Techie

This is a marketing video from HP simulating a datacenter disaster causing a fail over to a backup datacenter. People often ask me what I do for a living and for most of the time the answer I usually give doesn’t help. If the conversation continues with printer driver questions in Vista I know I failed to describe what I do. So in short, I help companies with the design, build, and implementation of large storage arrays that are designed to minimize application downtime due to hardware failures. These same storage arrays also have extended capabilities and features that help customers create enire copies of their datacenters in case thier primary datacenter gets “blowed up”. In this video, I would be one of the goofy white coat guys. Enjoy!

I recently started using Google Analytics to track my web site usage and so far it’s been great. By creating a account, and installing the wordpress plugin “Google Analyticator” I now get detail on how my site is being viewed. Great stuff - try it out!

When moving wordpress sites from one domain to another, it’s common to have hard coded urls in the database of the old web site. To update the majority of the posts, you can use the following sql statement to update the post urls. You may also need to run the statement on the guid foild as well. UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, ‘staging.server.com’, ‘www.productionserver.com’);

I found the following application from Microsoft to be quite useful for syncing files between hard drives and network drives. Check it out! http://www.microsoft.com/prophoto/downloads/synctoy.aspx

So Oracle is in the final stages of buying Sun Microsystems Inc, a company I adored for years. It’s too bad to see Sun go, and with all other Oracle buyouts I’m sure not much will be left of the original idea of Sun. It’s sad to see, but after seeing Sun as the premier UNIX envorinment in the late 90’s go through it’s demise in early 2000’s the writing was on the wall. I remember distinctly being at a good friends house discussing a plan we had to get in the car, drive to Merlo Park CA, and tell the then CEO exactly how to get back on track: ...

This thing is incredible… http://www.iwood3b.com/

I just found cool automater actions at http://junecloud.com The action I’m especially please with is the “Create Clean Archive” action. This will create a archive zip file that does not have the usualy .DS_Store files and crap. Excellent stuff!

OS Boot Sounds: http://titan08.free.fr/Boot%20Sounds/

I published my Sun Cheatsheet document to the world recently. It’s a compilation of Sun commands and processes that I documented over the years. Enjoy! http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dhjhzg6x_3c6d658

Buying a hosted domain: $100 Buying a pro membership on smugmug: $60 Installing Wordpress: $0 Able to manage my familiy’s websites with freedom and without major pain: Priceless! I recently started a journey on removing my dependancy on Apple’s MobileMe services. When .Mac ruled the land with web-based wonders, life was good. Then Apple decided to trash what worked with MobileMe, and everything went to hell. Load speeds, reliability, service limitations, email address changes, ical incompatibilities, groups disabled; all this appeared with the shiny new MobileMe. But I can sort of sync with my iPhone. Are you kidding? Did Apple really have to choose between having great user experience with .Mac and basic iPhone sync with MobileMe? Overall MobileMe is no longer worth the money and time I invested in it. So now I’m sporting a spiffy new web site using Wordpress which is very easy to use and I have completely stopped using Apple’s iWeb as a result. I have a regular IMAP email server with my web isp provider for email, and even Google Sync Mobile services for my iPhone calendar and contacts. I also use a paid picture site called smugmug for all of our photos. Why a paid site? I have complete control of the site and the themes, no Adware, backups, Share with family sections, and I was even able to point my own domain to the smugmug directly - http://pics.gridleak.com. They also handle raw picture formats which is a real plus. I learned the hard way that many of the “free” sites will tamper with your image resolutions when you upload them to save server disk space. If you’re interested in trying smugmug you can test it out with a free 14-day trail, and you can use the coupon code OHpYezYHRef9s for a discounted join rate. My Bro Stuart was the one that turned me on to the site. Yes… Stuart. The kid that didn’t have a computer until last year and started life right with a Macbook Pro. Werd! So I’m now ready to cut the cord on MobileMe. It’s sad really; Apple broke something that really worked. Even today it’s getting better again, but I’m tired of waiting. I’m also done with being at the mercy of a support FAQ web page when I have real problems. While Apple’s computer support is the best in the business, you can’t get a live person to talk to you about MobileMe issues. If you’re interested in making the plunge, or you want MobileMe like functionality, below is a list of technologies that take care of what MobileMe does for a Apple system: ...