Team-Ception

I think Zoom-ception is a better pun on inception but we use MS teams.  It's interesting when people share their screens and the video conference is shared and you can see yourself on their screens.

It's weird to see myself from both angles. It was even weirder watching both move as I spoke and seeing the very slight lag between the two.

Rosemary strikes again - another email subscription

So my last name isn't terribly common.  There's a pretty substantiated belief by the genealogy nerds in the family that we're all directly related.  We've been able to establish connections to several of the branches of the family tree going back to the early 1700's.  So Rosemary Whiffen is a distant relative of mine, and she thinks her gmail address is rwhiffen at gmail, unfortunately, it's mine.  

So I get subscribed to a lot of email lists.  Old Navy in Canada is the latest.   I also know when she orders shoes from Aldo.  The best one was when they subscribed to Netflix with my email. We got that one cleaned up pretty fast. She doesn't have much of an online foot print so I haven't been able to converse with her directly about the mistakes so I just unsubscribe where I can.

They left coffee grounds in the coffee maker pre-covid

So the universe doesn't want me to have coffee today. I had to go into the office to fix one of the security cameras that was offline.  I decided I wanted to brew myself a pot of coffee (we have those k-cups but I prefer the brewed stuff).  I opened the basket to put in my coffee grounds and was treated to this:

That's mold from March (it's July when I post this).  The coffee machine is pretty much fowled at this point, have to run a cleaning cycle and a few empty brews now.  So I made myself some K-Cup coffee (I typically brew two of the 4-oz cups because it makes it stronger in my opinion) and went to put some hazelnut creamer in.  Box says it use by July 2020:

And they weren't kidding:

Guess I'm drinking soda today.  Hopefully that's still good...

Praying mantises

This year I've had a lot more praying mantis sitings around my house.

I've seen the brown one (or ones) a few times since this photo, usually they skitter away before I can get the photo.  This little guy (assuming it's the same one or same brood) is about as long as my thumb now.

I see these green ones more often over the years. This guy isn't full grown yet.  Anyway, need to do some research on Mantises in northern VA to see what there is to know about them.

Mountain Vista, er I mean Mountain Lion

So I've been running Mac OS 10.8 'Mountain Lion' for a little over a week now and I am not impressed at all.  Fortunately it's only $20, but So far I have yet to utilize a single new feature in it. Messages plain ol' doesn't work for me.  I still have an @mac.com email address for my apple ID so there is all kinds of no-joy for messages.  I use Outlook for work, so I don't need reminders, and I use Evernote, so Notes is superfluous for me (and rather crappy to boot).   So far this is the Windows Vista of upgrades for me.  It added security, which is annoyingly getting in my face, it seems slower on some things (I get more beach balls than pre-upgrade) and of all the claimed new features, I don't touch most of them.  Yup, it's vista.

Worst part of the upgrade to me is that my trusty old 2007 MacBook Pro isn't supported anymore.  It's had a reasonable run, but it's sad when a still viable device is left behind like this.  Oh well, I guess Apple can't hit it out of the park all the time.

test pictures

testing a picture

I'm playing with a new blog editor called MarsEdit and want to see if it's worth buying.  Want to see if it can upload images directly to blogger.com blogs.

Migrating from my old blog to this new blog...

Right now my blog is hosted on PowWeb.com and it's been great, but I'm tired of managing the wordpress config myself, so I'm going to google's Blogger.com setup so it will be all tied into my existing google apps accounts for my vanity domain.  There's bound to be a lot of mistakes as I copy the posts over, so please bare with me.  I won't actually change the DNS entries until I get the stories 100% migrated.

For now I've run into the post limit for the day, so it'll have to wait until tomorrow.  Someday http://rich.whiffen.org will be here.

Mystery 5.8Gb of app data on my iPad

So I go to sync my iPad for my short trip to Denver. I wanted to put a movie on it so I could watch something on the plane . Imagine my surprise when my iPad had these stats:

5.8Gb of App data! Wow. Where did that come from? I go into the apps tab and sort my apps by size:

The biggest app I have installed is 190Mb (big to be clear, but not 5.8Gb of big. If I add up all my Apps, I get somewhere in the 500Mb range. Where is all this space going? So I do some googling around and get no where fast. Turns out Apple has changed the way they do backups from version to version. Some say it should be under /private/Library. Some say /private/var, etc... Anyway, I found my backups under /Users/rwhiffen/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup. Under there are some cryptic directory names, likely MD5 hashes. The one I'm interested in is from today when I'm syncing my iPad: 6bf83d2961ea2206b4c08edb555b2b0d89c7f218. Inside there are 4083 more hashed file names. One in particular is quite large:

