Another book I was made aware of through “Authors@Google” talks…

This book gives a pretty good idea of what was wrong about the initial approach of the U.S. in Iraq and how and why the “Surge” worked. I think it was somewhat long since it’s a mixture of Mr. Kilcullen‘s personal accounts and field studies of his past dealings of local/global terrorist groups in several Islamic regions.

I thought the essential ideas and messages were interesting, but I thought it could have been a bit shorter.

No wonder this book as been a best-seller for a long time. The book has a very good combination of academic and personal essay styles. Very easy to read and very convincing.

Dr. Robert Cialdini explains, out of curiosity from his personal experiences and his academic research, what makes people agree to the “compliance agent”, such as sales people.

It is definitely a great training material for sales people and con artists, but it also deals with how we, on the other side, can detect the tactics and avoid traps.

A very good and informative read.

Reading this book was more like reading a Ph.D paper. Besides, the idea seems interesting, but the arguments and evidence weren’t there to me. Quite disappointing.

Dr. Kessler talks about a subject that I have been struggling with for my entire life. While some of the biological research results he talked about were interesting and enlightening, I am not sure if his proposed solutions are anything new (and they are quite generic). I doubt we’ll see “The End of Overeating” anytime soon.

The organization of the book was a bit odd. It consisted of many short chapters and to me, it felt like some of the chapters were concluded prematurely.

Anyway, it is an interesting read for sure. Just don’t expect to solve your overeating problems after reading it.

I thought the organization of the chapters were interesting. Some stories were interesting. However, ultimately, this book by Stephen Baker felt too light on details for me.

I liked the fact that the book by Richard Weissbourd had a strong emphasis on the morality (as compared to the happiness). It’s something that I also feel that is lacking in the fast-paced, low-birth-rate world of today.

The book had an interesting section on the affects of the “Americanization” of the immigrant children on their morality. However, the book overall seemed quite not “organized” (or too narrative) for a study/research-based book.

It did have a conclusion section at the end, but I felt that I wouldn’t have came to those conclusions from reading the whole book up to that point.

The concept and intention seem to be good, but I am not sure if it made a good argument for them.

A Bit of Background

I have been looking for a backup solution for home. Ever since I took up a digital camera in 2001, I have been accumulating quite a bit of slices of my life in the form of digital photos. That collection grew with the arrival of my daughter.

I never liked the idea of burning it to a CD or a DVD: Each medium is relatively small. It’s a bit cumbersome process. It makes it easy to lose a piece of backup with (potentially) so many disks. So, I had an external 160GB drive that I’ve been using as an external backup device. It seemed to me, for backing up growing size of data, HDD seemed to be the only affordable backup medium.

However, this single external disk solution lacked redundancy; That is, if this single 160GB disk were to go bad, all (well, most of) my data would be gone.

Choices, Choices

So, I’ve been looking for an affordable redundancy backup solution. One of the obvious solution is a RAID system. However, it seems it had some special requirements (same size disks, controllers, etc.).

When I heard about Drobo, that seemed to have all my requirements. It had 4 hot-swappable disk bays and provided data redundancy with no same-disk-size requirements. The reviews seemed to be fairly positive (albeit a couple of hardware failure horror stories). However, the base model wasn’t a stand-alone product and it seems a bit expensive (I kind of vowed to never spend more than $500 for a computer, a notebook or a desktop).

Then I heard about Windows Home Server. It’s Microsoft’s contribution to the software-side of a home backup system. It was an OEM’ed product based on Windows Server 2003. The most important part for me was that it provides selective data duplication (thus redundancy) per shares.

HP seemed to be the most prominent hardware vendor that had a WHS product. It also launched with WHS and they had many additional software that made certain things easier. And the reviews seemed pretty positive.

The only thing was that they were still over my target budget (of $500 or so). It was actually similar to Drobo. HP did have a product that met my budget, but it was a single disk solution, which meant that there was no data redundancy.

acer Aspire Easystore H340

So, while searching around for different WHS solution, I came across acer Aspire Easystore H340. The first thing that stood out was that it was based on Intel Atom (N230). This meant that it was lower price and low power. The low price advantage is obvious (the price is below $400).

Since this is going to be an always-on stand-alone server, the lower the power consumption the better. It also means less cooling, which meant more quiet machine. Its lack of performance didn’t matter that much (I would have preferred N330, which is a dual core, though) since this is just going to be a file/backup server and I am not going to use it as a compute server.

It has four (4) hot-swappable SATA disk bays (for future capacity increase and file duplication), which came with a 1TB disk pre-installed with the WHS software. The disk that came with the system was Western Digital Caviar Green. This is a low-power version, which is also a plus for me. I’ve heard that the earlier ones came with a Seagate. I actually prefer WD, so that’s also good for me.

It has a gigabit Ethernet port and several USB ports. This is a head-less system, meaning there is no video-out (which is true for most preconfigured WHS systems). However, there is a WHS console program that you can run from another machine. Or you can even use the Remote Desktop client to log in.

