It almost feels like SOPA got its first test, but really it was GoDaddy’s terrible DNS management.

In preparation for some more major server changes, aimed at curing what caused some downtime last week, we moved the DNS from Peer1 to GoDaddy. We wanted our domain name provider to manage DNS temporarily, as we may be moving away from Peer1. Many SOPA opposers are asking people to move away from GoDaddy, but obviously you don’t want to do that while changing hosting solutions too!

Anyways, we flipped the DNS back to GoDaddy and coded in our A, CNAME, MX records, etc. All simple stuff.

A half hour goes by and I query up the raw DNS data. To my shock, only half of what I entered propagated to GoDaddy’s DNS. Our A record didn’t update, but half the CNAMEs, and half the MX records did. I wait an hour… still, all screwed up. Worse, when I go back to the GoDaddy DNS admin panel, it doesn’t match either what I entered into it, or what was in the raw DNS records.

If you aren’t too techy, that means GoDaddy took our entire site down. These are the codes that translate 1.23.45.67 into PhoneNews.com. If those codes aren’t published to the rest of the Internet, no web browser can find your web site.

You may be asking why I didn’t pre-configure the DNS records at GoDaddy… well, that’s because you can’t. They don’t allow you to edit their DNS records unless you have designated their name servers as the authoritative record.

In short, I don’t trust GoDaddy’s DNS management at all. This is going to delay our server changes, and caused unnecessary downtime for the site as we flipped our nameservers back to Peer1.

One nice thing about this feature (for Apple) is that it now allows Apple to get something it did not have before: usage statistics. Granted, Apple Software Update enabled Apple to see how many people were updating their Boot Camp drivers, but it was a poor measure for how many Boot Camp installs were actually being made.

Anyone in the industry will tell you that people often don’t update software. In addition, those downloads were homogenous; you could download a Boot Camp 1.x, 2.x, or 3.x update and deploy these across thousands of systems with a single download. The Boot Camp Assistant pulls down different bundles for each system, requiring it to be done on the computer, and having the computer pull that file down from the web.

As such, the Boot Camp Assistant is likely what Apple is using to keep track of how many people are using Windows on their Mac at any given time. And, it gives them per-model counts, so they can track how many, say, MacBook Air users are choosing to give up precious SSD storage in order to run Windows. Considering the bundles are model-specific, they could even be keeping track of how many people, for example, chose to install Windows on a 64GB MacBook Air versus a 256GB MacBook Air.

My point in conveying this information is that you should always re-download Boot Camp drivers with each Windows install. There is certainly a lot of interest in Apple (or at least, there should be) in evaluating which Mac models are going to be moved to ARM-based processors, and which will stay on more-powerful Intel CPUs. Windows support is a key factor in that, Apple does want to know if that feature is important to you (even if they have no interest in replying to your emails stating such).

If your feed URL is http://www.christopherprice.net/feed/ then you’re all set. If not, you need to update to that URL.

I’ll keep the old FeedBurner setup working, but you may be delayed by as much as several hours to get news. Yeah, it’s my personal blog, but still, I’m someone that always likes to have the fastest path to a news feed.

When I signed onto FeedBurner, it was hailed as a rocketing startup that promised faster, more reliable feeds… with monetization that the blogosphere didn’t offer at the time.

Since then, Google has gobbled up the company, and I have to say… it’s not one of Google’s finest hours. The transition to AdSense in-RSS ads has been a dismal failure, and the product has languished under Google’s monolithic oversight.

Hopefully Larry Page’s “cutting the fat” campaign will give Google some added attention to products like FeedBurner. I really do hope that will happen, but this is long in the making. I noted quite awhile ago my intent to disable Google services that have been languishing… this is merely making good on that commitment.

Here’s the alleged email:

” Thank you for your inquiry to Seagate Technical Support. You used defragmentation on drives with partial SSD memory on them. SSD memory isn’t made to be defragmented. Therefore, the memory functionality is unable to properly work now. The drive will therefore have to be replaced.

If you have any additional question, please let us know.”

Okay, time to clear the air on this…

First, the reply from Seagate tech support is dead wrong. Not the first time they’ve given totally wrong info (on the Momentus XT), probably pulled out of somewhere south.

