Here is a really cool video that shows a hard drive running with its top cover removed.  (Of course, that particular drive is now worthless, since the tiniest bit of dust can cause the heads to damage themselves or the platters.  But it was surely worth sacrificing one hard drive for the purposes of making a cool demo video.)

One note of clarification: people sometimes use the term "hard drive" to refer to their entire computer (sans peripherals like monitor, keyboard, and mouse).  That usage is incorrect, though.  The big ol’ tower that you plug all the cables into is not the hard drive, it’s the computer.  The hard drive is an individual device -- the size of a small book -- that is found inside the computer.  And it’s the device shown in the video above.

Update: the first time I watched this video, I missed the first ~5 seconds of audio (I had my volume muted previously).  During that time the guy mentions that the hard drive has a transparent cover.  So they didn’t remove the cover from a disk, killing it in the process, as I originally stated.

But don’t let that dissuade you -- there are other benefits to killing your hard drive by removing its cover.  For example, the magnets that control the servo for the read/write heads are extremely strong and fun to play with.

It’s that time again!  And it has been quite a while; my previous layout may have been the longest-running ever -- certainly the longest in a while.

If things just look totally broken, you may have to press Ctrl-R or Ctrl-F5 in your browser to make sure you’re viewing the latest version of the page.

I’m not sure about the blue though (in the sidebar).  Does it look good?  Does it match the green in the header and the gray in the background?  I was experimenting with a lighter gray in place of the blue, and I may switch to that instead.  Unless everyone loves the blue, that is.

The other week I discovered this new free internet radio service called Pandora.  You create an account with them and then enter the names of a few songs or bands that you like, and it plays those songs/bands as well as other music that sounds similar to it.

So Pandora is similar to Yahoo’s Launchcast service, except where Launchcast is designed to be compatible with as few systems as possible, Pandora is based on a platform-independent technology (Flash), so I can actually use it under Linux.  And it also doesn’t just pick "similar" music based on a list of genres that someone decided should apply to your songs/bands; instead, they’ve actually done some much more low-level research into the acoustics of the music itself:

Quoting The Music Genome Project:

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it’s about what each individual song sounds like.

Over the past 5 years, we’ve carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 different artists - ranging from popular to obscure - and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time.

The first band that I put into Pandora was I Can Make a Mess Like Nobody’s Business.  If I had written this post a few weeks ago, I could have told you what the first few similar bands they played were, but alas, I have forgotten.  I do remember, though, that I was impressed with how many of them were other bands that I already knew and liked.

What’s also cool is that within the first week, Pandora got me hooked on two new bands that I really like now: June and Copeland.  I had never heard of June before, but a few people over the past couple years have mentioned Copeland to me, and I just never got around to looking into them.  The songs that Pandora has played have been from their 2005 album "In Motion," which I just bought the other day and I really love.  The June songs are from their 2005 album "If You Speak Any Faster," which I’m sure I’ll be getting soon, too.

And speaking of music that you should go check out, Kim and I went to see Mae last night at Mr. Small’s Theatre here in Pittsburgh.  We both love this band, and we thought the show was really good.  Actually, now that I think about it, the last time I saw a Mae show was the first time I had ever heard of them: they were one of the opening acts (along with Riding Bikes) at an Elliott show at the Church in Philly.  And the guy I went to that show with was the first person who told me to check out Copeland.

I won’t go into too much detail about the Mae show last night because it looks like Kim is on the case.  I’ll just mention that the vocalist seems like a really nice and cool guy, from what you can tell by just looking at someone while they’re singing.  He was quite the sweaty beast though, because it was really warm in the place and he had a long-sleeved shirt on.  I realize that there’s really no benefit to you, loyal reader, in my mentioning that last bit; it’s just that I love to say "sweaty beast" whenever the opportunity arises.

Over the past few months, Kim and I have watched some (relatively) old movies on DVD.  For most of them, I hadn’t seen them in the past 5 years, and for some it had been a few years longer still.

We have watched:

The Back to the Future Trilogy

The Indiana Jones Trilogy

The Fugitive

Back to the Future and Indiana Jones are (or should be) classics; The Fugitive is a probably little too young for that.  But all of these movies are fantastic.

Next up is The Jack Ryan Special Edition Collection: The Hunt for Red October/Patriot Games/Clear and Present Danger/The Sum of All Fears.  I think the only one of those I’ve seen before is Clear and Present Danger, so I’m really psyched about these ones.

