Data centers worldwide now consume more energy annually than Sweden. And the amount of energy required is growing, says Jonathan Koomey, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. From 2000 to 2005, the aggregate electricity use by data centers doubled. The cloud, he calculates, consumes 1 to 2 percent of the world’s electricity.

Data Center Overload – The New York Times Magazine

I’ve spent a not insignificant amount of my career (such as it is) in or thinking about data centers.Those of you (and you know who you are) already familiar, who find yourselves bored by page 2, might find some interesting reading on page 5.

What you might not be aware of, though, is the quality of their DVR. Here are some features you’ll love:

1. When recording one show while watching another, and you attempt to fast forward through the show you’re watching, you have a good chance of seeing the DVR re-boot itself. The real benefit here is that you don’t have to worry about the show you were recording taking up all the disk space it would have taken up if it… well… finished recording.
2. There must be some secret magical code built into the data stream that signifies the start and end of commercials. When watching a recorded show, and the show returns from commercial, about half the time the screen will go all pixelized for 3 or 4 seconds and the sound will drop out for about 10 to 15 seconds. This is a great feature, because you’re not bothered with having to listen to the resolution to the cliff-hanger that lead into the commercial. Thank you, secret magical code!
3. The FiOS DVR is a wizard when it comes to disk space management. Just check out the picture below. I was so happy with this feature that I asked them to send me another unit. But don’t worry, it did the same thing!


fuzzy math

4. One surprisingly pleasant feature is that you can’t fast forward in approximately the last two minutes of a recording. This is so nice when there’s a little tid-bit, like the tail segment of a show, that you’re trying to locate quickly.
5. Verizon has built closed captioning into the DVR, and it’s a gem! Sure, there’s plenty of gibberish and scores of unreadable characters; that’s par for the course these days. Where Verizon stomps the competition is in timing. In many shows, entire sentences are only displayed for a fraction of a second. Verizon has really hit the nail on the head with this feature, because, hey, who reads these days anyway?
6. One feature they’ve cleverly left out is the ability to skip through large chunks of a show. So if you’ve recorded a 4 hour football game and want to quickly skip to the middle or near the end, all you have to do is fast forward. At top speed, it only takes many, many, minutes.

1:41 PM: Control is restored. I immediately click to save my Word file. The MacBook freezes again. I notice an uncharacteristic repetitive clicking sound from hard drive.The sound is indicative of failure/retry attempts by the drive.

1:50 PM: After several minutes of no response, I power down and re-start the MacBook. I get the welcome chord and white screen but no Apple logo, and the fan starts and spins up to high speed. I power down.

2:05 PM: I dig out my AppleCare paperwork. I unplug my Time Machine backup drive.

2:17 PM: I call Apple tech support. I have experience troubleshooting and repairing PC issues, but relatively little in the Apple world. Because of this, I feel blind and helpless. In behavior uncharacteristic of other tech support calls I’ve made, I control my frustration, relax, and submit to the skill of the rep. She walks me through a reset, which involves removing the battery and holding down some keys. After this proves fruitless, she walks me through booting from the original OS X disk to access the disk utility, which doesn’t even show the hard drive. Declaring the drive dead, she opens a ticket and schedules a visit that afternoon at the Tyson’s Corner Apple store Genius Bar.

4:00 PM: I drop off the MacBook at the Tyson’s Apple store. I’m told they have the drive in stock, and to expect about a day turn-around. I return home.

6:34 PM: I receive call that the MacBook is ready.

7:30 PM: I pick up MacBook from Apple store. There is a slight delay, and I have to wait a few minutes in the store (torture, I know) while they, as I am told, “clean and polish the unit” before returning it to me.

8:10 PM: Back home, I turn on the MacBook and enjoy the welcome video with the cool flight through space and trippy “doo doo doo” music.

8:12 PM: I reach the screen asking if I want to transfer data from another computer, or restore from Time Machine backup. I select the restore from Time Machine and plug in my Time Machine drive.

8:43 PM: Restore complete, I finish a few registration screens and log in. The MacBook is exactly the same as it was earlier that day. There’s even a restored version of the Word document I was working on. About 20 minutes worth of work was lost.

Elapsed Time: 7 hours, 3 minutes.

So far, the only setting I’ve found that wasn’t restored is the “Require password to wake this computer from sleep or screen saver” setting in Security. And I had to do a couple of rounds of updates. And, interestingly, Time Machine was turned off. I turned it on.

Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.

- Otto von Bismarck

If that were true, then why is that show on the Discovery Channel, the one where they show, amongst other things, sausages being made, so popular¹? Because it’s fun to watch things being made. On that premise, I offer, for your amusement, a window into the creation of a website. Last year, I developed www.thecocoagallery.com, an online presence for ACKC Cocoa Bar, my friends Eric and Rob’s stores in Washington, DC and Alexandria, VA.

