PolyMicro Systems

Purchased a 500GB Freeagent Pro external drive for $139 this weekend and very impressed with the quality of the product. Manufactured by Seagate, it comes with USB 2.0, dual Firewire 400 ports, and an ESATA interface along with a 5 year warranty and was just what I was looking for in an external system to backup my MacBook Pro which is currently my primary development system.

The unit is in a very solid feeling metal enclosure which stands upright with an attractive backlit plastic inset along with the power supply, USB and Firwire cables, and modules for USB and Firewire. There are two modules that plug into the base of the unit. One contains the eSATA and USB port while the other contains 2 Firewire 400 ports. (Firewire 800 would have really sweetened the deal!).

Although it comes only with software for the PC (shame on you Seagate) it works fine with MacOSX and I tested it with both USB and Firewire and discovered the Firewire was actually a tad faster at about 4.60MBs while USB was about 4.2MBs according to Superduper

If your interested there is a good review at www.bigbruin.com.

Copilot

How it works: You go to https://www.copilot.com, enter your name, and get an invitation code. You then download and run a tiny piece of software. Tell your friend the invitation code, they go to copilot.com and enter it, and they download a tiny piece of software. Now you’re controlling their computer. Works with Windows or Macintosh, through almost any firewall.

Details: Weekend = 8pm EST (GMT-5) Friday night to 2am EST Monday morning. Copilot subscribers can use Copilot free on weekends, too.

Something to consider

Joel on Software

To reach this sweet spot, we borrowed an idea from Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota. He calls it Five Whys. When something goes wrong, you ask why, again and again, until you ferret out the root cause. Then you fix the root cause, not the symptoms.

Since this fit well with our idea of fixing everything two ways, we decided to start using five whys ourselves. Here’s what Michael came up with:

• Our link to Peer1 NY went down
• Why? – Our switch appears to have put the port in a failed state
• Why? – After some discussion with the Peer1 NOC, we speculate that it was quite possibly caused by an Ethernet speed / duplex mismatch
• Why? – The switch interface was set to auto-negotiate instead of being manually configured
• Why? – We were fully aware of problems like this, and have been for many years.  But - we do not have a written standard and verification process for production switch configurations.
• Why? – Documentation is often thought of as an aid for when the sysadmin isn’t around or for other members of the operations team, whereas, it should really be thought of as a checklist.

“Had we produced a written standard prior to deploying the switch and subsequently reviewed our work to match the standard, this outage would not have occurred,” Michael wrote. “Or, it would occur once, and the standard would get updated as appropriate.”

After some internal discussion we all agreed that rather than imposing a statistically meaningless measurement and hoping that the mere measurement of something meaningless would cause it to get better, what we really needed was a process of continuous improvement. Instead of setting up a SLA for our customers, we set up a blog where we would document every outage in real time, provide complete post-mortems, ask the five whys, get to the root cause, and tell our customers what we’re doing to prevent that problem in the future. In this case, the change is that our internal documentation will include detailed checklists for all operational procedures in the live environment.