Jason’s Random Thoughts

Is it just me, or is sun-block cream really big business?  Until five years ago, SPF 15 was recommended if a person was going to spend more than half an hour in direct sunlight.  For a while it was 30 … now we’re being told that SPF 45 lotion should be the minimum we use for protection from our sun’s UV rays.

The differences in the Sun Protection Factors are often misunderstood.  SPF 15 will filter out just a bit more than 93% of all UVB sunlight, whereas an SPF 30 will filter out 97%.  So SPF 30 is not “twice as strong” as SPF 15, rather, it will only allow half as much UVB penetration.

Though despite all the warnings we’ve heard, many of us go without adequate coats of the slippery goop.  I’ve avoided the stuff pretty well over the last decade, only occasionally being forced to apply mixtures of titanium-dioxide and zinc oxide to my skin.  But after hearing the recommendation for SPF 45 products for this summer, I started asking myself “has the ozone depleted further?”  Oddly enough, no.  In fact, the ozone layer has been on the mend for quite some time, albeit slowly.  Many sources believe it will be several decades yet before we’re naturally protected with pre-1970 levels.  Antarctica is the last continent on earth without protection from the sun.

Thinking that the amount of pollution we eject into the atmosphere might offer some protection, I investigated the matter but found no real data to say our greenhouse effect was doing us a favor by obstructing some of these potentially dangerous rays.  Perhaps Dr. Roger Angel’s proposed sunshade could act as an artificial buffer ….

2007 is a low point in the Sun’s Solar Cycle so the planet will have less chance of being hit by coronal mass ejections, and though the Earth’s magnetic field is gearing down to switch polarity for the first time in 780,000 years, it plays little role in UVB protection (but a much bigger role on protecting us from everything else the sun belts out).

So why the SPF 45 minimum?

I’ve searched through some of the sunscreen manufacturer sites as well as some dermatologist pages, but can’t find anything aside from doom and gloom stories about the potential damage to DNA with prolonged exposure to short-wave UVB radiation.  While the concerns for genetic damages leading to various forms of cancer is certainly an issue, could this be just another ploy to scare us into buying the (moderately) more expensive product?

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How long would you be willing to wait for a plot of ocean-front property near Hawaii if you could buy the land starting at $40 US?  Ten years?  Twenty?  Ten Thousand?

Lo’ihi Development Co. will soon start offering oceanview lots that may not be realistically viable for above-surface residential complexes for a few millenia.  This is because the land that’s being sold is currently a kilometer (about 3,000 feet) below the surface of the ocean.

Ya know … I wish I would think of things this crazy once in a while.  Norm Nichols, co-developer of the online venture, assures people this isn’t a scam saying “If you really think there’s something here that you can’t live with, nobody’s forcing you to buy it.  It’s meant to be fun.”  This reminds me of a few other sites where we are enticed to buy entire star systems, or plots of land on various celestial bodies for relatively small amounts of cash.

What I find positively amazing is that some people actually make enough with these ventures that they only need to work part-time, if at all.  Though unlike some of the other sites, Lo’ihi Development lets you know that this is a parody up-front.

Scientists don’t know how long it will be until Lo’ihi will break the surface of the Pacific Ocean.  Some say ten thousand years, while others say never.  So if you’ve ever wanted to leave something worth absolutely nil to family after your passing, perhaps a few acres of land on this submerged volcano would be a nice parting gift.

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In a move that’s viewed as a major departure from their direct sales strategy, Dell will start selling their Dimension-line desktops at Walmart stores in June as part of a “global retail strategy to provide customers with more options.”  Keeping with these options, Dell is also giving American buyers the option to have the Linux variant Ubuntu 7.04 pre-installed on some of their systems.

I guess Michael Dell wasn’t too happy when he returned to the company earlier this year after a seemingly abysmal fourth-quarter profit.

What I find interesting is this Ubuntu offer.  By having a system configured with this OS, a customer could easily shave a hundred or two off the cost of their PC.  Of course, that said, the OS will only be offered on three Dell products, and only in the US for the time being.  But this could be a pretty big boost for the incredibly user-friendly Linux variant.

