Jan Rychter

Executive summary: don't buy it.

Convinced by people on podcasts (mostly TWiP and This Week in Tech) raving about how great the Drobo (from Data Robotics) storage device is, I decided to budget two into a project I'm working on. Expectations were high — Drobo marketing pushes the devices as easy to use, reliable and flexible. Being a Mac user, I expected an "Apple experience": plug it in and forget it's even there.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

To begin with, the Drobo is Loud. Not just "loud", but REALLY LOUD. And it isn't the drives, it's the fan that cools the whole thing. To give you an idea of what I mean by Loud, one single Drobo with ultra-quiet WD Green drives spun down is louder than my 8-core Mac Pro with 4 drives and an army of fans in it. It's that loud. To make matters worse, the fan in the Drobo turns on very frequently, even when the drives have been spun down for hours. I don't know why, as the drives are very cool to the touch.

You won't want to have a Drobo under your desk, or anywhere in your vicinity, trust me. And that means the fancy fast FireWire-800 interface that you just paid for is pretty much useless. I used a DroboShare to setup my Drobo in a remote location where I can't hear it.

The DroboShare comes with Gigabit Ethernet, as the marketing will point out. What they won't point out is that it connects to your Drobo with a USB cable, which (together with SMB) pretty much limits your transfer speeds to about 5-8MB/s. That's about 6 times slower than when connected via FireWire-800.

What you should also know is that using the DroboShare will provide its own annoyances. As an example, I found it impossible to create a sparsebundle disk image for use with SuperDuper on the Drobo. Go figure. SMB introduces other annoying problems, too — I couldn't copy my music collection onto the Drobo, because some filenames had non-ascii characters in them.

But all of the above are merely inconveniences. The real issue is with reliability. I bought the Drobo so that I can trust it with my data and forget about failing drives and losing data. Which is why I was slightly miffed when Drobo Dashboard kept crashing on me and reporting unreliable data, annoyed when it hung in the middle of the night when doing my first real backup, slightly angry when support told me my Drobo is defective and needs to be replaced, and really pissed off when the second unit I got corrupted my volume and lost data (when connected to a DroboShare). And then Data Robotics support asked me... whether I have a backup. Or a copy of DiskWarrior.

I have so far been through TWO Drobo replacements. Despite my asking, Data Robotics was unwilling to provide an upgraded (better) unit.

What's worse is that now I don't trust the Drobo at all. I looked closer: the DroboShare seems to use the plain Linux support for HFS+ that is known to be shaky. There is NO FSCK (Filesystem Check) program for HFS+ at all! Data Robotics will tell you that you can switch your Drobo between a Mac and DroboShare and you will be ok — but that seems to be exactly what resulted in my data corruption problems.

Then there is Data Robotics support. When you make "reliable data storage devices", you really need to have support that cares about customers, reads their emails and responds instantly. Responding after one business day is not enough. Given that support people will forget what was written before, or begin by asking what your address is and when you bought your Drobo, it will easily take a week before you get to the real issue.

What you should also realize is that when your Drobo unit fails, there is no way for you to read data off the drives. You need a working Drobo unit to do that, and it has to recognize the filesystem and mount it.

I bought a Drobo so that I can have reliable data storage without worrying about reliable data storage. The net effect was that I got an unreliable solution that I have to manage, worry about and spend time and money on. That's a failure in my book. I will never buy another Drobo unit again.

[... the above was been drafted, and then 3 months passed ...]

