Ho’s Chinese Restaurant

Very picturesque part of North Yorkshire and best associated with the Brontës.

Unassigned IP Address 169.x.x.x

I’d actually experienced this before while staying in a hotel and trying to use their free internet but had assumed it was the hotel’s problem. Not what I wanted to see from a new router.

Suggestions from the internet ranged from upgrading the firmware, rebooting the router, trying a new cable, and fiddling with various firewall options. Nothing worked. The strange thing was that running Windows via VMware Fusion on the same machine worked fine – Windows detected the connection instantly. It had to be a software issue.

After a bit of poking about I came across some Apple plist files that store network settings. A quick delete and reboot, and the connection was made without fuss. I can’t say why it wasn’t working, but somewhere along the line I’ve fiddled with something (not surprising, given the amount of software I install and remove), and it needed to be reset.

For future reference, and for anyone else who has the same problem, I deleted these files:

/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist
/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/NetworkInterfaces.plist

Remember that you will need to reboot afterward. OS X seems quite happy rebuilding the files, but if you want to play it safe you can copy them elsewhere before deleting.

If you’re in the market for a quick and simple way to display a Gravatar in a WordPress sidebar then check out the recently released Gravatar Widget plugin, as seen on WordPress.com.

Some of the features of the plugin:

• Email address of Gravatar taken from a user on the blog, or any address
• Change size of Gravatar
• Image alignment
• URL for Gravatar (when someone clicks on the image)
• Add arbitrary text to your widget
• Fully localized

Anyway, a while back I found an unusual hand-printed business card had been slipped in alongside the junk. I almost threw it away before noticing that it contained the URL for a WordPress.com blog. On closer inspection it turned out to be an advert for a blog about the area in which I am living, and which must have been hand delivered by the author – an unusual way to promote a blog. I can’t imagine that a similar online method of promotion would have made it past spam filters.

The card reads:

Over the coming days, weeks, months and years I am going to write and tell you about my life here in Spitalfields at the heart of London. How can I ever describe the exuberant richness and multiplicity of culture in this place to you? This is both my task and my delight.

The blog itself is an interesting read and I’ve already learned about several places of interest in my local area, as well as reading about some of the more colourful local characters. It seems that sometimes hand delivered spam is ok.

• Spitalfields Life

• HeadSpace Guide
• SEO Tips

Thanks Andrew!

Today marks my first day working full-time as a ‘code wrangler’ for Automattic. As a prelude to this the past three weeks have been spent manning the support desk at WordPress.com, which has been enormously useful in learning how WordPress.com works.

Suffice to say that I’m very excited about what’s coming up, and I’m looking forward to working with the rest of the team. There’s a whole bunch of good stuff going on and after having spent four years using WordPress, writing about WordPress, and developing more than a few plugins for WordPress, I can’t wait to get stuck in.

The MB662 is not a complicated NAS storage system. It has no web server, no iTunes software, no ethernet port or media server. It does however have a couple of flashing blue lights and this list of features:

• Supports 2×3.5″ SATA I/II drives
• Up to 4TB capacity
• USB 2.0 + eSATA (Silicon Image 5744 chipset)
• Hardware RAID with six settings
• No software required
• Screwless design
• 40mm adjustable speed fan
• Hot swappable
• Compatible with Windows and Mac
• Supplied with USB and eSATA cables

For this review the MB622 was supplied by Icy Dock and is available to buy from Amazon.

One thing for sure, the Icy Dock MB622 is a very solid piece of kit. In fact, you could probably use it to smash a few rocks. The silver casing is made out of one piece of aluminium, with a metal back plate, and two plastic drive doors on the front. The doors are the least sturdy part of the enclosure, feeling both wobbly and plasticky. However, as you are unlikely to be swinging from them this is less of an issue, and when closed you don’t even notice.

The back consists of a large protruding fan with speed setting, an eSATA and USB socket, a locking hole, a power socket, on/off rocker, ‘reset’ switch, and a series of 3 DIP RAID switches.

Most of these sockets and switches are self-explanatory. The RAID DIP switches control the RAID mode:

• JBOD – drives are independent and show separately
• BIG (RAID 0) – Both drives are combined into one big volume
• Fast (RAID 0) – Both drives are stripped together into one big volume, offering the same capacity as BIG, but with increased speed.
• Safe (RAID 1) – Both drives are mirrored, providing duplicate data on both drives
• Safe 33 (RAID 1) – Like the standard Safe, but only 33% of the drives are used for RAID 1, with the rest being used for RAID 0
• Safe 50 (RAID 1) – As expected, 50% is RAID 1 and 50% is RAID 0

The fan speed can be changed using a ‘volume’ control. This control seems to have a fair amount of range, with a lot of it having little effect. While it is great to be able to adjust the noise of the unit, there is no indication as to how this affects the temperature of your drives. Essentially you’ll need to a pick a noise level you are comfortable with (i.e. the same as your computer), and hope this won’t cause overheating.

Icy Dock describe the unit as having an anti-vibration design, which does seem to hold true – there was no rattling during the testing.

Talking of temperature the enclosure itself barely seems to register any change and effectively acts as a big heat sink. The power supply, like most supplies, gets hot quickly and stays hot regardless of whether the drives are in use.

Inserting Drives

This is almost too simple. At the top of the enclosure are two inline switches which, when pressed, pop open the front doors. Pulling the door down will engage a lever system that pushes any existing drive out of the sockets at the back. Inserting a drive really consists of aligning the drive sockets to the correct side, sliding the drive in, and closing the door – all connections are made. Super stuff.

Performance

All results taken from XBench and averaged over five readings.

So quite a surprising result. As expected the internal SATA drive is significantly faster in all respects. The 2.5″ PATA drive out-performs the MB622 in sequential tests, but is noticeably slower in random speed tests. A comparison with drives over at Small Net Builder shows that these results are maybe not so unexpected. Note that other RAID settings will probably give different results.

Unfortunately I don’t have an eSATA connection, so no results there.

Noise Level

An important factor for anyone considering placing the enclosure in an office or bedroom is the noise level. Naturally this will be affected by your choice of drive.

At close range the full speed fan is very noisy and, even though the results above suggest otherwise, is noticeable across an average sized room. At the lowest speed the noise is only detectable at close distance.

As mentioned before, there is no indication as to what speed is recommended to cool a drive.

Note that these results are not produced under studio conditions and are just meant to give a representation of the noise levels.

Other Details

The unit is supplied with both USB and eSATA cable, power supply, manual, and MB622 enclosure:

Conclusion

All told the MB622 is a nice sturdy little unit and would certainly fit in well with an aluminium Mac setup. Noise levels can be changed from loud to quiet, although there is no temperature feedback to know what is required. With a total capacity of up to 4TB it’s does offer a lot of potential storage space.

In terms of ease-of-use it is simplicity itself. Drives are slotted in, a RAID setting is chosen, and the unit is then available for formatting.

Due to the nature of this review, long-term stability is yet to be ascertained.

As I say elsewhere:

Guangzhou is a two-column fixed width theme for both WordPress and bbPress. It is highly configurable, with two widget areas (sidebar and bottom), as well as customisable skins and many other options. It supports threaded and paged comments, making for very flexible discussion pages, as well as separating pings and trackbacks from comments – essential to keep the flow of conversation consistent.

Guangzhou has been in use on this site for over a year now and drives the appearance of both the main website and support forum. One of the main reasons for selecting bbPress for the forum was it’s integration with WordPress, and this theme brings this even closer.

I even took some extra time to make a short video:

Note that this theme requires WordPress 2.8 or bbPress 1.0

In addition, a Japanese translation has been provided by Naoko McCracken.