I’ve tried a few Ubuntu flavours over the years.  Not for a primary computer, but mainly as a “where are they now?” kind of test.  Aside from understandably limited hardware support, this is an operating system that I would feel comfortable giving my parents.  But this does make me wonder if Dell is going to make a real effort at the retail market again.

Last year, the company had opened two retail stores in New York as a test to see whether they could compete against other mixed-market (direct and retail) providers such as Hewlett-Packard and Acer.  There was even a time when Dell PCs were sold at Best Buy, Costco and Sam’s Club … though that ended in 1994 with Dell citing low profit margins on the business.  So I wonder how different things will be at Walmart, where commercials show that happy face happily knocking a few bucks off the price of products ….

The only positive factor that I can see with this move is that now potential customers can try before they buy.  One of the biggest issues I’ve had with Dell products (aside from their shoddy construction and horrible habit of self-destructing 14 days out of warranty) is that we can’t really see what we’re buying until we get it.  We can’t see if the notebook will fit our hands properly.  We can’t see just how big and obtrusive that XPS case is.  We can’t see that their definition of “Wide Screen XGA” is actually just Wide XGA (give me numbers on your site, Dell.  Your descriptions suck.).

Well … now we can.

June 10th is the day Walmart officially starts selling these things there.  I wonder if any of the M-series notebooks will be available or on display.  I’ve always wondered what the M1210 actually looked like.

Not that I’ll ever own another Dell.

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Is anyone in the market for an affordable Network Attached Storage device?

The home server market is ready to pick up steam as more and more homes in many parts of the world begin to have several computers all connected to a simple network.  Many of these home may already be working with network shares across the various computers to easily distribute music, videos and pictures, or to share a single printer and internet connection.  One small problem with having network shares for people who are power-conscious is that a given computer (or computers) must always remain on for that data to be accessible to others.  With the explosion of notebook sales over the last five years, this is becoming more of an issue as people can often take their data out of the house, leaving gaps at home.

To solve this, some people put an old computer to use as a simple file server and leave it running somewhere out of sight.  However, some people don’t have an old desktop PC lying around, or they don’t want to have a huge box running somewhere and using a respectable amount of electricity.  To that end, many people are now purchasing NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices.

I’ve been using a Synology NAS for a while and it’s been relatively decent for what I’ve asked of it, but I find that there have been some issues cropping up lately and I need to replace it with something that offers a little more breathing room.  The model in question is the DS-106j.  It’s a great little box just a little larger than a standard USB drive enclosure, has 3 USB ports for external USB hard drives and certain printers.

What I don’t like about the device is that it runs a very stripped down version of Linux and uses a proprietary version of ReiserFS on the hard drives.  Although there is support for FAT32, I cannot suggest to anyone using drives larger than 80 gig to use it.

One of the pros behind the proprietary ReiserFS format is security.  If someone were to come and take some of the USB drives connected to this box and try to read it elsewhere, chances are they’d be hard pressed to get any data from it.  Other Unix boxes with Reiser support will not be able to read the data and most data recovery places that I’ve checked out online have even said that recovering data from proprietary file systems will cost quite a bit more than standard ones.

But of course, this is also a pretty big con.  If a hard drive dies and I need something that was on there, I can expect to pay some big bucks for the chance to get it back.

As it sits, I have this device pretty much filled to capacity.  I can’t add any more external drives, and it’s just too labor intensive to buy a larger drive, put it in a USB enclosure, and then trickle the data from one of the drives I’d be replacing.

So this leaves me with a few options.  I can either:

1. buy another Synology NAS device and a hard drive, and add more USB drives as required
2. buy a different NAS product
3. build my own NAS

Each of these options has been seriously weighed, with the second option being weighed more often than not.

Buying another Synology device and a hard drive, then chaining a bunch of USB drives to the end of it seems to be a waste of power and money.  While the disk (or disks) in the NAS itself will spin down to conserve power and reduce heat, the USB devices will just keep on going.  Normally this isn’t a problem, but I don’t want my drives to be running if they’re not going to be accessed for several hours or days.  I like that the Synology product has a great team of developers and a thriving community that is constantly working to make this a better product, but I feel it’s just too costly to implement in a fashion that I require.

