Martin Wulffeld's Personal Site

Movies 2012-01-02 - 2012-01-09

2012-01-02T00:00:00Z

Movies 2011-12-26 - 2012-01-02

2011-12-26T00:00:00Z

Movies 2011-12-19 - 2011-12-26

2011-12-19T00:00:00Z

Movies 2011-11-21 - 2011-11-28

2011-11-21T00:00:00Z

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2

My vote: 8/10.

OS X - Slow Boot Up With Intel X25-M SSD

2010-06-11T09:04:00Z

I’ve got two brand spanking new MacBook Pros. One is an Core i7 and the other a Core i5 which I was experiencing slow boot up times with.

The i7 is blazingly fast and boots my Intel X25-M 160 GB SSD in around 20 seconds from pressing the power.

The i5 (2.53 Ghz) however with the same SSD was booting in 50-60 seconds. Enough time to go make coffee, read the paper and build a house. Unacceptable to say the least.

Various solutions online suggest re-installing Snow Leopard but what worked for me was resetting the PRAM. After I did that it boots like normal (~25 seconds).

Obviously the problem isn’t with the specific SSD but the fact that the PRAM is in a bad state of some sort.

How to reset the PRAM

Google Chrome for Mac / OS X Download

2009-05-19T21:01:00Z

Google Chrome is a browser made by Google. The reason behind creating Google Chrome in a market where we have old giants like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s Firefox, Opera Software’s Opera and Apple’s Safari was the fact that Google felt the need to start from scratch and design a browser to handle the needs of today which for instance is supporting JavaScript heavy sites such as GMail.

It took me a few minutes to locate an OS X version of Google Chrome. It is still under development just like the Linux version but nightly builds can be downloaded here.

Bare in my mind that nightly builds aren’t even of beta quality.

autotest rspec hanging

2009-03-18T09:23:00Z

In case you experience autotest hanging around doing nothing with your rspecs simply put RSPEC=true in front of the command or add it permanently to your environment.

RSPEC=true autotest

Why Do People Laugh at Sarah Palin

2008-09-28T14:53:00Z

Because she’s a space cadet.

Formatting Problems with a My Book 1TB

2008-08-14T18:33:00Z

I just got a My Book Essential Edition 1TB external hard drive.

It came formatted for Windows with a FAT32 filesystem but as I’m on OS X I wanted to repartition and change the filesystem to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Should be easy enough using Disk Utility but it just kept bitching about some error:

“The underlying task reported failure on exit.”

Useless. No information as to what actually went wrong. Looking in the system.log (/var/log/system.log) more information was revealed.

Disk Utility[587]: newfs_hfs: /dev/rdisk1s1: partition size not a multiple of 4K.

So by changing the partitions to be a multiple of 4K everything now works.

The Story of a Passionate Life

2008-01-25T01:35:00Z

Absolutely fantastic. One of the most inspiring beautiful TED talks I’ve seen.

Manually Migrating Mail on OS X

2007-11-13T12:53:00Z

If you need to manually migrate mail between for instance Tiger and Leopard you simply need to copy the preferences mail file and the mail folder itself.

The preferences file which holds information on your accounts, signatures, rules, etc. is located here:

 ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist

Transfer that to your new installation to the same folder.

Then rsync your mail folder (or transfer it in whatever way you like). Remember to close Mail on both Macs.

Make sure no Mail folder exists on the target machine below ~/Library and then rsync:

rsync -az ~/Library/Mail your_user_name@target_machine:~/Library

After that simply start Mail and it will ask for authentication details for your accounts.

The World Needs Another Lyrics Site

2007-11-09T08:53:00Z

Yes, it does. If you do a search for ‘lyrics’ you only get a few thousand sites shoved in your face. We need one more. Lyrics Muse.

There are two twists to Lyrics Muse which makes it stand out. It’s community based so anyone who registers can edit and improve the lyrics. The most cool differentiating factor however is that if you’re a user of last.fm you will get your own personal interface to browse lyrics because Lyrics Muse tracks your listening.

In other words this makes it very easy to find the lyrics you need. It’s the primary goal of Lyrics Muse to make it as easy as possible to find lyrics. Oh, and not plaster the site with irrelevant ads and popup crap.

If you sign up please join the last.fm Lyrics Muse group here.

Rig 2007

2007-11-02T09:53:00Z

With the plethora of great games coming out soon it was about time to invest in a new gaming rig. My 2005 era junk can’t cut it no more.

There are at least three titles I’ll want to play. Call of Duty 4 which is Battlefield 2 infantry warfare sped up. Much fun. Unreal Tournament 3 which is mostly an update of the 2004 title. Amazing graphics and more balanced play. The multiplayer demo is lots of fun.

And then there’s Crysis.

The follow-up to Far Cry. A singleplayer demo is currently out and my god is it good. Every couple of years a new game comes along that sets new standards. Crysis is one of these games. The graphics is absolutely spectacular. It is jawdroppingly good even at small resolution with low detail. You have dense forests and bush, all dynamically rendered, even at distance. When you walk into a bush the branches move and makes sound. There are so many details in this game it’s unbelievable.