So, today my volume (drobo mounted via a droboshare) unexpectedly disappeared on my Mac. Investigation of the DroboShare logs shows:

MOUNT HFS+ : s_id = [sda1]
scsi: unknown opcode 0xea
SCSI error : <2 0 0 0> return code = 0x70000
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 4533105544
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 566638188
SCSI error : <2 0 0 0> return code = 0x70000
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 4533105552
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 566638189
SCSI error : <2 0 0 0> return code = 0x70000
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 4533105560
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 566638190
SCSI error : <2 0 0 0> return code = 0x70000
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 4533105568
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 566638191
SCSI error : <2 0 0 0> return code = 0x70000
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 4533105576
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 566638192
SCSI error : <2 0 0 0> return code = 0x70000
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 4533105584
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 566638193
SCSI error : <2 0 0 0> return code = 0x70000
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 4533105592
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 566638194
SCSI error : <2 0 0 0> return code = 0x70000
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 4533105600
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 566638195
SCSI error : <2 0 0 0> return code = 0x70000
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 4533105608
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 566638196
usb 1-1: USB disconnect, address 2
SCSI error : <2 0 0 0> return code = 0x70000
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 4533105616
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 566638197
[...]

Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 270838
scsi2 (0:0): rejecting I/O to dead device
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 270838
scsi2 (0:0): rejecting I/O to dead device
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 276472
scsi2 (0:0): rejecting I/O to dead device
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 276472
scsi2 (0:0): rejecting I/O to dead device
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 422806275
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 422806276
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 422806277
scsi2 (0:0): rejecting I/O to dead device
scsi2 (0:0): rejecting I/O to dead device
scsi2 (0:0): rejecting I/O to dead device

Drobo Dashboard doesn't launch, console shows me crash logs for the ddserviced daemon, which crashes every 10 seconds or so. Reinstalling drobo dashboard doesn't help.

I am so tired. I bought the Drobo so that I can save time, not so that I can run around and service it all the time, jumping through hoops set up by "support" from Data Robotics. I can already see how I'll have to spend several hours debugging the problems, dealing with support, reinstalling things.

I am posting this so that people are warned. Hopefully people will google for "Drobo" before buying it and I will save someone the hassle and frustration.

Will I lose data again this time?

Don't buy a Drobo.

Cory Doctorow tells us we shouldn't buy iPads. Others join him, whining about how iPad makes us all consumers, sheep, or worse, and how we are headed for a future similar to the one in Idiocracy, where we won't be able to do much except consume digital media.

To all those who complain about how un-hackable the iPad is: what have you hacked recently? Have you actually modified any hardware? Written interesting new software for an existing device? Released anything as open-source perhaps?

Well guess what: I have. I have been using Linux for 15 years, on desktops, laptops, handhelds, servers, tablets and embedded devices. I compiled software, fixed bugs, wrote drivers, improved things. I took to my HP-48G with a soldering iron and expanded the memory. I struggled with Linux on a Sharp Zaurus because I believed in an open device. I had to reverse engineer a Fujitsu tablet and write a Linux driver for a microcontroller that serviced the keys and orientation sensor, just so that I could use Linux on that tablet.

And you know what -- life is too short. I'll be buying an iPad so that I can work on more interesting things than making my hardware work properly. I'll use the device to jot down ideas, read articles, write notes, create presentations, sketch diagrams.

I'm not "losing" anything by buying and using the iPad. Just as I don't have to tinker with the jet engine of the airplane that will take me to London, I don't have to tinker with the internals of the iPad. If I want to tinker and hack, I can build a model airplane or an ultralite. In the computer world, there is Arduino, OpenMoko, and many other similar projects. Tinker and hack to your heart's delight and get educated about how electronics and software work on every level.

But I wonder -- why aren't you hacking and tinkering? Where are those "cool ideas from the creative universe" that you need so badly to give to me to run on my hardware?

More importantly, why aren't you designing something better?

Look at you: you have to actively convince people not to buy iPads. This means the product is so good and people want it so badly, that you have to fight the trend. So why hasn't anyone invented and designed a product that is this good and ships with full schematics and has this all-open architecture you crave?

Why haven't you?

If you actually wanted to write software for your iPad, instead of writing lengthy articles complaining about stuff, nothing prevents you from doing so. Just download the SDK and off you go. Yes, you will need Apple's acceptance to sell your app in the App Store, but it's all about ideals, isn't it, so no worries.

I know. It's easier to complain. But who's the sheep now?