Windows 7 automatically defragment hard drives, on a schedueled basis. The notion that Seagate would ship a drive that would need to be replaced, because of a defrag, is downright insane. Sadly, offshore IT often gives insane replies.

Now, to answer the question, defragmenting is a complex topic in this new era. On traditional HDDs, defragmenting makes sense, it’s just a matter of what you get back. On SSD, defragmenting now doesn’t seem to be the winning tactic (though some optimization algorithms do appear to help at times).

The way Momentus XT caches to the SSD is by taking note of sectors that are accessed the most frequently, and moving them into the SSD. As other sectors are used more, they rise in priority and get moved to the SSD.

So, when you defrag a drive, you do lose the benefit… those sectors in the SSD are now of the wrong parts of the drive.

But, fear not, because eventually, the new “most used” sectors will rise back up, and climb to the point that the SSD portion of the drive re-caches them. That’s why rebooting your computer a few times can result in faster boot times.

Plus defragmenting will still help because most fragmented files won’t reside in the SSD.

Bottom line, defragment your Momentus XT just like you would your hard drive. You may want to defragment a little less often, but you still want to defrag. On Windows, I would suggest only defragmenting when Windows Defragmenter says to, and on Mac I would suggest updating after every major release of Mac OS X.

Folding@home suffers from a problem that many projects do; the hardcore contingency of evangelists, users, and developers all switch to a beta that is buried away from the main site. Common users then download the latest version on the web site — are disappointed — and quit using the software.

If you’ve been living under a rock, Folding@home has been around for a good eon or two. It’s a distributed computing project, like SETI@home (yeah, it’s still going), that uses the computational resources of millions of PCs to achieve more than any supercomputer could accomplish. Specifically, Folding@home works on proteome folding, a key process in the replication of cells. Computer modeling tries to better re-create how folding takes place, and why problems occur. Those “problems” turn into diseases like cancer. It also will aid in understanding how diseases replicate, to better create drugs that can stop diseases faster.

Version creep is a common problem in software, it needs to be avoided by pushing people over to the beta, when the beta becomes the current stable version of your product. There’s nothing wrong with perpetual betas, ask Gmail.

Anyways, back to F@h. The latest Folding@home client, v7, makes one major change… it merges the three different flavors of F@h out there currently. Right now, there are three versions; standalone, SMP, and GPU. Obviously, these are for people with single-CPU, multi-CPU (or multi-core CPUs), and one for GPUs that handle CUDA/ATI Steam graphics computing.

Of course, these versions leave for a lot of overlap. Typically, the hardcore folder would have two versions of F@h running simultaneously. One version of the SMP core would be running, and then another GPU client for each graphics card in their system. Yes, many people out there spent a lot of time rigging up three (or more) clients of the same app to max out their computer’s computational resources.

Is the normal person going to do that? Nope. And as such, gazillions of clock cycles have been lost.

As of v7, there is only one F@h, and it automatically walls out every CPU core and every GPU core in your system. That’s the way things should be.

As a bonus, and the title of this writeup, you’ll quickly be able to test your system. I’ve already found one PC in my setup that crashes solely when the CPUs and GPUs are walled out… not when just one or the other is at any given time, such as playing video games. These can lead to those Blue/Gray Screens of Death that “just happen” for no reason. In reality, it could be an underlying hardware fault.

Couple of issues though. One, GPU folding only works with Windows, and it doesn’t look like it will be coming back to Mac or Linux any time soon, unfortunately. So if you have a Mac, you’ll have to reboot into Boot Camp to use it fully. Also, memtestG80, the GPU memory diagnostic, is not integrated into the app. If your GPU has a problem, it’s hard to pin down… as that tool is woefully out of date.

I enourage everyone to give the v7 beta a try, it’s far better than what is out there today… and you’ll see which Macs and PCs in your house can handle it.

Folding@home – v7 Beta

If you look at Apple Support Documents, and the Apple product pages, they refer to the product as “OS X Lion“. Not “Mac OS X Lion” or “Mac OS 10.7″, simply “OS X Lion”.

