My previous phone was old faithful: a Nokia 6020 that was, hilariously enough, my first cell phone. My Nokia took many beatings over it’s lifetime including two dips in the ocean and recovered from temporary problems as a result in very short order. It always just worked as a phone and nothing more. It’s battery lasted long enough that I would pretty much forget to charge it after a week or two and realize I have next to zero battery left at inopportune times because charging it was the furthest thing from my mind.

But now it’s out with the old and in with the new. Goodbye Nokia 6020, hello iPhone.

There are huge tradeoffs. Voice + data = more $$$ per month than just voice. But with that increased cost of ownership I get mobile Internet, something that a geek like me has wanted for a long time but had a really hard time justifying. The old phone would go way longer between charges but the iPhone does so much more on a charge. The list goes on and on.

Suffice to say, I’m happy for now but let’s wait for the excitement to die off and then I can really start to asses the cost/benefit ratio of this slick little black and steel rectangular box.

Related posts:

1. I’m in z-push Limbo
2. iPod Touch Woes
3. iPod Touch Woes – Part Deux

I did discovery yet more small misconfigurations and strange behaviour along the way:

1. OpenLDAP’s syncrepl using “refereshAndPersist” wasn’t working how I expected it to, no new changes were replicating to the slave LDAP server! I changed the directive to “refreshOnly” and set a 10 minute interval. I made several changes and monitored the slave LDAP server. Changes propagated in about 10 minutes, every time.
2. Despite iSCSI’s maturity and the maturity of QLogic’s HBAs I still noticed strange, unexplained target drop outs. Two HBAs per server, two controllers in the IBM DS3300 and just one target out of four was dropping. At first, I couldn’t figure out how to properly reconnect the target on a live system so I rebooted. Later, I discovered you can “disable” and then “enable” the specific target in SANsurfer or iscli, which worked to bring back the dropped target on a live system. Multipath picked up the “new” path right away, as expected.
3. Always remember to leave free physical extents in any LVM Volume Group in which you are taking snapshots of the Logical Volumes. It’s freakin’ obvious but I forgot and when I went to do snapshot backups, the snapshots were failing. Now I’m growing some LUNs on the DS3300 so that my VGs have room for snapshots.

All in all, a good weekend that was mostly filled with success.

Related posts:

1. Migration Weekend
2. When using Syncrepl…
3. Atempo Time Navigator 4.2 Archive Media Selection Tunable

Before upgrading from 4.1 to 4.2 Time Navigator’s media selection for archive jobs with standalone drives behaved as expected: If existing partly filled and open cartridges in the associated media pool existed, Time Navigator would request those media be placed in the drives upon the start a new archive operation, effectively only asking for new, unlabeled media to be inserted once the existing media was full.

However, with the upgrade to 4.2 we found that Time Navigator was no longer requesting the existing, partly filled, open cartridges and was instead requesting new, unlabeled media to be inserted into the drives instead! The result of this new behavior was that Time Navigator would use new tapes for every new archive operation, no matter if existing, partly filled and open media was available in the media pool. Basically 4.2′s default behavior was preventing us from filling any archive media unless the particular archive job would happen to be larger than a single tape.

While I don’t know why the functionality changed, I do know what tunable to modify in order to make 4.2 behave like 4.1. The tunable is “check_external_cart_when_recycling“. Setting this tunable to “Yes” has restored the 4.1 behavior, allowing us to make full use of all archive media capacity by only requesting new media when all the existing media in the media pool has been filled.

I believe we only faced this problem because we use standalone archive tape drives that do not have an autoloader or robot nor an “inventory” of online tape. Each tape must be manually loaded. I suspect that if we had an autoloader for our tape drives, that 4.2 would have made the correct/expected selection of media.

I doubt that anyone else is going to face this problem but it took about 3 weeks with Atempo’s R&D department to figure out the problem so I figure if posting here can save anyone that amount of time, then I’ll have done my part!