You live in the United States of America. You design all your forms to have a mandatory "State" field. And then you decide it might just be a good idea to sell to the other 95.4% of the world. But you know, most of the world does not use the concept of a "State" all that much.

The moment you put a "country" field in your form, two things should happen:

• you should remove the State field if the country isn't set to U.S.A. or at least make it optional
• you should stop insisting on NANPA-formatted phone numbers (NNN-NNNNNNN)

I write this after wrestling with a number of unbelievably stupid web forms, all of which required me to provide a "State" name (I don't have one), choose from a list of states, or provide a fake phone number just to satisfy a stupid validator routine.

Two important articles appeared in the last few days, both elaborating on why Mozilla is reluctant to adopt the H.264 video codec. Both are well thought out, but Mozilla is playing the wrong game here.

The implied conclusion is that we should all switch to Theora, since that is unencumbered with patents. Well guess what — pretty much every algorithm used in modern video compression is patented. And there are only so many ways you can slice and 2D-DCT a macroblock. There is no reason to believe that Theora is somehow designed "around" all those patents. It might very well be impossible to create a video codec that doesn't infringe on something. This article has a much more realistic approach to the issue at hand.

The game to play is to either abolish the patent system altogether (it has outlived its usefulness), or to make patent claims on algorithms void and unenforceable. Simply avoiding H.264 just because the licensing situation there is sorted out won't get us anywhere. We'll end up adopting something else (be it Theora or On2 VPwhatever) and finding out about patent claims years later, once the codec becomes popular.

Robert O’Callahan, Mozilla Hacker, wrote an interesting article about why he believes Mozilla should not support the H.264 format.

Other issues aside, I don’t understand why supporting a proprietary Flash plugin from a single vendor is better than opening support for a standardized (albeit similarly patent-encumbered) video format with open-source implementations.

Every couple of years I have an encounter with assembly programming. It's funny how rules that applied years ago are useless now. The most recent encounter lasted about two weeks and resulted in a 600x speedup in a critical function. But, all wasn't nice and rosy: it was more difficult than I initially planned, took more time and provided a few surprises.

Key takeaway points, so that I can remember them and so that people googling for answers may find them:

• If you're looking for the PSRLB (parallel shift right logical bytes) SSE instruction, it isn't there. But there are two ways around it: you can either shift words using PSRLW and then mask out the higher bits, or for shifts with a count of one, use (xmm14 contains 1 in every byte and xmm15 is 0):

   psubusb xmm0, xmm14
   pavgb xmm0, xmm15

• If you need to "horizontally" sum 16 bytes in an XMM register, you will find that the PHADDB instruction doesn't exist, either. There is PHADDW and you could use that in combination with PMADDUBSW (multiply-add bytes to words), but the resulting sequence of instructions is far from optimal. Fortunately, there is a trick: use PSADBW. This computes the sum of absolute differences, which if you use 0 as the source parameter will correspond to your sum, and stores it in two quadwords, which gets you halfway there. In my case, I simply accumulated the results using two quadwords per register, and combined them at the end.

• There is a nice PMOVMSKB instruction which converts a byte mask to a bit mask. But why, oh why isn't there an instruction which does the opposite? Extracting a 16-bit mask to a 16-byte register turns out to be painful.

• The last time I programmed in x86 assembly was using a Pentium 4 with the infamous NetBurst architecture. It was an ugly, unpredictable beast, where a mispredicted branch could cost you a fortune in performance terms. It seems that with the newer Nehalem chips Intel really got things right -- latencies for most instructions are small and predictable and overall performance is more consistent across the board. There are fewer traps. And unaligned data accesses aren't penalized as badly as before!

• LOOP is slower than

   sub rcx, 1
   jnz .loop

Go figure.

• Thank God and AMD for FINALLY adding registers. Back in the P4 days it was ridiculous: having a 3GHz processor with only 6 usable general-purpose registers and 8 SIMD ones sounded like a joke.