Now, I am working on a site for Eric’s other venture, Artfully Paper, located in Alexandria, VA. The domain, artfullypaper.com, still points to their old site. The new site is accessible via IP at http://161.58.102.185/. First, some expectation management:

• It’s a work in progress, so you never know what you might see when you drop in.
• I am using several pieces of JavaScript that I can only test on the server. So it’s not just a draft gallery, it’s an actual test tube.
• I’m testing on IE, Firefox, and Safari. While I’m working out bugs, some things might work in one browser, and not in another.

For anyone interested:

• The drop-down menus are via HV Menu.
• The Apple-esque cover flow is via Finn Rudolph’s ImageFlow picture gallery.
• The image pup-up functionality within ImageFlow is via Torstein Honsi’s HIghslide JS JavaScript thumbnail viewer.

Oh, and what of poor Otto? Ok, so he did unify Germany in the second half of the 19th century. But most of us know only of the WWII Battleship that bore his name, the largest warship of her time and one of the most famous ever. The warship that, after the Battle of the Denmark Straight, where she sank the HMS Hood, the pride of the British navy, was hunted and sunk by the same at the famous direction of Winston Churchill: “Sink the Bismarck.”

¹Full disclosure: I don’t actually know of a show on the Discovery Channel that shows sausages being made. But I wouldn’t be surprised if How It’s Made or How Do They Do It? showed that. And, it turns out, they’re both on the Science Channel, not Discovery. And, I don’t really know if they’re all that popular. But I like them.

I instructed her to leave the case open and point a fan towards the innards. That stopped the blackouts and confirmed the diagnosis. Surgery was needed to replace the power supply. One call to Dell and $97.63 later, and the new organ was on its way.

The patient: Dell Dimension 5150C

In the olden days, PCs were held together with thousands of tiny screws: tedious, but easy to identify. These days, many makers use finger-operated latches to give easy access. Few tools, if any, are required. The downside is that sometimes the latches can be difficult to identify. In this case, the side cover is loosed via the latch on the top rear of the case.

The initial incision - don't be afraid to cut

Inside, it’s pretty standard. In the body cavity below, the object in the upper left quadrant is the CD/DVD drive. Below it and out of sight is the 5.25″ floppy drive. The lower left quadrant is the braincase: buried in there is the Intel CPU, which runs pretty hot, so it’s got a heat sink and fan attached to it and is encased in a plastic duct that directs air past it for cooling. The lower right quadrant is the hard drive. And in the upper right quadrant is the power supply we need to replace.

Rib spreaders all the way wide. Can you identify the major organs?

Below is the new power supply (PS). I had looked at the model number on the old PS and tried to find it on the Dell website, but no luck. So I called support and gave them the PC’s serial number to place the order. The new part looks right, but, to make sure, I checked the new part number against the original one. They weren’t exactly the same, which isn’t a surprise, but they were close, and the input and output power numbers on the sticker matched, so I felt comfortable we had the right part.

Fresh from the cooler: the new heart

Below is one of the two blue latches holding the hard drive in place. Just press and remove. Anything this color inside the cavity is a latch that releases something.

The blue clips make removal easy

Since the PS extends under the CD/DVD drive, I started by loosing it…

The CD/DVD drive loose, but still connected

…and then lifting it out of the cavity. The gold Ribbon cable carries data from and to (in the case of a writeable device) the CD/DVD drive. I was hoping I could just leave the gold cable in place.

CD/DVD drive pulled out, but still connected

Next, I unlatched and pulled the hard drive out. It has two cables attached to it. The blue one carries the data to and from the drive. The red/yellow/black bundle that runs to the power supply is – you guessed it – the hard drive’s power cable. With gentle pressure, it’s easily disconnected from the hard drive.

Hard drive and CD/DVD drive pulled

The following picture shows a big colorful cable bundle running from the power supply to a white connector that’s plugged into the mother board. However, the gold CD/DVD cable is in the way. Guess I’ll need to disconnect the CD/DVD drive anyway.

The CD/DVD cable blocking the mother board power cable

With the gold CD/DVD cable disconnected, the big power connector is accessible. There’s a little plastic latch on the side of the connector that releases it.

After disconnecting the CD/DVD drive, the mother board power cable is accessible

Three screws through the rear of the case hold the power supply in place.

The only tool required is a Phillips head screwdriver to remove the 3 screws holding the power supply

Removing the 3 screws liberates the power supply

Below, the power supply is out, but not completely disconnected. We’ve disconnected one power cable that ran to the hard drive and one that ran to the mother board, but you can see another one, a yellow and black bundle, running from the PS to the mother board. You can also see that I’ve pulled the floppy drive (laying to the left of the carcass, but still connected), in order to get my fingers on all those cables. With all the major organs pulled, the mother board is almost completely exposed.

The heart outside the chest cavity.

Once the third and final power cable is disconnected, the old PS is free and can be recycled via your friendly neighborhood electronics recycling program. Don’t throw it in a landfill!

To close, just reverse the steps:

1. Place the new PS in the cavity and fasted it with the three screws
2. Connect the two power cables to the mother board, and the third to the hard drive
3. Put the floppy drive back in place
4. Re-connect CD/DVD drive’s gold cable to the mother board and put the drive back in place
5. Put the hard drive in place
6. Put the side cover on