February 2012
2 posts
January 2012
9 posts
Highly Available, Multi-Site MySQL
I’ve been playing with designs for this lately, and it’s been interesting, given some of the following considerations:
The applications in question are (relatively) low volume, low transaction applications.
Only one site will be active at any given time.
Delays of 30 seconds or so are acceptable in case of failure within a site.
With that in mind, I’ve been playing with...
MacBook Air Thoughts
It’s been a few weeks with my MBA now, and I have a few more thoughts:
The screen on the 13” model could just a bit bigger, with more pixels. Its 1440x900 resolution is pretty good (and better than most Ultrabooks—their biggest shortcoming, in my opinion), but the bezel is large enough that it could—and should—be enlarged a bit.
It’s nice and thin. It could...
Steve Jobs' Biography
I finally got around to reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, and overall, it was pretty good, with a few caveats. A great deal of it will be very familiar to anyone who has read Owen Linzmayer’s “Apple Confidential” (which I can’t recommend highly enough to anyone with any interest in Apple’s history), and there are plenty of Jobsian anecdotes that...
A Few More Apple Things
I already ordered a sleeve and “ScreenSavr” from RadTech. They look nice, and should suit my OCD-ness quite well. It’s particularly important now that my laptop will actually get used on my lap (instead of sitting on my desk with an external LCD, keyboard, and mouse attached to it at all times).
I’ve wanted a truly dockable Mac for years, and Thunderbolt should make that...
New Computer Time
It was about a year ago that I bought a used ThinkPad off eBay, and with that, I started to think my Mac days were nearing an end. The hardware is still top-notch, but I had serious questions about their commitment to OS X, as well as whether or not the changes to the OS were positive ones (or just attempts to turn it into an iOS clone, which is not a compliment).
With my MacBook Pro nearing 4...
December 2011
4 posts
Recycling RSA Appliances
RSA hasn’t gotten a whole lot of great publicity in the past year, and rightfully so. However, the old SecurID appliances (the ones with LCDs on the front panel) are pretty nice and recyclable systems. I’m specifically referring to the ones where RSA sourced the boxes from Celestix. They’re pretty much standard x86-based servers that don’t consume a whole lot of power, and...
My Next Car →
My 1990 Nissan 240SX was 2,684 pounds, with a 2.4 liter truck engine making a measly 140 HP, with a 5-speed manual. It was boatloads of fun though, with a perfectly chuckable, well-balanced RWD chassis.
This 2013 Subaru BRZ (and its Toyota/Scion sister) looks to come in at 2,689 pounds, with a 2.0 liter flat-4 making 200 HP (about what my GTI does), with a 6-speed manual. And while I...
November 2011
2 posts
Never thought the Pope and Joe Paterno would have...
If he had been Father Sandusky, I’m guessing he would’ve had at least another 20 or 30 years before anything was done about it.
October 2011
2 posts
Watchthe_real_netflix
Dear Volkswagen
1. Could you please stop using triple square screws/fasteners all over the place? They’re a pain in the ass to work with, and difficult to find bits for. Tell your German friends too, please.
2. If you are going to continue to use triple square screws/fasteners, could you please not use friggin’ gorillas to tighten them up? When a caliper carrier is held in place by two 14mm triple...
September 2011
2 posts
FCoE Woes
We’re building out a few new datacenters at work now, and before I can get a start on the Linux infrastructure, we’ve been working on the core infrastructure (network and SAN). We’re fortunate in that we’re able to use some of the latest-and-greatest technologies, including some nice new 10GigE switches that support FCoE, along with necessary CNAs (converged network...
August 2011
4 posts
A Week With A Mustang
A good friend of mine was getting married in California (in the Monterey area, to be exact), and being the car nut I am, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to visit and terrorize the PCH. But since I was flying out, I would need a suitable rental car to do it in. In poking around the various rental sites, a BMW was looking to be the best option (at a reasonable price, anyway), but by the...
July 2011
1 post
June 2011
2 posts
May 2011
2 posts
Old IOS + IPv6 Multicast = No Fun
When I got my Cat 3550 for home, it came with an ancient version of IOS (12.1, circa 2002). Not ideal, but I didn’t think it’d be much of a problem. It wasn’t until a few weeks after I had it running that I found the first issue that would affect me.
As it turns out, the methods that iTunes uses for AirTunes and DAAP require multicast, and to be more specific, IPv6 multicast....
AOL Instant Messenger? →
Good article, and shows how much one particular thing has changed in so few years. I started college in 2004, and AIM was still The Way of staying in touch with people. By the time I graduated in 2009 (my first two years of college demonstrated the equation BAC = GPA), it was just about dead.
I signed on to AIM tonight for the first time in months, and unsurprisingly, none of my friends were on....
April 2011
3 posts
“As for me? I switched to the Mac. No more grep, no more piping, no more SED...”
– The UNIX-HATERS Handbook. I read bits and pieces from this every now and then (after reading it in its entirety a few years back). You have to love the irony of someone switching to the Mac (circa 1993) because of no grep, no piping, and no SED scripts, all of which exist on the modern-day...
Inspecting SMTP Traffic with Cisco PIX/ASA
One of the really cool things you can do with a Cisco PIX or ASA is inspect traffic to make sure only commands valid for various protocols are being passed. In my limited toying with their inspection, it even goes as far as stripping things like version strings that might be of use to an intruder.
