Miles Davis The Original ScrumMaster?

2009 was the 50th birthday of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, a Jazz classic, indeed a classic for music of any time.

Listening to Kind of Blue again, got me thinking. Those recording sessions embodied everything good that should be part of Scrum.

• Communication - Musicians tend to be a synergistic bunch anyway especially Jazz musicians. . If you get a chance to watch a Jazz group in action, forget the music. Watch how they communicate. They're constantly listening or watching each other to guide them forward.

• Empower the team - Although Miles lead the group, he didn't tell everyone exactly what to do but let the group (or team) get on with it. He trusted them. In fact most of the tunes weren't written out specifically. A few modal scales were written out and it was left to group to improvise.

• Give value early - Most of the tracks on Kind of Blue were first or second takes. If that's not giving value early, I don't know what is.

• Learn and improve. - It was interesting listening to the out-takes of the recording session. All players were responding to each other to improve each other's playing. A notable example is the recording of 'So What'. In one of the takes, the recording is stopped early because Miles did not like the beginning. When you hear the accepted take, you'll agree that pick was the correct choice.

Each of these players changed music in so many different ways during the next decade, many of them becoming leaders of their own groups. They learnt from this session and changed the course of music forever. It truly was a sum of parts is greater than the whole.


And that's why Miles would be a great scrum master, even if he didn't know it :).

Some programming nuggets

I recently came across this list of nuggets that new programmers should learn and veterans have learned the hard way :).

Check out the link:

Things every programmer should know

Upgrading ReadyNas Duo

The time had come to upgrade the hard drives in my NAS. 500 GB in a RAID configuration is not much space these days. I looked around for a good 2TB drive with good eco credentials and quietness.

I finally plumped for a couple of Western Digital WD20EADS Caviar Green hard drives.

Drives not recognized

I place the new drive into the NAS but the WD20EADS was not recognized. I felt deflated; maybe I had bought two very expensive paperweights. A check on the ReadyNas DUO forums informed me that I should upgrade to a newer version of Radiator 4.17

Apparently these drives are not recognized by Radiator 4.16. I've installed the new firmware and voilà my new drive was then recognized. Unfortunately, I noticed another problem.

Ever increasing LCC count

Although these drives are eco-friendly there not very amiable with Unix-like systems. Seems that these drives are too clever for their own good. To be more green, these drives park their heads if there is no disk activity after 8 seconds. But Unix will usually frequently write to a disk on a periodic basis, which means the heads will continually be parked and unparked. This increase Load cycle count, LCC unnecessarily. This is important as there is an upper limit to the LCC count, say 300,000 after which the drive will shutdown due to it thinking there is a drive error. You'll then be unable to access your data and will have to send the drive back to Western Digital for replacement under warranty. Not good :(.

To get around this there is a WD utility, wdidle3, which allows the changing of the parking frequency or to disable it all together. This is a DOS application so it needs to be run from a boot disk. You can't run it from Windows 7 x64 either as it's a 16 bit application. What I did was plugged in the drives into my PC and created a USB disk to boot into DOS after which I could run wdidle3.

I followed these instructions:

1. Download FDOEMCD.builder.zip from http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/.
2. Add wdidle3.exe to CDROOT folder. (wdidle3.exe)
3. Execute MAKEISO.BAT to create new FDOEM.ISO CD image file.
4. Burn FDOEM.ISO to CD or usb stick. It will boot to DOS and allows wdidle3 to run.
5. Disable wdidle3 timer on all discs (wdidle3 /D) or increased the park time to max time of 5 minutes (wdidle3 /S300).
   

More in depth Instructions found here: http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=124&t=20907

I set the park time to 5 minutes rather than disable it. This reduces the risk of platter errors should the drives be knocked. If you disable, the heads will always be in contact with the platters so if you inadvertently knock your hard drive you could damage it.

Another thing is that your drive may not be recognized from DOS. This is probably a BIOS issue. Check that your hard drive controllers are not using AHCPI. Change them to use IDE for wdidle3 update and revert them to AHCPI afterwards. It shouldn't take long for wdidle3 to find your SATA drive. If it longer than 10 seconds, then check the BIOS.

Since I've made these changes my LCC count has hardly risen. To put it into context, without wdidle3, my LCC increased to around 1000 in just 1 hour which means my drive would have been bricked in less than a fortnight. But now everything's hunky-dory.

Western Digital needs to get their act together. They really shouldn't be selling these drives without warning consumers that you may have problems on non-desktop computers. You live and learn.