Category: Techie

My datacenter is all blowed up…

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!

mySql search and replace within a field.

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’);

 

Goodbye Sun Microsystems…

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:

  • Start advertising was a big one. Sunrays – Awesome. Who knew they were awesome outside of Sun? No one. I was at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games supporting the Timing computers, which were Sun (again who knew?) and it was retarded that Sun didn’t want to be seen as a sponsor of the games. Dumb. On top of that, I got to see how daily random blackouts were wreaking havoc on Windows NT machines that the press were using, only to think, “If they only knew how easy support would have been if Sunray’s were here.”
  • Quality needs to be #1 again – Patches need to be solid again. Stop pushing code out the door to satisfy delivery plans. Make it right the first time.
  • Understand product support should be where opportunity is seen for improvement and customer satisfaction, and not simple as a operational cost. There was so much red tape internally at Sun it all but guaranteed unhappy customers.

Sun deserves their fate. I hope Solaris is nurtured into a bigger and better product, with fewer bugs, and ZFS can deliver on the promises it made 5 years ago and has yet to achieve it’s greatness. Xen virtualization is nice, but lacks the nice migration and recovery options VMWare has. Project Blackbox I’m sure will morph into a “Database in a Box” concept.

Oracle hopefully will take the CoolThreads sun4v technology to the next level.  The old powerhouse SPARC sun4u procs should rest in peace like the Z80’s and 68k series procs. Great procs, but power hungry and without the market share it’s too costly to keep up.

Best of luck Oracle. I wish you the best. Be gentle with one’s you buy.

My A-10 Foamie and F4U Corsair

Here’s my new A-10 warthog just completed and the F4-U Corsair I’m building.  The A-10 is my first ducted fan plane so I’m excited to see how it does.  I expect to “mod” it for Colorado’s altitude.  I got the A-10 kit from NitroPlanes and while the parts are a bit cheezy, the foam construction is very good.

I’m also very excited about my F4-U Corsair.  Debi got this plane for me years ago, and I’ve been frustrated about not getting it built – I plan to have it flying by next month!  It calls for a .40 size engine so of coarse I’m installing a .60 MDS or a .70 Supertigre so it should scoot around just fine.  More to come.

Bye MobileMe…

iphone_thurrott_mobile_me2Buying 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:

MobileMe Replacement
Website ISP like FatCow or BlueHost
Email ISP like FatCow or Google Mail
iWeb WordPress
Mobile Sync Services Spanning Sync, GooSync and Google Sync Mobile
iDisk ISP or something like Amazon S3 or Nirvanix
Back to My Mac Screen Sharing or LogMeIn.com
Pages and Numbers sharing Google Apps

My hope is that Apple learns from this experience and doesn’t become another company too big to care about it’s core users; like what happened with “the other” company we all know and love.

Let us now pray…

Bold vs iPhone

iphone-vs-blackberry-boldAfter buying both the iPhone and iPhone 3g, I became frustrated with the typical iPhone problems – spotty 3g network access, no cut-n-paste, etc. As a result, I was excited about the Bold and got one right when it came out. Having used a crackberry in the past was I confident that it would be the device for me.

I used the Bold for a number of days and learned an important lesson – Appreciate what you have. The Bold did not have all the answers, and after using the email and web interface on the Bold, I quickly realized that the iPhone was still the device to have.

Now I have a new appreciation for the iPhone. It has issues, no doubt. But the core functionality has yet to be challenged by any competitor.

After compiling a list of features and rating them, I posted the results at:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pLRnDwRBVmrELW9i6ug_-fw

Using system wide socks proxy with iphone tethering

apple-imageRecently I discovered a program called proxifier, a OS X Leopard program that will send all network traffic through a defined socks proxy server. So instead of defining the proxy settings in each individual program, simply turn on proxifier and redirect all the network traffic.

proxifier is the same thing as WideCap or FreeCap in the Windows side. tsocks for OS X may work as well.

So why is this important? Well, I’m on the road a lot and with a iPhone 3g that’s jailbroken you can install a socks server called 3proxy through the cydia installer and with proxifier you can route all your network traffic on your Mac through your new socks server at 3g speeds. This means I can get email, surf the web, use skype, etc. all through the iPhone Continue reading Using system wide socks proxy with iphone tethering

OSX Mirrored Raidset Recovery

apple-imageToday I experienced a firewire drive failure on my mini. To determine which drive was bad was a bit difficult since the apple profiler does not show serial number information about the drives and the firewire id can change depending on which drive was ready first, etc. After the experience I now have the following steps to take to make this easier in the future. The follow was done after I replaced the bad drive — There also appears to be a Disk Utility issue with disk replacements do I went the terminal window instead.

Continue reading OSX Mirrored Raidset Recovery