Besides the low base price, NewEgg offered a free extra 1TB WD Caviar Green for a limited time. That just made my decision easier although this product was fairly new. Also Bing Cashback helped a bit.

Setting Up of Easystore H340

The setup was relatively easy, but there were a couple of things that acer could have done better. 1) The quick install guide and the physical manual that came in the box is really lacking. The system has a “information” indication on the front (the “i” indicator) and it remained “RED” during the first boot and installation. I was really concerned thinking that I might have gotten a lemon.

It turns out that this was because the McAfee AV that came with the system was complaining that the evaluation copy was not properly enabled. There was no description of indicator lights on the system in neither the quick install guide nor the manual. The manual I downloaded from the acer’s website does have descriptions of those indicator lights. However, it’s incomplete and made me more worried because of its description of the “RED” “network health” indicator (the “i” light).

Anyway, if you ever get this box, just let it run for a few minutes until things seem to quite down and ignore the “RED” network health indicator for now. When it seems the disk activity has quieted down, use the WHS console (installed either from the CD or from the box’s webserver) to set up things such as the admin password and stuff. Once you are done with it, you can deal with the “network health” messages.

I like having an anti-virus software, but I don’t know if I like the McAfee tool that came with it. It has an evaluation license, so I can hold off that decision for 60 days. I wonder if other free AV software works with WHS (there seems to be a plugin API that other components can hook into the WHS console) or Microsoft’s own “Morro” for that matter would work in WHS…

Adding the extra 1TB disk that came with it was very simple. You just plug it in into a free slot without turning off the computer. It comes up in the WHS console and you then need to enable it as a part of the backup system. You actually have an option to turn that into a backup device for the WHS system itself, too. I am actually thinking of turning my old 160GB external HDD into this role once I get confident with this system.

It set up some default public shares. You can also create your own public or per-user shares. The only left was to create file-duplicated shares for my photos and videos and copy things over.

It came with a media server software, but I turned it off and using the Remote Desktop client, I installed a free version of TVersity that I’ve been using. Because of lack of performance of Intel Atom N230, transcoding video (e.g., cellphone videos into something that Xbox 360 can play) is really bad and I wouldn’t recommend it. However, just streaming things without transcoding is perfectly fine.

So, now I have a small, low-cost ($389 + tax + shipping – $12.25/Cashback), low-power (I doubt it will use 50W), 2 TB (10 years ago, I never would have imagined I would own a terabyte storage at home) file/backup solution that does the daily backup of two Windows 7 RC1 PCs. I am pretty happy with it.

As a person who enjoys movie and technologies in audio-video entertainment, I really enjoyed this historical overview by Scott Kirsner.

The main thread of his storytelling is the struggles between the innovators and the “preservationists” (or “status quo”), and mostly focused on the triumphs on the innovators’ part. And I think that was the only gripes I have about the book.

That is, not all innovations make technical and economical sense. When a technical innovation works out, it usually has been around for a long time and almost always something other than its technical merits made it win over the doubters. I don’t think this book was explaining those triggering ideas and I think that could be a bit misleading.

Other than that, as an interesting overview of 150 or so years of movie industry innovations, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Another pickup from Fresh Air and TED. Also, Dan Ariely sometimes does guest appearance on Marketplace.

This book has some similarities to Freakonomics, but it was more about the social experiments that he and his colleagues have done.

They are showing that we are irrational often times and the irrational behaviors are predictable (or statistically consistent). He doesn’t try to explain why that much, though.

I think this is another author that I prefer listening to that reading his/her book. Some parts were interesting, but often I couldn’t quite agree with the interpretation (or the explanation) of his experiments.

I get a lot of book references from Fresh Air and TED and I heard about Steven Pinker on both.

This book is about the recent developments in social science on human nature (“nature” vs. “nurture” is a very controversial subject). According to Mr. Pinker, the prevalent assumptions in the 20th century about human nature involved three ideas: “blank slate”, “noble savage”, and “ghost in the machine”. However, recent research and experiments show that they are not true.

“Blank slate” states that we can be anything we want to be. This idea helped greatly in the social changes in the 20th century, against many types of social oppression, discrimination, and inequality. However, this also creates unrealistic expectations from parents and well-intentioned but negatively-impacting public policies. “Noble savage” is a notion that in the natural state, we are all “good”, and that the evils in human nature is a product of modern culture. “Ghost in the machine” is an idea that the self (“ghost”) can be completely detached from the biology (“machine”).

I don’t want to go through the book literally, but the main idea of the book is that we can’t ignore our biological nature. One of the studies he included is about the affective-ness of parents (after birth) in forming children’s personalities. This type of studies are done by looking at identical/paternal twins and siblings that grew up together or separately. And it turns out the influence of parenting is almost insignificant.

It was very interesting and informative. I don’t think I agree with everything Mr. Pinker wrote, but still this is something to think about.