And the final observation: just as several years ago, the state of x86 assemblers is a sad, sad affair. To use a construction industry metaphor, an average x86 assembler has the complexity and usefulness of a hammer, while the DSP world is using high-speed mag-rail blast-o-matic nail guns with automatic feeders and superconducting magnets. I mean, seriously, do I really have to manually track register allocations?! Manually reorder instructions and measure performance to see which arrangement is faster (hoping not to break any dependencies)? Manually update stack pointer offsets after pushing something onto the stack? Write prologs and epilogs for C-linkable functions myself?

If anybody is thinking about writing or improving an x86 assembler, take a look at what Texas Instruments provides for their DSPs. See how you can write "linear assembly" and have your compiler schedule VLIW execution units for you. See how you don't need a piece of paper with a huge table detailing which registers are used in which part of your code.

I find it ridiculous that the most popular computing platform in the world does not have a decent assembler. What's even worse, from the discussions I've seen on the net, people are mostly interested in how fast the assembler is (?!) rather than how much time it saves the programmer.

Anyway, the net result of this encounter is a function that is about 600x faster than the original C implementation. It is about 4x slower than the theoretical limit (calculated assuming only arithmetic ops, no overhead, no memory accesses, and 16 ops per cycle), which I'm very happy with.

x86 assembly, see you in several years!

UPDATE (22.12.2009): I wrote this post hoping that it will help people searching for the non-existing PSRLB instruction -- and it worked -- I can already see it in the logs!

AppleScript release notes for Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.5.6):

Folder Actions now attempts to delay calling “files added” actions on files until they are done being copied. Previous versions called “files added” actions on new files as soon as they appeared in the file system. This was a problem for files that were being copied into place: if the file was sufficiently large or coming over a slow server link, the file might appear several seconds before it was done being copied, and running the folder action before it finished copying would behave badly. Folder Actions now watches if the file is changing size: if it stays the same size for more than three seconds, it is deemed “done”, and the action is called.

My experience with folder actions was that they are one big race condition waiting to bite you. It’s something all the tutorials conveniently glossed over. I kept wondering why Apple kept them if they are so obviously unreliable.

Hopefully that change, while far from correct, will make them usable.

Merlin Mann:

Because, with Adobe apps, everything from installation through activation through re-activation through software updates through more re-re-reactivations through (HEY! more updates!) is like a giant rectal exam. That I paid for.

Couldn’t have phrased it better myself.

Dear Music Industry Executives,

This is to explain why I will “steal” music using BitTorrent, eDonkey and any other easily available means.

I will not do it because I want to save money or because I’m cheap. Far from it. My 600-or-so CD collection packaged into boxes and stored in my basement should attest to it.

I’ve been trying to pay for music online. I really have. I wanted to use the iTunes store, but it doesn’t sell music or movies in my country. I tried to register as a US customer, but a US-based credit card is required to do that.

I managed to buy several albums from Amazon MP3 right when it opened, before it told me my money was not welcome (“Please note that AmazonMP3.com is currently only available to US customers”). Hulu told me its video library can only be streamed from within the United States.

I own a Sonos system, so I tried to get a Rhapsody subscription. But they didn’t want my money (“The Rhapsody MP3 Store is currently only available inside the United States”). Pandora didn’t want me either (“We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S.”).

Spotify was a glimmer of hope (it isn’t in the US!), until it told me that “Unfortunately, due to licensing restrictions we are not yet available in your country.”

So, in spite of my best efforts over the past several years, I have been unable to pay for music online. And frankly, I’m tired of trying. What difference does it make which country I’m in? Is my credit card any different from any other one? Are my dollars/euros of lesser value?

You have been playing your silly regional games and you think you can keep playing them forever. Make these people wait. Release the album here, see if it gets traction, then price it higher there. Regionalize DVDs to control releases and pricing. Well, the game is over.

From now on, I will have no qualms about downloading digital music. I will continue to buy from sources that want my money (Magnatune, artists like Ronald Jenkees). For everything else, I will just download it. It only takes a couple of minutes anyway.

So, next time you wonder about why your sales and profits are declining, remember — it’s because you didn’t want my money. And perhaps instead of complaining about P2P, hiring hordes of lawyers or buying expensive ad campaigns it is easier to simply start SELLING your stuff to people who want to pay for it.