Nice graphics without good gameplay obviously don’t make much of game but Crysis excels in gameplay as well. Let me put it this way. I’ve never played a singleplayer demo more than once. The Crysis nanosuit enables you to increase your speed, strength and armor or cloak yourself for a short period of time. Cloak makes it possible to sneak in on the North Korean soldiers and put a bullet in their neck. It’s fucking priceless.

So anyway to play this beast of a game I needed new hardware and went with the following:

Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 3.0 Ghz CPU
Noctua NH-U12F CPU cooler
2 GB Crucial DDR2 BallistiX PC8500 RAM
Inno3D 8800 GT 512 MB graphics card

In 1680×1050 with all settings on high and 2xAA I get around 20 FPS which is actually quite playable. At 1360×768 with no AA the FPS increases to around 30.

Deborah Scranton: Scenes from "The War Tapes"

2007-10-25T03:01:00Z

Hosting Migration from EasySpeedy to Hetzner

2007-10-17T01:41:00Z

For more than two years now I’ve had a dedicated server at EasySpeedy. They were my first encounter with the dedicated server business as a customer.

The only other company I’ve ever been in more direct phone contact with is TDC Kabel TV (now YouSee).

But they were cheap.

That’s why I chose EasySpeedy. They also had lots of bling on their homepage. Tons of different operating systems were available to be installed on my shiny new server but I would only ever need one – Debian. Sure it’s a nice feature should you want to experiment but it’s obviously not important to most customers who simply want one of the popular choices.

Uptime and stability, however, is quite important though. On the front page of EasySpeedy.com you can read:

“99.98% Proven Uptime.”

Lies! Lies! Lies!

During my first two months in 2005 with them they had already gone below 99.98%. Excuses were plentiful. Sometimes it seemed as if I had to make them aware of network problems with their carriers. Absurd.

Adding to the downtime problems were problems with extremely slow connectivity for months making it near impossible to work in a shell.

The last half year or so has improved though but both September and October saw issues that affected uptime.

So I’ve migrated to a new Hetzner server. I now have two servers there and manage four. The only issues I’ve had has been a few problems during the initial setup. Price obviously matters. Their DS5000 server is a much better offer than any of EasySpeedy’s.

Only time prevented me from moving away from EasySpeedy sooner.

SATA Corruption Between Disks

2007-10-09T13:11:00Z

I’ve been having all sorts of hardware troubles for the past many weeks. They always seem to come in batches. First a bad RAM stick caused massive corruption of my files as I installed two new SATA disks in my fileserver. Problem surfaced when I suddenly noticed audio glitches in my MP3 files which weren’t there before.

Thought the problem was fixed when I identified the RAM as the culprit and it largely was. Yesterday, however, I decided to test moving a bunch of files from one of the new SATA disks to the other to see if the problem was gone. If there are issues with the RAM the files would likely have corruption after the copy.

And they were corrupted. I wtf’d as I had tested this RAM thoroughly when I removed the bad stick. Retesting showed no errors and replacing it with a pair of extremely high quality RAM modules also produced no errors in memtest86.

Then I suspected the disks to be faulty but there were no errors being thrown around in the logs. By further testing I narrowed the problem down. There would only be corruption when copying between the SATA disks. Not if first copying to an IDE disk and then from that to the SATA disk. I.e.:

 SATA disk (1|2) <-> SATA disk (1|2)  - corruption
 SATA disk (1|2) <-> IDE disk <-> SATA disk (1|2)  - all good

The system this was happening on was Debian Etch. Kernel 2.6.18 and I tried the latest stable 2.6.22 as well. No difference.

I think I’ve finally found the solution after hours of searching and planning massive hardware upgrade (new board, CPU, etc.). Setting EXT-P2P’s Discard Time to 1 ms instead of 30 us have so far made the problem go away. God knows what that setting does.

The board in question is an Abit AN7 with an onboard SiI 3112 chip.

Moving Files Off an iPod

2007-08-27T08:56:00Z

At 8:02 AM an incident occured here at the apartment. Neighborhood #2 (Laika) from the Arcade Fire album “Funeral” was discovered much to my distress to contain a sound glitch. Having heard that album quite a lot I knew this stemmed from some very recent file corruption or possibly that iTunes had raped the file. The latter I believe to be more likely.

Luckily I have an iPod lying about with the album on so I thought I’d just hook it up, browse to the file and recover it and I could go back to the days chores. That’s actually exactly what happened but instead of taking less than a minute I had to spend around 30 minutes on the operation.

Apple, in all their coorporate wisdom, have made it not only near impossible to retrieve the files from an iPod by hiding the folder your music is stored in, but have also renamed all the files into random 4 letter words like “WZBX.mp3”. Why? Because they can.