One other movie that I haven’t seen in probably 10 years is Tango & Cash.  I remember bits and pieces of it, but overall I just remember how much I loved it.  Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell totally rock in this movie, and I hope to get it soon.

I really need a Mac Mini.  Why?  Because at $499 it’s the most inexpensive Mac OSX system you can get, and because I need a Mac OSX system to do web development on Apple’s Safari browser.

Since Safari’s browser market share is so small, I have always generally written it off as not worth my time to make sure that my webpages work properly in it.  But as I’m doing more and more web work, and I now have one product in particular that is generating a lot of interest, I’m getting more Safari/Mac users that want to use my products but can’t.

But I don’t really have $499 to drop on some new hardware right now.  There are some less expensive deals to be found on eBay, going for $150-$200 currently, but they’ll probably be a lot closer to $499 in a couple days when their auctions end anyway.

Anyone have a relatively new (OSX, 10.3 or better) but used Apple system they want to part with?

Out of the blue I was thinking about the J4 cave today and found your photos after a quick Google search.  Thanks a lot, they bring back some good memories.  I must have been in that cave a dozen times while at Penn State in the early 90’s and didn’t take one stinkin’ photo! 

What’s with the straps in the entry culvert?!  Like you said, if you need handles, you probably don’t belong there.

I understand it’s closed these days; that’s too bad.  I’m glad some of us had the opportunity.  Thanks again for posting the photos.

-Frank

Not to bump your exciting business news from top billing but it’s all your fault for getting me hooked.  And jumping in at day 5 is confusing.  Especially when we’re watching earlier days being rerun on the A&E channel the hour before tonights premier started and I have no idea which day it is or what time it started.  Yikes!  But it is a great show; however, I feel my heart racing various times throughout the shows and I’m hoping my age can handle it :)  Just kidding.

My AJAX File Uploader has turned out to be an awesome project.  As previously reported, on its first day it received 6000 unique visitors, and now 2 months later it’s still getting about 150 per day.

By popular request, I’ve added a bunch of new features since the initial launch, like support for multi-file uploads and e-mail notification of new uploads.

I end up spending quite a bit of time developing it, so although I give it away for free for personal use, I now charge a license fee of $89 for commercial use.  That’s worked out pretty well, and pretty much everyone who’s bought it has been fairly gushing about how happy they are with it.

I also have a couple clients who found the uploader one way or another, and then got in touch with me to ask about a customized version of it for their website.  So that’s brought in some business as well.  It’s been really interesting to watch this project, born strictly out of necessity and given away for free, turn into something that generates revenue for the business.

I’m currently trying to code my way around one irritating issue that some people are having with it, though.  [Update: it turned out to be an issue only on these few particular machines, and there was nothing that this script (or any script) could do to get around it.]  The whole premise of the script is that when you upload a file to a website through it, it shows you a progress bar and how much time is left before the upload is complete.  This requires that the server logs how much data has been uploaded so far, writing this data to a file or database and updating it about once per second during the course of the upload.  Then the user’s browser sends a request to the server about once per second to ask for the data from the log: how much has been sent so far?  How ’bout now?  OK, what about now?  Over and over.

The problem is that on some servers, the system is configured to do write-caching, so that when a program saves a file, it doesn’t actually get written to the hard disk right away.  Instead it’s kept in memory (RAM) until some predefined time limit has passed (say 5 minutes), and then when that time comes the server does a sync, writing all the cached data from memory to the hard disk.

Such write-caching is done to increase the server’s performance -- writing to memory is many times faster than writing to disk -- and it’s very common.  For example, that’s the reason it’s bad to turn off your computer using its power button without doing a shut-down first: some of the files that have been created/changed/saved aren’t actually really saved yet, and they won’t get saved until the next sync, which you might prevent from ever happening if you pull the plug without shutting down.

So how do you get two processes to communicate if you can’t use files to share data?  You use IPC, of course.  But InterProcess Communication has a tendency to take something simple and make it really complicated really quickly.  Once your program has to fork() a server and accept socket communication from the client and try not to bother the actual business of the upload too much, it starts getting hairy.

So I’m taking a little break to remind you that Day 5 (aka Season 5) of 24 starts tonight!  The season premiere is 4 hours, with the first 2 starting at 8 PM Eastern on Fox.  24 is one of the best things in life -- and I loathe most TV, so that’s got to tell you something -- and I’m so psyched.