I need a TeraByte to start (in addition to the TB that’s already in place), so that means getting something like the CS-406.  As of this writing, that device sells for $560 at NCIX … and it doesn’t even come with hard drives.  All said, I would need to spend about $1300 to have this particular NAS and enough drives to make up a TeraByte.  That’s a No-Go.

The second option, buying a different NAS product, has been on my mind for a while as well.  D-Link has their DNS-323, and I could put together a simple TB worth or storage for under $700.  Netgear has their sexy little SC-101T, which would also run about $700 for a TeraByte of storage.  On top of this I’ve considered the offerings from other vendors such as the Buffalo TeraStation Pro II, Infrant ReadyNAS NV+, and even one of the iOmega StorCenter Pro units.

What I don’t like about these is the sheer cost of startup, and the limited future growth potential.  Aside from the StorCenter Pro, none of the other solutions even come with hard drives.  The NAS enclosure itself is $800+.

I like my data readily available … but for that price, I’m almost tempted to go back to massive DVD binder libraries and a comprehensive indexing method similar to the Dewey Decimal System.

So to that end, I’ve decided to go with the third option; building my own.  With all the hardware options and operating systems out there, I shouldn’t have too much trouble putting together a decent NAS solution for my needs.  Basically it has to have a few basic things.  The NAS must:

1. be contained in a small and unobtrusive case
2. be almost silent
3. be easily affordable by almost anybody
4. be easily expandable either by easily adding more internal drives, or USB devices
5. use very small amounts of power unless under heavy load

As I go forward with this little project of mine, I’ll post updates and images of the system as it progresses.  Depending on the final cost of the solution, I might just consider building these for sale on eBay.  If an empty enclosure can fetch $700+, then I’m sure I can sell a custom unit with storage media for the same.

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They’ve been working up to this for the last four years, and dammit, it’s here.

I’m not sure how long this has been out, since I found it by an absolute fluke while getting the latest version of Douglas Karr’s Technorati Rank WordPress Plugin.  While downloading I happened to notice an AdSense showing the blue 1U server to the right and said “WTF is that?”  Feeling adventurous, I took the plunge and started reading up on what this little thing can do… and it’s gonna be a winner.

I’m very suspicious of Google’s technologies because they’re too good to be true.  Almost a decade ago I learned that when things often seem this way, they usually are.  Everything has a price, but Google just hasn’t started extracting their price.

In the last year alone I have been asked to integrate more and more Google stuff into various corporate CRMs, websites, smart-apps, and portable applications.  I’m still trying to get the blood off my hands from a project I had completed a few months back to integrate Google Calendar into a company’s BlackBerry system.  I don’t know if it’s just me, but I find this absolute trust in Google to be scary.  Thousands of companies are uploading so much data to this organization, and I’m wondering when the shoe is going to drop.  Trade secrets, customer lists, sales leads, corporate stragegems, financials … everything is being put on these servers where the data is out of the owners’ hands.  When the day comes that Google says “Oh, we’re charging you for all this now”, companies will be hard-pressed to rip out all the Google-specific code written into virtually every aspect of their business.

And people say that Microsoft is evil ….

However, my rant finished, Google Mini is going to be a huge success for these guys.  This little box will index the contents of a corporate network and provide a single place for users to look.  What’s more, it has support for LDAP so that when someone goes to search for documents they will only see the results that they have permission to access.  At most of the places I’ve done work for in the last two years, this service would be a God-send.  Quite often there are very similar documents in completely different network shares, and people spend more time trying to collect information than use it.  Most everyone is already very accustomed to the Google GUI, and productivity could potentially skyrocket with something like this.

Naturally, since the 1U server would be provided to you already loaded with software and awaiting integration into a corporate network, this wouldn’t be free.  The price structure looks to be right in line with what most corporations would be willing to pay, with the starter package going for $1,995 USD for searches on up to 50,000 documents.

I am curious to know what information is sent back to Google, though.  I’m sure that this box requires some sort of internet connection to keep itself up to date and would likely complain if it was not granted access to an outside port.  While I doubt Google would use this for covert corporate espionage, the possibility exists.  This little server could be more dangerous to a company than anything people have wrongfully blamed Microsoft for.

Of course, all that said, I’ve already recommended this to a few clients as well as my current employer in an effort to help them help themselves.  This is already a winner.

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