Related posts:

1. Time Navigator HA Cluster Agent Configuration
2. Migration Weekend: Success
3. Migration Weekend

I was able to replace the headphone jack without too much trouble, in fact I would say it was a pretty easy fix. The old ribbon cable stub left from the snapping of the old ribbon cable came off the PCB without too much trouble at all. Just applied a bit of heat and up she came. Soldering the new ribbon cable+headphone jack assembly was very straight forward as well. I just made sure to clean the four pads off nicely, add a tiny bit of solder to each pad then put the ribbon cable down on top and apply some heat. From there I added a bit more solder to the top because the ribbon cable pads have little holes in them to allow the solder to flow through from the back to the front. All said and done, I think I did a really good job.

But, and here’s the kicker, I think ruined ANOTHER battery! Arg! These things must be ultra sensitive to shorting out or otherwise because I can’t figure out what else might have caused my THIRD battery to die on me. Yes, I’ve accidentally shorted it momentarily while fixing the headphone jack AGAIN.

Alas, perhaps it was not meant to be. First battery died because I tore the casing by accident, second battery because I got the damn thing wet. And now the third battery because I appearently cannot keep the red and black leads apart at all times…

At this point I’m not sure what to do. Give another battery a short? These things are cheap, so why not?

Related posts:

1. iPod Touch Woes

First, I took it snowboarding and it decides to get wet and short the battery somehow, killing it. Bad iPod! I told you not to get wet but you wouldn’t listen! At first I wasn’t sure if the battery really was dead or if the iPod itself had died. I quickly found out the battery was at fault when plugging it into my Macbook and seeing it come alive… too bad it was demanding that I restore it.

So, I tried to restore it. Turns out you can’t restore an iPod touch that doesn’t have a working battery. Part way through the restore, the iPod would die, presumably because it would disconnect from the USB power momentarily. Fine, I bought a new battery and soldered the three tiny little wires in and tried to restore it… and BAM! same problem! Ok, my fault, I didn’t let the battery charge enough. Once charged, I was able to perform the restore.

Now after waiting quite some time for the iPod backup to restore and my music to sync, I try plugging in my headphones to listen to some music. Nothing. The software volume slider is there and I can turn up the volume all the way but nothing. Some jiggling of the jack allows for one channel to come through all muddled. Open the iPod back up and I notice how I destroyed the ribbon cable going from the board to the jack during the battery replacement! Noooooooo.

I actually spent time trying to run four cables to jump the broken ribbon cable, but I didn’t heed my friend’s advice: There was no space for four wires in that tight case. Absolutely no way I could put the back on with those four “jumper” wires crudely soldered in. I also ended up shorting out at least two of the four leads, making my iPod think some kind of remote volume control was plugged in and preventing the display of the software volume controls! I decided to remove my failed attempt at fixing the headphone jack ribbon cable.

I’ve now ordered a replacement jack and I’m going to learn about the joys of soldering a ribbon cable to a tiny PCB. Wish me luck for when it arrives!

Related posts:

1. iPod Touch Woes – Part Deux
2. Microsoft Nomenclature
3. Migration Weekend

What would happen is that while recording, the variable hi hats would respond correctly and play closed when I had the hats closed and open when I had the hats open. However, on playback the hats at the start of a song that should have been closed, played open! After I had closed the hats once in the recording, the playback would then play closed as it should have been from the start…

This was perplexing for a little while until something dawned on my friend: Not long ago, I had adjusted my MegaDrum settings so that it would only send the hi hat pedal position MIDI CC messages when the position was changing or had changed. That is, once the pedal was resting opened or closed and the final CC message for that position was sent, no more CC messages where being sent to BFD. The previous configuration, which I thought was a misconfiguration, was sending CC messages at a fairly constant rate when the hats were both open and closed, basically constantly informing BFD of the hi hat pedal position.

It turns out that while recording, the initial closed pedal position CC message was not recorded so on playback BFD simply assumed the hats were open. After recording some closed position CC messages at the start of the track, everything worked fine! I’ve since returned the MegaDrum configuration to one where constant CC messages for the hi hat pedal position are being sent so that when we record from now on, we will always been recording the hi hat pedal position and it will always be “correct” on playback/bouncing. I just had to lower the “closed lvl” setting and raise the “high lvl” setting to achieve a steady rate of CC messages from MegaDrum to BFD.

I just thought I’d share that for anyone in the same position, wondering why BFD with “all hats variable” seems to play the “wrong” hi hat position on playback when it worked fine while recording. If you’re getting this kind of problem, now you know why.

