mcbeen.com

I have been considering upgrading my old infrant chassis for a while now. It works great, but it’s painfully slow. Its been efficient and very reliable for me. Netgear continues to update the firmware to this day with new features and bug fixes. It has been a great investment.

That being said, spending 600 dollars on a new chassis is more expensive than actually building a full machine and tossing the drives in it. Believe me, I fully understand the cost tradeoffs here. I understand there is a lot to be said the the dividends and time savings on the backend. Still, I have held off.

Then, this christmas the family was especially generous. I picked up a few Newegg gift cards, and decided to redeem them for a Thermaltake level 10 gt. It has a ton more space than my original chassis from over two years ago, along with numerous hot swap drive bays.
I had a few drives kicking around, so I tossed them in the extra slots and played around with setting up a software array in OS X. It worked out fine, but the redundancy options were limited to RAID 1. I looked around for something more interesting.

Today I came back across an old project I had completely forgot about, ZFS. If you are not familiar with it, you should go look it up. Its possibly one of the best fundamental technologies out there for hard drive systems. Apple was working on embedding it into OS X for a few years, but had to abandoned the idea after licensing fell through after the Oracle/Sun Merger. I found there was an open source port of what apple had been working on, and that a prepackaged installer was available.
I went ahead and downloaded it and tossed my spare drives at it. Soon after, I had a nice large pool of raid5 equivalent storage just beckoning for my data. I started tossing files at it and was quite surprised at the performance. Using 4 drives I’m pushing over 200 mb a sec through the array on write. Considering this is all running in software, its pretty good.

ZFS supports tons of advanced features, and easily allows for in-place expansion using larger drives.

I may have finally found a very interesting infrant replacement.

I’ve been experimenting off and on for some time now with OS X on alternative hardware. My experiences has been somewhat mixed, as I generally don’t pick middle of the road hardware for the systems I build.

But since I have extra time on my hands these days, I have pushed further into it than before. I have been met with moderate success, although I would never recommend this process to anyone. Its cheaper to buy a real mac.

Here’s my config:
ASUS P7P55D EVO motherboard running 915 firmware.
ATI 4770 Family Graphics

Noteworthy sites for reference:
http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=199411
http://osx86.sojugarden.com/installer/
http://netkas.org/?p=315

Tips so far: Watch your security settings. Repair permissions before every boot while building. PFix can help tons with this (found on the second site). Don’t burn media, its not worth the money or time.

I’m currently wrestling with my graphic card, as its not fully supported.

Dell Deals For EqualLogic – Forbes.com

If you hear a faint sobbing in the distance. It's probably me.

Equallogic has been one of the two pillars of success in my department. The combination of VMware and Equallogic has been amazing to watch. But in all reality. Any decent iSCSI system would have achieved the same results. We were onef their first customers, and have been very happy with their hardware. But we will not do business with Dell. They still owe us money for not honoring our warentees on hundreds of machines.

I have another meeting with Compellent on the 19th. They seem to have taken equallogic a step further.

Why oh why could they have not been bought by hp or EMC?

Ballmer: Microsoft will power the mobile devolution

Someone should let him know he is too late. And devices that can use this won't be out for another 8 months… at least… wow.

Microsoft’s System Center Mobile Device Management SCMDM 2008. Rolls of the tongue huh? In another demonstration as to why marketing cannot be allowed to run amuk, Microsoft has once again developed a fully branded letter and word jumble. Since it's from microsoft… it must have microsoft in the title. They are also pushing system center hard at the moment… so it has to be there to. Mobile is a key marketing term for the windows mobile division… they probably tried and failed to throw windows in the title. Of course we can't forget the year. Without adding the year… how will people know they need to upgrade!!! Gotta have that churn. Why would you want to run any thing from last year?

It's just too simple to name applications what they really are.

We having been using VMware here at work for quite a while now. We have the full setup, and it all works really good. But we have had a very annoying problem with VMware convertor for some time now. It migrates virtual machines to ESX server from Virtual server just fine. Also handles Physical-toVirtual great as well. But after you get the VMs on to your ESX box, and you want to reconfigure them, or move them back to virtual server, you can't. You get this error "unable to determine guest operating system". After search the forums and such, we found little advice. But a small line at the bottom of a discussion board on a third party site had the answer. "unplug your usb drives". What? Bullshit. That can't be it. I took a look around my computer, and sure enough I had a USB floppy plugged in. I removed it and tried again… It worked.

So. If you use VMware convertor… UNPLUG YOUR USB DRIVES BEFORE RUNNING!

I got my iPhone for work back in june for a few reasons.

• I really wanted a touch screen ipod.
• I wanted a video ipod with a larger screen.
• I wanted portable email on my phone.
• I wanted a phone that didn't suck.
• I needed to test out our new external mail system at work.

You can see that none of these issues were related to cost. Good PDAs cost tons. My last ipaq was almost $700.00. A 400 dollar iPhone was no big deal to me. Imagine my surprise when I  went over the phone bills with my boss, and discovered that comparable service through verizon on our Q's was almost $120.00! I currently pay around $70.00 for my service.  Over the lifetime of the service, this really adds up and more than covers the added cost of the device it self.

I'm really confused now about why people are claiming the iphone plans are expensive. Maybe they should double check their overages. 

Jenn… neverwhere.com is coming, but you blog is back up at jenn.mcbeen.com.

Joe… Your blog is back online at joe.mcbeen.com

The BBS is backonline as well. Complete miracle.

I'm staring at CPG right now trying to figure out how I want to attack it. We'll see.

