Windows Defrag v KingDian SSD... FAIL

I'm sure you all already know this one, and many vendor specific implementations of SSD drivers/applications prevent this... Not me though.

Yes, I have a dirty cheap (£27) SSD from KingDian in my Laptop... Wait, wait wait, stop abusing me!  This is just a boot disk to hold a local OS and some scratch space, all my storage is provided to this machine over NFS.

The trouble?  Well, in the late summer the wife and I had a few days away in deepest darkest Wales... Now this was a disconnected break, however, I couldn't resist taking the laptop loaded down with a few DVD based games and a steam download or two, plus I got to take some system code with me and a slew of PDF's I could read... I got a lot of work done, even without Linux (yes I had to flatten the machine back to Windows 7).

And I pretty much put the machine away until just before Christmas, I then needed it again, so flipped it out the cabinet and fired it up, only to immediately find the battery was dead... It had been dying, I rely on a meager source of dodgy, second party batteries from China... You know the kind of Lithium cells you'd not want to leave alone too long.

But being Christmas I was skint, so I've had to wait until the end of the month to get a new battery... Which arrived today, I left it to fire up and take it's first charge, everything looked fine, it was still Windows from the holiday, so I left it to it and I've been and enjoyed some TV...

Upon coming back up however, the machine is mental... Telling me I have no boot device, I had left the machine on... It has no network connection, so it can't have downloaded a Windows update and restarted... I was a little baffled... But fear not, I'm a trained professional...

This got us into a Windows Recovery, and after not giving a shit and starting normally, back into windows, where I started to puzzle out the problem....

Event Viewer, and Applications... Nothing but the panic about the non-clean reboot... System... Hmm... System shows the last event at 16:54 and then the reboot at 23:54 (alright, don't judge, I watched three films okay, and we had a take-away!)...

 So what was the event at 16:54... "Service Control Manager".... Hmm, which service.... "The Disk Defragmenter service entered the running state"...

OH SHIT... This is an SSD, you really shouldn't defragment them (it reduces their life)... So it tried to defrag and not only crashed windows, but made the device/bios not able to inter operate upon a warm restart.  That's quite a feat.

A hot reboot sorted everything, so I'll not dig any further, however, I'm interested in this phenomenon.  The disk is a cheap chuck away one, so I start the defrag manually... BOOM, crash, same thing.

I trawl through my box of bits and find an old OCZ 128GB SSD (which has about 26% life remaining - lol) and I throw Windows 7 onto this... Let it all set up and I come back (it's about 23:35 now, if anyone's counting).  Starting the defragger on the OCZ device, no problems.... It just does nothing, the management software from OCZ stops any nastiness.

Back to the KingDian, boot up.. .and Defrag... BOOM.

It's definitely something about the very cheap KingDian drive... Any ideas?  Drop it into the comments, but its back to Arch for this machine me thinks.

Hard Drive Heat Problem

Most of us are well aware of how much heat electronic equipment puts out, what can be less intuitive and harder to balance is the problem of heat from hard drives.

Good organised machine operation, with clearly defined device usages, easy control of units across machines, sites or different customers is the key, therefore enter stage left a nice fat label to hold all the details of the unit.

Except, this label acts as a heat blocker, reducing the surface area of the metallic or foil labelled drive as delivered, reducing the area across which the heat from the unit can dissipate, and even causing uneven heating, or heat wearing over time.

The net result... For my project, a high mechanical drive mortality rate, which I simply could not explain, nor model or explain in the man lab.

Only a trip to see how these machines were being employed sufficed to show the problem, label after label applied and reapplied, a drive on within a machine was untouchable it got so hot.  My solution, put a number on the drive in marker pen and link that number to a database entry with all the drive information.

This solved the heat death problem.

But it also opened up the scope of the information being transmitted, with access to any smart phone the customer could then look up the information, so could their designated engineer, they need never bother me - which is again key to efficient business practice.

Like-wise those not wanting the quite useful information on the harddrive to be public, simply have their information about the drive secured away behind a password on the site, or even more simply not on the site.

Options and solutions, that's how I see this problem benefiting projects going forward... If only we'd not been putting label after label on for year after year.

Software Development : Failed to get Agile

I've just been party to a conversation about a project elsewhere in my work place, my team is not involved, I was observing passively (alright, alright, I was ear-wigging).

The conversation was quite heated, one member of staff was adamant things were fine, whilst another was adamant they were inadequate.  The two of them were at complete logger heads. The driver of the conversation ran like this:

"We're not really designing software, we're asking everyone's opinion, writing it all down and only picking the things we really need to do"

As an agile developer this is essentially how I run my team, we write every possible item down, everything and I weight them, schedule them and during out sprint hand-overs we reorg whom is going to tackle diffing parts of the system to share the experience and share different things.

