To build the site, I used two technologies:

1) Flite – an open source text-to-speech system developed by CMU.  It was a low quality wav, but did the job well.  I also used Espeak, but the code looked like it required the server to a sound card installed, which mine does not.  So I switched over to flite instead.

2)  SOX – an open source sound exchange application.  I originally used the default one that came with CentOS 5, but it lacked the feature of sequencing the sounds together instead of merging them on top of each other.  So I uninstalled the default rpm and downloaded the code base and recompiled the latest version.

The code wasn’t too complicated, it was just figuring out how to get all the stuff to work together.  First get flite to spit out a wav:

/usr/local/bin/flite -t “‘ . $name . ‘” -o /tmp/closertemp/’ . $rand . ‘.wav’

the -t option is to use the text that’s passed in instead of a file

then I push it to sox:

/usr/local/bin/sox –combine concatenate /tmp/closertemp/’ . $rand . ‘.wav /tmp/TheCloser_1.wav /tmp/’ . $rand . ‘.wav’

the rand # is to make sure i always produce a unique file name for every request.

The drobo, lacie and raid, are all generally external drives that you can connect via a firewire, usb, and sometimes even a network connection.  They usually act as additional drives that you can store massive amounts of media on for backup, storage, or portable storage.

The lacie drives are generally good for media files that you dont really care about losing.  The reason I say this is because if the drive in the lacie dies, you’re pretty much SOL (shit outta luck!).  There’s no redundancy, meaning, the content is all stored on one drive and not backed up on another drive.  If it dies, you’re poopooed (that’s the technical term ).

With a RAID drive and lacie drive, there’s a difference.  The content is usually spread across multiple drives so that you if one drive fails, the other drives have some data in reference to that drive so you can restore the content when you buy a new drive for it.  This is called data striping.   The drobo uses proprietary software to handle this and RAID systems use the RAID data striping algorithms to handle this (RAID 5, 6, 10).

So why do I prefer Drobo over RAID?  Well the biggest reason I love my drobo is because I can use different size drives in my drobo.  This is the biggest benefit to using a Drobo over RAID.  Most RAID system require you to have 5 drives (or 6) of the same size.  So once you run outta space, you have to figure out what to do with the data on your drives while you’re upgrading drives.  This is typically a massive pain in the ass.  With the drobo, all you need to do is strip out a drive, then replace it with a new one of a bigger size.  That’s it.  I even started with drives of varying sizes.  It’s not the most optimal use of the drive space, but the point was that I could use all my drives without having to buy drives of all the same size.

In the end I would recommend this product over a RAID system or a Lacie drive.  It’s just that much simpler to use.  It is a bit pricey at about $360, but I haven’t had any issue with my data, and I feel pretty comfortable using it alone as my backup.  Feel free to email if you have any questions!

ok, so why drobo? originally I was a pc user and was happy with my lacie drive formatted in NTFS. I swapped over to a mac, and sadly my external drive wasn’t writable anymore. I installed ntfs-3g which is a mac “driver” that allows it to read ntfs drives. That worked for a while until my drive got accidentally unplugged (by my foot, d’Oh). On top of that the ntfs-3g was extremely slow. My only other option was to get a new lacie drive or download 250 gigs of music, movies, and backedup up docs onto another machine and format the drive for FAT32.

So, I was stumped, I poked around on the net and ran into a post that talked about a nightmare of a time recovering data from a lacie harddrive once it crashed. uhhh, that made me a bit nervous, so I decided to go with the drobo option ultimately. My laptop has about 5 years worth of pictures, all of my code, my business documents and data files, and a whole mess of other stuff. I really can’t risk all of that on the lacie drive (oh and the drobo looked prettier too).

Ok, to the fun stuff…..

First Impressions

So i go the drobo box … cute packaging… the “welcome to the word of … drobo” was a great touch. reminds me of opening up my macbook pro box for the first time. (coicidence that the drobo guys are mac guys… hmmmm).

My first impression is that it’s much bigger than i thought, at least in depth. I thought that it would be about half the size depth wise. I dont know why… just from the pictures on the site, thats what I would have figured.

Setup

I love it when companies provide huge big dumb Step 1 Step 2 and Step 3 things. It allows me not to think about anything and follow directions.

Insert drives.. sure thing. I happen to have 4 400GB drives from a server that crashed a year ago (that i never bothered fixing). So here we go. Opened the drobo casing…oooh magnetic… nice… not a swivel based door WHICH ALWAYS BREAKS.. another great touch.

oooh another great feature, you just slide the drives in… no stupid bays to deal with.. awesome.. all four drives slid in without a problem. ooh i think my lacie is getting jealous.

Step 2 plug in stuff… weird the power cable has a white plastic covering… never seen anything like that… i dont think the mac even had that… kinda neutral about it… if they could save money to me as a consumer by taking that off, I would’ve been happy about it…

plugged in… ITS ALIVE!!!!

uh oh… i hear clicking… thats usually not a good sign… it looks like two of the drives might have gotten damaged when i was moving them.. crap. nice that i got an error on my screen! cool.

ok.. lets see how easy this really is.. ok i swapped out the drives, but nothing has happened… so i guess i’ll unplug this guy again. a quick not about the drive.. its pretty quiet.. which is awesome… so now i have three drives in and not all 4… (still all 400 gb drives). hmmm it says my total capacity is 2 tb, that’s definitely not right… i wonder if it matters..

wow… time machine picked up that i have a new drive (im not currently using time machine)… awesome! another example of just working!

Looks like time machine is starting to backup all my data… cool beans! ehhh time machine looks like it messed up a little. i didn’t want to use the entire drive as my backup drive, so i went into disk utility to partition the space into two spaces, 1 TB each (i still dont think i have 2 tb, but drobo does, so lets see what happens).

Ok, it looks like that kinda messed up time machine… So im going into system preferences and changing the time machine drive. hmm It looks like I can’t force a backup.. thats annyoing. found a post on mactips that says right click on the icon allows me to do it. ok! back in business!

Time to transfer my crap over!

Overall i’m pretty happy with the way that the drobo is working so far. I’ll give another update in the next month or so.