My PowerBook G4 is was on Craigslist

It’s spring cleaning time. I just posted my PowerBook G4 for sale on Craigslist. Update: it sold already.
I have a few more things I’ll be listing soon:

Airport Extreme Base Station (802.11 b/g) – $50
Griffin iTalk (iPod voice recorder) – $20
iPod Shuffle 1GB + spare battery – $40
iPod Nano 8GB Black – $100
iSight Video Camera (firewire) – $70
23″ HD Cinema Display (plastic bezel) – $450

FreeBSD, Compact Flash, ZFS, and minimum root partition size

The day I booted a FreeBSD system off Compact Flash I was hooked. CF is an extremely robust storage medium with no moving parts. CF cards have emerged completely intact from washing machines, clothes dryers, and impacts that would destroy any spinning disk. After setting up a system to boot from CF, I am confident that henceforth and forevermore, that system will have a functional boot disk.

I’ve stuck CF cards and USB thumb drives into servers in our data centers, our server room at the office, and my server closet. The practice has served me quite well but that is not to say that CF is perfect. Write speed is slow. There is a finite number of write cycles each block can endure. Some CF cards claim DMA support but don’t support it well enough to be useful. Some server boards do not include internal IDE or USB ports. But everywhere else, we use CF.

Because of CF write limits, I always mount the root partition read-only. Files on the / partition are not frequently altered so this rarely causes any inconvenience. We recently built a 6.7 terabyte storage array at work using a HP 320S chassis, a pile of disks, and ZFS. ZFS volumes aren’t bootable in FreeBSD but we had already installed a USB thumb drive as the boot partition.

After working with ZFS, I decided that gmirror was no longer sufficient for my personal file server. It needed ZFS, which meant upgrading to FreeBSD 7. This server has been running off a 256MB CF card for years. The CF card is so old it was actually made in the USA! While upgrading to 7.0 I ran into a snag, the FreeBSD kernel (and modules) now use over 100MB. That means 256MB is no longer enough space for the new kernel and the old one to both fit.

Texas Michigan driving stats

One way mileage: 1,290 (Garland to Cadillac)
Total miles driven: 3,294
Total gallons of gas: 129
Avg. price per gallon: $2.94
Total gasoline purchases: $380.40
Gas stops for Odyssey: 4 (one per state: AR, MO, IN, MI)

Travel Cost for 4 persons Cost Time (1 way)

NOTES:
Flight costs include auto rental ($300) and airport parking ($84).
Flight times include drive to airport (1 hr), checkin and security (2 hr), rental car pickup and drive from GRR to Cadillac (2 hr).

Flight, direct ($300 ea) $1,584 7 hrs
Flight, 1 hop ($200 ea) $1,184 9 hrs
Auto – Honda Odyssey (fuel) $300 16 hrs

On the drive to Michigan, we hit snow in Lansing and saw almost a dozen cars in the ditches on I-96. The GRR airport was already shut down so if we had flown, we’d have been diverted to another airport and stranded with many other holiday travelers.

During our stay, I made a day trip from Cadillac to Lansing, hitting snow near G.R. on the way down. The entire return trip was in near whiteout conditions. Cadillac gained 8 inches of snow during my half-day absence. Kayla now confidently asserts that if it is snowing, we’re in Michigan.

The return to Texas was similarly exciting. When we left Michigan at 8 PM, a winter storm was in progress and the temperature had plummeted. The traffic grooves within each lane of the freeway had iced over. For those daring enough to drive “in their lane,” the roads were treacherous. We saw two tractor trailers, an Indiana police cruiser, and an assortment of other vehicles inadvertently parked in the snow filled ditches along the highway. Progress was slow but once past Indianapolis, the ice was gone and the roads cleared up. We drove through the night while the kids slept, arriving around 2 PM.

It is easy to imagine that flying would have been better. But both flights would have been delayed, erasing the time benefits. And when flying, we are separated from our luggage, making it onerous to placate travel weary companions. Driving was definitely the right choice.

Backing up my Mac

Last September I wrote an article about backing up a Mac. I’ve received several inquiries about how best to back up while using Time Machine.

I find I have two distinct needs for backup. The first is total disk loss. If my system disk fails, I need to get back up and running with a new disk. If that disk is pre-populated with the OS and all my data, then I have an extremely fast and reliable way to recover. I consider this part of my backups absolutely essential and I use SuperDuper for making and updating these disk disks.

Creating a bootable snapshot requires a spare disk. My dual G5 had extra drive bays so it was easy, buy and insert a spare disk. When I switched to the Intel iMac, I connected those same backup disks to the iMac and laptops via my Wiebetech ComboDock. That worked but wasn’t very convenient so I picked up an external dual drive Firewire to SATA enclosure with a spare hot-swap drive tray.

