Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

ZFS on Western Digital EARS drives

According to the stats, my previous post was one of the more popular on this site. This was in response to a question I was asking myself before building a NAS box at home. In looking at the components to use in building it, I came across another question. How does one fix the performance of ZFS on Western Digital’s green drives with model numbers ending in “EARS” (WD15EARS, WD20EARS, etc)?

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Wednesday, June 16, 2010

ZFS on different sized disks

Note: Following this is not for the faint of heart. If you aren’t comfortable with partitioning, then don’t follow the steps here. I’ve read many posts on how to handle ZFS/Raid-Z on differently sized disks. The goal is to gain the most disk space availability while still retaining the redundancy of surviving a single disk failure. The posts I’ve read either would achieve the theoretical capacity, or be capable of expansion, but not both.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Common Media Player Framework

About 3 weeks ago, Kevin (developer of NitoTV) and I decided it was a bit silly how we were each writing playback mechanisms on the AppleTV with little to no collaboration between us. So, we decided to write a Common Media Player Framework, which is licensed using LGPL. Kevin sent me the code he used for DVD playback inside NitoTV as a place to start. I stripped it down to a smaller piece, and started the framework.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, February 27, 2010

Passed My Defense

I haven’t posted here in a while, and with good reason. About two weeks ago, I passed my Ph.D. defense. So, come May, I will officially have a doctorate in Computer Engineering, though I am effectively done with my degree. Legacy Comments: Steve - Feb 15, 2010 Looks like I get to be the first (at least on your blog here) to congratulate you - great job, Graham! Push Eject - Feb 16, 2010

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, February 13, 2010

Incorrect Podcast Order on my iPod

One of these days I will learn not to grab the latest and “greatest” software the moment it comes out. Yesterday, I upgraded my iTunes to version 9 and my iPod Touch’s firmware to 3.1.1. Then, I noticed that one of my podcasts was out of order, and furthermore, the release date was no longer showing up on the iPod itself. Strangely, only one podcast was having this issue. I started to suspect that this was my fault, since this one podcast, Escape Pod was a podcast I was listening by going through its archives.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Thursday, September 10, 2009