Hi all,
Back after the bank holiday (and protracted absence).
I have new objects of lust.

It is a fear of mine that I am going to lose the thousands of files, pictures, mp3s etc. that I have accumulated over the last 10 years of computing. Some of it is complete rubbish of course however much is precious. I am already at risk of losing the video footage of my daughters early years, all recorded on 8mm Pal. Also difficult to retrieve are the pictures taken with the Apple QuickTake camera whose compression algorithm is now obsolete (when I get that working I may offer it as a service for others!)

I need reliable storage and a way of backing up properly. I am going to invest in a couple of things to allow me to achieve this.

Storage
I could of course build myself a server, a low cost option if you don’t use Microsoft software on it, and I have looked closely at doing this. There is an OSS project called FreeNAS which allows a cheap PC to run as a file server for most protocols and have a web management interface. It looks very good. Its the whole reliability thing.
Firstly I want RAID5 (4x250GB drive will yield a handy 750GB of space) so either a RAID card or mobo is needed.
Then a reasonable case, PSU, memory, processor, Drive cage, cables etc. hmm starts to add up for a collection of spare parts that won’t necessarily work together especially with the OSS software.
As an alternative I am looking at a designed for purpose unit called a Infrant ReadyNAS NV. The box has the hotswap RAID5 drives, the web interface, gig ethernet NIC, USB backup function and is low power (which will make the Mrs happy – she always moaned about the servers running up the leccy bill)
It is indeed a wonderful thing. Finacially it is a bit demanding at around £850 but I have secured an interest free loan so I can get it and the next item of lust….

Network
When we moved into my house it was what you would call a fixer-upper. All the walls needed a plaster job, there was no wiring, no water, heating and the bathroom was where the TV is now situated.
Over the years we redeveloped the house as we had money but I have always tried to think ahead. When the walls were being plastered for instance, we put Cat 5 in them at the same time. This bulk wiring propagates our phone and network connections much as a business would use distributed wiring in an office.
At the moment I have two network devices that everything connects to. The first is the Belkin Internet Router which has 4 10/100 Ethernet ports. This device also provides the laptops with 54g wireless and is currently providing wired network for an OfficeJet JetDirect connection. A link from the router (located in the living room downstairs) goes into the wall to the patch panel in the loft to an 8 port 10/100 switch which feeds all the loft devices and the XBox back in the living room.
It is this switch in the loft thats up for replacement.

As the NAS will be Gigabit enabled I am going to get a 16 port gigabit switch from NetGear. It is unmanaged and nothing really special, it doesn’t even do jumbo frames, but it is an affordable 16 port 10/100/1000 switch and will fit nicely into my master plan.

Output
OK, now I am going to have all this nice infrastructure, what should I hang off it?
Since I bought the plasma I have been longing to connect a machine to it. The screen and the surround amp I purchased to go with it are both HD ready and support 720p (at least).
Despite the obvious virtues of the Sony Media centre system, I vowed after the Fujitsu “laptop” and my XDA to never give Bill any more of my hard earned.
It just so happens the new Mac Mini Intel Core Duo can output to HD via its DVI-D connector including all that nasty HDCP stuff, and with a suitable cable with HDMI at the other end, it will connect in a jiffy.
The Mini also happens to have a gigabit ethernet interface and the throughput to handle a gig connection easily. It has a nice little remote control too. The thing was made to be connected to a TV, my TV.
With a DVD writer, the Mini can backup all my nice data files to disk, with a little bit of software, RIPped versions of my DVDs can be played back without my lazy phatarse getting up to change disk. Music will play from the mini via its digital optical output leaving the Amp’s £700 Air Studios tuned circuitry to squeeze every last bit of detail cleanly from the music source and because storage is less of an issue, I feel some re RIPping of my CDs may occur as I adopt a loss-less audio format.
When Apple start their HD movies on demand service I will just press the button and enjoy the experience before HD-DVD or BlueRay get their disagreeable acts together.

So there you have it. In this short entry I have spent my gadget budget for the next two years but I think it will be worth it because as a result our files will be secure, we have a media box to die for and a nice fast network to run it all over.

Now, where did I leave my credit cards?

Apple history 102 (not the really early stuff)

A long time ago in a place far far away (Cupertino CA) there was once a struggling computer manufacturer. They were struggling because of a lack of drive, a lack of direction, a lack of vision.
Meanwhile not far away in Redwood CA. the ex founder of the company had moved on with his life and setup another company making bizarre looking black cubes and pizza boxes which run software written originally at a university and modified with a printer technology. They had loads of vision by no money.
This company was also struggling because their technology was just that little bit ahead of the curve that the market and some of the ancillary tech had not caught up yet.
Canon, the Japanese giant that was making the curious black hardware in partnership, pulled out of the project and the company (NeXT) transitioned to become a software vendor for x86 machine and in direct competition with Redmond.

Stick with me on this one, because it is going somewhere topical.

Meanwhile in Cupertino, our “beleaguered” computer company was trying to develop a modern, ahead of the curve OS, to take them into the new century and seal the march on their arch rivals from Redmond. Trying and failing, several times. The new OSs in question were Pink, Copland Taligent and that story is for another day because I don’t want to lose the person who is still reading just yet.
So it was after millions of man hours of development and nothing worthy of the NBT title to show for it, it was decided to look outside for a replacement OS.
The list of contenders was small but the smart money was on an ex-Apple member startup called BeOS. Also in the running was NeXT and some kind of agreement with Sun Microsystems.
NeXT was chosen for various reasons ( not least the Steve part of the deal ). Apple (NeXT, the deal was more NeXT taking over Apple than the other way round) then set about Macifying OpenStep.

Now here’s the topical bit: When OpenStep became Rhapsody and after Apple changed their plans for the OS a couple of times, a structure was devised for the OS that allowed a OpenStep (Cocoa) environment called Yellow Box a Mac Classic environment called BlueBox and another environment for running Windows applications inside the fledgling Apple OS.
This runtime environment was subsequently “Steved” along with the other proposal to allow YellowBox and BlueBox to run under MS Windows NT.

History has a way of repeating itself and it was in interest I read in the rumour sites this week that 10.5 (Leopard) will include a form of Virtual Machine environment that will allow Linux and Windows OSs to run on a Mac OSX machine. I just wonder what else we can look forward to as Apple fish around in their source code database pool of failed projects.
Will the iPhone feature Newton technologies or the next version of Pages be an OpenDoc word processor?
Will we see Mac OS X on third party hardware legitimatly just like OpenStep was designed to be. I hope so, because most of these ideas failed because they were ahead of the time or current technology, not because they were bad ideas. Technology and time are progressive and today there may just be a place for this stuff.

Here’s some bedside reading about computer history related to todays posting (I love wikiwiki);

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Computer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_%28OS%29