It seems the 2009 Mac Pro has an issue. When it idles, the processor temperature is about 35 C (95 F). When you play music in iTunes or any other application, the temperature rises to 50 C (122 F) or even much higher in a short amount of time. I read about the issue on MacRumors (article here) and and in a discussion on the same site here.

I have a late 2009 Mac Pro and I have tried to reproduce the issue. All I had to do to succeed in this was play a song in iTunes and within half a minute the temperature of the processor of my Mac Pro (a 2.66Ghz quad core) had risen by 15 degrees Celcius. That’s 27 degrees Fahrenheit. Rather silly when you think playing audio is a simple task for a fast processor like this Nehalem.

In discussions I’ve read the issue doesn’t exist when running Windows on the Mac Pro. This makes me think it’s a software issue. Well, at least software glitches can be easily fixed. Let’s hope Apple takes this issue seriously. So far they haven’t acknowledged it.

A month or so ago I booted my Mac and noticed that I didn’t see my NAS (the Synology DS408 I mentioned earlier) in the Finder. I had a look at the status lights and noticed the drive light of the second drive was blinking irregularly as if it was reading or writing data. It wasn’t possible to SSH into the machine anymore. I tried to restart it with the power button, but that didn’t seem to have an effect. It only started blinking and then nothing happened. In the end I pulled the plug and let it sit there for a while.

Later I tried to turn it on again, but it didn’t seem to want to boot after pressing the power button. I took the electricity off again and a few minutes later turned it on again. It did boot that time, but drive 2 seemed to be dead. The NAS beeped loudly to show its discomfort. I shut it down again, took drive 2 out and put it back in. Somehow the drive came back to life again and I could rebuild the RAID configuration.

But I was not comfortable with the situation. Why did the drive fail in the first place? Did it fail? Was it a loose connector? Or did the NAS malfunction? Oh well, the feeling of discomfort slowly disappeared with time as the NAS kept performing nicely.

Last week it happened again… Drive 2 failed. I bought a new 2 TB Hitachi DeskStar drive and replaced drive 2. Time will tell what will happen. Will this drive fail too?

So far I have observed it runs a bit hotter than the 1 TB drives in the nas.

I chose a 2TB drive because I am going to replace the other drives with 2 TB drives too.

After I got my new computer I turned my old desktop into a host for virtual machines. At first I tried KVM under Ubuntu, but I didn’t get it to run smoothly. I then found out that VMware has a free version of their ESXi hypervisor platform.

The hypervisor seems to be free, but the software to manage it is sort of free. I haven’t been able to put in the serial key yet, but I must say the way it runs now is impressive. I’ve got three virtual ubuntu servers running on my old 2.4 GHz core 2 duo with 4GB of ram. It all runs smoothly. I do see some slowdowns, but it’s ok. The graphical client software (Windows only unfortunately) is very elaborate and offers a lot of functionality.

I’m still trying to find out though if I can stick to ESXi once the 60 day trial period runs out or if it just becomes unmanageable. So far I’m not sure. Anybody got any idea what I’ll miss then?

Three weeks away from home means that on return you’re confronted with software and firmware upgrades for just about every piece of software and hardware you have lying around the house.

This blog had to go through 6 upgrades. The other blog will have the same amount. My Mac went through three. My Ubuntu laptop is complaining and I haven’t even dared to boot my work laptop. My phone wanted to be upgraded too. Not just it’s OS, but about ten pieces of software on it too.

I’m starting to feel I am serving the machines instead of they me….

One of those weeks. A 4 day course from tuesday to friday. Of course the company had an event on tuesday, so I wasn’t home until after midnight on tuesday, well, wednesday. Well, I could have come home earlier, but the poker clinic (!) after the corporate stuff and great Italian food took a bit longer than expected. Still it did mean that I spent most of the week exhausted.

I met some interesting people at the course. Some Australians who work for Tomtom, an Italian guy living just a few miles away from me and a few other.

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It was fascinating to see how people responded on Twitter to the faked elections in Iran. The people on Twitter were among the first to report on what was going on in Iran. Quite a while before the conventional media caught on. Twitter users even started bashing CNN for not picking up the story. #CNNfail became a heavily used tag for a while. It is true that Twitter brought the Iran situation to the attention.

Something just didn’t feel right about it though. Call me a cynic, but I couldn’t believe that so many people were suddenly interested in the fate of Iran. I think it’s quite safe to say that before these elections most of the (Twittering) world couldn’t have cared less about what happens to Iran.

I wasn’t very surprised when I clicked the profile of a few of these ‘protesters’ and found quite a few could be considered Valley girls and boys. The majority of them American I wonder how outraged they were about the last couple of American elections…

Twitter is fashionable and what’s easier than supporting a good cause from your arm chair?

When we returned from Berlin and left the highway close to our home we saw something remarkable. In no time the city had turned a body of water near our house into a recreation area. A few hills, a beach and a picnic area with those typical one piece table and seats constructions. All in all a plan quite well executed. We’ve spent a warm evening there with two salads and a rather mediocre wine. The bad wine didn’t spoil the atmosphere. It was warm, we were lying on our towels on the sand and we were enjoying the food and each other’s company.

This picture was taken on the other side of the water. This other side is an area is nature reserve area with a few paths running through it. They weren’t used very often as we had to thrust our way through the thicket in the beginning.

This arrangement of table and chairs is on a private part of the nature reserve area. It looks like they’ve been standing there unused, but that’s just because the weather hasn’t been good enough.

That nature reserve area was quite a discovery. It’s narrow and long, but you do get the idea you’ve left the city behind. Despite the fact there’s a highway nearby that’s full of cars day and night.

This should fix it completely.

This could result in an endless loop if I also post tweets on my blog. Better leave that off then. heh

Oh well, here goes…

Well, let’s see how this works. I put a twitter plugin in Wordpress. What I blog about is now also sent to twitter.

These days a lot of new software is just about integrating different services it seems.