I’m trying to go paperless at home… well, not really. Â I’m really trying to make sure some important documents don’t get destroyed if we ever had a fire or other disaster at home. Â I don’t know why, but that sort of things concerns me now. Â Maybe it was Hurricane Katrina and memories of Hurricane Hugo blowing over my house years ago, but I digress. Â What I’ve found is a great little Mac app that does the trick for my document archive – its call Yep. Â Its billed at iPhoto for your PDF’s and that’s a pretty accurate billing. Â Its a great library application for your PDF files, wherever they happen to lie on your filesystem. Â
This is going to be short post… part of my New Years resolution to be more postive… Â I’ll warn you, this one is just a rant. Â Its just one of those things that irks me. Â
We went to Circuit City this past weekend, again. Â Its only the 3rd time we have been in the Myrtle Beach store since it announced its closing. Â We were searching for a deal, which has been hard to find, even in their liquidation. Â I finally bought something – I bought a new multi-function printer for home. Â Our printer/scanner/copier at home is getting pretty long in the tooth and its ink finally dried up last week. Â I’d heard that the printers at CC had finally been marked to 25% off. Â The last time I went in, they were a pathetic 10% off – and that was off of some jacked up price that someone pulled from their nether regions. Â Finally, at “25% off”, the price dropped to $10 below what NewEgg, Best Buy, Sam’s Club and everyone else has been selling this particular HP printer for… Â
I realize this has been widely reported, from every news outlet in the country, but let me just say it. Â Those prices at the liquidation sale (Goody’s Family Clothing, Circuit City) — They aren’t deals people – they are rip offs. Â You could buy most to of the merchandise cheaper the day before the liquidation was announced. Â I know its not really news, but its still a sad state of things. Â
But I’m not sure what I’m more sad about – that people fall into the one-million-gazillon percent off syndrome where anything on sale is a great deal and I must buy 3 – or the corporate greed still exhuding from corporate America even during a liquidation. Â Let me explain. Â Put anything on sale, no matter how much you mark it up, and there are people who will buy it – because its a “great deal” or “it was on sale.” Â Are we really that gulliable America? Â Secondly, you’re a business that is failing. Â You can’t make it on your own two feet. Â You weren’t selling it at your “everyday low low price”, so why come in and raise prices just to “mark it down” to a price above your everyday low price… Â It makes no sense. Â How much does it cost a company like Circuit City to keep the lights on and pay employees, rather than simply do a true going-out-of-business, sell the merchandise at a real discount and wrap things up? Â Its a dying cow, put it out of its misery… Â I’m sure they’d make more money that way, but what do I know, right?
There was a time when I was the first on the block to try everything new that came out. Â Those times have long since past and family and other priorities have taken over. Â But this weekend, I was able to try Google Gears and finally understood the value of the service. Â Over the years, I’ve become a big believer in many of Google’s services. Â They are my primary search in all my browsers, I’m loyal to my GMail (more on that), and I’ve embraced Google Docs, much to the point that I don’t even have Microsoft Office installed on any of my Macs anymore. Â I must confess, though, that I do have iWork installed, though, for some of the more creative things – like family newsletters.