No related posts.

What’s Included?

My Studio Master 6.4 came with a beautiful chromed 13″ snare, four 10″ toms, one 8″ kick, the plastic ECYMBAL crashes and a metal ECYMBAL ride and metal hihats with a fully functional and moving hi-hat stand. It appears the modern Studio Master 6.4 now comes with the ECYMBAL-II cymbals instead, which I have not had the pleasure of playing yet.

The included rack is sturdy but it’s not entirely rock solid. I still have some sway while really hammering on the kit but that could be a result of the fact that I’ve often be labeled a “hard hitter” when it comes to drumming. The rack is nice but it’s entirely standard, nothing special.

The kit also comes with cables and basically everything you need except one crucial element: the module. As I’ll describe later, I decided to take a chance on a DIY project called MegaDrum instead of buying a commercial module. It saved me cash and it works really, really well (after a lot of tweaking).

Mesh vs. Rubber

My only other previous electronic drumming experience comes on a Yamaha DTXpress IV, which has rubber pads unlike the mesh pads of the Hart kit.

I can only say that for my style and comfort, there is no comparison. Mesh all the way. I used to get wrist pains from acoustic drumming many years ago and I found the problem was even worse on the rubber Yamaha pads. After switching to the mesh pads of the Studio Master 6.4, all my wrist pain associated with drumming went away.

The playability of mesh is also night and day. With the ability to set the head tension like you would with an acoustic kit, the mesh snare and toms allow for just as much or as little bounce as one might like. Personally? I’m liking the heads tight at the moment. It allows me to play faster rolls more accurately and with less effort. Another big difference when moving to mesh was the kick response. The rubber kick pad of the Yamaha was “dead”, it had no rebound whatsoever and was actually rather acoustically loud. I was never able to achieve my desired level of kick accuracy with the rubber pad.

Overall, the mesh is entirely superior for my drumming.

Plastic vs. Metal

As far as cymbals go, my kit came with the (now discontinued?) original plastic ECYMBAL crashes and metal ECYMBAL ride and hihat. My only major comment about the cymbals are that there is no question the metal cymbals are superior in feel. The ride is very heavy and sits like a nice good acoustic ride. Same with the hihats. The plastic crashes on the other hand are very light and they don’t play the same way a good acoustic metal cymbals does. That’s not to say they are bad, but if there was one instant upgrade for the Studio Master 6.4 that I would recommend, it would be replacing the plastic crash cymbals with something more solid and more accurate feel.

The ride cymbal is two-zone: bow and bell. The hihat is also two zone: bow and edge. The crashes are single zone with a switch-based choke. Both the ride and hihat come with an included rubber pad to minimize stick noise. Neither of the plastic crashes come with noise-reducing rubber but I’ve added my own, lighter rubber to the crashes to achieve the same goal.

Playing the Kit

Playing the Studio Master 6.4 is a dream come true: Nearly acoustic feel but quiet enough to play in an apartment building (if you’ve got the kit raised off the floor with some kind of mat to dampen the “thud, thud, thud” from the kit, that is). Since getting things setup perfectly, I’ve been playing this kit just as I remember playing my old acoustic kit. I’m not making any serious compensation for the fact that this is an electronic drum kit.

Electronic drumming isn’t for everyone, but for those of us who either prefer the versatility or have no other option, the Studio Master 6.4 is a good mid-range kit that provides excellent acoustic-like feel without the acoustic output of a “real” drum kit. As far as playability is concerned, Hart gets a major thumbs up for the Studio Master 6.4.

The best part of this kit has to be the snare. Being 13″ it’s much bigger than your average Yamaha or Roland snares. It’s super heavy because it’s made out of some serious metal with a nice chrome finish. The size of the playing surface along with the tensionable mesh head provides a great snare experience, which is key to a great drum kit experience.

What about the Module?

As mentioned earlier, the only thing the Studio Master 6.4 doesn’t come with that you’ll need right away to get drumming is a drum module that converts the piezo triggers into sounds (or MIDI). The two big players here are Roland and Yamaha. Alesis also offers a few modules, but none with the reputation of Yamaha or Roland’s modules.

