Mar 26 2006

Articles and Stuff…

Category: WebsitesJonathan @ 7:38 pm

Hmm.. I really need to write another article, well I suppose I don’t NEED to, I just want to! It’s pretty addictive writing is! Dispite a few annonymous comments on my articles by some arseholes who are too chicken to give a name or an email address i shall continue writing them!

Although it may not be the most exciting stuff it IS interesting to me, and I’m sure other people might find it interesting too! So if you wish to post your abusive notes do them somewhere else or at least leave an email or a name!

Anyhoo, I’m thinking about writing an article about using a Compact Flash card as a bootable hard drive, as I’ve been playing around and you can do some really cool stuff with it!

Been a bit busy with other web projects at the moment, spent quite a while working on a site for Tameside Netball Club. The design is pretty much finished now and I just really need the content to go on. I also need to get the forum fully tested.

This site has been a real adventure for me as it’s given me a chance to develop my own web based WYSIWYG content management systems using a great script called aBitWhizzy. It’s an AJAX-style app which gives users a cross-browser compatible online webpage editor. As powerful as Frontpage or Dreamweaver and as easy to use as Microsoft Word! If you want to have a play with it visit here.

Although it is an amazing app it does have some features missing and it has given me a real chance to develop add-on features and integrate these with aBitWhizzy. For example, although images can be selected from the server and added to the pages there is no way to add additional images onto the server, so i have designed a basic PHP file upload script, customized it’s look and increased it’s security and have seamlessly integrated it into aBitWhizzy. I’m very impressed with it because you wouldn’t even think you had left the page builder software at all, and when you return from uploading your pictures the new images appear instantly on screen ready for use on your pages.

It’s all still a work in progress at the moment and hopefully I can start putting content on soon , but it’s certainly a very exciting project!

Jonathan


Mar 25 2006

NAS Server Woes!

Category: Geek Stuff,ITJonathan @ 2:54 pm

I have just purchased a NAS HDD Enclosure which I was currently using with a 120GB maxtor drive to store my files and using the FTP functions to give my friends access over the net. It’s basically just a normal USB HDD enclosure with a board inside with a extractor fan to cool the drive and RJ45 network connection, with a metal casing that slides over it. (If you aren’t sure of what NAS is click here)

Well today I was showing someone the drive (forgetting it wasn’t all screwed together) I was holding it by the metal case and the guts of the box and heavy drive all came crashing out onto the desk. 100% my fault of course, but then something weird and totally unexpected happened.

I knew there was very little chance of the drive surviving this while switched on! and I was right, the NAS box no longer recognised the drive in the machine and it was completely totalled. When I turned the box off and on again I got a strange clicking noise and then a musical tune, definately not a mechanical noise but a real tune (imagine a song being played through POST beeps).

I presumed this was the NAS box’s way of telling me the drive was blown. Until I pluged the drive into a PC and found the tune was coming from the drive itself.

A bit of googling came up with this forum post (Link)

A guy on the forum posted this (Download), which is the exact noise i am getting.

Another guy posted this video, (Download) again the exact noise i am getting.

Thankfully the drive was just a spare and I already had 2 seperate backups of the data on it. Apart from being gutted at losing a good drive through my own silly fault everything is ok now and I have replaced the drive and the server is working fine again!

That certainly ranks are one of the strangest things I’ve seen, along with motherboard capacitor’s leaking electrolyte!

Update: After asking my friends on grc.techtalk, It seems the musical tune was coming from a component called a “voice coil” which the drive uses to locate data on the drive cylinder heads, this voice coil is coincidentaly the same component that causes the noise to be produced in a simple speaker. So I can only assume the voice coil inside the hard drive was damaged and was causing this strange noise to occur!

Jonathan