When Google Gears first appeared, I asked myself, why’d anybody want that? Â What does it buy you? Â See, I can’t imagine the world without Internet – its always close by for me, but not everyone is that way. Â I can’t say I really understood fully until this weekend. Â My wife and I have been discussing building a house and so all our spreadsheets with potential scenarios are in Google Docs, so we can share (talk about its killer feature, right?). Â Well, sharing is great, but we hadn’t had time to talk about some of the scenarios I’d put together. Â See, I am the geeky numbers one in the family and my wife confessed she really didn’t understand what she was looking at… Â So, we had an hour’s car ride Saturday while traveling to go see the circus with our daughter. Â Enter Gears. Â
I was invited to write a guest entry for Matt Simmon’s Standalone SysAdmin blog while he’s on vacation. Â My entry about patch management in virtual environments appeared today… Â http://standalone-sysadmin.blogspot.com/2009/02/software-patching-is-other-benefit-of.html
About the same time I pressed publish on my impressions of iPhoto ’09, looks like another article went live on Gizmodo. Â It is full of tips and tricks and is a more exhaustive review of the software. Â http://i.gizmodo.com/5142596/iphoto-09-the-definitive-review-and-tip-sheet
I had pretty high expections of iPhoto ’09 after its debut during MacWorld. Â The features I saw weren’t revolutionary, but they were welcome additions to the software. Â Facial recognition and geo-tagging were the two key features introduced, but it was the social networking ties that really shined. Â I have been playing with the software for several days and overall the features added are nice. Â But the software seems a little sluggish compared to the ’08 version and we can see some of the eye candy (core animation effects) added throughout, which don’t really add much. Â
One of my other passions is the TV show LOST on ABC. Â I’ve been an avid Lostie since it debuted about four years ago. Â And what I’ve found as a geeky side-game is the producer’s use of old Apple hardware in the series. Â We have seen one of these in the Swan station, which played prominently into the story line as the survivors had to enter their string of numbers every 108 minutes to keep the station from exploiding. Â We also saw another in the Pearl station, with an Imagewriter attached… Â Given the history on the island and the timelines, its a very cool addition for the core geek audience that follows the show. Â
In the past couple weeks, we saw another Apple computer at the tail end of the episode, off the island. Â One character is trying to track the location of the Island using the computer and a giant pendiulum. Â (I feel sorry for anyone reading this who doesn’ watch the show… I’m sure you’re Lost.) But it has to say something about culture that these machines have endured for almost 30 years. Â I think its a major highlight for the significance these computers played in the personal computer revolution. Â And just one of those geeky tie-ins that I feed on…
I’m trying very hard to research and find a good DPAP photo server, which could serve as a repository of photos accessible via iPhoto. Â I see a lot of solutions like Firefly Media Server that work for iTunes media servers and I know that DPAP is based on DMAP, same as the DAAP which iTunes uses. Â I have seen mention of DPAP on Firefly’s website, but not sure how this all works. Â I can’t seem to find a good article that talks about setting up your own DPAP server. Â Anyone know of one? Â
I have found a couple Perl or Python scripts that seem to serve this, but not sure exactly how it all works…
iLife ’09 has begun shipping. Â I received my confirmation just a few minutes ago that it is shipping and scheduled for arrival tomorrow via FedEx. Â Reports started surfacing as early as last night that the software had begun shipments for some areas. Â Apple also announced that iLife ’09 would be available in stores starting tomorrow, January 27. Â I’m looking forward to getting this loaded and testing the new iPhoto and iMovie.
I’m wondering what everyone else in the world does… I’m investigating running Virtual Center/vCenter as a virtual machine in order to remove two additional physical servers running Windows 2003 Enterprise in a cluster. I’m also very interested in running vCenter as a Linux virtual appliance when that becomes available. Is anyone out there running vCenter as a virtual machine? If so, how do you do it? Do you run it on a separate ESX cluster from the clusters it manages? How do you protect this in the event of a storage or ESX failure or some kind?  Does anyone else NOT do this for specific reasons? Anyone else running vCenter 2.5 in a Windows cluster (MCSC)?   If not, how do you protect your vCenter to make it resilient to failures? Just looking for other people’s personal experiences, not necisarily a corporate recommendation…
As a side note, we recently upgraded our farm from Virtual Center 2.0 to 2.5. Since that time, I’m seeing some things that I don’t necessarily think are working properly. We have Update Manager and Converter Enterprise installed and both services seem to go AWOL on us from time to time, disconnecting or just going unavailable from the Plug-Ins in Virtual Infrastructure Client. Not seeing much so far in VMware KB to help with running these peripherial services in a Windows cluster… Any help there would be greatly appreciated too…
