Cisco Cius no more

 Posted on June 6, 2012  |  Erik

Cisco Blog » Blog Archive » Empowering Choice in Collaboration: “Based on these market transitions, Cisco will no longer invest in the Cisco Cius tablet form factor, and no further enhancements will be made to the current Cius endpoint beyond what’s available today. However, as we evaluate the market further, we will continue to offer Cius in a limited fashion to customers with specific needs or use cases.” Another one bites the dust. [Read More]

Text to speech

 Posted on June 6, 2012  |  Erik

Apple has included the text to speech feature in its OS for a long time now. I’ve played with it from time to time over the years, but never really found a use for it in any of my workflows. But today, I think that I may have found a perfect use case: reading draft blog posts back to me. I use Byword for writing blog posts with iCloud syncing to ensure I have everything everywhere. [Read More]

Turning the argument around

 Posted on June 6, 2012  |  Erik

A couple of thoughts that occurred today while listening to the classic argument against Apple building a physical TV: People don’t replace their TVs every two years like they do with iOS devices. Now, this argument is predicated on two hypotheses: Apple wants to create identical market structures to the current iPhone/iPad markets Apple isn’t interested in any new market that is smaller than the iPad. These arguments are predicated on the idea that Apple will only ever open new markets in order to “move the needle” which is going to be awfully difficult at their current scale. [Read More]

Little Thing: Device Chargers

 Posted on June 5, 2012  |  Erik

Little Thing: Device Chargers — The Brooks Review: “This is one of my favorite Little Things tips: just buy more chargers for your devices. I know that you have probably heard this before, but I really do hope that you do this.” Must read little article from the Little Things series over at the brooksreview.This aligns nicely with my approach for coping with the fact that I spend an enormous amount of time using various devices that are battery dependent. [Read More]

Re: Beneath contempt: The Apple TV business model

 Posted on May 31, 2012  |  Erik

Beneath contempt: The Apple TV business model | asymco: “As Tim Cook repeated, they are very interested in this space. However, any discussion of the future must include an analysis of the business model and the sustainability in terms of profit that keeps long term development focused on getting the product to be good enough for the right jobs to be done. What we should think about however is this ‘polar opposite’ business model. [Read More]

iWeb recovery

 Posted on May 29, 2012  |  Erik

With the upcoming closure of the iWeb hosting by Apple, I’ve been looking around for at different hosting options. However, in the midst of this, I discovered that during the various machine upgrades, swaps and so on, I had somehow misplaced the iWeb data files stored in ~/Library/Application Support. Since I only use iWeb for a little personal blog for friends and family and it gets updated very intermittently, I had not noticed that the files had gone AWOL. [Read More]

The next frontier...PaaS

 Posted on May 15, 2012  |  Erik

Some new virtualization technology that’s starting to mature nicely that enterprises and developers should start looking at: Cloud Foundry Iron Foundry Stackato The Cloud Foundry is an open source initiative for building platform neutral Platform as a Service (PaaS) environments. Sponsored by VMware (or purchased or something like that), the concept is similar to Azure, providing the underlying platform that can be deployed to create custom elastic clouds and eliminating much of the make work involved in managing the OS and middleware stacks. [Read More]

Tape in 2012

 Posted on May 11, 2012  |  Erik

I’ve been reading a number of articles recently concerning LTFS as an opportunity for keeping tape alive as a new tier of data in big data environments. There are even some very interesting new appliances on the market that target this type of usage like Cache-a. As an archival tool, I find this a potentially useful approach. But as a near line cloud storage solution I have a few quibbles. [Read More]

Back to backups

 Posted on May 9, 2012  |  Erik

It’s been a while since I documented the current backup architecture at the house which has changed a little bit with the inclusion of two little HP Microservers running Solaris 11. I’m a big fan of the HP Microservers as they offer the reliability and flexibility of a true server, but the energy consumption and silence of a small NAS at an unbeatable price. Overview The core of the backup and operations is based on ZFS and it’s ability to take snapshots and replicate them asychronously. [Read More]

Migrating stuff

 Posted on May 9, 2012  |  Erik

I’m in the process of migrating some of the stuff from the old server which is starting to show its age. In any case the auto-replicate script is now available here. New stuff will show up under the Projects section.