After occasionally wondering over the past 2 years whether spending money on extra drives to build a RAID 5 array in my desktop PC was worthwhile, I now feel vindicated after one of my drives (a Western Digital WD5000YS) failed over the weekend. Upon restarting my PC, Intel Matrix Storage Console was able to identify the failed drive, but it was impossible to actually use the computer due to constant delayed write error notifications and constant freezing. After noting down the serial number of the failed drive from Storage Console, I was able to remove the failed drive, and my PC is again working although the volume now shows Degraded status.
Even better, Western Digital have an Advance Replacement RMA program where the replacement drive is shipped immediately without needing to first return the faulty drive. They reserve the value of the replacement from your credit card, and this is not deducted as long as the faulty drive is returned within 30 days.
After repeatedly retrying the upgrade for about 3 hours due to activation server errors I was finally able to upgrade by Wednesday evening.
Since then things have gone pretty smoothly. Finally having the ability to copy and paste is a godsend, as are basic things one would expect from a phone like sending contacts to other people via MMS/email (unfortunately no SMS), receiving MMSes (although it took 12 hours for O2 to respond to my activation SMS) etc.
Spotlight (the search feature on the home screen) seems useful, although emails not downloaded from the server will not be searched. In order search mails on the server, the search function inside Mail has to be used – a search box has been added which appears when scrolling all the way to the top of a mailbox in email, and after searching emails on the phone, a “Continue Search on Server” option is presented which uses the IMAP SEARCH command to search mail on the server.
The phone screen also seems to have been pimped somewhat with more information visible on the recent calls listing to show which of a contact’s numbers (home/mobile/work/etc) the entry refers to. Had a problem for a few hours after the upgrade where the names of my favourite numbers had been replaced by their telephone numbers, but that seems to have gone away on its own.
The maps application looks very slightly different, with slightly different graphic for the GPS location. Also the iPod application now supports more precise scrubbing to find a position in a track – by dragging your finger down the resolution increases. Also there are a bunch more tweaks I haven’t yet tried…
A quick guide to migrating contacts, calendar, email and email filters from GMail (user@gmail.com) to Google Apps (user@domain.com).
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Just came across this, looks like it has been around on Sourceforge for a while as part of lib-high-scale. Designed for large numbers of CPUs (e.g. Azul hardware), but microbenchmarks claim a small improvement over ConcurrentHashMap even on 2 CPUs.
Steps for applying a patch to the Apache source tree and building a Debian package of the patched Apache in order to install via apt as normal.
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After planning to do this for some time, I have finally finished setting up my domain as a blog. Still not 100% finished with the layout, which required an ugly javascript hack to sort out the column heights, but at least I can start posting now!
