Thomas Legg's Geek Blog

So after spending a few days in Taipei for Computex, I was quite astonished by the overwhelming use of young female sex appeal to attract the attention of predominantly male electronics buyers.

There were more than a few vendors that used booth babes and dance teams to attract attention under the guise of product demonstrations and PR spiels. And beyond the vendors, even the Computex organisers had the Computex sweeties swarming the show. I didn't end up voting for any of them, because I didn't think it was the proper use of the young women's talents and didn't seem very professional (though I have a feeling some of the guys at the show probably wish they had this sort of thing at the office).

Here's the official announcement of the winning Computex sweetie. (NTD 5000 ~= US$155) I walked by as they were taking that group photo at the bottom of the page. Unfortunately they did this right at the entrance to the floor at the back of TWTC Hall 1, which produced a major bottleneck while they were taking the photos. I do hope that Global Sources and the HK TDC don't bring this sort of thing to HK's electronics trade shows in the Spring or Fall.

So the Songbird project released a new version based on the 1.7 branch. That means I'll have to download that branch and do some testing of compatability between the trunk support libraries and the 1.7.x Songbird code before I can release a new PPC Songbird to the world.

I currently have a mostly working trunk build (1.9alpha), but it's really not quite ready for prime time due to some issues with importing songs in to the library. I also have to do some work on the gstreamer qtwrapper audio decoders. By default the code distributed by the songbird project just produces a nasty hiss for audio codecs that are passed to quicktime to be played (like mp3s).

So after the new server case, I wanted to toss in some more RAM. Unfortunately I discovered my cheap Lemel motherboard had mistakenly attached a DDR connector instead of a DDR2 connector to the motherboard. This meant there was no way to add the second stick of RAM. This meant that I was going to have to spring for a new motherboard.

While playing around with the Lemel motherboard, I discovered that my power supply was acting crazy and that my DVD burner had failed. So these got replaced as well. FreeBSD ports also migrated the default php5 from php 5.2.x to php 5.3.x, so there may be some hiccups from this as well.

Once I got the SATA cables connected to the right drives, the machine booted up perfectly in to multi-user mode and all of the services started without a hitch. At least at first glance everything is working okay. If anything isn't, feel free to drop me a comment.

So after returning home from vacation, the weather was unseasonably warm and humid here. I decided to check on the temps inside the server and things weren't pretty. The hard drive temps were pushing towards 50°C. If it was this bad now, I'm sure when summer actually arrived it would be the death of my hard drives.

So I finally bit the bullet and replaced the nasty old beige case that I'd been nursing across a decade and 4 or so motherboards. The old case has a place for a case fan on both the front and back panels, but the front case plastic doesn't actually have any air intakes for the front panel case fan. *face palm* I'd actually drilled a few holes in the case, but knew that was at best a band-aid. To replace it I bought a relatively cheap Cooler Master Elite-342 case. It has an open front grille in front of a 12cm fan that blows directly over the hard drives. It also provided me an opportunity to blow a whole bunch of dust out of the CPU cooler.

The system is in place. It's not back to 100% yet as the motherboard battery might have died and the CMOS settings for the CPU were lost in the transfer. Also some daemon seems to have seg faulted on boot, so I'll have to go figure out whether it was critical or not. So expect some turbulence in the next few days as the new home for the server gets live testing.

UPDATE 4:15pm
Running a FreeBSD buildworld to test the cooling of the CPU and hard drives. Even in the middle of a buildworld, the CPU is running about 10°C cooler than it was previously under general load and the hard drives are under 30°C now with heavy disk usage. Seems like money and time well spent.

So I haven't booted back in to Tiger to test 10.4 compatability yet, but it runs fine on my 10.5.8 box. This will require a G4 or G5 as I've enabled altivec optimizations during the build.

The build reports itself as 1.4.3, which just means it comes from the 1.4 branch sometime after the 1.4.2 release was made. There may be a later build that is an official 1.4.3 and we'll get to that when and if it happens.

Download it, test it and let me know if it doesn't work. If it doesn't, please open up Terminal.app and run "grep -i songbirdnest /var/log/system.log" and cut and paste the output in to an email to me. If you need to backup or delete Songbird prefs/application profiles, they are located at ~/Library/Application Support/Songbird2

Songbird 1.4.3 dmg
md5 for Songbird 1.4.3 dmg