 

rwhiffen:6bf83d2961ea2206b4c08edb555b2b0d89c7f218 rwhiffen$ ls -lh 5180d2cec771957569b3dc0a8eed20b536fa9185

-rw-r--r-- 1 rwhiffen rwhiffen 4.2G Dec 14 00:22 5180d2cec771957569b3dc0a8eed20b536fa9185

rwhiffen:6bf83d2961ea2206b4c08edb555b2b0d89c7f218 rwhiffen$

 

So that's probably my problem App. Now I just need to figure out how to get 5180d2cec771957569b3dc0a8eed20b536fa9185 translated into something meaningful. There are a few files:

 

-rw-r--r-- 1 rwhiffen rwhiffen 93500 Dec 19 13:01 Info.plist

-rw-r--r-- 1 rwhiffen rwhiffen 660554 Dec 19 13:01 Manifest.mbdb

-rw-r--r-- 1 rwhiffen rwhiffen 126656 Dec 19 13:01 Manifest.mbdx

-rw-r--r-- 1 rwhiffen rwhiffen 7025 Dec 19 13:01 Manifest.plist

-rw-r--r-- 1 rwhiffen rwhiffen 189 Dec 19 13:01 Status.plist

 

That probably have the data, just need to figure out how to read them. Info.plist just has some interesting xml data about my iPad. Manifest.plist looked promising. It was in binary so I had to convert it to xml first: plutil -convert xml1 Manifest.plist (be sure you copy it to a temp location first and don't convert the original...). Manifest.plist looked like a bust too. Status.plist is just the status of the last backup. So no useful stuff there. Ugh.

 

So that means I need to try and slog through the mbdm and mbdx files. Yikes. Fortunately someone else has been there first: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3085153/how-to-parse-the-manifest-mbdb-file-in-an-ios-4-0-itunes-backup The user Galloglass' solution worked best for me. I cut and pasted his Python code into a file lsback.py and chmod'ed it 755.

 

rwhiffen:6bf83d2961ea2206b4c08edb555b2b0d89c7f218 rwhiffen$ ./lsback.py | grep 5180d2cec771957569b3dc0a8eed20b536fa9185

-rw-r--r-- 000001f5 000001f5 4479500672 1291642994 1291642994 1291592204 (5180d2cec771957569b3dc0a8eed20b536fa9185)AppDomain-com.polishedplay.puppetpals::Documents/ipad/recordings/new/audio

rwhiffen:6bf83d2961ea2206b4c08edb555b2b0d89c7f218 rwhiffen$

 

So it would seem that there is a stray audio recording for PupetPals , one of my kids games. So I deleted it, re-synced the iPad, then added the App back.

Now a more reasonable number. Still higher than I would have thought, but not 5.8Gb.

 

It's a rough job market, in pictures...

Great blog post today on The O'Reilly Radar. It graphs the number of online job postings month by month for the last four years. I won't steal the pictures here, you'll have to click the link to see them, but it confirms what I've been seeing while doing my job hunting. It looks particularly bad for the folks back home in Minnesota. A slight downward trend, with a slight uptick now. Although I have a feeling it will ramp up a bit more for June and July as more government spending trickles out of the stimulus bill. Personally I went the month of March and April with very little job oportunties. Late April and May it picked up slightly (and I landed a short term contract). Now here in June, no fewer than 5 promising oportunites have come my way. It figures, as soon as I take a long term job (W2, not 1099 or c2c) that other options come out of the woodwork. Extensions and increased hours at me current contract. A data center move with CSC (love those, I'm good at it and it has a set end date). A systems engineering lead with the direct competition of the company I'll be working for on Monday (slightly more senior role to boot... DOH!). A data center manager job... SAN/VMWare engineer... All promising, but I won't be pursuing any of them. I've placed my bets and am going to ride it out for a minimum of 6 months. More likely a year or more. My strategy/thinking there is an idea for another post.

Anyway, good luck out there...

I miss the rejection letter

A while back Louis CK was on Conan O'Brien. He had a great bit on "Everything's Amazing, Nobody's Happy." Basically how things are amazing right now and people still have room to complain. My cell phone has more abilities than the first five computers I ever owned combined. And yet I still find time to complain about what it can't do.