My other backup need is file recovery. If a file is deleted, incremental backups allow recovery from a specific point in time. A bootable snapshot can only help if that particular file existed when the snapshot was taken. Fortunately, the few times when I really needed to recover a file, that was the case.

Time Machine fills a void in my backup regime and works out perfectly with the dual disk enclosure. One disk stays in the enclosure and is my designated Time Machine disk. Time Machine manages incremental backups automatically. I maintain my bootable snapshots using two disks and the other drive bay. Every other month I swap out the snapshot disk and store the eldest offsite.

Are these books worth keeping?

The year 2007 brought about The Great Book Purge. Our personal library has been slowly growing and we have insufficient space for them. To inflict our books on someone else’s bookshelves, I set up accounts at half.com, Bookins, and Bookmooch.

To get started, I checked the value of each of my books on half.com. Any books worth more than a few bucks ($5+) I listed on half.com for a little less than the highest priced similar item. Most of those books sold within a week, clearing off almost an entire shelf.

I listed another batch of books on Bookins, a book swapping site. On Bookins, the buyer pays $4.95 for shipping. The seller (me) gets a USPS label printed with the persons address. I have only to wrap the book, tape on the label, and drop it in the mail. After a month, I’ve shipped off a half dozen books and have a bunch of points in my Bookins account. However, I’ve only received a couple books of my wishlist. Bookins only has a couple thousand members and most book trades are fiction, a genre I have little interest in.

The last site I’ve been using is BookMooch. As with Bookins, on Bookmooch I created a list of books I wanted and books to purge. When a book I want becomes available, I get an email alert and can request the book from the giver. The giver pays the postage to send the book to me. They gets points when I receive the book and those points are redeemable for books that they want. It’s a pretty good system and my biggest complaint is that with BookMooch, as a giver I must take the book to the Post Office due to new Media Mail regulations enacted in October. It would be most excellent if I could print online postage as Bookins does.

While going through our books, some stand out as truly excellent books that deserve a mention. Here are my three favorite books on child raising.

Why Gender Matters

Seasons of Life

Making Children Mind
Without Losing Yours

A hard won lesson on investing

I started saving for my retirement in 1991 because my employer offered matching contributions. Matching money is free money so I saved exactly as much as they would match. Since I started at $7/hr, two percent of my check was about $6 per week. It’s a trifling amount but when I quit to found MichWeb 3 years later, I had saved about $900.

I paid no attention to that account until Kysor was acquired a couple years later. I was forced to roll over my retirement account and the dollar value was quite surprising. I had invested $900, the company match had kicked in another $900, and over 5 years it had grown to around $5,000. I invested for the match but learned a valuable lesson on leveraging compound interest.

Years later I read a book by Peter Lynch. One of his most famous bits of investing advice is, “buy what you know.” Instead of taking the advice of Wall Street or your neighbor, invest in companies whose products you are familiar with. If you eat Cheerios every morning, General Mills might be a good stock for you. If you ride a hog, Harley Davidson might be a great choice.

I know AAPL because of my familiarity with their products. For several years, I got into the habit of buying their stock at $15 and selling at $25. That was fun until one day I sold and the stock never came back down! After months of waiting, I bought back at (gulp) double the price I had sold at. This brings me to my hardest won lesson on investing: every notable error I’ve made investing was a sale. Over all, I’d be better off if I had never sold anything.

I ran the numbers to answer a nagging question, “How much more would we have in our retirement accounts if I had never sold AAPL stock?” $15,950. Tomorrow, that number will be even bigger.

my $0.02 on Leopard

Disclosure: I own Apple stock.

I first installed Leopard in early 2007. I backed up my system and installed. Since I have a spare mac, I can tolerate a fair bit of breakage on my main system but the pre-WWDC builds of Leopard exceeded my threshold. After a few days I reverted back to 10.4.

At WWDC, Apple seeded a new build and I backed up and installed again. After a few days of using it, I deemed the bugs I ran into as tolerable and have been running Leopard on my main desktop system since. Note when I placed my order.

Order Date: June 28, 2007
Order #: ***-*******-*******
Recipient: Matt Simerson

Items not yet shipped:
1 of: Apple Mac OS X Version 10.5 Leopard Family Pack
Sold by: Amazon.com, LLC

Amazon was running a promotion and guaranteed their lowest price on Leopard Family Pack if I pre-ordered. My experience with the pre-release versions had me convinced that it was just as compelling an upgrade as its predecessors. If you do buy from Amazon, which I recommend, please use the link above and it’ll provide me with a referral bonus. If you don’t need the family pack, here’s a link to the single license version.

Since then, new beta releases of Leopard have arrived and all the worst bugs have been exorcised. I find that build 9A559 is far less problematic than the four days I spent with the release version of Vista. Despite having a Vista license that came with a new machine, my experience with it compelled me to upgrade to XP.