My health has been in question over the past few days. Nothing serious, I’ve just got a cold that refuses to actually get going. I’ll get the sore throat, which will disappear and then reappear, along with the full nose, which would gdo the same. Ergh. Not good.

Anyway, in response to Noscere’s post, I’m going to post some of the WordPress plugins I use, just so you know what goes on “behind the scenes”. Note that I won’t mention security related plugins here!

First up is Akismet. Nothing really much to say about this particular little utility. It saves me having to delete spam, and with just over 45,000 spam comments at the time of typing, it’s saved me some work!

Secondly, there’s iMax Width, and no, it’s nothing to do with the branch of cinema. It forces any image I post on here to a maximum width of 500 pixels. Normally, this is the case anyway, as most of the photos I post come from Flickr, which automatically have a width of 500, but I’ve seen on a couple of occasions, I’ve posted one of the bigger sizes, meaning that if this plugin wasn’t there, the page would look like shite. And what do you mean by “it does anyway”?

Next up is Stapress reloaded. When work stalled on the original Statpress plugin, several spin-offs were released. This is just one of them. I’m not sure if work has halted on this too. Either way, it doesn’t really matter, it’s still usable. Unfortunately, it seems that this is the number-one cause of slowness on the site, as the database size grows quickly.

And then, we have Twitter Tools. I must admit to still not fully understanding Twitter. Why would I want to limit myself to 140 characters to say something? And if I want to send someone a private message, I don’t want that 140 characters eaten in by whoever’s user name it is. I use it mainly for giving a quick twitter update, announcing a new blog post (which I’ll probably do with this one), and for quickly creating a bit.ly link, should I want to pass the link to someone else. I’m sure someone will give me a reason why twitter is so… erm, needed. Saying that, when a celebrity is reported to be dead, it’s the first place I look.

WordPress Database Backup is pretty much redundant to me, as since installation, I have other backup mechanisms in place. I don’t think I’ve used it in about 2 years. It’s infinitely slower than my other methods, and I only keep it in place for emergencies.

And if it isn’t our old friend, Google XML Sitemaps up next! (You can tell I’m really starting to struggle for introductions to these) which creates an XML sitemap readable by Google, presumably so it understands the site better. Or something.

Last up, because I can’t be bothered to do anymore, and I can already see Chad’s eyes glazing over is WP tags to Technorati, and is the reason there’s two sets of tags in here. I assumed it would help the blog get “noticed” (though I always seem to complain or get overly paranoid when it does get partially popular), and was installed after the “tags” feature was added to WordPress. I’m not sure if it provides any benefit anymore, as the plugin hasn’t been updated since the iron age, and the amount of hits I get from technorati is negligible, so I’m not even sure if it works anymore.

To answer the questions you weren’t thinking of, no I don’t use any type of cache plugin. It caused me headaches last year, and to think this blog generates any type of server load that would require cache usage, would simply be delusion on my part. The only time I’ve generated noticeable server load was when I posted that Jeremy Beadle had died about 2 years ago. It soon quietened down as soon as word started to spread across the interwebs. Obviously, with the introduction of the afore-mentioned twitter, I wonder how many people do the same as me, and just bypass Google altogether….

Right, that’s it for now. Hopefully, I’ll get my body in order shortly. I’m off work for the next few days.

You know, it’s just been a crap few days, and October’s always a shit month, so I’ll probably not be blogging much in the near future. Yes, even less than usual!

The past few months at work have been OK, but it’s now the silly period, and it’s even sillier than usual. I could go into details, but as the Facebook Grass (the “person” who grasses up lowly employees to the higher management should they even breathe a word of truth about our place of employment) is doing his/her thing again, I’ll just say one thing. “LOL”.

Mind you, I don’t think many people at work actually read this site any more, so I could sit here and blurt the whole thing out. It’s pure pantomime stuff, it really is.

Tonight, however, I’m going to hopefully forget about the whole fucking place, and let my hair down, for I shall be attening The Studio tonight, to watch a few local bands play, including Accidents By Design and the almighty Infernus. Should be a good night.

Back to the subject of blogging, I have completed blogging about that stupid sodding hard drive. It works, that’s the end of it. Therefore, the other morning, after another shocking 12-hour shift, I came home and decided to write a blog about music. I’d been listening to one of my favourite tracks, and decided I’d write an indepth blog about what I liked about it. Only thing was, I’d written an identical blog 18 months ago, and didn’t realise until I’d just about finished it.

ironically, that previous post also gives details about hard drive upgrade problems I’d been having around that time.

Anyway, because I’m not going to waste an hour’s worth of typing, here’s the post in its entirety..

I’ve had a shit day at work today, so you’ll have to forgive me for having one of my “ooooh, a song I like, and how I came about it” blogs.