Similar thing with the job market. Searching for jobs has never been easier. In good job markets you can put a profile up on job boards and sit back and wait for people to find you. In tougher markets, you can search and apply from the comfort of your computer. No resumes to print, cover letters to write with awkward salutations, no envelopes or stamps. You apply, and 5 minutes later it can be in the hands of the HR department. It's amazing. You can sit in any internet connected location in the world and look for jobs in any major metropolitan city in the western world and then some. The 'web 1.0' way of doing it was a bit cold and non-personal, so sites like linkedin.com have stepped in to meet that need. (My profile's here) There are other avenues as well. EMC has a twitter account for jobs. It's never been easier for job seekers and employers to find each other.
As the Joe Walsh song says: "I can't complain, but some times I still do". I miss the rejection letter. I still get them every once and a while, but haven't gotten any on this latest round of job searching. And I think it's an artifact of living life at internet speeds. So I've sent resume's and inquiries to a handful of opportunities but haven't received any kind of response. Others I have recieved a canned response from the HR application they used to allow you to apply, or an auto-reply email from the HR@company.com email box. I guess I can forgive the lack of response. The flood of potential applicants and the number of dead ends therein would make it a fools errand to respond to them all personally. With the ease of applying for jobs, a person can apply to several dozen jobs in an afternoon. So the likely hood of someone in HR responding to someone who's already taken another job is pretty high. So I guess I shouldn't be surprised that HR doesn't get back to me personally. But it doesn't mean I have to like it either. Some times it would be nice to know that a real person at least received my application. It would be nicer still to know that I didn't get it so I wouldn't be left to wonder.
Oh well, even though everything is great, I'm not completely happy...

A rambling post about twitter, Steve Case and Revolution Healthcare (mostly twitter though)

I've been on twitter for a little while now. And I've had a few thoughts running through my head but never enough to warrant a post, until now. I want to cast these thoughts into bytes for later mockery. I expect when I retire I'll come back and read these posts (in what ever format they evolve into) and make a lot of fun of myself. Kind of like when I look at pictures of myself as a teenager now. The "what were you thinking!" kind of stuff. This could be a long and winding post, apologies in advance. On with the dreck!

So I'm on twitter, mostly as an easy method to update my facebook status, because Ecto (my blog editor of choice) has an option to set your twitter status to notify of new blog posts and lastly (and perhaps secretly the real reason) the pure geeky-ness of it. For the most part, I follow people I know, but I do follow some non-people, like The American Red Cross and a few celebrity types like Dr Tiki or The Big O and Dukes radio show. Recently I got back on the Diggnation bandwagon and decided to follow Alex, Kevin and a few others. Kevin Rose tweeted a note about a new website he put up: wefollow.com which is a twitter directory that ranks by number of followers. Good idea that fills a certain need for folks. I used it to find other interesting people to follow like Tim O'Reilly, Leo LaPorte, Snoop Dogg and Steve Case. Initially I started following people like crazy. Before I new it I had added a few dozen people. I did this late at night so it seems like a great idea at the time. Then the next day started. And I started to drown in an avalanche of tweets. Some very interesting ones, like Tim O'Reilly's or funny like Christopher Walken. The irony of cwalken to me is I distinctly remember not laughing very much when he was on SNL a few years back. Go figure. Anyway, the rest of them were just pure clutter for me. When I finally got back to check my timeline on my phone, I had 375 tweets waiting for me. In less than 12 hours. DOH! So I started dropping people like wet socks off a cloths line.

Brief interlude. Back in 2007 after leaving the Red Cross I was contacted by someone from HR at Revolution Healthcare. They made it clear that it was a Steve Case venture. Basically using his name and reputation as a recruiting tool. At first I wasn't very keen on the idea. Didn't seem like a great fit. But the more I thought about it the more I liked the idea. Healthcare, and in particular health insurance needs a revolution or at the very least a 'market correction' in this country. Steve Case's name could open the doors to companies that would otherwise ignore a startup. The ratio of insurance company people to health care providers in amazing to me (even worse when you look at just Doctors). So I thought working for Revolution Healthcare might be worth a second look. If Steve Case could use his name recognition and access to other execs to open doors, the venture could be very successful. Turns out it a good thing the HR person never got back in touch with me (although I was peeved at the time) since they've laid off a lot of people. It was nice idea. Hopefully they can weather the storm and keep trying. I would have liked to have been a part of it.

