AlexHopmann.com

MacWorld did a comparison of the golf-scoring apps for the iPhone and ranked TeeShot “Best of the Bunch”.

TeeShot is by my buddy Chris Evans and it rocks. Its great to see how the iPhone provides a great opportunity for talented developers.

So I have a nice new storage array going for my home using the Sans Digital ESATA case, 4 WD Greenpower drives, and the Silicon Image ESATA card that came with the Sans Digital enclosure. The card comes with software called SATARAID5 that appears to mostly work just fine- it was easy to setup a RAID5 array with my 4 disks, and while I can’t dynamically add more disks too it (it looks like there is some other newer software that supports that kind of thing), overall it works well with one major exception. Before I mention that I should add that I’m just looking for some good reliable mass storage. This isn’t a “backup”, it doesn’t need the highest performance storage possible (although faster is always better), and all that. I’ve tested yanking a hard drive out of the array in mid-file copy and putting it back in later and it rebuilds (takes about 24 hours) but is fine.

The big catch is that everytime I reboot my system it does a rebuild- the management app has a nice UI that says that “Group 0 Volume A was not shutdown properly”, and it kicks off the rebuild which takes a very long time. So far those rebuilds have worked great but its really annoying to have degraded performance and reliability after every reboot.

Anyone have any experience with this stuff or ideas? Is there some way to manually shutdown the volume before I reboot? Some bug fix version that fixes this issue (I’m running SATARAID5 version 1.5.2.1 on Vista 32-bit).

The newspapers today are reporting that Cisco has acquired Pure Networks. Congrats to the team, and to Cisco/Linksys which is getting itself a fine group of people and some great technology. Pure was always in a complicated marketplace but it makes a ton of sense to me that an industry leader like Linksys would see Software as a great advantage in making Networking easier for their customers. Plus it makes me feel like my decision to buy that Linksys WRT600N a few weeks ago was the right one.

Speaking of which- so far the WRT600N is performing really well, and I’m also using it with a WGA600N which is a dual-band N bridge that I’ve got to hook up equipment downstairs (the XBox, the Wii and the TV). There are two main problems I’ve had so far with the WRT600N. The first is that I named both my 5.4ghz and 2.4ghz networks with the same SID and its sometimes really unpredictable which network a given device has joined (and usually difficult to tell which one its connect to). This is partly a problem with the devices which don’t really communicate well which band they are on, but the router could help a lot here too. Its really confusing to figure out which devices are going to work best on which bands (between trying to balance distance, penetration through walls and media-playback performance). Messing around with it sometimes my TV (which acts as a media extender) works with awesome HD capability and sometimes its just crap. This seems like one of those things some intelligent home network management software could help with (hint hint).

The bigger problem is that for some reason its tunneling isn’t working. I love to use the remote access client to connect in to my home machines and I just can’t get that to work with this router. I can’t tell if its bugged or I’m doing something wrong, but the interface to set it up is actually less intuitive than normal (which is saying something).