Having tried all major GTD apps for the Mac I thought I’d summarize my thoughts. While many people try to compare features, I would like to concentrate on a more subjective review. After all, a GTD app is something you use on a daily basis, so it isn’t just tables with features that matter.

Since I used all major GTD apps on the Mac extensively (e.g. I moved my entire life into each of them in turn), I think I’m qualified to form an opinion.

There are three major contenders in the Mac OS native application GTD arena:
* OmniFocus
* Things
* The Hit List

There used to be iGTD as well — but it has been discontinued now that its developer joined Cultured Code and works on Things. I used iGTD a long time ago, but found it too heavy on features and too crash-prone.

I should also probably mention TaskPaper, which while cool, isn’t really a full-blown GTD app.

Let’s go through each of the three in turn.

OmniFocus (The Omni Group) is the most mature of the apps. It was clearly developed with lots of user feedback. It is quite complex, with lots of user interface. However, I found that I’m spending lots of time on the mechanics of managing tasks instead of actually doing stuff. There is lots of clicking, tabbing and cursoring around to be had in OmniFocus. Plus there is that ubuquitous Omni inspector thing, which some people love and some people hate. I fall in the second category. I don’t like multiple window apps.

Things is carefully designed to look nice, which scores it a lot of marketing points. It also seems simple to use. I jumped onto it with enthusiasm, also buying the Things Touch iPhone app. But after several weeks problems became apparent. First, Things forces a structure upon you and that structure isn’t very well designed. There are projects, areas and „focuses”, which don’t really complement each other. In theory, Projects are for ordered, sequential lists of tasks, Areas for single-shot tasks and Focuses cut across them, letting you see which tasks you have to do immediately and which can wait. But if this is so, why can’t I schedule a task in a project to be done in the future?

The biggest problem with Things might seem inconsequential unless you realize this happens dozens of times a day. Let’s say I have a task in my Inbox. I know it belongs to a project and I need to start it today. I can either drag it to a project or drag it to „Today”, but in either case the task will disappear from my Inbox. I then have to hunt it down again, searching for it. This is a complete showstopper problem.

Until very recently Things also had no keyboard support at all — even the tabbing order seemed wrong. This has been improved in recent versions, but it is clear the developers never use the app without a mouse.

Things Touch was nice until I filled it with tasks. Then it became so slow that it was virtually useless. Unreliable syncing didn’t help either.

I then tried The Hit List — and after an hour moved my life into it and never looked back. It isn’t perfect, but it gets most things right. Here’s what I really like about the app, all of this is in contrast to the others:
* In the Inbox, you can drag things to „Today” and they still remain in the Inbox, which lets you then assign them to projects,
* There are lists and folders. You can use these lists as projects, areas, shopping lists, anything you want. No artificial distinction into „Areas” and „Projects”.
* Smart Folders let you organize tasks your own way (I have a „Stale tasks” smart folder that picks up untouched stale things for review).
* Insanely great keyboard support. Navigate to a task, press „F”, and then type several letters from any of your project names, press enter and your task gets moved. Similarly for jumping to projects, use „G” and type any subsequence of characters of your project’s name. I wish all apps had this nailed down so well.
* Great interface for repeating tasks. Press „Cmd-R” on a task, type „every week” and the task becomes a repeating one.
* Tabs that let you keep frequently used views easily accessible.
* Auto-suggested tags that really work (surprisingly).

Overall feeling after several weeks of usage was that I was on top of things. I could manage my tasks easily without spending too much time on the mechanics of it.

The Hit List seems to contain everything I wanted from OmniFocus, but with a much better interface. I just hope the author will keep improving it very carefully, without implementing every feature people ask for. In GTD apps, streamlined interface and usability are more important than features!

Roughly quoting Merlin Mann (43Folders.com): „asking which GTD app is better is like asking if mustard is better than ketchup”. Those are subjective choices, hence my subjective review.