This chap however, was incredulous... He expressed "WRITING EVERYTHING DOWN" as a bad thing... He only wanted to do the things he felt fit, he wanted to sit down and look at the specification, produce an analysis and ONLY do what he suggested.

This would have made perfect sense to be towards the end of my academic study of software development; before the reality struck home in the work place, and I was flabbergasted to hear this chap simply working twenty something years in the past.

I mean, he's old... This company is old... But, not that old surely?

I literally caught myself tipping my head to one side as if trying to pour those words, and the way they were said, back out of my brain.

He didn't stop there though, he sat and without knowing it essentially dismissed as absurd the complete concept of Agile development; at least Agile as I use it...

"You'd be constantly juggling which task to do next, swapping people on and off tasks.... What would you do?  Meet daily, what would be the point?"

I'm not sure whether this was genuine inflexibility or purposefully derailing the effort to adopt agile beyond the scope of my own team, whichever it was, it sounded and felt extremely awkward.

It makes me wonder quite if anyone outside my team actually uses Agile processes around here...

BBC - History - Russia - Auschwitz - Remember

The lack of copy and proof reading with the BBC is getting annoying now, I've pointed things out to them, I've blogged about them, but we're down to basic bad copy now, as a journalist I think your first order of merit should be to write coherent text, which can only be scanned one way... The moment your words could be interpreted two ways you've failed in your job of clearly communicating.

Here's an example, from a BBC blog about the 70th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz...

See it... "Dozens of the Nazi killers at Auschwitz escaped justice after the war"... That can be read two ways... That there are dozens of killers whom were Nazi's who escaped being brought to justice... Or that there are dozens who killed Nazi's who escaped justice...

I know, and I presume most of you know the history, so we know the writer intends to mean that the Nazi's were the killers and they escaped, but history teaching, cultural differences and the sheer number of holocaust deniers might want to read that differently.

I personally knew a British Solider whom was part of the very first units to get to Belsen, I saw the look in his eye as he described what he saw, I do not deny the Holocaust, I hold it up as the biggest crime ever, EVER, committed, a crime which cuts through divides and should unit all people to resolve never to let something like that happen again.

But then I meet kids now who don't know it happened, that don't know who ran the countries, I've heard kids who know the name Hitler, but they associate the name more strongly with caricatures in computer games, they find it hard to realise the dark days Europe went through, the dark days which my grandparents gave their youth to abate.

And we read of parts of the world where there is conflict today, even driven - as the holocaust was - in part or in full by religion, and one has to question what is the point, why fight?

There are extremists from all over, Islamic, Christian, Orthodox, then there are extreme wings of politics, and it all leads back to a lack of context, you can fight and maim and attack today, but should you?... If you and your family, your country, your people had been ravaged by true horror, would you?

In the Ukraine, Russians do not want to remember the Great Patriotic war's beginnings, they did not until recently acknowledge they had murdered Polish officers when they sided with Nazi Germany and invaded Poland, the history is brushed under the carpet.  Just as it is with the cock-eyed Russians running into Ukraine, a whole other sovereign country, and declaring they are fighting to restore their country.

No, no you're not, you've forgotten the horror, and turmoil thrown up nearing a century ago by one World War and then another, you've got no back story, no history, perhaps only propaganda.

And propaganda has been seen to be journalism tainted with a strong bias, so journalism has a lot to answer for, and the least it could do it write coherently on matters of import.

My XML Library is Kapput

I've been using an XML library of my own devices, based around RapidXML for ages, it has been totally brilliant, utterly useful and completely thread & memory safe for about three years.

Yet today, the trusty dog that it is, has turned around and bit my hand, as I've found a bug, and I'm not sure where the bug comes in, whether in my code or from the underlying RapidXML.

My problem, I load a structure:

<Root>

    <a>0</a>

    <b>1</b>

</Root>

This is fine, however, these turn into my classed "XMLConstruct" and I have three of these:

XMLConstruct

   m_Name = "Root"

   m_Value = null

   m_Children[2]

       [0] = XMLConstruct

          m_Name = "a"

          m_Value = "0"

          m_Children = null

       [1] = XMLConstruct

          m_Name = "b"

          m_Value = "1"

          m_Children = null

          

This is fine, it works, I have my data... But every use previously I created a class "Root" from this, and used that classes "ToXML" function.

However, today I want to just open the XML and "for each node if m_name == 'a' set m_value = '999'".

Sounds simple... Nope, when I do this the XML output I get from the underlying Rapid XML is:

<Root>

   <a>

      <>999</>

   </a>

   <b>

      <>1</>

   </b>

</Root>

This is a mystery to me, I'm going to have to bottom it out, but it's that kind of problem on a Monday morning which annoys me.

More annoyingly, the C# implementation of the same library I'm using, does not do this... The difference between the C++ version and the C# version is the underlying XML library, so I'm suspecting something about the node allocation, or the node use inside Rapid XML being off...