Back to twitter. Steve Case. Started following him because he came up in the top-10 for #tech on wefollow.com (doesn't seem to be anywhere on wefollow.com now) and because revolution health care. Wanted to see what kind of exec he might have been. Well turns out he likes the finer things it seems. He's had some expensive tweets (well at least for a lower pay scale guy like me). Pics from Sunset in Captiva FL, Advice on where to stay in Maui. Starting a resort in Costa Rica. Then there's the @user replies to people I don't know. Kind of weird only seeing half of a conversation. But I kept with it for about a week. Today, can't take it anymore, have to 'unfollow' Steve Case. Not that he knows or cares mind you. I wouldn't in his place. But he wasn't saying anything that was particularly interesting to me, especially in the context of what I use twitter for.

Which leads me to another Twitter thought. Twitter needs a feed filter ability. Not sure I've thought this idea out completely but I need two twitter feeds. One of my 'a-list' people I follow. Close friends, businesses that announce stuff via twitter (like MacHeist, w00t or Red Cross) and the like. Then the B-list twitter where all these other folks can go. I could then follow up with their stuff when I have spare time or an interest. Maybe another way to look at it is 'push' the tweets from group A but I'll 'pull' the tweets from group B when I want to see what they had to say. I'm sure there's a better way to say what I mean here. And who knows, maybe you can already passively follow people and not have them clutter up your timeline and I just haven't figured it out yet.

Anyway, time to get back to the business at hand. Time to push 'publish' on this ramble and have it announce via twitter, go figure.

IBM to buy Sun?

According to the WSJ IBM is in talks to purchase Sun. The MSNBC version of the same story provides a lot more detail. There's a bloomberg article that seems to be down as I write this that indicates that Sun asked HP they turned it down.

One thing that strikes me is that all of this is coming from one source, so there may not be much to this. This could be just a bunch of speculative talk. This same speculative talk also indicates that HP was asked and HP turned Sun down (which is a bit surprising because HP and SUN would be a better fit IMHO).

But if we pretend for a moment that it's all reasonably true some interesting things come to mind. The cross-country nature of the two companies will be a big issue. It's east coast vs west coast. It's suits and ties vs pony tails and sandals. IBM's cathedral approach to Suns bazaar approach. On top of that you can't have HQ's on both coasts. Which one goes? In the end, IBM will 'win out' eventually just out of shear entrenchment, in my opinion. There just isn't enough Sun left to change things. There is the possibility of it being a separate entity, similar to EMC/VMWare. That's likely how they'd start, but eventually they'd restructure under the IBM way of doing things.

Another interesting choice is what becomes of the hardware lines long term? Do they push SPARC out in favor of POWER? Do they do both? Short term they would try both I'm sure, but eventually they would have to drop one or the other. I suspect they would drop SPARC. The high-thread low-Mhz model of the T1 and T2 chips doesn't have as much traction as I think Sun or IBM would like. The POWER line on the other hand takes the same tact as the SPARC64's but with much higher clock rates. Perhaps a T1/2 and POWER lineup would be workable. But it's a tough choice. Neither CPU has the broad adoption of the X86 instruction set CPUs of AMD and Intel. I think in a merged company the sun x86 lines would be gradually dropped within a year in favor of the IBM setup. Hopefully a 'best of both' approach would be taken but I doubt it. As long as the OS's could be ported to both, any of the possible permutations and combinations would likely be workable, with the possible exception of keep everything as is.

The AIX vs Solaris issue would also be interesting. Sun's current sunset dates (if maintained) would have IBM support Solaris for up to 5 years after the decision to stop Solaris. If they decide to drop AIX they're faced with a similar issue (although IBM's EOL policy is a bit more cryptic). Either way you slice this one there are going to be a lot of hurt feelings. The AIX vs Solaris camps would be bitter enemies if it weren't for the common Microsoft enemy. My hunch is Solaris would be taken out back behind the woodshed and not come back. It would likely happen after all of the corporate structures are merged and aligned. Then Solaris would be stopped and open solaris would be the road forward for Solaris hold outs.

