YetAnotherPersonalHomepage

Another year closer to 40. :)

I commented in mid-2006 about motorcycles in the HOV lane in the context of the state of Virginia ignoring federal highway transportation law. Now here we have New York City defies federal law even after the NYS DMV agreed with the motorcyclist and removed the violation from her record.

Nice example of the rule of law from the Bloomberg administration.

I was reviewing some notes from last year and a colleague made an off-hand remark about software testing,

There is no such thing as no time, just no priority.”

Paul Graham released his language Arc, see here for the background and the January 29th, 2008 announcement.

Which brings us to this clever job posting for an Arc Developer:

Arc developer, seven+ years experience required.

It’s geek humor if you were around in the 90’s when recruiters were looking for Java developers with five to seven years of experience in a language that had only been publicly introduced in late-1995.

I have a knack for buying into removable storage that looks like it will be great but eventually ends up in the market dustbin- syquest drives, LS-120 floppy, Iomega Jaz, etc. I’ve had them all. I was digging in this collection of also-ran storage and found a Castlewood Orb drive and the Castlewood branded usb-scsi adapter. I’ve been interested in getting to one of the disks that has my 1999-2000 mboxes and other odds and ends. These are also backed up on DAT- another storage medium that should have failed- but my DAT drive is an internal, full-height model and I don’t have a PC lying around with a bay. What can I say, I sure can pick ‘em.

The usb-scsi adapter is a Shuttle Technologies eUSCSI chipset and recognized under OSX Leopard. All it took to get working was an active terminator on the drive and setting the SCSI Id to 0 (zero). That SCSI Id means no other device is going to work daisy-chained, but given the roughly 500Kb/s transfer speed I saw this is just good enough to pull my old files off and move them to another medium.

Here’s a dump from the Apple System Profiler:

eUSCSI Bridge Ver 1.11:

  Capacity: 2.05 GB
  Removable Media:  Yes
  Detachable Drive: Yes
  BSD Name: disk2
  Version:  1.00
  Bus Power (mA):   100
  Speed:    Up to 12 Mb/sec
  Manufacturer: Shuttle Technology Inc.
  Mac OS 9 Drivers: No
  Partition Map Type:   MBR (Master Boot Record)
  Product ID:   0x0002
  Serial Number:    07
  S.M.A.R.T. status:    Not Supported
  Vendor ID:    0x04e6
  Volumes:
MISC:
  Capacity: 1.99 GB
  Available:    1.2 GB
  Writable: Yes
  File System:  MS-DOS FAT16
  BSD Name: disk2s5
  Mount Point:  /Volumes/MISC

It even shows up properly in the Disk Utility and can be repartitioned.