It turned out that for the purpose of using it as a TV theme, it was sped up by approximately 10%. I think I prefer the original, slower version.

I’ve just noticed that this post contains more swearies than any I’ve written for a long time. Ah well, never mind, eh?

EDIT: Ooooh, I do like these edits. Missed out a quote mark which meant that the first section of text was missing. Quickly fixed, so sorry if the post didn;t make much sense originally.

…. hopefully. I’ve done the deed, and have switched the hard drive over to SATA 150. Hopefully, this should fix it. Won’t find out for about 6 hours though. Will post updates. Might even film it.

UPDATE: YES, IT WORKS!

Now, let me just start off my saying that, once again, this site suffered downtime. This is the second time there’s been issues in as many days, and for all the reliability that 34sp have given me over the past 8 years, it seems like the move to their professional hosting package was a bad one. I’ve experienced over 8 hours of downtime in the past week alone.

Anyway, enough of my whinging about the website. I’m happy to announce that the 1Tb hard drive is working. It turns out I DID have to change the SATA interface speed to 150. Easier said than done, and unfortunately, it wasn’t as easy as sticking a jumper on the back, like in the good old days. You have to use the software provided by the manufacturer.

Neither of the computers I own that can take SATA drives would recognise it, so the manufacturers’ solution of loading their software to change the speed was dead in the water. I knew what needed to be done, but there was no way of doing it.

So, I had to find somewhere with a SATA 300 interface. Thankfully, at work, I sit right behind a lovely, fast modern computer with more SATA 300 ports than…. er, my machines, obviously.

I slip the side off the machine, connect the cables, load the Samsung software disk, change ONE option, switch the machine off, and that was literally it. The menu option was changed, and everything I hoped was good to go. Of course, I couldn’t test this theory until I got home. 12 hours of drudgery sat before me, as I looked at my little shiny drive, in its fetching plastic case, waiting, nay BEGGING me to connect it and give it some information to store.

I burst through the door this morning, running up the stairs, clutching the drive in my puny little hands. Before my coat had even hit the floor, I was connecting it up, ready to give the drive its first taste of proper binary.

Within minutes, I was rebooting, hoping to see a drive called “BIG” in my computer. I did! WOOO!

I’d copied a few files over when I was messing about with USB connections, so I tried to delete them and start from scratch. It wouldn’t delete them. Erk.

I tried to format the drive, it wouldn’t do that either..

I rebooted and drived the same thing. It still wouldn’t.

I deleted the current partition, and created a new one. Phew, this time it would format. I assume it just didn’t like the format that Vista gave it. I just performed a quick format, however, as a full format would have taken forever. Probably not the 12 hours it took while it was connected via USB, but it would still take some time.

Data is now copying across from the old drive onto the new one with no errors or ill effects so far, and it should take another couple of hours. As for filming it, there really wasn’t anything to see. I did intend to put the machine on this desk so I could see the monitor, but I realised there was no point. It would either work, or it wouldn’t.

I’m going to have a celebratory beer and hopefully draw the line under what must be the most boring series of posts in the whole history of blogging.

Yes, unfortunately, mercuryvapour.co.uk did indeed suffer some more downtime last night. It seems this server has some major issues with Apache. According to the hosts, if something stops working, such as Apache (the web server software), then it’s supposed to restart it. Clearly, this didn’t happen, as it went down at 21:30 last night, and didn’t reappear on the interwebs until 00:45.

It’s clearly not the first time this has happened, as you can probably tell by my constant whinging over the past few posts. I really hope that 34sp get to the bottom of this.

In other news, the weekend has been an entire write-off! I’ve done absolutely nothing, and most of the time has been sat in front of my shiny new keyboard typing bletherings over the internet. I shall let this continue, and also give a little bit of an update on my hard drive situation. I still don’t have a solution to this.

You may remember my update to the original post. Basically, I ruled out the drive as being faulty by connecting it via a USB2 adaptor. It worked fine. that was on Vista.

Now, the machine I wanted to connect it to (my “media” server) is running Windows 2000. Not much of a problem. Especially when I connected it and got the “Your hardware is connected and ready to use” message. Fair enough. I entered “My Computer”… Hmmm, no drive appeared. A bit strange. I knew it was formatted (that fucker took 12 hours) and that the USB adaptor wasn’t faulty.

Right clicked “My computer > Manage > Disk Management”. It didn’t see the drive either. What the fudge?

I entered Device Manager, and noticed that instead of saying the model of drive that was connected, it simply gave me “USB Hard Drive”. No model number, or anything of use. Aaaargh.

I was spitting blood at this point. Predictably, the SATA > USB unit came with a tiny driver CD. This didn’t help, as the driver disk included only had drivers for Windows 98SE. No drivers for Windows 2000! The drive is still completely useless to me.