The storage area is the only area that seems straight forward to me. And is the only technology area that IBM and Sun can merge easily. Since neither company is storage leader (although IBM has a much larger market share) merging the product lines would be relatively simple (compared to OS or hardware). Neither company has a good story to tell in the mid-range market (although the 7000 line from sun is interesting, if not proven). The high end market is dwindling and I think both companies will not invest a lot in that space and leave it to Hitachi, EMC and NetApp (I exclude HP because the XP is pretty much a HDS...). Combined they could also aggressively go after Dell's market share (and nibble at HP's). Dell is growing by virtue of selling tons of little storage, basically doing it on volume. And since the high-end Sun arrays are re-branded HDS gear, the just have to maintain the support infrastructure. Plus Sun has the better play in the emerging flash market and IP knowledge that would come with that. Add onto that the StorageTek side of the house and it's an idea with some promise. So far, this would be the easiest (but by no means simple) merger.

The other software assets could also bring some value to IBM. Mysql and Java would join IBM's already impressive web offerings. Add Sun's middle-tier and middleware offerings to that mix and you have a very expansive software portfolio. And then there's the Sun ports of Xen and purchase of virtual box. Both of these virtulization offerings would give IBM a small counter to the VMWare juggernaut. And then you can add Open/Star Office to the Lotus brand (when was the last time you saw a SmartSuite purchase?) for an enterprise desktop solution. After a bit of blue-washing the code base and essentially free access to the IBM patent portfolio these products could really take off. There would be a few orphans here and there, like NetBeans. Not sure where Netbeans fit's in a Rational world. But the software portfolios could be a great combined force.

So far analyst reviews are mixed but trending towards 'thumbs down' and I can't say I disagree. The short run would be dreadful and IBM would have to walk a delicate line to avoid loosing Sun's existing customer base and its massive and active development communities. If end users and developers are going to be forced to change, there's no assurance that they will change to IBM. If you have to go through the trouble, you might as well look at all the options. Well, so far it's just idle speculation. Time will tell where this ends up.

In case my recent birthday wasn't proof, I'm old...

So, if it wasn't already clear to me by my birthday and the fact that I'm now pushing 40 reeeeealy hard, here's an SMS conversation I had the other day that I could barely understand.

First, I should note, it was a wrong number, second I have a full qwerty keyboard so typing isn't as big a pain for me I guess.

HER: Hey

ME: Hey? This is rich, who is this?

HER: Sarah:-)

ME: Ok... don't think I know you

HER: Sarah jjs gf

ME: Uhhhh doesn't ring any bells wrong #?

HER: Ugh no i go to ur skwl sms u no u jus found out how i look lyk gosh

ME: I'm 39 and haven't been in school for years

HER: O ok sory rong #

So Sarah is the girlfriend of "J.J.S." I presume. And If I read the long reply right, we go to the same school. And I'm pretending not to know who she is because I think she's ugly. That's my guess anyway. I'm glad I don't know any Sarah's well enough to SMS with them. Not that I SMS much, but if I did and started talking to the wrong Sarah I could be on a dateline special... YIKES!

Desktop or Laptop part II

Previously, I was debating myself on whether or not I should get a laptop or a desktop to run virtuals on.. Well things have changed a bit. On March 3rd, Apple upgraded the iMacs. They go to 8Gb now. Further, HP makes a 17" laptop that supports 8Gb and is around $760 (after rebates) maybe even cheaper elsewhere. Slam dunk, you'd think right? Replace my 2006 iMac with a new iMac beefed up to 8Gb and all my problems are solved and I didn't take up any more space on my crowded desk. Ahh, but life's never that simple. Go to the apple store and try to buy a 20" iMac (or any size, doesn't matter) and customize it to 8Gb. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Did you see what happened to the price? YIIIIKES! That 1199 iMac just jumps to 2199. OUCH! I could buy a drawer full of Asus laptops for that and just set them on the floor when I need them. Same price jump is true for the HP laptops. It's between $400 and $600 per 4Gb SO-DIMM to upgrade these things. So I could go the 20" iMac route (or treat myself to a 24" iMac) and then go 3rd party at a later date and not pick up yet another device burning electricity in my house. I like that aspect. Keeps the same footprint but gets over my memory limitation.

Well I have the desktop I'm going to buy picked out. A Dell XPS 435MT. Costco and Microcenter both have them for $999.99 (until march 31st). Other places (dell.com perhaps) probably have them too at that price. It's an intel i7, which is quad-core with hyperthreading, which is kinda like having 8 cores. It comes with a 750Gb drive plus 6Gb of ram, and a good assortment of ports and expansion options. So I get lots of horsepower at the expense of floor space, lugging out the monitor every time it needs to be rebooted and the fan noise. But it would be SWEET!

If it weren't for my desire to have a small, relatively clean computer area this would have been a no-brainer. Why do I need to make things so complicated?

