killswtch.netA geek’s thoughts on various stuff

The first jump was supposed to happen on 7th April, but was cancelled due to high winds. We went along to the airfield today to re-attempt the jump, but once again the weather was not entirely in our favour. Therefore we will be trying again at an unknown date – booking will be left until the last minute so that we can at least have some idea of what the weather will be like.

There’s just over a week to go before my planned sky dive in aid of Alzheimer’s Society. So far sponsorships are at a pretty impressive £200, thanks in part to some very generous individuals. The target I set is just £50 away, so if you haven’t done so already please, please sponsor me for whatever you can afford through Just Giving! I’m paying for the full cost of the jump, so every penny donated goes to the charity (plus a bit more if you opt to give Gift Aid).

My first WordPress theme, KillerLight, has been released on wordpress.org. The theme is a slightly altered version of the one used on here.

Like this site, it has a javascript-based animated header which fades slowly for a lovely faux-lighting effect. All current WordPress features are supported, including widgets and gravatars.

One important thing to note about the theme is that IE 6 is not supported – it’s just not worth the effort. Instead, a message is displayed to users of IE < 7 informing them that they should either upgrade or get a different browser.

One day I decided to try out Windows 7 public beta. I had a spare 500 gig drive lying around, so I thought I’d put that in my main machine and disconnect the normal 2x 250gb drives which house my day-to-day Vista install.

So I hooked up the spare drive, got Windows 7 installed, played around for a little while then got bored with it.

Reverting my computer back to its normal configuration was easy. Just remove the spare drive and re-connect the old ones. So I did that, and powered back up and glanced at the side of my perforated case. ‘Funny’, I thought, ‘I don’t remember having an amber LED inside the computer… and what’s that sound? Cables hitting a fan?’. Then came the smell. ‘F^&*ck!!’

After the reflex move of yanking the power cord, I removed the side of the case and extracted one of the drives to find the scene below.

I think there may be a flaw in the design of the SATA power connector, which means that if it’s slightly dislodged then the 5v rail and ground can short out quite spectacularly. And when you have a high-power PSU, the over-current cut-out threshold is set too high so there’s no protection from things like this.

The drive which was damaged is part of a RAID 0 array, meaning that half of the data of my running system was on it. I have 2 independent methods of backup for my main computer: daily file backups of all important files (photos, source code, documents etc.) and a manual perdiodic backup using Norton Ghost. If the worst came to the worst, I should eventually be able to recover all my important stuff and theoretically a complete system image. However, last time I tried to restore from Ghost, the result was very unreliable and had to be dumped.

So, before I considered going down the route of backup restores I thought I’d have a go at repairing the drive.

It looked like only the board had become damaged, and at that only the connector and nearby soldering (the copper tracks had melted into balls) was affected. Ebay is your friend when it comes to finding rare parts, so I started there. I needed an exact match to the drive that I was trying to repair, since I needed a controller board which would work with the internal drive mechanics which should still be working fine.

The first order was a disappointment. The listing was slightly misleading, as it listed the exact model I wanted but the model I received was an equal size but completely different configuration.

The second order wasn’t as bad, but didn’t work. It was manufactured at a different plant, and used slightly different chips and a different firmware version. Although the drive spun up, none of the computers I tried it with would recognise it at all.

2nd replacement drive - didn't work

After wasting a chunk of money, I looked at the corner of my desk and whaddya know … an excact matching drive! Lesson: look around for things hiding in plain sight before wasting money. The matching drive was originally paired with the damaged one, but got replaced when it sounded like it was dying (turned out to be something else).

The identical drives which provided the solution

So, swapping the board from the twin drive to the broken one solved the problem. 2 weeks later I had a working machine again.

My sister and I are going to be jumping out of a plane at circa 13,000 ft (weather permitting) to raise money for charity on 7th April.

I’m raising money for Alzheimer’s Society, and she’s collecting sponsorships for Cancer Resarch UK.

If you would like to sponsor me, I’ve set up a Just Giving page at http://www.justgiving.com/simonsbigjump

The image above is just for illustration. Since this will be my first jump, I have no photography of me falling out of the sky, so I used the GIMP to make something.

If you haven’t noticed already, I’ve made a few improvements to the KillerLight theme.

• There is now a JavaScript-driven header animation, which has the ability to detect a slow computer and disable itself. You can turn it on and off manually with the button at the top-right.
• A few more icons have been added here and there
• The ‘read more’ link is now styled
• The footer can expand vertically instead of being fixed height

I’ve taken a look at it in IE6, and it’s not as badly broken as I feared. At the moment the animated header screws things up royally, and the top horizontal navigation doesn’t display horizontally. I hope to at least get things looking reasonably presentable soon, by disabling the animated header for IE6 and changing the way the top nav is styled.

As for a future release of the theme, it’s all planned out in my head. A non-branded version of the header images will be included, so anyone can have that fading animation. The name of the blog will be overlayed in standard text.

I also have a few ideas for spin-off themes, which are a slightly different take (new graphics) on the same structure. Watch this space!

This morning I really struggled to get out of bed. Being very tired still, in a nice warm bed while outside it was -7 °C and my room probably wasn’t far off that, it took some convincing that I really did need to go to work. While laying there, between drifting in and out of consciousness, I got to wondering if I could make my room a little warmer without changing the central heating settings or adding another heater. I had the idea that I could set up my computers to respond to temperature.

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A few months ago we were given a couple of old laptops by some relatives. I cleaned both of them up, gave one a fresh install of XP Home and the other Ubuntu. The former has now become the family PC and the latter is sitting on top of some draws in my room unused because the power supply connector is nearly unusable.

Being the lazy person I am, wanting to be able to watch TV and surf from the comfort of my bed, I decided I needed a laptop that actually works. When someone on the UKHA mailing list pointed to an offer on Amazon for an Acer Aspire One L150 (white) for £199, I decided I had to go for it. I wasn’t too keen on the white netbook though, so I paid a little more for a lovely blue number.

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Inspired by my friend David’s own post, this is my brief review of 2008 and my goals for 2009.

There hasn’t been any major change in my life through 2008 (that I can reveal on here, anyway), but I’ve managed to do plenty of interesting things at work. I think the thing that 2008 will be remembered for is the dramatic downturn in the world economy, though fortunately I’ve not been touched by it so far other than seen dramatic interest rate cuts on my savings.

For 2009 I hope to:

• Become a Microsoft Certified Professional
• Complete a software project I’m working on, and sell it
• Buy a house/flat
• Get more exercise
• Push for a revival of socialising at work (it’s died off over the last year)
• Have another great holiday somewhere with friends from uni
• Do more non-C# coding, to revive the broadness of my programming skills base – specifically PHP

No plans to move abroad, though moving somewhere else in the UK isn’t out of the question – depends on the circumstances and the incentives.

Let’s hope that 2009 brings a more promising outlook for the economy.

The CurrentCost power monitor has become very popular amongst amateur home automators and those technically-savvy who want to keep an eye on how much electricity they are using (and ultimately how much they are going to have to pay in bills). A couple of months ago I purchased the CurrentCost device and a USB cable to connect it to a computer from eBay. Having just seen their eBay store, it looks like they’ve got a fantastic new model on the way, but this article is about the older version.

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