Don't Buy LaCie d2 Quadra Hard Drive

I see a lot of Mac users with LaCie External Hard Drives. I know that they have been used and relied on by many, and I had the overall impression that the quality of LaCie Hard Drives was excellent… until this thing.

I was using a personally-owned Western Digital MyBook hard drive with Time Machine on my work computer. It has been working fine for a long time other than the fact that it is very slow. I have had it for about 3 years, and spent almost an entire year working directly of of it. Well, it is not exactly the highest performance drive and it was aging (plus it was not that big). So I convinced my boss to buy me and the other Mac users in my workgroup nice, external hard drives for to use with Time Machine so that we could all have our backups… Approved. Awesome.

I ran across the d2 Quadra (SKU# 301442U). It is a 1TB drive, and has several options for the interface (eSATA, Firewire 400/800 and USB2.0) and included cables. It was $179. I have been seeing several “bargin” external drives going for $100 or less so I figured if I wanted the better perfomance, higher-quality drive with the multiple interfaces, we should go for the LaCie d2 Quadra.

The guy that buys everything for us bought abot 20 of them from buy.com and they came in relatively fast. When I opened them up they looked very well designed, and I set it up immediately to start my Time Machine Backup. Seemed to be going fine. That night, a colleague of mine let me know that his drive was acting funny. Well, I wasn’t sure what the issue was, but decided I would take a look at it in the morning. Turns out that the thing was dead. mechanically, the drive was dead. It wouldn’t do anything except make terrible noises when it was powered on.

So, we got a bad one. No big deal, these things happen, right? Mine was still working OK… So I go to find the guy that bought them and tell him that we need to return one because it is broken. Meanwhile, on our way over to the see it, another person in our group sees us as says that her drive is dead too, and making weird noises. Good thing he had only given one to the three of us so far.

OK… so we check the serial numbers, and they are all very close together (all three of ours were only 5 numbers apart). So, we find that we have one that is about 1000 different and she sets up to try that one out. This time a couple of days go by before the inevitable.

So, let’s recap.

2 dead within 24 hours with a third another 48 hours later or so. Mine and my other buddies’ replacement were still working, but I noticed mine started making a loud and odd click when I ejected it. Great. Needless to say, we are boxing up the ones we have open and sending the whole lot back. Unfortunately, being that we all work in government, the 3 that failed, we cannot even return because there is the possibility that there is sensitive data on them and they will have to be destroyed.

LaCie, What Happened?!?!

If anyone has a suggestion for a GOOD, high performance external hard drive, please let me know. I am currently looking at the following as replacements:

• Fantom Drive’s G-Force Quad Interface
  • http://www.fantomdrives.com/products/gfquad.htm
  • $119 on MacMall.com right now for the 1TB version
• Seagate FreeAgent Desk for Mac
  • http://freeagent.seagate.com/en-us/hard-drive/hard-drive-mac/Free-Agent.html
  • $165 on MacMall.com

I recently switched to the Mac for my work computer (with Windows XP in parallels… I have some VBA macros that are necessary to do my job. Over time, I expect to replace most of it with AppleScript.)

The other day, I noticed some weird emails in my Sent Items Folder in Entourage. They did not have a sender or a subject. If I opened them up, I could see all the headers and any html tags(if any). under the displayed headers, I could see that it was indeed emails that I was sending, but they were somehow becoming corrupted. Today, I figured out that they were emails being sent with my iPhone using my exchange account. I did a little searching and found out that there is a bug that adds some junk to the email header. Outlook on the PC doesn’t get the bad headers because of the way it connects to the server or it just ignores the bad header (it wouldn’t suprise me if the latter was the case).