The next assalt on storage arrays...

Chris Evans had an interesting post discussing the cost of enterprise storage. This post was spawned by a question posted on ittoolbox.com by Ditchboy434. Yikes, it's like I'm spreading rumors in the eight grade again... and then she said that he said that they said... Anyway, the brass tacks are: Why is enterprise class storage's cost per GB so drastically higher than personal storage? Why does 50Tb of enterprise storage cost $500,000 but 50Tb of personal storage cost $5000? (Seriously, 50 1Tb drives can be found for around $100 each) Chris accurately points out all the reasons why Enterprise storage is more expensive. It has added value. More hosts can share that 50Tb. You can cluster nodes with that storage. It has redundant/dual everything. Fancy features for backup and spare copies, etc. It's fairly straight forward to explain what those extra zeros get you and for the most part the business case holds.

But I think there could be a change on the horizon. Maybe it's already here and I just don't know it. With local storage getting so large, it's possible to put storage amounts in a 4U server that would dwarf arrays from 5 years ago. Even in a 'standard' server it's possible to put ridiculous amounts of local storage on a server. It used to be the only way to attach large amounts of storage to a server was to attach it to an array. That's not the case anymore. Now the array is surviving on it's RAS and feature sets. So you might get an array so you can move data between two servers in a cluster. If your primary sql server fails, the cluster moves the storage to the backup node automatically and your back in business. But in MS SQL 2005, for example, it has the ability to mirror a database in software. You no longer need an array. Just put equal amounts in both boxes and you're on your way. The price per Gb of individual drives and the price to performance ratio of servers has gotten so low that it's now a real option. Instead of a redundant array of disks, you can have a redundant racks of servers. More and more enterprise apps are adding replication abilities at the app level. And as that replication moves up the hardware stack, the case for enterprise arrays gets harder.

A brief tangent. Cloud storage is the latest thing in storage. The idea is you tell 'the cloud' to write your data and it takes care of finding a home for it, making sure it's secure, and making sure it's protected from loss. The same kind of features an enterprise array provides, but outside of a single array now. Provided you have bandwidth to spare you can have the storage spread out across the globe. Or you can simply buy storage as a service from a vendor, like Amazon. If you have the bandwidth, it can be a great way to handle ever growing storage needs.

Ok, back on track. So cloud storage in most cases means wide area. I.E. Not within a single data center. If you're in a single data center, don't buy our cloud storage product, just buy an enterprise class array instead! Or at least that's how I think the argument would go. But what if someone comes up with an easy and efficient 'cloud within the data center' scheme? What if you could suddenly take all that local storage and pool it into "our storage" and share and share alike? I believe there are already some niche products that do something similar to this, but they have requirements and restrictions (and perhaps consumer perception issues) that has prevented broad adoption. What if, for example, Sun's ZFS was able to work across servers with minimal admin intervention? I have to throw that caveat on there because what I'm describing could loosely be considered ZFS and NFS used together, but there's a lot of admin intervention there. Plus I would envision it doing iSCSI or FCoE instead of the NFS protocol. Now who needs an enterprise array anymore? When you fill a rack in your data center, you'd get a 2-for-1 special. One rack would have the computing power and the storage.

Now, having said all that, it'll be a long time before anything resembling this comes to pass. Gig-E vs 2, 4 or 8 Gb fiber channel is one reason. Storage I/O performance is another. One of the big attractions to enterprise class storage is the raw performance of it, and that will be hard to overcome for now. On top of that, with the way storage vendors snipe at each other, their skills will be well honed to attack a common enemy.

On the upside, failed drives could lead to an interesting game of whack-a-mole. With all the leg work running from rack to rack, sys-admin obesity could be a thing of the past.

EDIT: corrected some spelling, grammar and the price of 50 1Tb drives.

Cats and foil....

So I’ve always been told that putting tinfoil on counter tops and the like will keep cats from getting on it. Suposedly they don't like the sound or feel of it. Lola likes to get in front of the TV, esp when we’re playing Wii. So I decided to put foil on it to keep her off of there. Here’s what Lola thought of my foil and attempts to remove her from the center of attention:

She so unbothered by the foil that she even naps on it.

I'm not about to break out the squirt bottles next to my HDTV…. Oh well, as long as she keeps her head down and I can see the screen…

 

Desktop or laptop....

I've been thinking about getting another laptop or desktop lately. My goal would be another machine to run virtuals machines on.

