Icetips Blog

I was doing some php research yesterday and stumbled on this online php book that had some very good information and examples that I could put to use right away. Check it out at http://www.tuxradar.com/practicalphp It's all online in html format, so there is no PDF etc. but it is easy to navigate with links to previous and next chapter as well as a "Jump to" drop down and a link to the table of contents.

The book has been updated for php 5.2 so it is kept fairly current, which is always a plus with online content!

So, if you are looking for good, free, text on php stuff, check this book out - it doesn't cost you anything

Arnor Baldvinsson

In my last blog I described my experience with the 1.5TB Seagate FreeAgent Desk external drive that I bought from Costco.

Instead I ordered a Coolmax CD-391T-U2 enclosure from TigerDirect and a 1.5TB Western Digtial drive. Wednesday I received the enclosures and the drive and immediately put the drive in. It was a bit tricky to put this together and the USB cable that came with it was only about 14-16" long. I plugged it in and the first thing I noticed was how loud the fan was. It was disturbingly loud!

First thing was to partition and format the drive and I knew that would take a while so I set it to do that over night. The morning after it was still formatting and I realized something was not right, so I stopped the formatting process and reconnected the drive to another USB port with another cable in case it was a cable/port problem.

8 hours later it was finally done with the format process so yesterday afternoon I started a backup process. I immediately realized that something was not right. It was barely getting 1MB pr. second transfer rate to the new drive. After messing around with it I realized that the enclosure seems to be having an issue with the USB to SATA conversion OR that it is actually designed for USB 1.1 not USB 2.0! So I decided to not mess with this and I am returning those to Tiger Direct.

After hours of checking things out I decided on my next enclosure to test out, a Vantec NexStar 3 NST-360SU-BL enclosure that supports both USB 2.0 and eSATA which supports up to 3Gbps (Gigabits per second) transfer rate compared to 480Mbps (Megabits per second) for USB 2.0 and only 12Mbps for USB 1.1! I should have those sometime next week and will report my experience with those. The Vantec does not have a fan so it should be quiet. It does come with both USB and eSATA cables (unfortunately the machine I'm using this with doesn't have an eSATA port, but more on that later) and get's 4.7 stars out of 5 available in 94 reviews on TigerDirect. The price is (currently) the same as the CoolMax, or US$29.99.

Arnor Baldvinsson

In September I bought a 1.5TB Seagate FreeAgent Desk external drive from costco.com. I had been looking for an external drive solution for backup purposes for a while and the FreeAgent drives looked good and we had previously bought two 500GB drives that performed without a single problem.

I plugged the drive in and everything looked good. I set up all my backup processing using the two backup software I use, InSync from Dillobits and Second Copy, both of which have served me well for years.

After I had set everything up and shared the drive, since part of the backup was from another computer, I rebooted my computer to make a clean start. That's when the problems started. During bootup I got an error message about a drive being problematic, don't remember exactly what it was, and the disc diagnostic program insisted to run on my C: drive. Everything checked out and no problems were reported.

I set all my backup processes to start and did some direct copying as well and after about 12 hours all the data was in place. For the next few days everything worked fine, but then one day I got an error message from windows telling me that there was a write error and it couldn't write the Q:\$MT file or something like that, Q:\ being the drive letter of the FreeAgent drive. This persisted for a few days and then everything seemed to be working ok again and for the next 5 weeks or so no problems at all, so I decided this was something for the history books.

About 3 weeks ago I decided to buy another drive of the same type so I can rotate the drives for an off site backup, which I use the removable drives for. I have been very busy lately and I delayed putting up the drive until last weekend.

This new drive started out with write errors from the start. I re-partitioned and re-formatted the drive twice to see if I could get it to work, but no help. I ended up returning it to Costco for a full refund.