Note that this title lacks two key things; Mac and 10.7. More specifically, if you look at an Apple Support Page’s affected products listing, it will appear like this:

Mac OS X 10.0, Mac OS X 10.3, Mac OS X 10.2, Mac OS X 10.1, Mac OS X 10.4, Mac OS X 10.5, Mac OS X 10.6, OS X Lion

Why the change? It’s not quite clear. Apple still refers to the product as Mac OS X under the About This Mac feature in 10.7.2, so there is a bit of mixed branding.

I do suspect though that this late change in branding implies that Apple may be prepared to do what many have rumored; blend iOS and Mac OS in some way down the line. It may or may not happen with Lion itself, but there has been considerable talk of ARM-based devices that resemble netbook-style MacBooks, instead featuring multi-touch displays and an ARM CPU.

In light of Windows 8 running on ARM, and notebook makers eager to combine ARM and Windows to increase profit margins, and deliver lower-cost computers (to combat tablets primarily), Apple may see the need to quickly respond to the rise of Windows ARM. Having a product that is “Lion” but also not necessarily the power, prowess, and capacity of a “Mac”, could allow Apple to retain customers that would otherwise defect to the lower-cost Windows ARM offerings.

Such a change also allows Apple to mix branding while creating a hierarchy of devices. With iOS devices focusing on portability, and Mac being the Cadillac brand of premium personal computers, Apple could create a middle-ground offering that runs on ARM, runs Lion, but requires recompiled software and functions as a middle-ground between the two products.

It could be one of the best moves Apple makes. Honestly, how many iOS device owners would buy a $400 Apple netbook? How many $2,500 MacBook Pro owners would buy one?

Apple has said netbooks may not be in their DNA. They never said they wouldn’t compete in that price-point or arena. This is a small change that could mean big things for where Apple takes Lion, especially if that means taking it to ARM… which they now happens to be a strong point for the dual-core Cortex manufacturer.

Back when Apple was burying Copland, there was a hurry for a new platform. Basically, it was down to two key rivals; BeOS and OpenStep (previously NeXTStep). Solaris and some oddball deal for Windows NT were also on the table, but weren’t main choices.

Now it has come to the table that Apple bought NeXT because of ambitions to move to Intel. Well, not really.

Apple needed a modern kernel that wasn’t rooted in machine code. BeOS and OpenStep were great candidates for this. Windows NT too had shown it could exist on PowerPC and Intel at the same time, which was why Apple was eyeballing the platform too.

Really though, this wasn’t the main reason. Apple has always had ambitions to run Mac OS on Intel. This dates back to the Star Trek project, which began a good decade before there was even the idea that Apple would be in the shape it was in by the late nineties.

Steve’s passing has opened up a lot of history… people who weren’t there, weren’t rooting for Apple at the time, and even those that patently disliked Apple at the time… all want to know how Apple got to where it is. But, those that grandstand grand plans, will make history a bit too blurry to set the story straight down the road.

To be clear, Apple acquired NeXT because OpenStep matched BeOS in terms of being a potent operating system platform that Apple could build on. What gave NeXT the edge, was Steve Jobs himself, who was grooming Apple leadership to give him the bid.

For what it’s worth, Intel’s x86 talents would not give them an edge in the PC world until after Motorola spun off its PowerPC assets… there was, after all, plenty of competition in PowerPC, provided by Motorola, IBM, and newcomers like Exponential (which now as Intrinsity makes advances in ARM… but that’s for another day).

I’ve often argued that it took a crusade to change Apple’s mindset, and I was always referring to one guy. That one guy was right on most of the time. That guy changed the world.

It’s taken me a couple of days to put together comments on Steve’s passing. There are few people that I have ever felt their loss would hurt either myself, or the world, as much as his did. Every time I talked to him, even in the times I didn’t agree with him, I knew he would change the world.

I’m honored to have rooted for him when few did. I am humbled that he, and everyone on his team, paid for my college education (I bought AAPL at $4/share post-splits, right about when he returned to Apple). And, I thank him for making some insanely great products. Steve, humanity will never forget you.

For starters, I use the 500 GB Seagate Momentus XT in my MacBook 13-inch Late 2009 machine. This is a bit of an oddball in Macs, as it is one of only about two or three machines that purely uses the NVIDIA MCP79 chipset to power the entire system. The only Intel chip in this machine, is the Core 2 Duo CPU.