After using a Yamaha DTXpress IV with it’s included module for several months and playing demo Roland kits at the music store, I knew I wasn’t ever going to be happy with the sounds that come with these modules. As such, we began trying out MIDI triggering of BFD1.5 with my Yamaha module instead. It wasn’t easy at first but we eventually got things going fairly well but I still wanted more tweakability as the Yamaha module only had very basic trigger settings.

Right about  that time, I ditched the Yamaha kit for the Hart kit and started to build myself a MegaDrum to play the role of trigger to MIDI interface instead of buying a commercial module. There’s no looking back! I had ordered a MegaDrum kit offered by a forum member that included quality professional PCB and most of the parts necessary. Building the MegaDrum with this kit was more like “assembling” than building due to the high quality of the kit. My friend even did all the board soldering for me! It took some time to get the MegaDrum mounted in a case and working but it was worth it.

We’ve since upgraded to BFD2 and made many, many firmware upgrades for the MegaDrum since first building it and it’s sweeter than ever. If you’re not a DIY kind of person, it might be a bit daunting to build a MegaDrum, but for anyone out there wanting to trigger MIDI from their electronic drum kit and with some DIY skills, I would highly recommend the MegaDrum. It’s far, far, far cheaper than anything Roland or Yamaha make and it’s far more tweakable too. Unfortunately, this can mean more setup time but it also means that a wider range of pads are better supported with MegaDrum because of it’s inherent tweakability.

Conclusion

The Hart Dynamics Studio Master 6.4 kit totally rocks!

Related posts:

1. BFD2, Variable Hats and MIDI CC Messages
2. OpenGear CM4116 Review

Actually, it smells pretty terrible but this is the first and only time I’ve seen this happen so I thought I’d share!

No related posts.

This won’t have a large functional difference but it pisses me off none-the-less. I’ve been using Network UPS Tools (NUT) with our APC UPS devices over USB and now I come to realize that this Eaton UPS doesn’t support USB, or rather it doesn’t come with a USB cable although the documentation says it does. Now to integrate this Eaton UPS with NUT I need to use SNMP since the Eaton only comes with a serial cable, which is useless to me for monitoring purposes. I guess I get to find out how NUT’s SNMP support is now.

This silent switch with a minor model change/update just rubs me the wrong way. I’m not so happy with the management of this UPS either…

UPDATE: Got the Powerware 5125 working with NUT via SNMP… seems good so far.

For the sake of posterity, here is my /etc/ups/ups.conf for the 5125 to work with NUT:

[ibm3000_1]
  driver = snmp-ups
  port = ibm3000-1.mydomain.com
  mibs = pw
  pollfreq = 30
  community = mycommunity
  snmp_version = v1
  desc = "Rack \#1 - IBM UPS 3000 HV @ U1/2"

This of course assume you’ve already properly configured the 5125 with a DNS name or IP address and properly enabled SNMP, allowing your NUT client to connect

UPDATE 2: The Powerware is starting to grow on me a little. It looks like it packs more juice than the same 2U unit from APC: 45% load and 12 minutes run time compared to an APC with 48% load and 8 minute run time. As long as I ignore the web management interface and stick to NUT via SNMP, I actually kind of like this UPS.

Related posts:

1. Check Your UPS Batteries!

The reason you want to check your UPS often? Well, there are a few but here’s mine:

I found that one day in the UPS supporting our firewall/passive gateway device. Notice the top two battery packs. The UPS wasn’t monitored and was still happily putting power through but I really wonder what would have happened had we experienced a power loss and the battery was actually called upon… would it just have lasted much shorter than it was supposed to or was there a real fire/safety hazard here? I don’t know for certain, but I know when your batteries start bulging and being misshapen, it’s time to replace them.

The scratching on the battery pack labels is a result of trying to remove the battery pack tray from the UPS shell and having it just barely fit by the edge. Any more bulging and the tray wasn’t going to come out, complicating the fix as I swapped this battery tray for another, all online. If I wasn’t able to remove the battery pack, I would have had to shutdown the firewall device as it only has one PSU, I couldn’t “move” it to another UPS online.

So yes, please be sure to check your UPS system and battery packs, especially if they are 3+ years old like this one was!

Related posts:

1. IBM Changed UPS Vendors