The key advantage of a full, dedicated hardware RAID is that it requires no software or drivers. That is not the case with “fake RAID” hardware cards that use a combination of special hardware and software to manage the disks. Still, hardware-software RAID should provide some performance advantage over full software RAID. In my testing, however, I did not find that to be the case.

Performance Testing Methodology & Setup

System: ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe Motherboard (Socket 478, Intel 865PE),Intel Pentium 4 3.0 Prescott 3.0GHz 1MB L2 Cache, 4 GB RAM, Windows 7 Ultimate

Drives: Two Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA

I used IOMeter (http://www.iometer.org/) to test each configuration using the same configuration. My IOMeter configuration file is located here. I ran 4 sets of tests; sequential read, sequential write, 70% sequential read + 30% sequential write, and 70% random read + 30% random write. For each test, 1GB of data was read or written in 256KB chunks. Each test was run twice to gain some (limited) measure of trust in the results.

Each test was run on two different hard disk controllers that support RAID: the Intel ICH5R SATA Controller RAID that is built into my motherboard and a SIIG SATA 4-channel RAID PCI Card - (Silicon Image Sil3114r5 Chipset) - which I purchased for testing. The SIIG PCI controller was an absolute piece of crap. The included management software was buggy as hell on Windows 7, and the performance was atrocious – roughly 50% slower than the Intel controller in almost all the tests. This is to be expected, since it is a PCI card and doesn’t have the advantage of being as tightly integrated into the processor’s southbridge. Plus Windows wouldn’t build a RAID 1 on it so that configuration couldn’t be tested. For that reason, I’m not showing the graphs here but they’re in the attached Excel file for the curious.

Results

Windows RAID performed just as well, if not better than, the hardware controller RAIDs tested and Windows always incurred the lowest CPU utilization. The results are a mixed bag, where there were some cases where Windows did somewhat better than the Intel RAID and others where the HW solution did slightly better. The key take away from the performance results are that the speeds were all within a few MBps of each other, which I consider to be in the noise, while Windows used less CPU consistently.

All of the raw data is in this Excel file.

Sequential Read Tests

Sequential Write Tests

Sequential Read/Write Tests

Random Read/Write Tests

Conclusion

Supposedly the main advantage of a fake RAID is that is should perform better than full software RAID, both in the disk transfer rates as well as CPU load. And that may be the case for some configurations, but I did not find that to be the case in my testing. Windows performed just as well as the “fake RAID” with a slightly lower CPU load. Given that I’m more comfortable with the Windows management consoles than the software provided by Intel to manage their RAID, I chose to mirror my drives via Windows RAID 1.

Additional notes

I don’t claim that your results will be the same as mine – I ran these tests because I was curious. If you disagree with the results, or have a different opinion, that’s cool. I’m not here to debate you. I just wanted to share my findings in the hopes that it will be useful for someone else in a similar situation. Please feel to comment if you get a different result or have experience. Enjoy!

My recent hard disk failure made me realize that I had no idea where to find the CHDSK logs that are created when Windows runs CHKDSK at boot. In my case, I had just installed a drive that had a bunch of NTFS corruptions caused by a different computer.

Below I walk though what I think is the easiest way to find the CHKDSK logs (and more) which are available in the Windows Event Log.

Short Answer

1. Start Windows PowerShell as Administrator

2. Type in the following at the prompt:
get-winevent -FilterHashTable @{logname="Application"; id="1001"}| ?{$_.providername –match "wininit"} | fl timecreated, message

Note: if you want to limit the search to just the recent events, you can add the starttime="11/25/2009" to the FilterHashTable parameter above.

Long Answer

Windows Event Log
Windows stores the results of CHKDSK, among other things, in the Windows Event Log. This is a good thing because the Event Log does a great job managing a lot of data. Given that so many different parts of the OS are involved in writing to the disk, it wouldn’t make sense to write the results in several different text files. You’d never be able to find out anything. The only downside to this is that you have to learn to use the Event Log, which isn’t that hard.

Windows PowerShell & the Event Log
The easiest way to read the Event Log is to use Windows PowerShell and the Get-WinEvent cmdlet. (Note: Windows PowerShell is built into Windows 7/Server 2008 R2.  You will have to install PowerShell V2 on Windows Vista to get this to work.)

PowerShell makes it is easy to just for exactly what you need. For example, in the “Short Answer” above I just ask for the specific CHKDSK event ID 1001 from the “Microsoft-Windows-Wininit” event provider:

get-winevent -FilterHashTable @{logname="Application"; id="1001"}| ?{$_.providername –match "wininit"} | fl timecreated, message

But how did you know where to find that!?
Truthfully, I really didn’t. I had to dig. This is one of the reasons I use PowerShell. Sometimes I have to ask for everything and filter through to find what I want. In this case, I started with looking at absolutely everything that had happened since 7:00am today, which was the time of my last boot. I dumped this all to Out-GridView so I could see it easily.

get-winevent -FilterHashTable @{logname="*"; starttime="7:00am"} | select timecreated,providername,id,containerlog,message | out-gridview

(Note: that the ‘starttime’ can take all manner of date and time formats, e.g. 11/25/2009 would have worked as well. If you need to set an upper bound on the time, use ‘endtime’.)

Next, I used Out-GridView to filter the results looking for the keyword “CHKDSK” in the Message field. This showed me who logged the event (Microsoft-Windows-Wininit) and what ID the event has (1001). From there, I created the query that is in the “Short” answer above.

What about other related events?
I was wondering the same thing. Probably the most useful query here is to search for the keyword “Disk” in Out-GridView which will show you several events of interest. It was interesting to see that there are also several events from NTFS, for example, which have indicated that the volume was corrupt in the first place. Also, I apparently have a few bad blocks on some of my disks I’m gonna see about taking care of…

Alternatives
You can also see the same data in the Windows EventViewer, but I find it much harder to find things in there unless you know exactly what you’re looking for. The Event Viewer can be found on Vista and Windows 7 by going to Start and then searching for “Event Viewer”.

Logical guess: looks like the controller for the external drive has failed. Time to pull it out and stick it in the server.

[edit] Yep… my Adaptec USB 2.0 external enclosure released the last of it’s remaining magic blue smoke. Dropping the drive into my Windows 7 server box rebuilt the drive indexes and recovered the data via chkdsk.