As such, the update process may differ starkly from other Mac models. For the previous SD24 and SD25 firmware updates, it was much more of a breeze than other Mac users, my Mac happily booted from the CD-R image, and ran the update.

One major configuration change that I made however was switching to a dual-drive configuration, with a SSD drive in the other drive bay, instead of my optical drive. Combined with FileVault 2′s EFI bootloader, my Mac decided it was not going to boot from the optical drive. At all. I couldn’t even boot a Windows install disc. Obviously, I’m going to be looking into that a bit more later.

But, realizing that firmware SD28 fixes a critical data corruption issue, I had to move to Plan B. Which, was to take my MacBook apart, and pull the hard drive out. I took it into a PC about seven feet away, and booted the install disc that I had just burned.

The entire install process took all of about two minutes. The firmware update downloaded to the drive without any issues, and I pulled the drive out of the PC, and put it back into the MacBook.

Then came the moment of truth: Would the MacBook boot from the drive with the updated firmware. If you read my most recent article on Momentus XT, you would know that with Momentus XT updates in the past this was no certain thing.

Thankfully, it booted fine. I am writing this post right from the drive, and haven’t had any issues with it since. It has passed a SMART self-test and I’m about to run a long drive self-test as well.

My biggest concern in the wake of the process is that Seagate continues to not have a Mac hard drive firmware update solution for their internal drives. Apple has the code to facilitate this; they have offered it on many Seagate and other HDD manufacturer-built drives when they shipped from the factory with this code. I implore Seagate and Apple to share the update binary for Mac so that Mac users can update any hard drive from inside Mac OS X. It does no goodwill to Apple to keep that code to themselves.

The lack of a Mac updater aside, the update hopefully, hopefully puts an end to Momentus XT’s woes, because the underlying technology is solid. It’s the best balance between the ideals of extremely-fast storage, and extreme capacity. I’m seriously afraid that the 1 TB version of the drive has been held up due to the marketing blunders that these firmware issues have caused. The only thing I can suggest to Seagate on that front is to give it a new marketing name, apart from Momentus XT…

… and to send me a review copy. I’d be happy to tear it apart and let people know it’s as solid as a standard hard drive.

If you are a Momentus XT owner (like myself), you can breath a sigh of relief and update immediately… after backing up, of course. This firmware update will hopefully, hopefully tie up some painful loose ends that have stifled the life (thus far) of this innovative technology.

As the first second generation hybrid hard drive out there, the Momentus XT took the operating system out of the equation of hybrid drives. Whereas the first generation required Windows Vista (and only Windows Vista), these new drives benefit from OS independent caching of files to the solid state portion of the drive. As such, you can even dual-boot Linux, Mac, and Windows on the same drive, and still see a performance benefit.

Unfortunately, the issues I mentioned above are quite severe. The drives from the start have had issues booting on many systems, especially Mac systems where they are in an especially high level of demand. Worse, the firmware updates have made a bad situation worse. Some booted with SD24, and didn’t with the updated SD25.

To make that matter worse, a file corruption bug was found where when dealing with ultra-large (as in, several gigabyte) files, you then lost data completely. This usually could only be recreated using a terminal command to generate a massive file, filling up most of the 250 to 500 GB drive, followed by a very long CRC/MD5 checksumming process.

Seagate did offer up an update, SD26, but only did so under the table, and on newly-shipped drives. Why? Because yet again the update had bootability issues, rending some Macs boot-less immediately after updating, whereas other machines worked just fine. Seagate couldn’t issue the update as-is to users, especially in the wake of other problems, so Seagate casually hoped the issue would blow over in regards to file corruption, waiting for engineers to issue a consolidated fix.

Judging by the version number, it appears another version almost came out, though I doubt we’ll ever know (or really care, for that matter) what held up SD27. Bottom line, SD28 is out, and you should update immediate. Just, backup first. I’ll be backing up tonight, and updating later today. I’ll report back on my experiences, but I encourage everyone to immediately make updating your Momentus XT (again, after backing up) to be a tip-top priority.

After all, it’s firmware, and if you have this drive, odds are you get a small sense of glee from updating your firmware anyways.

Seagate Momentus XT Firmware Update – Seagate.com

Update: You can see my personal debrief of the SD28 update in the following article.