Recent happenings…

Life’s been busy!

Couple of things I wanted to touch on this evening:

1.  The Microsoft contribution to The Apache foundation for platinum partnership.

Lets think about this for a moment…  This is the same company who not so long ago tried to sue apache for patent infringement..  Now, they suddenly see the merit in their work and further along its development?

The real question here is, what is $100,000 annually to Microsoft? They make that in a day from consulting work inside a large company. $100,000 dollars annually is the  minimum amount required for platinum membership to the apache foundation.  If you take this information and base it on Microsoft behaviourly, then I think you can quickly start putting together a picture a slight bit closer to reality.  A company with the financial resources of Microsoft contributing the minimum level of the highest partnership of a competitor and polar opposite business methodology implies they really only want the reputation of being a platinum contributor to an Open Source project.  Given the heat they are constantly under internationally, thats worth WAY more to them as a company than 100K per year. This is a P.R. move, folks.  Nothing more, nothing less.  When Microsoft actually starts releasing MS-Office, or MS-SQL, or any of their products existing or new with MS in front of it as Open Source, then I will believe they are serious about Open Source. One of the richest companies in the world tossing 100K at an open source foundation doesn’t really make my heart swoon…  The best thing to come out of this is more development money for Apache!

2.  Touch technology is inherently flawed.  After a few months of owning an iPod touch, I’ve come to the decision that while some great eases in computer usage could be leveraged, it is by far the messiest and most unsanitary of all forms of input interactivity.  touching, tapping, smearing your hands and fingers all over a surface….  Its really kind of gross..  Think about the industries where they want to implement these things… Bars… Casino’s… Doctors Offices!!  A public smear-board of blurry finger-printed computing with everyones germs all over it!  Sure, there are touch devices today, and one can carry disinfectant wipes or hand cleaner, but the unfavorable apparence of a average use touch screen is going to be a big problem.

3.  Freemind!  Freemind is one cool little piece of open source goodness.  I’ve never used any sort of mind mapping software before, but now I find myself wanting to use it for everything.  From planning a deployment, to developing a big picture outline of a project, to even finance planning.  I’ve gotten a few people at work turned onto it.  I definately recommend anyone looking for a good organizational mapping/charting tool check it out!

4.  Piaggio.  I’ll probably be the proud new owner of an MP3 500 this week or weekend hopefully.  I’m completely excited about it.  A Street legal three wheeler, made possible by the parallelagram front suspension.  Truly an important advance in technology.  So is over 60MPG!

5.  I just won some new computer speakers on ebay.  The Klipsch ProMedia 4.1 system.  I remember when this system came out… I wanted it so bad, but it was over $300 brand new!.  This bad boy is 400 Watts of THX certified power.  I got an excellent deal on it, and am pretty stoked to hook it up.  My old sound system finally bit the dirt.  Last week, the subwoofer amplifier literally blew up.  The smell of burnt electronics filled the air, which is never a good thing.  But, I must say these speakers have quite outlived my expectations of them.  It was a Microsoft Digital Sound System 80 2.1 setup.  It just had unbelievable clarity and tight bass.  I always believed Microsoft made great peripherals.  All I use is Microsoft keyboards and mice, and thats all I’ve used for years now.  I’ve never seen them do a powered speaker system before, or since the DSS-80, but it was a fine piece of audio technology.  RIP DSS-80!

I am a pretty huge klipsch fan.  Having heard their products side by side against Bose and some other major speaker makers out there, I truly believe what I have heard out of klipsch home theater systems outdoes everything in its class, and usually a bit cheaper.  My home theater system was no small investment, but for the quality I get, it was nothing compared to what a Bose system would have cost me for the same or lesser quality sound.  I paid something like $300 or so for the Klipsch subwoofer and $500 for the quintet setup, but it will blow your mind when you’re watching a movie.

6.  I’ve recently switched browsers from Firefox over to Opera for a trial and I have to admit it, I am impressed overall with it.  I was skeptical at first, but I must say that for me, I like the look, feel and responsiveness of opera moreso than firefox.  It doesn’t come without its own set of nuances.  For example, because it is apparently different enough from Mozilla and IE, some pages will not allow you to view them.  It memory residency is also a little more bloated than Firefox which was a bit dissappointing to me.  I never really understood why a web browser should take 80-120+MB of memory which is usually where firefox sits.  Opera is sitting now at 184MB with one page open…  Luckily for me, my system is not short of physical memory, but it would be nice to have a leaner, fully functional web browser that gave the browsee the opera experience.

I have some pretty cool stuff happening this week at work, but I have to be careful how much I write about the details on a public site.  Lets just say that despite having a summer cold right now, I really think I am going to enjoy this week thoroughly!

Until next time!

-T.

Three Cheers for Sun, Solaris, and RedHat Enterprise Linux!