I have one last ace up my sleeve before I invest in a PCI SATA card. I’ll know by this time tomorrow if my hair-brained solution has worked. The PCI SATA idea has taken a set-back, however, as it appears you can’t get SATA 300 PCI cards, only PCI-Express, which none of my systems have.

I really don’t need another external 1Tb drive, but that looks like what I’ll have if this doesn’t work.

This post may not be suitable for anyone under the age of 18. I’m going to shout and swear a little. This post does not contain a solution to the issues listed below… yet. It does, however contain a load of technical jargon that nobody in their right mind will understand. Ah yes, I’m going to to off onto one of my little rants about the state of computers. Or rather, just my computers.

Whilst at work a few days ago, I decided that my little MP3 server at home could do with a bit of a boost. It’s currently running 2 IDE drives, 1 60Gb IBM Deathstar, and a 200Gb Maxtor. The 200Gb drive is completely chock full of stuff, and the Deathstar is ancient and noisy, I really didn’t fancy putting anything on it that I could risk losing.

Off I toddled to my normal place of computer hardware purchasement, Ebuyer. I noticed that they had a Samsung 1Tb drive for sale. A Spinpoint HD103UJ, should you care.

Now, I’ve had “trouble” with Samsung drives in the past. My first 500Gb drive was a Samsung, and it began to show signs of dying within 3 months, though this technically may not have been the drive’s fault. This 500Gb still serves a purpose, however. its magnets are now used to keep the oven door closed since the handle snapped off it.

I ordered the drive, after deciding to give Samsung another chance, along with a few other things… another keyboard, which I intend to use at work, and a SATA/IDE to USB adaptor.

Despite the fact I paid nothing for the “super-saver” delivery, it was delivered within 36 hours of me placing the order. The doorbell rang, and I hurriedly rushed downstairs, met the UPS guy with a grin from ear to ear, ran back upstairs clutching the afore-mentioned parcel, and ripped it open like a kid on Christmas day.

I’d just finished nights, and the drive was cold, so to avoid any possible condensation damage, I decided to leave fitting the drive until I’d had some sleep.

I awoke at roughly 6PM, looking forward to the procedure of opening the machine, taking the old 200Gb drive out, connecting the new 1Tb one, then connecting the old drive via USB, copying the data over, ghosting the 60Gb system drive, writing the image to the 200Gb drive, making the 60Gb redundant.

It all sounds so very seemples (squeak).

Firstly, i disconnected Beastbits so I could use the power cables and the monitor so I could actually see what I was doing. I took out the old drive, fitted the new one via SATA, and powered on the machine. The SATA detection screen came up…

“No devices found”.

Confused, I checked my connections, and sure enough, I’d not connected the power cable to one of the molex connectors. Bohh, fucking idiot.

In it goes, reboot, aaaaand, yes, “No devices found”.

This was the shit that I’ve always dreaded. It means that the drive is a SATA 3.0Gbps, and my motherboard is a SATA 1.5Gbps. According to the scrappy little pice of paper you get with the drive, “you should switch your drive to SATA 1.5Gb/s speed with a software which we are providing via www.samsunghdd.com”

Um, OK. I couldn’t see how a piece of software could possibly help if the hardware can’t actually see and detect the drive. I played along, and found the appropriate software on the Samsung website. It came as an ISO image. And, the only machine capable of writing ISOs in the whole of Mercuryvapour Towers is Beastbits, which was sat on the floor, totally disconnected.

Almost in tears, I swapped the computers back, and burned the ISO to a DVD, and swapped them back again. Lo and behold, the Samsung software totally failed to recognise the drive, so it was impossible to change the settings.

Now, I’m not disfamiliar with the whole “SATA 1.5/3.0″ issue, and I know that all of my other drives have a jumper you can change to allow it to work. This particular drive does indeed have a set of jumpers on the back…

Unfortunately, these are undocumented. Nothing on the label of the drive, nothing in the shitty little scrap of paper you receive.

I spent the next 20 minutes looking for a hard drive with the jumpers still attached to it, so I could use one of these. Turns out both jumpers do absolutely nothing to rectify the issue, and the drive still remained undetected.

OK, fair enough, I couldn’t do anything with that computer. It was a lost cause, so I thought I’d try and connect it to Beastbits to see if I can get it to detect. Success! Er, sort of. It would get as far as the SATA detection screen, and it would hang.

Note how the first drive has the size printed next to it, but the Samsung drive doesn’t? Yes, that’s because there’s a known issue with the SATA controller on my motherboard with drives over a certain size! JOY! It’s well documented here.

Seems like the only solution is to get a SATA controller card and hope for the best. and there wasn’t as much ranting as I’d originally planned. But for now, I have a 1,000Gb paperweight. Tits.