DELL: It's not a bug, it's a feature...

 Posted on April 24, 2008  |  Erik

Sigh. This kind of stuff is really annoying. I’m in the process of building up a storage system using some of the latest kit from DELL and just ran into some very interesting and annoying problems. The setup is two DELL R900s coupled to MD1000s with the latest PERC6/E SAS controllers. Our initial benchmarks on the system are really quite impressive. Now I’ve moved onto the acceptance tests to validate the way the system reacts to various types of failure and how it recovers. [Read More]

Groupware Bad

 Posted on April 22, 2008  |  Erik

Groupware Bad: “If you want to do something that’s going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.” Nicely written little article on the perils of developing solutions that nobody wants to use. I think that this is exactly why Apple is seeing a resurgence these days. They’re not targetting the buzz-word laden feature lists demanded by IT managers, but are designing applications that appeal to real people. [Read More]

iTunes FUD

 Posted on April 14, 2008  |  Erik

I can’t believe the sheer amount of misinformation floating around out there concerning iTunes. Yet again I’m showing off OS X to someone who is curious about how I use it and how it works. When the conversation turns to the iPhone, there’s an immediate negative reaction regarding the necessity of using iTunes. There are still people out there who believe that iTunes encodes everything it touches into some proprietary iTunes only format and doesn’t read mp3’s. [Read More]

ESXi 3.5

 Posted on April 10, 2008  |  Erik

Just in the middle of a VMware presentation where someone has finally explained clearly where it fits in the grand scheme of things. I understood that in larger environments, the ability to drop-in new hardware resources without requiring your technicians to deploy the OS on local disks (although that is pretty easy to automate) was supposed to be the primary appeal. Going against it is the lack of Service Console for larger enterprises who have fairly well evolved supervision and management toolkits that install in the Service Console. [Read More]

Virtualizing Citrix?! » Yellow Bricks

 Posted on April 7, 2008  |  Erik

Virtualizing Citrix?! »: “This is also something that’s new to me, VMware is also doing intra-VM page sharing besides inter-VM page sharing” (Via Yellow Bricks.) Whoa! Now that is something that is obvious in hindsight, but absolutely astounding when you think about it. Lots of clients ask about the viability of virtualising Citrix servers on an ESX platform and there are a number of reasons why this can be useful like being able to easily clone servers to increase capacity and ensure that you get the exact configuration with all of the little tuning tweaks, avoiding some of the internal bottlenecks of Windows etc. [Read More]

Brazen Careerist obviously never worked as a developer

 Posted on April 5, 2008  |  Erik

Via The Lone Sysadmin. : Writing without typos is totally outdated » Brazen Careerist by Penelope Trunk Interesting rant. Personally, typos bother me a lot. Having them in your document distracts me from your point. Enough of them and I stop reading. Many other people are like me. Do you want to run the risk of me being the guy you submit your resume to? I have to agree with Bob Plankers here - I admit that when I’m in a hurry typos can slip through but that I do work at trying to stamp them out. [Read More]

 Posted on January 1, 0001  |  Erik

Something that I was just thinking about recently, spurred on by cleaning out some of my cable drawers and running across my old beloved Palm Treo 650 and a Handspring with the GSM adaptor. I couldn’t sell these on eBay when I first replaced them and I’m sure that the current resale market approaches nil - it’s hardly worth the bother to put them up for sale when I can expect that the sale price will be roughly equivalent to the marked up shipping cost – or worse. [Read More]