The bubble is about to pop

The Dubai property speculation bubble is about to pop. Aldar, a major developer, is looking to restrict the ability of customers to re-sell their property purchases. This comes on the heels of the decisions by Nakheel to prevent people who have purchased into the Trump project here from selling for a full year after purchase. All in all, what this means is there’s going to be a clamp-down on the silly profits that have been fueling the bubble. Which in turn means that the investors are going to bail out before more “controls” are added to the market, and the market will “correct”. The banks aren’t going to like this…

Never Talk To The Police

Two videos, one from a law professor and the other from a police officer on why you should never talk to the police.

Happy 60th Dad!

So, in truth, this isn’t my image at all. It was taken by our wedding photographer, Robin Lynn. I was trying to find a fitting photograph for today, and I couldn’t. I really wanted something that had the both of us in it and was a personal moment of some kind – which means I have to rely on others to take the pics. I’ve been out of the country so long, it’s hard to find good ones. So finally I settled on this – a few minutes after my wedding, giving my father a well deserved hug for the years of support and dedication he has shown to me.

I love you dad. Happy 60th Birthday! Here’s to many more!

Samsung Drive Warranty

So, now I get to find out how good Samsung is with drive warranty work. One of the drives in my home ZFS file server went offline with “too many errors”, so I pulled the drive, and did drive-wide read-write tests. Consistent failure across three tests. So, I’ve got an email into Samsung ME to see what it’s going to take to replace the drive. I’m hoping they aren’t as bad as Western Digital.

Adding SSD to OpenSolaris on the cheap

Solid State Disks are all the rage right now for their low seek time, high IOPS ratings and low power consumption. However, they cost an arm and a leg at the moment. NewEgg charges $675 for their cheapest 64GB STA device, which works out to be $10.50/gb. Their cheapest 32GB drive is $359.00, which is $11.21/gb.

You can’t currently buy 64GB CompactFlash cards (or, I haven’t seen any) but you can get 32GB cards for $127.00 each. So, a CF->SATA adapter is $31.99 from addonics, which yeilds $158.99 for a 32GB drvice – not bad at just under half the price. I haven’t actually ordered any of this – it’s all just speculation – but if you were to use this as a slog or a cache device for a relativley slow ZFS array, you could probably get a decent speed boost.

You can of course go with an CF->IDE adapter, if you have free IDE ports laying around, the adapters are $22.99. This makes a 32 GB SSD cost $149.99 – which is $5 under Transcend’s IDE SSD, which isn’t nearly as appealing. At that price, I’d probably just get the pre-built one and be done with it.

Remember with all of this, if you have extra CF cards laying around, you might be able to work out some of this even cheaper.