But it can be a real pain in the ass too, as I found out when I was moving my personal mail server...
Networking Gear
I’ve played with a decent amount of networking gear, both at home and at jobs. At home, I’ve had two managed switches over the past few years: one from Asante and another from Dell. Neither were very good, really. They worked just fine, but their UIs were both pretty awful (both GUI and text-based). Quite simply, they made doing routine things (adding VLANs, assigning VLANs to ports,...
March 2011
4 posts
Marco.org: Bag of hurt →
marco:
In 2008, Steve Jobs was asked1 if and when Macs would play Blu-ray movies. He responded candidly:
Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. It’s great to watch the movies, but the licensing of the tech is so complex, we’re waiting till things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace.
The implication is that Apple doesn’t believe that Blu-ray will
Allow me to translate the Jobsian...
If Greenpeace Had Existed 2,000 Years Ago... →
Most people outside of Japan seem to be more concerned about the failing nuclear reactors in Japan these days, which is incredibly callous, considering that far more people have already died due to the tsunami itself than will ever die as a result of the current issues with the power plants.
A Slashdot member (grumling) heads off the Greenpeace anti-nuclear drivel with a brilliant analogy here....
Giving Up On Netflix
…or at least thinking about it. I’ve had Netflix for around half a year now, and I love the concept. It even works pretty well, most of the time. There are two large problems with it though:
The delay in getting new releases
The limited selection of watch instantly movies
The quality of some of the more popular “watch instantly” releases (most Starz Play movies)
With...
Apple: The Next Evil Empire? →
The title of this article suggests Apple being an evil empire may be an event of the future, but I think it’s already happened. Apple makes great products, but they’re doing the same exact things that got Microsoft into a lot of hot water, and had a lot of Apple folks calling for Bill Gates head. The big difference is that Apple’s products are (generally) quite good, whereas...
February 2011
4 posts
Flying Sucks
After over 25 years of perfectly satisfactory ground and water transportation, I finally had to take to the air this week for work (driving from Connecticut to California really isn’t a terribly desirable option). And, in short, I hate flying just as much as I thought I would.
I hate it despite neither of my flights being delayed (in fact, both flights took off on-time and arrived early). I...
Virtual Private Servers
I was reading this article at Ars Technica the other day, and it piqued my interest in setting one of these up for myself. While I have quite a few servers running at home (four Linux servers, plus another embedded Linux system as a firewall), I hate relying on a cable modem connection for my e-mail, web serving, et cetera. I had looked into a few of these services in the past, but they were...
January 2011
12 posts
Replacing Books With iPads? No thanks... →
ginandjesus:
elbles:
…
Bottom line, I’m quite skeptical of any “study” like this. It reminds me of when my school tried to force tablets upon us, and went to great efforts to suggest they increased productivity, and other kinds of inane bullshit. Shockingly, a professor I had, who happened to be one of the biggest proponents of then-new tablets, had his research sponsored by Microsoft....
Replacing Books With iPads? No thanks... →
I’ll be the first person to advocate technology when it’s an improvement over “the old stuff,” but I think this is a very bad idea. I’m less than two years out of school, but my memories of classes are still very distinct. If I was going to class to learn, I left the laptop in my bag, and got out my pen and paper. A laptop offered too many distractions to be...
Rolling Your Own IM Server →
Ars has a pretty good primer on getting your own XMPP IM server going. That said, I’d throw in a few comments about ejabberd. In the one install I saw of that, it was a mess. We were using it with a LDAP backend (synced with AD), and we had a myriad of issues: High CPU utilization, seemingly random issues with shared roster groups (buddy lists), frequent crashes, et cetera. This was with...
Teaching Linux →
My school required CS majors to take an “Intro to UNIX” class, and used Linux to do so every year I was there (it was probably Solaris a few years prior). It wasn’t and isn’t a hard thing for CS majors (or similar) to learn, and it’s something they’ll almost certainly come across in their careers at some point or another. But the idea that a CS major has to...
Is Facebook The New/Next AOL? →
John Dvorak sure seems to think so. It’s been forever since I’ve read anything from/in PC Magazine, but I did find this interesting. You can argue the usefulness of Facebook (and there’s plenty to find useful about it), but in my opinion, it’s just yet another in a long list of sites and services. From Usenet, to AOL, to MySpace, they’ve all come, and mostly gone.
As...
A Late Christmas Present →
A bit too late, I’m afraid, but I’m thrilled just the same. Maybe the Eagles will finally has a defense that can make in-game adjustments next season…
Who's Afraid of the Verizon iPhone? →
marco:
I was going to write about this angle of the Verizon iPhone, but Watts Martin already did a better job of communicating what I wanted to say, plus more, in this post:
But in the US market the great Google vs. Apple Fight Fight Fight! has been a lot less of a real competition than either the technology press or the cheering fans make it out to be. With Verizon getting the iPhone and...
Vista: It Doesn't Suck
When my new-to-me ThinkPad showed up, I needed to put an OS on it (it came with Vista Business loaded by the seller, but I don’t trust installs I don’t do myself). My initial inclination was to go with Windows XP—I’ve used it for years, it would have been blazing on the ThinkPad, it’s pretty solid, et cetera. But the XP installer didn’t recognize the hard drive...