Currently I have a macbook pro with a core 2 duo and 4gb and an imac with a core duo and 2gb of ram. Since the imac tops out at 2gb and is 32-bit only it has limited usefulness for what I want to do. I want to be able to run windows 2008 server or solaris 10 to practice and learn with. I can do some of it with my MBP but a 2nd machine to network and cluster with would be ideal.

So this brings me to my choices. I could buy another laptop with 4gb of ram. It has the advantage of coming with a built in monitor, keyboard and mouse. I can stick it in drawer when I'm not using it. I don't have a lot of space so that's a big plus. Its relatively quiet too. It does have less performance and ability though and isn't upgradeable and tops out at 4gb. I think I can work within those limitations. I see geeks.com has a few 17" dual core laptops for around $499. (they go in and out of stock every few weeks) Add about $75 to the price to max out RAM and add an external drive to run the virtual machines on and you're all set.

I could buy a desktop and monitor for about the same price. It would top out at 8gb (or more). It could probably run vmware esx or Sun xVM, which I really want to play with. It could also have more cpu-cores for the same money. Lots of advantages, but I already have the iMac desktop. I'd have to get another monitor and keyboard (not a big deal, but it takes up space). And it'd likely be pretty noisy relative to a laptop. For example, CyberPowerPC has an intel i7 (quad core plus hyperthreading for 8 cores for HT aware OS's) for $789 (as of February 26, these things tend to change a lot). Now I have CPU power, lots of RAM headroom, faster drives. But it's harder to put this thing away and take back out when I want to work with it.

It's a tough choice. I think in the end I'm going to go with the desktop. Although it takes up more space, I can do a lot more with it. It also has a lot more long term life and can be upgraded as technology advances so some of the costs down the road can be avoided. With the laptop, the only step is to buy a new one, but that space savings and the conveniences of being able to take it with me is pretty tempting. I guess the 'left field' choice would be to replace the iMac with a Mac Pro (or a Mac Mini if the upgrade rumors are true and the specs are right). I hate it when choices are never cut and dry like this.

Monster got bit...

Good thing I started job hunting today or I would have never have found this out. Some how I missed this in my downtime between engagements. Looks like Monster.com had a serious security breach. They forced me to change my password and gave other 'just in case' warnings to me.

They say:

As is the case with many companies that maintain large databases of information, Monster is the target of illegal attempts to access and extract information from its database. We recently learned our database was illegally accessed and certain contact and account data were taken, including Monster user IDs and passwords, email addresses, names, phone numbers, and some basic demographic data. The information accessed does not include resumes. Monster does not generally collect – and the accessed information does not include - sensitive data such as social security numbers or personal financial data.

I say: You got hacked.... 'illegally accessed' is like using collateral damage to describe innocent bystanders.

They say:

Are you contacting consumers directly?

Monster elected not to send e-mail notifications to avoid the risk those e-mails would be used as a template for phishing e-mails targeting our job seekers and customers. We believe placing a security notice on our site is the safest and most effective way to reach the broadest audience. As an additional precaution, we will be making mandatory password changes on our site.

I say: "We're hoping people don't notice, but they're going to find out anyway. Oh well!"

I like this one:

What security measures do you have in place?

Monster has made, and will continue to make, a significant investment in enhancing data security, and we believe that Monster’s security measures are as, or more, robust than other sites in our industry.

Monster has a full-time worldwide security team, which constantly monitors for both suspicious behavior on our site and illicit use of information in our database. To maintain the integrity of these security and monitoring systems, we cannot provide further details.

Fat lot of good it did 'em! Ah well, it's not that bad in the end. I mean if you're on Monster.com, you WANT people to find your resume.... Now it just happens faster. Hopefully I'm one of millions of people who were found and I fly below the radar of who ever has the data. Besides, who'd want to be me anyway?

More google auto updates with out asking...

Googles doing me wrong again... A while back I complained about google auto-mounting a disk image and then updating software with out letting me know or asking my permission. Well, they've done it again. Yesterday, hardware growler reported that "GoogleVoiceAndVideoSetup_1.0.5.634" was mounted and unmounted. So looks like the GoogleTalk feature of Gmail was updated. Thats a good thing, updates are welcomed. Not asking me first is not. And in this case, I don't even see a preference to disable this feature. So GoogleTalk is phoning home, downloading updates and installing them, all with out a single notification.