So I did some research online to try to find out what the heck is going on with those drives. Well, you don't have to look very long to find people who have had a lot of problems with the 1.5TB FreeAgent drives! One of the websites I found was this one. It claims that the problems are caused by overheating, which I can relate to since there is no ventilation for the enclosure, it is completely closed off! I could also feel it getting pretty hot and someone that posted about this had measured the drive temperature getting up to 250°F or about 120°C What seems to be the common fix is to open the case and unplug the drive light. The enclosure has a big light the slowly flickers as data is being written to it. My guess is that his fluctuation may be causing voltage fluctuations which are causing problems for the drive. I've seen people post that they removed the drive from the enclosure and put the drive in their machine instead and it performed flawlessly.

Yesterday I returned the drive and started looking around for a replacement! After some snooping around on Tiger Direct I found a combination that I am going to try out. Because of the alleged overheating problems with the Seagate FreeAgent my curiousity was spiked when I found enclosures called CoolMax. I decided on the Coolmax CD-391T-U2 enclosure since it has a nice big fan built in.

The measurements on the image on the page at Tiger Direct is not correct, the enclosure is 2" x 4.5" x 8". To go with it I decided on a 1.5TB Western Digial drive, also from Tiger Direct.

Once I get the combination and have had a chance to put it to gether and put it to work I will let you all know how it is working out.

I use external drives for off site backups and rotate them out about once a month. I keep on site backups on internal drives which are then backed up onto the external drives once a day. Various backup processes keep backing up data throughout the day to the internal backup drives. The external drives also provide secure backup for my fourty thousand plus photos!

I have chosen not to backup entire drives, rather just the data that I work with and need. We have somewhere around 4-5TB of diskspace in the office and it would take substancial amount of drivespace to do a full image backup of each drive. As drive space comes down in price I may consider that seriously in the near future.

Arnor Baldvinsson

Several weeks ago someone in the Clarion world mentioned LogMeIn to me as a way to remote control your computers. So I downloaded and installed their freeware version of it on my laptop and the two desktop computers that I work on.

On mornings like today, when the weather is cool and crips, it is very nice to be able to light a fire in our wood stove in the living room and park myself in front of it with my laptop and access my desktop computers. It works pretty well on our LAN (which is mostly 1GB, cat 6, but my laptop is obviously wireless) and it is free! I have not yet experimented with LogMeIn over the internet.

The only problem I have had is that when I connect to my laptop from the desktops, it tends to log off after a few mintues and I have to keep logging in. I'm not sure what that is about but I rarely need to use that so it is not a big deal.

You can run it in full screen or you can run it contained within the browser. The color dept can be determined but beaware that it actually changes the color dept on the machine you are connected to. The color dept is restored when you diconnect from it, but it might cause confusion if you look at the screen you are controling

All in all, definitely worth looking into if you need to remote control your computers. They also have Pro2 version and several other products that can be combined to create powerful remote control setup to control external computers and create VPN settings but those products are not free and generally require a monthly or an annual subscription.

Arnor Baldvinsson

I stumbled on a really good deal on a HP LaserJet CP1215 color laser printer I had been looking at it at OfficeDepot and they had it for $199. I was looking it up on the HP website and they had it for a $99 special deal and free shipping so I jumped on it.

The printer arrived it last Saturday and tonight I finally got some time set it up. It was easy to set up. I connected it to my Vista 64 machine and there were no issues or problems and it prints just beautifully! I checked it couple of days after I bought it and it was back up to $299 and I see that they are now out of stock

It is rated 12ppm in Black only and 8ppm in color. We are starting to send out printed letters to our customers since we get close to 40% of our emails back with errors of one sort or the other, mostly because people have changed email addresses. So it is getting very difficult for us to keep in direct touch with our customers.

We have already sent out one mailing, about 3 weeks ago, and we got pretty good response so we are definitely going to be using this more and more in the future.

I have two excellent Epson photo printers, an older Epson 2200 workhorse and a more recent R-340. After comparing prices for ink and toner I realized that the difference wasn't much - if any - and the laser is faster and does a pretty good job - images and graphics look crips and details are excellent. Besides I would like to use my photo printers to print photos, which is what they were made for!

I will keep you updated on how this printer works in the long run, but so far it looks pretty impressive!

-- Arnor Baldvinsson