I was already way out of the warranty, but contacted the seller (sluchatka.net) anyway (what if…?)… As assumed, it wasn’t just a simple problem they could’ve fixed themselves so they sent them to authorized repair center (pmc.cz) to get the estimated cost of repair.

I haven’t heard back from them for few days and suddenly I got delivered package with brand new pair of Shure SE535 (newer model with better cable) for free!!!

Well played, Shure!

There is one annoying issue with this drive in Mac OS and that is its aggressive power management which spin downs the drive immediately after last application stops accessing it. Not only causes this clicking sound every few seconds and excessive wear (spin up/down cycle count is limited), but also performance is really crappy, as application accessing the drive after spin down has to wait for drive to spin up again.

To deal with this problem, you have to set APM value of the drive to higher value (as described here):

To observe Load_Cycle_Count and Start_Stop_Count parameters of the drive, I've used smartctl:

./smartctl disk1 -a | grep -e "Load_Cycle_Count" -e "Start_Stop_Count"

To set APM value, I've used hdapm:

./hdapm disk1 128
disk1: WDC WD7500BPVT-22HXZT1
Setting APM level to 0x80: Success

After experimenting a little bit I found the following:

• value 254 seems to mean no head parking (Load_Cycle_Count doesn't increase) and no spin down at all (Start_Stop_Count doesn't increase when MacBook is up and running)
• Value 128 (possibly 128 - 253) seems to allow head parking approx. 2.5 secs after last disk access (Load_Cycle_Count increases and click can be heard) but no spin down is allowed. Drive still seems to slow down a little bit after some time, but it doesn't seem to do a complete start/stop cycle as Start_Stop_Count doesn't increase
• Value 127 seems to allow heads to be parked quite often and spin down is allowed - drive seems to wait approx. 25 seconds after last access before complete spin down)

Now, the decision between 128 (don't allow spin down) and 127 (allow spin down) is up to everyone's preferences. Googling a bit revealed that modern laptop drives can do somewhere about 600,000 load cycles and 50,000 start/stop cycles.

To make sure APM value is set after every reboot, you can place hdapm.plist under /Library/LaunchAgents as described in documentation. I'm using the following script:

Result is positive: I've got new battery (for free) that allows me to work 4 hours again!

Good job!

• Create DB control class by extending JdbcControl
• Declare DB control variable in page controller and use @Control annotation to have it automatically instantiated and injected
• Use the DB control

The above works fine. But what happens if we would like to use our DB control class from within JSP page which is not part of our Beehive application and has no access to our controller?

The following text presents one possible approach.

Custom DB control class:

Classic approach, instantiate via @Control annotation in controller:

But what if we need to instantiate the DB control class manually? One possible approach might be creating a factory like this:

Download here.

More information can be found here.

Today, Remote Mic Console 1.3 has been released for both Mac OS 1.5.x and MS Windows XP.

More information here

I am happy to have contributed to such a great piece of an open source software.

More info on http://www.dolejsky.com/trashcan. Download here.

Download drum tab PDF here.