Pain in the you know where: Intel ICH10 and Matrix Storage

The SATA RAID supplied by the chipset has proven to be such a pain that I have to vent here. I tried to use it on my Windows 7 Ultimate x64 to provide some redundancy, and eventually gave up after so many failures. The driver seemed to randomly put the array in rebuild, which slows the Core 2 Quad 9550 with 12 GB memory to a crawl. Sometimes a drive was just randomly reported as failed, the whole array as offline. Luckily enough most of the time the boot/system drive was a single Raptor, so Windows still survived. A measure for redundancy for my data turned into a constant live test for my backup strategy. ;)

If you search for Intel Matrix Storage Manager problem, thousands of posts easily turn up. Like this one on Intel's user forum, with 500+ replies. And there are multiple other threads like that, just on Intel's forum. That oughta tell you something... A lot of the complaints are with version 8.9.0.1023, and some reported success with reverting back to 8.8. I had no such luck. All other versions fared just as badly. I also saw reports on 9.x with the same problem. I don't think there's anything wrong with my hardware: once I put the drives on the lowly Windows dynamic disk mirror, things have been just fine.

I've used consumer fake RAIDs from VIA and nVidia in the past and never had much of a problem. Neither was run in a typical environment (VIA for Win XP x64 and NVIDIA for Win 2003 Standard x64), but they were just humming along happily. The nVidia machine even ran VMWare Server with 4 VMs. But the Intel stuff doesn't even work under a lightly used Windows 7 machine.

I couldn't believe Intel had unleashed such buggy stuff on users. Bad vibe for the overall reputable company. They need to get their acts together. If not, I guess there're plenty of chipset vendors to choose from. They may be the king of CPUs, but outside of that, make the steps carefully please!

How to install Salesforce.com Connect for Office with MS Office 2010 (Excel only)

Well, it doesn't by default. The installer runs without error, but there'll be no Salesforce.com ribbon available. I don't know what went wrong, but you get nothing in Office14/xlstart directory. If you do the same thing with Office 2007, you'll get a SFDC.xla, and a SFDC12.xlam in the directory. I tried this on two separate Windows 7 instances, one virtual, one physical, both x64, with the same result. Office 2010 is x86. Connect for Office is 1.8.1.1.

Since the juice is all in the xla files, I decided to just copy the 2 files from a working Office 2007 machine to an Office 2010 VM. Files copied, open Excel 2010, and voila! Salesforce.com ribbon works as expected. I could log on, import reports, refresh them, all without issues.

The source machine for the files has Connect for Office 1.8.0.8.

BTW, it looks like Office13 is skipped. Why do people have to be that superstitious?

Update and disclaimer: here's a link I put up for downloading the 2 needed Office files.  These are SFDC Connect for Office files and the intellectual property belongs to no one but Salesforce.com.  The link should be up as long as they do not object to them being distributed this way.

90W 9T215 doesn't charge E6400

That's right. So don't buy those P/N 9T215 generic replacements that claim to be Dell Latitude E6400 compatible. I tested original 9T215 on E6400s (not on purpose) and it just doesn't charge. BIOS says it's unknown adapter. Computer actually runs on A/C but battery doesn't get charged. Why? There must be love between the two for it to charge? It's enough to power the machine, it must be enough to juice up the battery. That's just annoying!

Crippled "Recovery Disc Creation" on HP Mini

HP Mini 210 is really a good netbook: attractive design, broad configuration options, and very capable offering of software, esp. for cloud and data management. However there's one thing that is quite annoying with it: the "Recovery Disc Creation".

It is cheap stingy for HP to not provide a factory recovery disc (Dell provides that by default). So HP includes this Recovery Manger program (by Cyberlink) for you create a set of restore discs. You'll quickly find the option is really a pain to use, because

• Very slow start. Will take more than 10 minutes for it to be ready to burn the first disc, prob. because it needs to decompress source files.
• Doesn't take RW discs. Only DVD+/-R is accepted. Why? Did the designer just get teleported from 2003?
• The long process will restart if disrupted. If unfortunately the program gets interrupted on the way (computer goes into sleep, for instance), you'll always have to restart the very long process from scratch. No resume option at all.

The annoying program is probably not going to be a deal-breaker, but definitely bad enough for me to write this post to vent... :)

Be thankful this time

SCO's case against Novell concerning the copyright of Unix related to Linux is finally dead. I never considered it as having any merit, but decisions defying logic could certainly happen in a court. We should all be thankful that is not the case this time.

It has been a test on how well the open-source model can stand against people's urge to keep all profit to themselves. The whole saga should make people think twice before trying to profit at other's expense: just because a certain way of business makes it difficult for everyone to keep profit all to himself, it still doesn't mean everyone would treat the model as an enemy.

I'm not as a staunch cheerleader for FOSS as Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is, but I'm certainly a strong supporter of it. The whole open-source way happens to bring out the best of us social animals in my opinion - everyone else benefits when you prosper, when doing it right. This makes less useful for our instinct to exploit and fight others to preserve our own genes, because the goal for your own benefit is aligned with others' welfare, and that makes us less animal and more... human, shall we say?

in reference to:

"Novell Wins! SCO Loses!"
- Novell Wins! SCO Loses! - Computerworld Blogs (view on Google Sidewiki)

Migrating Ubuntu ... no sweat

Here's how I moved a Jaunty installation from one computer to another. The old one is Core 2 Quad Q6600 on LANParty DK X38-T2R. The new one has Core 2 Quad Q9550 running on Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P. Different memory and drive configuration. The only thing shared was a pair of HD4670. I just moved the drive containing the root partition to the new computer, booted Live CD, and did the following under grub:
root (hd2,1)
setup (hd2)

Done. Reboot, select the drive to boot from, and I was back in my old Jaunty desktop. Could it BE any easier? It actually could, if I hadn't install grub on another boot drive in the old computer. I wouldn't have even needed the grub reinstall. True plug-n-play.

Could anyone imagine the pain if I were to try moving a Win 7 installation?

By the way, the only thing that caused a bit trouble was the RAID volume (Intel Matrix Storage based) on the new computer. After the grub reinstall, one of the RAID drive got dropped so the volume became degraded. GRUB shouln't touch the drive or anything related to the volume, so what the heck? Luckily the Win7 installation on the volume did survive so I was able to rebuild it, but not without complications. I'll have another post on my frustration on this Intel fake RAID junk.

The annoying "Save error: Unable to perform save on all files" from Force.com IDE

Sometimes Force.com IDE would throw such generic error when trying to save to the server, the error mentioned is "An unexpected error has occurred".  Right, that's helpful... The Log Viewer will have "Save failed!(Open log file for full message and/or stacktrace" and I never found a good way to "open log file" other than checking the debug log from the Web UI (Admin Setup > Monitoring > Debug logs).  Mostly I found the error is the result of using field values without including them in a query, or a failed System.assert call.  Why couldn't the IDE just say so?  There are a host of other things that may cause this too, which makes debugging a pain.