I have two servers at my work that are about to roll 1 year of consecutive uptime and operation without downtime or a reboot.  Its these kind of real world metrics that just completely discredit anything Microsoft puts out about Windows Server being superior to *nix Operating Systems in my personal opinion.  I will be the first to say that Windows Server 2003 is an extremely powerful windows OS, and much more stable compared to its predecessors.  However, superior to *nix?  I’m sorry, but this simply is not the case.  Some could argue that windows is easier to administer because its interface is most known and familiar, but if I had to apply some real zero tolerance reliability into uptime, I simply would not choose windows first.  If I needed to scale to absorbent amounts of memory and cores and have it optimally handled, again, I would not choose windows first.  If the application was written for windows, then obviously I would have to choose windows, but I would have to start doing some more advanced practices, like node failover clustering for example, in order to provide the kind of uptime UNIX and Linux can deliver de-facto.  Of course, I’m more than willing to say I stand corrected.  If anyone reading this blog post can send me an undoctored screen shot of a SINGLE windows server supporting an average of 21 users logged in to it and working simultaneously (more if you consider application services) for more than 361 days, I will happily eat my words and stand correct.  In ten years, I’ve never seen it done!   Windows must come down and reboot more frequently than *nix OSes to maintain stability and stay updated.

So, here are the two Birthday boys to be:

Server 1 is a SunFire X4200 running RHEL4 Linux.
18:46:14 up 361 days, 8:35, 21 users, load average: 3.00, 3.00, 3.00

Server 2 is a Sunfire V880 running Solaris 8. (They don’t make 880’s anymore, but the 890 is the same thing only it handles faster processors)
6:47pm up 361 day(s), 9:55, 1 user, load average: 0.02, 0.01, 0.02

Next Post

I have a few pet projects on my plate as of late.  By pet I mean, ones I’m more excited about than others.

BGAN Satellite connectivity: The task is this:  Provide **reliable** access to the company network from the remotest of remote locations.  When I mean remote, I mean you don’t even have electricity, just the battery in your laptop and maybe a DC car adapter, surrounded by mountains and foothills.  Last year, I set up a process utilizing Sprints EVDO wireless data card, and while this proved fast, it certainly did not prove reliable.  It was only functional as far as a typical sprint cell phone would be, which if you happen to be a sprint customer, you know thats rather on the limited side.  I will be testing a Hughes 9201 immersat mobile dish in the upcoming months to see what options we have here.

DSView:  Expanding a product released by avocent to fully leverage all the available components of a truly lights-out data-center.  Extending this product in the following ways:

• 2 Factor Authentication (Smartcard or RSA)
• Single Sign-on (Certificate pass-through)
• VMWare extensions
• iLO/iLOM extensions
• Fully implement Serial-over-LAN
• KVM/VM (Keyboard/Video/Mouse/Virtual Media

High-End Workstation Blades and software: Using a combination of 3rd party and homebrew tools to leverage a pool of high-end graphics enabled workstation blades to provide a completely remote High-ended graphic modeling solution.

I’m considering dropping another one on my plate:

Virtual Workplace (a.k.a. Sun Microsystems Project Wonderland)

I see so much potential in this tool.  Its a truly cross-platform solution to applications integration and virtual collaboration that far exceeds your traditional teleconferences and netmeeting offerings today.  The best part is that its completely open source.  You simply have to see it in action to see what I mean.

Revolution: OS and an introduction

So, a technical blog… This is something I’ve toyed around with doing for quite some time.. But, how would I do it?  What would I cover?  How would I start it?  I guess I’ll start it off with a small introduction.

Since before the days of “the net”, back when you had to dial into these things called BBS’s, I’ve gone by the name Sparticus.  I spelled it Sparticus because I really wanted the name, and there was already a dormant account called Spartacus on the first BBS I ever called, but they only ever called in one time.  As I transitioned into more internet-like services such as NNTP and IRC, the name Sparticus was far too common, so I had to throw some numbers at the end of it.  Have somewhat of a concept, even at the age of 15-16, of social engineering and information security, I chose 414 because they meant absolutely nothing!  I still use the Sparticus414 handle, though a few years ago I started also using the name Toupeiro on various technical boards.  The name is Portuguese for the masculine tense of the word Mole, which was nicknamed to me by the girl I was dating at the time.  I was rather fond of the name, so I kept it, and still use it today in several forums and threads, such as ubuntuforums, appdeploy, HP, WineHQ and several other places.  As of this post, I am 28 years old.  I started working in IT during my senior year in High School a few weeks before my 18th Birthday.  At that time I was mainly supporting NT 4.0 systems and a Tokenring network, but would soon graduate on to DG/UX, application packaging and scripting.  I’ve no formal training, or any degree’s at this time, yet today I’m amongst a fantastic team of brilliant IT people working for my companies Technical Computing team.  Oh sure, I’ve taken some formal courses since being employed, but computers and technology was my hobby.  It was one of my first passions, and to this very day I take great satisfaction in the work I do.  Because of this, I am maticulous about it.  Because I am maticulous, I am good.  I’m not egotistical, and I don’t claim to be an expert, though I know this concept of being an expert is something I need to reassess continuously, but I know that I am good because if I was not, I don’t think I would be where I am at today.

