Testing out wordpress for the iphone

This is my first post using my iPhone. I’ve installed the wordpress app and now I’m typing on the phone itself!

First thoughts: it’s great! I was a little concerned that the iphones spell checker wouldn’t work but it does (although not in the post titles).

I’ve tried to attach a photo of brendan so let’s see if that works…

iPhone on O2’s Simplicity Tariffs – £25 a month

My brother has just given our dad his old 2G iphone after upgrading to the 3G one. Initially I thought he would have to pay £35 a month for the iPhone tariff, but it turns out that you can use the old iPhones with any o2 tariff.

There are a number of sim-only Simplicity tariffs, that have short term 30 day contracts, and these start from £15 per month. You can then pay £7.50 extra a month for unlimited data, or £10 a month for unlimited data + wifi.

In the end he opted for the Online 15 tariff with the web+wifi bolt on. This gives him:

  • 200 minutes
  • 400 texts
  • Unlimited O2 to O2 calls
  • Free voicemail
  • Unlimited data + wifi

The only thing he doesn’t get his visual voicemail, but not bad for £25 a month.

Installing the Brother MFC-9840CDW on Ubuntu

To install a Brother MFC 9840 CDW printer on Ubuntu, you must:

  1. Download the LPR driver from here
  2. Download the CUPS wrapper driver from here.
  3. Install them.

You can use these commands:


wget http://solutions.brother.com/Library/sol/printer/linux/rpmfiles/lpr_debian/mfc9840cdwlpr-1.0.0-7.i386.deb&lang=English_lpr
wget http://solutions.brother.com/Library/sol/printer/linux/rpmfiles/cups_wrapper/mfc9840cdwcups-1.0.0-7.i386.deb
sudo mkdir /var/spool/lpd
sudo mkdir /usr/share/cups/model
sudo chmod 777 /usr/share/cups/model
sudo dpkg -i --force-all --force-architecture mfc9840cdwlpr-1.0.0-7.i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i --force-all --force-architecture mfc9840cdwcups-1.0.0-7.i386.deb
sudo aa-complain cupsd

UPDATE – 22ND NOVEMBER 2008 – ALTERNATIVE METHOD
One blog reader, Hans, has commented that you can just use synaptic to install the printer drivers. I haven’t tried this myself so I would be interested to hear how others get on using this method. Please post a comment if it worked for you!

  • Open up Synaptic Package Manager.
  • Search for 9840 and install the packages.
  • Set it up under System > Printers.

SATA hard drives for our coraid ATAoE SAN

We are looking to purchase some drives for a Coraid SR1521 storage appliance. Coraid maintain a list of compatible drives on their site, so it would be wise for us to stick to drives that have been tested without problems.

Hard drives comparison

  • All disks shown are 1TB SATA drives.
  • MTBF is the Mean Time Between Failures
  • AFR is the Annualised Failure Rate. This is the % of the population of these drives that are likely to fail in an average year. I’ve calculated this myself based on 24/7 usage (e.g 8760 / MTBF * 100).
Manufacturer Model Type Part Number MTBF AFR Price (inc VAT)
Seagate Barracuda ES.2 Enterprise ST31000340NS 1,200,000 0.73% £165.59
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 Desktop ST31000340AS 750,000 1.17% £99.99
Samsung Spinpoint F1 * Desktop HD103UJ 600,000 1.46% £89.85

Notes
* The Samung Spinpoint F1 has not been tested on a Coraid device yet.

Tom’s hardware have a comparison of SATA disk transfer rates.

X-bit labs have an in-depth comparison on 1TB disks.

Samsung make an interesting point in their spintpoint F1 announcement pdf. Although buying a 1TB drive may cost more per Gigabyte than 2 x 500GB drives, the 2 drive solution is twice as likely to fail per Gigabyte. However, it will generally be slower as you have less spindles.