Wrong. I tried at least three of the twenty I purchased (for a few quid) and none of them would even begin writing. Brasero/K3B both complained about incompatible media types.

Remembering that my DVD drive, a trusty NEC 3500A, was designed, built and purchased somewhere between 2004 and 2005 (4-5 years ago at this point) and that I hadn’t ever updated the firmware, I set about researching ways and means into doing this.

I came across this website, run by a pair of firmware hackers named Liggy and Dee whom have (between them) released, and continue to host, many firmware releases (both official and unofficial) for a wide variety of NEC optical drives.

What’s more, their binflash (or ‘necflash’) utility was even released as a Linux binary and it even provides compatibility for reading the official NEC .exe firmware releases! I was sceptical that it would work under Ubuntu 9.10 at first, but much to my delight it worked perfectly. With a little reading, I was able to dump my current firmware (2.16) to file and subsequently flash two different firmware releases: 2.58 (an OEM firmware release) and the latest, official NEC firmware 2.1A release.

The full output of my escapades for anyone curious:


~$ sudo ./necflash -flash -v -s Desktop/NECND350_v21A.exe /dev/sg2
Binflash - NEC version - (C) by Liggy and Herrie
Visit http://binflash.cdfreaks.com

Identified drive: 4 - 3031
Detected drive from Firmware: 4

You are about to flash your drive with the following firmware:

Vendor: _NEC
Identification: DVD_RW ND-3500AG
Version: 2.1A

Remember no one can be held responsible for any kind of failure!
Are you sure you want to proceed? (y/n) y

Entering safe mode
Sending firmware to drive at 0x006000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x00e000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x016000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x01e000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x026000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x02e000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x036000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x03e000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x046000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x04e000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x056000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x05e000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x066000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x06e000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x076000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x07e000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x086000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x08e000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x096000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x09e000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x0a6000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x0ae000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x0b6000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x0be000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x0c6000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x0ce000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x0d6000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x0de000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x0e6000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x0ee000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x0f6000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x0fe000
Sending checksum to drive
Erasing flash block 2
Erasing flash block 3
Erasing flash block 4
Erasing flash block 5
Erasing flash block 6
Erasing flash block 7
Erasing flash block 8
Erasing flash block 9
Erasing flash block 10
Erasing flash block 11
Erasing flash block 12
Erasing flash block 13
Erasing flash block 14
Erasing flash block 15
Erasing flash block 16
Erasing flash block 17
Erasing flash block 18
Writing flash block 2
Writing flash block 3
Writing flash block 4
Writing flash block 5
Writing flash block 6
Writing flash block 7
Writing flash block 8
Writing flash block 9
Writing flash block 10
Writing flash block 11
Writing flash block 12
Writing flash block 13
Writing flash block 14
Writing flash block 15
Writing flash block 16
Writing flash block 17
Writing flash block 18
Leaving safe mode

Whilst the 2.58 OEM release didn’t fix my problems, 2.1A did and I now have a freshly-burnt copy of Windows 7 Pro to go and play games with. Nice one, Liggy & Dee.

So here’s an experiment. A phrase that I know yields no results on Google (as of this posting date):

Rachel Jennison Harper.

I’ll update when Google does..

Edit: Google has now updated! In no more than 19 hours, too.

In addition to this, I appaer to have made a mini celebrity out of Miss Harper. Given the continued existence of this blog (and the long-standing back-up of Google’s search listings) she won’t be forgotten any time soon!

This really is a true story, and she doesn’t know I put it in my comic because her wifi hasn’t worked for weeks.

Well, I laughed at least. And it reminds me of a famous euphemism, too!

Nick: “Jon, why have you locked your door?”
Jon: “I’m re-compiling my kernel!“

I have happened across some statistics collected “for demographic reasons” by my University’s Students Union, as a result of their routine swipe of your student card whenever you show up for any paid night at the Uni bar. You wondered what it was for, right? Well now I can tell you!

The sample I’ve acquired is an excerpt of the statistics collected for ‘Project Friday’ at Legends, on Friday the 2nd May 2008:

Year of Study Attendees
1: 65 (52.42%)
2: 33 (26.61%)
3: 19 (15.32%)
M: 2 (1.61%)
Data not current: 5 (4.03%)

Gender Attendees
Male: 97 (78.23%)
Female: 22 (17.74%)
Data not current 5: (4.03%)

Department Attendees
Computing, Engineering & Technology: 111 (89.52%)
Health: 5 (4.03%)
Business School: 3 (2.42%)
Data not current: 5 (4.03%)

Study Site Attendees
STAFFORD: 116 (93.55%)
THOMAS TELFORD SCHOOL: 2 (1.61%)
STOKE: 1 (0.81%)
Data not current: 5 (4.03%)


78.23% male!

I’ve long-wondered what the ratio of males to females on the Stafford campus really is, but it appears that we truly are screwed: out-numbering the girls by over 3:1. What’s scarier is that 5 of the ‘patrons’ weren’t even identifiable as male or female.

One could suggest that this would be a blessing in disguise for the female minorities of Stafford, however, with an overwhelming majority of the male attendees being first-year Computing and Engineering students, it could quite possibly the reason why they don’t bother coming in the first place.

Oh, and one last thing: WHO LET THOSE TWO SCHOOL KIDS IN?!

(And no, I don’t care if they’re female!)

One of our servers, for historical reasons, is actually hosted in the same rack at UKS as four more; all owned by one of our larger customers. We happen to manage all of these servers, too.

Anyway, sometime around 4pm yesterday (just as I’m about to leave – typical) one of the redundant PSU modules in their primary VM host, and as a horrible, unexpected side-effect, it blew the fuse in the rack’s power bar! Which really shouldn’t happen, but.. Well.. It did!

UKS inspected the issue as soon as we noticed, and promptly replaced the fuse. Of course, [almost] all of the machines are set to ‘power-on after AC power loss’ in their BIOS settings. As they all do, the resultant surge in power draw once-again trips the fuse.

We were blamed for not using staggered start-up on our APC PDU. But they don’t all support it? Why should the fuse blow at the sight of four >2A servers starting up? It’s not like the rack was purchased on a fixed ampage – the servers are all paid on single-server hosting packages!

Anyway, as I’m actually off on holiday today, I’ve had to convince the admin girl to drop a spare PSU down to Redditch.. No big deal, as UKS are more than capable of swapping the PSU out.

The bigger problem was the extended downtime of our main web server. It hasn’t got a working LED, so it was “quite difficult” for the on-site engineer to determine if it was up or not. I suppose checking the airflow through the back of the machine, or the multitude of drive lights weren’t obvious options…

After a night of down-time, it’s actually up again. The backup VM didn’t go quite to plan, which I think we’ll need to investigate in the future. And I suppose I’ve got a LED to fix when I’m next in the data centre!