RaspberryPi is well known for it’s price. Everywhere it is mentioned that the cost is $35.

And actually really is 🙂

But there is “fineprint” too…

This is not the price at what you will receive the board?!

In addition to cost of RaspberryPi board you have to count for additional charges.

Here are the facts:

(NOTE: numbers are coming from my invoice and may vary for different cases):

1. PaspberryPi board ($ 35 USD) (note USD part) = $37.96 CAD

Per google (On 14/9/2012) it should be $33.81 CAD

This equals to $4.15 CAD for currency exchange and rate of 1.0846

2. Tax = $7.93 CAD (  🙂 )

3. Shipping = $15 CAD ( again 🙂 )

For total of: $60.89 CAD

So let’s do some financial analysis.

If we sum all “additional charges” they come at ~ 45% of total price.

And for the visuals representation on pie chart:

RaspberryPi total price pie chart by charges

RaspberryPi total price pie chart by charges

 

Hope this will help to make educated choice and not get caught by surprise.

After almost 2 months waiting my RaspberryPI finally is in my hands.

I’m sharing unpacking pictures:

 

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

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Good news  the cult game for iOS has HTML5 version for Chrome OS.

And the better news it could be played from windows OS, but Google Chrome or Firefox 4 browser is requred.

I personally tested on Firefox.

And the bad news…

Of course there is one – it is really addicting.

You are warned 🙂

Enjoy

From long time I did not update KompoZer page, but there was no stable version.

Anyway I’ve decided to publish an updated (even it is considered
development) version.

And for those of you who do not know the program:

KompoZer is a complete web authoring system that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing.

KompoZer is designed to be extremely easy to use, making it ideal for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site without needing to know HTML or web coding.

Visit my Kompozer RPM package page to download.

Sooner or later hard drives fail…

That’s why we use RAID arrays. The best solution is to use hardware RAID – one assisted with specialized processor on the board. In that category I do not include cheap (called Fake RAID) solutions integrated on the motherboard.

But unfortunately sometimes real RAID controllers are too pricey – here on help comes software RAID.

The good news is that it is included in most of the recent OS. Linux does not make an exception and the software included is really well optimized and even recommended to achieve better performance over Fake RAID.

Now in case of failure we are protected, but RAID 1 and 5 will protect the data in case of one drive failure so it is better to replace the failed drive as soon as possible, but on other side you do not want to stop the machine right now.

NOTE: If you have IDE HDD do not use following procedure. IDE drives are NOT HOTSWAPPABLE and removing it may cause MORE DAMAGE.

This is valid also for ordinary s-ATA and SCSI drives.

In case that you have hotswappable drive SCA or similar you can replace the drive when the machine is working.

If you are not sure check the documentation that come with your hardware.

And now after all this precautions let’s start:

Determine the failed drive

To check what array and what drive have problem simply type:

cat /proc/mdstat

Here is sample output:

md2 : active raid5 sdd2[4](F) sda2[0] sdc1[2] sdb2[1]
106221312 blocks level 5, 256k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/3] [UUU_]

In this case the problem is sdd.

Check drive size and type

For the size type:

fdisk -l

And look for sdd in the output.

To check exact drive model type:

dmesg|less

and again look just before SCSI device sdd:

Next step is to obtain replacement drive

(ideally the same model)

Dump the partition table from the drive, if it is still readable:

sfdisk -d /dev/sdd > partitions.sdd

Remove the drive to replace from the array:

mdadm /dev/md2 -r /dev/sdd2

Look up the Host, Channel, ID and Lun of the drive to replace,

by looking in

cat /proc/scsi/scsi

Remove the drive from the bus

echo "scsi remove-single-device 1 0 3 0" > /proc/scsi/scsi

Verify that the drive has been correctly removed

by looking in

cat /proc/scsi/scsi

Physically replace the drive

Unplug the drive from your SCA bay, and insert a new drive
Add the new drive to the bus:

echo "scsi add-single-device 1 0 3 0" > /proc/scsi/scsi

(this should spin up the drive as well)

Recreate the layout

Re-partition the drive using the previously dumped partition table:

sfdisk /dev/sdd < partitions.sdd

If failed drive was unreadable here you need to create new partitions

Add the drive to your array

mdadm /dev/md2 -a /dev/sdd2

You can check if the operation was successful by issuing

cat /proc/mdstat

Inspired with modifications from

AMD officially announced first Quad Core 45-nm Opteron CPUs code name “Shanghai”.

They are not only up to 35% faster than previous line but also consume 35% less power. In addition improvements in virtualization can increase performance up to 40%.

They use improved Direct Connect Architecture in conjunction with HyperTransport 3.0 and AMD-V including new Rapid Virtualization Indexing feature.

New 45-nm process allowed to increase L3 cache size up to 6M.

newegg leading online retailed for conputer related equipment now expands in Canada.

New site is accessible here:

It was a while I did not check the status of the project, but after I opened my application it detected new version and prompted me do I want to update.

So now I have version 0.9.3. Here are the changes made from my last update:

0.9.3 (2008-10-07):

  • fix an issue with opening non-ascii files
  • updated Japanese and Brazilian translation

0.9.2 (2008-10-06):

  • ability to disable auto-update check
  • improved text rendering – should fix problems with overlapping text
  • improved font substitution for fonts not present in PDF file
  • can now open PDF files with non-ASCII names
  • improvements to DDE (contributed by Danilo Roascio)
  • SyncTex improvements
  • improve persistence of state (contributed by Robert Liu)
  • fix crash when pressing ‘Cancel’ when entering a password updated translations

As usual latest version can be downloaded from official web site.

    Microsoft is rushing to release Windows 7…

    After market success of Apple MAC OS X and Asus EeePC using alternative operating systems the ecossytem arround M$ succes is seeking for alternatives.

    BusinessWeek reports that HP is trying to improve Vista or even replace it with another OS  possibly assembled by HP engineers.

    HP has their own HP/UX unix based OS used in their high end servers so probably they will reuse their expertize in that field to release ..ux based OS.

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