So it seems that godaddy and netsol don't like each other much. I tried going the easy way, and just pointed network solutions at godaddy. No go. either email worked or the website….not both. So…what the hell… we'll just move the domain right? Nope… I updated my contact info a few weeks back, so netsol won't let me. It's for my own good you know.

It looks like I'll be able to function for now… I went ahead and move authority for my domain to netsol for the first time, and I am now managing all entries on their servers. So far so good.

What's more fun, is that I have been wrestling with this for a couple days now… and no response from netsol or godaddy for assistance.

Sink or swim right?

I have had my iPhone for a little over two months now. This would be my third smartphone… and my first since abandoning the sector a year ago. “Smartphones” are an oxymoron. Generally they are dumb. They store and access tons of information, but know nothing. It’s the classic confusion between knowledge and intelligence.

As an IT engineer, I am forced to get these devices to work reliably on our networks. In general.. it sucks. For example… the current “cheap” smartphone, the “Q”, is on everyone’s list. It has a reasonably nice screen, confusing nonbutton-softkeys, and very stiff keyboard. I was delivered one a couple weeks back, charged with getting in setup for our OWA server. No problem… just put in the address and… what the… what do you mean I have a certificate problem? The Q does not come with the latest set of root CAs, so I’ll need to add a couple in… no problem right? just copy them down and click them… What do you mean I’m not allowed!?
Turns out this is regular problem for the “Q”. So much so that Microsoft has developed and released a special verizon certificate app. I’ll just go down load it… copy it to the “Q”… and run it. Oh… I have to go setup a custom folder to put my certs in… ok, whatever… Now, lets run the app… click the certs… ok first one done… ok now the intermediate… WTF?!?!? WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT IS NOT A VALID ROOT CERT?!?!? Of course it’s not you stupid phone. Just import it!

Well… This went on for days. Litterally. I tried certificate chain downloaders. I manually created CAB files from my certs. I tried unsupported utilities (from microsoft) that no longer exist on the internet. Nothing worked.

I was finally able to get around the problem by REGISTRY HACKING THE PHONE. That’s right. I had to HACK THE REGISTRY ON MY PHONE to get a root certificate chain installed.

And this is supposed to be “enterprise ready”

Thus leads me to the first myth of the day:
“The iPhone is a consumer gadget that is not enterprise ready”
I guess this can be translated to, “If I don’t have to fuck with it for a week, it’s not sufficiently hard enough to use to justify my job”. After I got my iPhone, it was on our mail server, using push services in less than 7 minutes. It was so simple, that anyone who has sent a home email account with an ISP could do it. That’s a large number of people.

“The iPhone touch screen keyboard is inaccurate and slow”
“Physical keyboards are better”
“I want to be able to type without looking”
I have yet to measure my words per minute on the iPhone. What I can tell you, is that I have typed out multi-page emails on the iPhone. They were typed very quickly. I did not have to get bandaids when I was done from clicking hard “Q” buttons.

The autocorrect on the iPhone is frustrating when lost. I find myself pointing at my computer throughout the day saying, “You know, my iPhone would have gotten that right. Why can’t you?” The autocorrect is a true killer feature. It is what allows quick typing without excessive focus on hitting the right key. There are some obvious ones it can’t get. For example: dog vs fog. Both have roughly the same pattern on the screen. That’s about the only draw back to it I can think of.

The screen requires very little contact to type. When watching smartphone users try the iPhone for the first time, they make the exact same mistake I did when I picked it up. Pressing too hard. When you do that, it creates a huge target area, which can lead to mis reads. The best touch is the one you can barely feel. By using a lite touch, you can type excessively fast, and your fingers do not hurt.

Typing without looking. I think some one made this one up on the fly without thinking. These are smartphones. They keyboard is attached to the screen. What… do you close you eyes while typing? seriously? Some would say it is for typing in the dark. But again, that’s from lack of experience. The iPhone has no issues with darkness. Or bright sunlight for that matter.

Accuracy. I don’t know how else to put this. The algorithms apple uses to figure out finger position is black magic. I do not understand it. It should not be possible. With a co-worker testing me. I loaded up a search for all pizza restaurants in the quincy area. It came up with four. Two of them happened to be very close together in the default zoom level. They completely overlapped, except for a couple pixels. I was able to reliably click on the requested push pin every time. It is important to point out that there is no screen calibration tool for the iPhone. Apple is doing something very different here, and everyone needs to figure out what it is and copy it. It will change computing. Here we have better than stylus accuracy with a finger tip, and after less than a week with the device.

“GSM on the iPhone takes five minutes to load an email”
I’m not even sure this deserves a response. It doesn’t. But this is typical of the baseless FUD being spewed these days. So, how long does it really take? Text emails are instant. Doesn’t matter how long they are. An Apple HTML email with a couple logos, like a receipt, takes seven seconds. But how about the mother of all emails. A weekly itunes alert. These bad boys hurt even desktop readers… so what’s the damage? fourteen seconds to full readable html layout, twenty seven for all images to complete loading. That’s about ten times better than five minutes. My gripe with the email app is that it does not support rotation. According to apple’s guidelines, it definitely should. Maybe in a future release.

“Apple will never update the iPhone. Cellphones can’t be patched”
1.0.2. Next.

I guess at some point I should go back and link to all the sites these claims were made from. Maybe. We’ll see.

For now, how about we measure the iPhone on merit, vs baseless slander.

For me, it is worth every penny of it’s cost. Some (Steve Balmer) would argue that it is the most expensive phone ever, and that would be more than a little in accurate. Right now a treo 650 goes for between 300-450 dollars without a special plan. Basically the same price range. Unfortunately, ATT does not offer a rebate/deal at this point. Maybe some day.