So I found this guide which is very helpful if you discover errors in your music collection, accidently delete some files or just want to move some of YOUR files from the iPod to another storage.

Since filenames were rendered useless I noted the size of the file and did a search in the terminal on the exact size on the iPod:

find . -size 6092603c

Will search for files below current path with the exact size of 6092603 bytes.

My next MP3 player will probably be of the iRiver kind. I find my three year old iRiver iHP-120 to be a better experience than this shiny new 80 GB iPod. Albums are quickly and easily navigated to and it just gets out of your way. Luckily we’re going to use the iPod with our iPod Hi-Fi so its shortcomings will be no huge problem.

So up yours, Apple.

Chris Cornell at Vega

2007-08-22T21:05:00Z

We attended a spectacular show at Vega yesterday with Chris Cornell and his band performing. Was absolutely awesome. That man still has one hell of a voice.

Seasons

Preaching the End of the World

We Got Married

2007-08-06T13:15:00Z

On the 4th of August Marianne and I got married in Skedsmo church. After having been a couple for more than 8 years it was about time.

Sony HDR-SR1

2007-06-05T02:55:00Z

We bought our first video camera. A hard disk based Sony HDR-SR1 which can record high definition video. So far very pleased with it but an extra higher capacity battery has been ordered. The battery shipping with the camera lasts a little over an hour when recording HD.

OS X support non-existant as far as I can tell until software comes along which can read Sony’s native m2ts format.

Beautiful Fractals

2007-05-16T14:59:00Z

So I’ve launched a new blog named Beautiful Fractals. I recognize the name might make you believe the fractals I make and post are beautiful and I’m on a huge ego trip but that’s certainly not the case nor the intention I wish to convey with the naming.

The meaning behind the name is quite simply about the inherent beauty in the fractals themselves that made me choose the name. I find them incredibly fascinating for some reason and I love working in Apophysis trying to produce something nice.

Each fractal posted you can download as wallpaper in different resolutions and enjoy.

High Resolution Transformers Pictures

2007-05-11T23:20:00Z

The awesomeness factor is off the scale.

Link

MacBook Pro Battery Problem

2007-05-02T13:59:00Z

However, the last couple of weeks I’ve been using it on battery only here and a problem surfaced. When the battery indicator goes down to around 40 minutes left the machine shuts down. No warning at all whatsoever.

The OS X System Profiler and Coconut Battery showed me a cycle count of 15. That translates into not-a-whole-lot for 9 months of use! Remembering some business about an Apple battery recall last year I thought my battery qualified for that but the serial didn’t match apart from the first A1175. My battery’s serial ends with “TY4B”.

Last night when I went to sleep the battery indicator said 100% charged. Currently and for the last couple of hours it has been at 97%.

So I called Apple support and a new battery is now on its way with UPS. Should be here in 10 days or so.

UPDATE 2008/sep/15:

The replacement battery had the same symptoms and after 35 cycles its capacity was roughly 1000 mAh. Lame. Called Apple support and they wouldn’t do a fucking thing because the MacBook Pro was over two years old. Lame.

Also in the timespan since the replacement the logic board also keeled over and had to be replaced. Lame.

Lesson learned:

Apple hardware sucks and is of seriously low quality. I take extremely good care of my laptops and I’ve never had problems before I bought a MacBook. Infact, the MacBook is the one I’ve carried around the least.

Footnotes Plugin - Integrate TextMate with Ruby on Rails

2007-04-22T18:46:00Z

I just stumbled across this great little plugin called Footnotes made by Duane Johnson.

Basicly what it does is enhance the standard error page to include links in the different traces which when clicked will take you straight back to TextMate for easier debugging. Nifty.

You also get a series of links at the bottom of a successfully rendered page whereby you can easily see session, cookies and the log for instance or jump straight to the view or controller file.

Footnotes is hosted at TextMate’s home MacroMates.com and is installable the usual way by:

./script/plugin install http://macromates.com/svn/Bundles/trunk/Bundles/Rails.tmbundle/Support/plugins/footnotes/

or if you want to check it out without adding it to your repository:

cd vendor/plugins
svn export http://macromates.com/svn/Bundles/trunk/Bundles/Rails.tmbundle/Support/plugins/footnotes/

Restart your server and enjoy.

I found it lacking a bit in the CSS department so you might want to tweak the plugins insert_styles method in the textmate_footnotes.rb file if you find the links unreadable.

Personally I tweaked it to:

<style type="text/css">
  #tm_footnotes_debug {background-color: #000; padding-top: 5px; margin-top: 0.5em; text-align: center; color: #999;}
  #tm_footnotes_debug * {color: #CCC;}
  #tm_footnotes_debug a {text-decoration: none; color: #bbb;}
  #tm_footnotes_debug pre {overflow: scroll;}
   fieldset.tm_footnotes_debug_info {text-align: left; border: 1px dashed #aaa; padding: 1em; margin: 1em 2em 1em 2em; color: #777;}
</style>