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’);

 

Why pre-flight checks are good…

This video was taken by Mr. Brown while we were at the Cherry Creek RC airfield (http://www.denverrceagles.org/) last week.

If you watch the video you’ll see the starboard aileron at full deflection.  The guy who flew the plane had a hard landing earlier that day and didn’t forgot to do another pre-flight control check before this flight.  I do a lot of pre-flights now mainly because I’ve crashed my share of planes making stupid mistakes.

My first famous blunder with a RC plane was from a elevator that was responding backwards, so when I pulled up, the plane actually wanted to go down.  Simple fix – you click on a reverse switch on the transmitter and you’re good to go.  Since I didn’t care to do a pre-flight check, I only realized the issue after I managed to get the plane in the air.  When I realized what I did I figured, up is down and down is up…  Got it.  Seconds later, the plane started to climb, and I instinctualy went down on the controls. Well, down was up… so the plane continued to climb and basically looped – right after take off.  Now it was pointed right at us! Death from above I thought; Clear the deck!!!  I managed to miss everyone involved, and the plane crashed.  From that point on I vowed to always make sure I check the plane before flight to help insure the control surfaces are working like they should.

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.