So today, I work on several different pieces of IT.  My primary focus, both in my job for the past 2+ years and in my hobbies for the last 9 or so has been in Linux and Open Source.  I am still a windows admin, and if I had to put the expert label on myself towards any facet, I would place it on my windows experience.  Not because I think I am the best there is.  Not because I have all the answers.  But, because I’ve done a whole lot in vast areas of Windows infrastructure support, because I can stand on my own in a situations surrounding even new and unfamiliar windows infrastructure, adapt to the differences and apply what I’ve done, but also because I am more than willing to share any and all of my knowledge with anyone willing to learn.  My supervisor told me something the other day that stuck.  I don’t care how good you are, how much you know, how many degrees you have, or how many years of experience you carry, if you cannot share what you’ve learned you are not an expert.  I wholeheartedly agree.

My work passion is enterprise design.  Why something like enterprise design?  Because its ever changing, there is always something new to learn and to test.  It takes all the components and builds a much bigger picture by effectively tying everything together in a way that works and, if done well, makes sense to even the non-technical.  I like the big picture.  I like making sure all the little projects I work on are in line with a big picture.

Some would think that by now, I would be more burnt out than I am.  Truth is, I did get burnt out at my last job, but I feel 100% recooperated now.  I think I had to leave windows support as my primary focus because as much as I enjoyed what I did, I saw too much that was simply out of my control that I couldn’t do anything about.  That and I was being worked to death from a time perspective..

The biggest problem with windows is Microsoft.  In their philosophy and in their support model.  They make some fantastic products, but its moments where those products become their own limits that the big picture for windows gets fuzzy.  Even if I know exactly how to fix something inherently wrong in a windows product, Microsofts EULA explicitly denies me to change it.  At times, this was a problem for me then. I think I’m ready to be a windows admin again on a more regular basis than I have been recently, because in the last few years I’ve become much more acquainted with FOSS and Linux than ever before, and the bigger picture there is something I’m eager and excited to be a part of.  In other words, I don’t have to dwell on the shortcomings of windows and what I can do that Microsoft will support, because I have linux to apply value to, and in turn receive gratification from the effects of my work.

When I was a full time windows admin, the majority of my hobbies surrounded technologies around windows infrastructure, packaging and scripting being my two most favorite I think.  But, there were things about these that were inherently flawed, by design or by procedure.  I knew it, in fact most support communities knew it, and even some Microsoft staff knew it.  However, it was Microsofts way or no way.  This was especially true with packaging, where Microsoft dictates strict guidelines to follow to ensure things are “Designed for Windows”, that were extremely limiting and most of the time unnecessary and even unsecure at times.  What could I do though?  I had to follow procedure.  I couldn’t really add any value, even if there were value to add, and remain compliant, so I would basically have to script or package something for my employer, knowing full well it was either insecure, or ineffcient.  This is where my burnout came from primarily.  As I mentioned, I am maticulous in my work, so over time, things like this started to make me bitter about Microsoft.

But its in light of all this where FOSS and Linux really take the stage.  Open Source, Free software means I am free to change it however I see fit to make it better, or work how I need it to.  This enables me to add value in ways I couldn’t on Windows systems.  The job started to become way more gratifying again, and I slowly began to be able to handle the workloads I did before.

So there is my introduction.  As I mentioned, this is a technical blog.  Even drenched in all this technology, I have a wonderfully full personal life I share with my beautiful fiance, and my family and friends.  There are also hobbies outside of technology I partake in which may come up from time, but I am really going to focus on making this site an outlet for my career and my hobby; IT.

I will end this post with a link to a video.  Linux and Open Source is still new to a lot of people, but the ideals and practices have been around for a little while now.  The video I am linking is called Operation OS.  It’s an 85 minute documentary filmed in 2001 about the Linux operating system, and the pioneers of the Open Source movement like Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman, the GPL (General Public License) which is the wonderful piece of legal documentation that makes this all work the way it does, and the Free Software Movement which predates linux and originates from proprietary UNIX systems of the 70’s dictating what you can use on a computer, and what a man named Richard Stallman (known also as RMS) did to change all that.  Keep in mind, this was filmed 7 years ago, but if you have an interest in technology, and have had questions about Linux and Free Open Source Software (FOSS), it really is an important documentary to watch.

I think that’ll do for tonight.  Thanks for reading, and I look forward to seeing what this blog holds.

-T.