What to know some more scary stuff? How about this:

Jan 20 20:36:23 rwhiffen-macbook installer[10817]: Package Authoring Warning: GoogleVoiceandVideo.pkg authorization level is AdminAuthorization but was promoted to RootAuthorization for compatibility, ensure authorization level is sufficient to install.

Jan 20 20:36:23 rwhiffen-macbook installer[10817]: Package Authoring Warning: GoogleVoiceAndVideo.mpkg authorization level is NoAuthorization but was promoted to RootAuthorization for compatibility, ensure authorization level is sufficient to install.

 

And if you look in /private/tmp you will see that, yes indeed, google did stuff as root:

 

rwhiffen-macbook:~ rwhiffen$ ls -ld /private/tmp/GoogleVoiceAndVideo.mpkg.10817E8zL7g/

drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Jan 20 20:36 /private/tmp/GoogleVoiceAndVideo.mpkg.10817E8zL7g/

rwhiffen-macbook:~ rwhiffen$

 

So not only is it secretly phoning home, downloading an update, it's doing it as root. Now I explicitly authorized root access upon install. So the update having root ability is by design and I authorized it by typing in my password when I installed the software the first time. But I did not authorize subsequent use of that authorization. It's scary to think what trouble this could lead to. I'm assuming google has some kind of cryptographic controllers to test for legit updates before snagging them, but what if they don't? What if an ISP gets it's DNS hacked and they set up a fake update? It'll run as root with out anyone knowing. I guess I wouldn't have such an issue with it if I had an option to opt-in or opt-out.

So today I'm going to sign up for the google groups and use some "ALL CAPS" language and see if I can get any kind of response. Probably not, but it's worth a try.

 

Lots of Syncing contacts.. (G1 saga continues)

So in the past, I used to sync my contacts via bluetooth to my phone. Well because Android is half-baked, it has no such ability on the T-Mobile G1. But, as an alternative they have a periodic OTA sync feature with your google/Gmail contacts. This, it turns out, really hurts your battery life. It's not a push from Google. Your phone wakes up every 5 minutes (from what I gather from forum postings) and pulls contacts, calendar and gmail changes from google. If your away from WiFi it's done over G3/Edge. So I turned that off and force a manual sync on demand, just like I used to do with my Nokia phone over bluetooth.

First order of business, get the google calendar into iCal easily. You could already subscribe (read only) to your google calendar, but you had to go into your google calendar to add events. Well they added calDAV ability to google calendars which overcomes this. This gets me where I wanted to be a long time ago. I wanted the google calendar to be my primary calendar but didn't want to have to depend on web access to update.

So to get my Macbook Pro contacts to google I had to first enable google syncing. If you have an iPhone or an iPod touch, this feature is available to you. If you do not have one of those, no worries, there's a hack to enable it, which I did. I even had a old ipod entry to hack to make it work (my 30Gb 5th gen ipod was stolen).

It works great, but the merge of the google (and yahoo in my case) contacts with your address book is terrible. Basically you end up with a ton of duplicates and contact entries for every 'suggested contact' email address you email too. Bleh! Because I have both Yahoo and Google sync enabled those email address-only and duplicate addresses went to yahoo too (why yahoo? because I can...). YIKES! To make matters worse, a lot of contacts were missing critical information, like phone numbers, address or email addresses. It seems the 'merge' didn't work at all. The fix was to delete all the yahoo and gmail contact entries, and then within iSync (which doesn't really make sense because iSync is only used to sync to phones) reset all sync history.

Then I manually cleaned up my Macbook Pro contacts (painful, but not the end of the world). Then I ran sync from the menu bar again.

Presto! Data in three places. Then I manually sync the G1 (settings -> Data Syncronization, press the menu button, 'Sync Now') and the same data is now on the phone. Data now flows in all directions effortlessly. Eventually I'll figure out how to put a 'sync now' shortcut on the phone so I don't have to drill into the menu.

But there's always a catch. In this case, the catch is Instant Messenger. Well, it turns out (and I think it warns you) that if you delete a contact who is also an IM contact in either service, it deletes them from your IM. DOH! So now I don't have any of my gtalk or Yahoo IM contacts. Fortunately most of my IM is MSN or AIM. But still, not fun. Now I have to go back through my address book and look for yahoo and gtalk people, like Siva, Tariq or Dayton and re-add them to the corresponding client. If I had it all to do over, I would log into the native clients and try to export my IM contact list. Then again, maybe it's a good thing. I had a contact who I can't for the life of me remember why it's there. Well it's not there anymore...