Fortunately, it is just a simple added three lines at the top of the email and this should be correctable with a script. Since I am trying to learn AppleScript anyway, I thought I would take my chances. After reading a view discussions and blog posts on the issue with some suggested fixes and scripts, I came across an AppleScript made to correct the problem that I decided to examine. Unfortunately, this script didn’t work at all for me, but from looking at the script, it appeared this was mainly due to how it was attempting to detect the “bad email”. Pretty much every “solution” I found required the user to select one or more messages in Entourage and running a script from the Entourage Script menu. Not a very elegant solution, in my opinion. On top of that, it appears that Entourage does not allow AppleScripts to directly modify the email and save it back anyway. Well, I need better detection, and the ability to link the script to an Entourage Rule (and maybe still maintain the ability to run it from the script menu if I wanted.) So, I did and here you go:

Download:

FixSentFromiPhone_1.2.scpt.zip

Here is how I setup my Rule in Entourage to make it run automatically when new message arrive in my sent items folder:
Execute If all criteria are met
If
Folder Is Sent Items
Specific Header Subject Does not exist
Then
Run AppleScript FixSentFromiPhone.scpt

UPDATE: I found that there is a much easier way to do a portion of the script I wrote and updated it.

UPDATE2: It appears my script needs to be made more flexible in order to handle messages with multiple recipients (at least it didn’t work correctly when I did a “reply to all”). I am thinking about it and may update soon.

UPDATE3: Since I had not gotten around to it yet, a reader modified my script and sent me the changes he made to handle messages that had been sent to multiple destinations. I then took his changes and integrated them into the script. Everything seems to work well for me. The download above has been updated. Thanks!

Slightly adventurous Intel-based Mac owners seem to often be afraid or confused about installing Ubuntu along side OSX, but it is actually quite simple. There are some oddities that make it different from installing on a PC (but if it was the same, it wouldn’t be a Mac now would it?). Because of this, I am going to outline my easy install method that will leave you with a dual-boot system with OSX and Ubuntu (Those out there that want a Triple-Boot setup will require a bit more complication and I suggest just checking at ubuntuforums.org).

Intro / Setup

For the purposes of this article, I will be assuming that you have OSX Leopard (10.5) installed on your Mac (with some additional details for those with OSX < 10.5), and you would like to install Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex along side it. This should cover most users at the time of this writing.

Read the rest of this entry »

3:56PM

Olivia Brielle Campbell

7lb 12oz

19.5 in long

She is beautiful and is very soothed by our voices already.

3:30PM. We’re pushing! I can see the Baby’s head full of hair! They are calling the doctor over. She crowned in 15 mins. The doctor is on his way.

2:30PM. Fully dilated. Still at station 0 and the doctor wants her to labor down until she gets to a +2 station. They also have her in  funny position now to try and get the baby to rotate around. Once she gets to a +2 station, they will have her push every two minutes until the baby is born.

12PM. The nurse just came in an checked and my wife is at 9 cm already. It’s crunch time. She will be back in another hour to check again, but we are to the point where she can feel the urge to push at any time. She has been resting very well trying to store her energy… she will likely need it soon.

10AM. Doctor finally came in. He decided to go ahead and break her water. INTENSE contractions now. There was an immediate call for an epidural. The anesthesiologist is here doing it now. Finally some relief. I’ve been told this will be my only child now… We’ll see. Great, now comes the catheter. That is something I don’t want to even think about… At least she can’t feel much now. Contractions are peaking much higher.

8:30AM This morning, we have not yet seen the doctor. He was supposed to come in about 6AM to check on things and decide how we were going to proceed, but we have not seen him yet. My wife is starting to have pretty regular contractions now and and when the nurse checked her earlier she was 4 cm dilated and the baby is 80% effaced. The warmer is setup to put the baby in when she comes. I have been trying to occupy myself by surfing the web and watching TV. Hopefully the doctor will come in soon so we can know more about what the plan will be for the day. For now, we wait.

3AM. Starting the Pitocin. My wife is struggling with whether or not to get some kind of pain relief through her IV. She will be able to get an epidural in another hour-and-a-half, but she has been trying to hold off on that. The medicine is starting to take effect as her contractions are becoming more intense. I think she has decided that she doesn’t want to have a baby anymore.