Set your creep factor to Stun

First things first... Rigby smashed my iPhone. She was so cute when she did it too. She was playing on it, laying on the floor in the Rogers store while I was changing my airtime plan, shortly she became bored and wanted to go back to her game of 'Jump off the stand for the giant iPhone display'. Asking if she was done I reached out to take the phone from her when she tossed it to me, I watched in slo-mo as it took a dive about 3 feet in front of me on to the tile floor. That's when the screen cracked. It still works though.

In the end I got a new phone, the HTC Dream and am slowly unlearning the iPhone. The android system is quite good and I am slowly finding little apps in the market that work for my needs. The creep factor came in yesterday when I downloaded LAYAR. It's an app I am told exists on the iPhone too. LAYAR is a augmented reality application for finding what you need near you, restaraunts, subway, coffee, movies etc etc. I tried out a few of these and then came across the Tweep finder. This layer adds locals around you that are tweeting currently. From there you can point the phone in the general direction of them, see the GPS coordinates, distance to them from you, their picture, the time they tweeted and then you can open their twitter stream to see what is going on with them.

I managed to find some grade 10 girl sitting at the McDonalds who had just broken up with her boyfriend and was talking with a group of people online about how a) broken hearted she was b) annoyed with the bitch that he was with now and c) how she sucks at Math 10. Although I didn't actually go find her or anything, I could tap the GPS location and get the pin on the McD's across the street from my location.

Creep factor 12

I am now rethinking not only owning this application but the way that I tweet, like maybe only tweeting when I am about to run off to a different location.

Hackintosh

I'm oh so happy. I have managed through a few days of work (about 6 hours in total) to get OSX86 10.5.6 running on my Dell X300 laptop. While a little slow due to the X300 being from 2005 and only an intel core single 1.2Ghz Pentium M with 640Mb ram it's still pretty damn good.

I'm super stoked to have a 'mac laptop' again as I really miss the simplicity with which I used to acomplish my tasks at home. I like my ACER Windows based laptop from work but I also feel restricted on it's use as OBVIOUSLY it's my works laptop.

The installation of OSX86 was pretty straight forward and you gotta give some serious props to the folks who have put their time and effort in to making it that way. The forums of infinitemac.com and others really help if you plan on doing this project yourself. I'm super interested in trying it out on other PC's like the IBM T60 core 2 duo.

The project manager of technology has a few IBMs and has been eyeing the project for a while, I showed him the X300 and now he wants me to work with him getting one or more of his units running. lol. Gladly I will do it as he got me the X300 as a write off from work.

This all came after struggling (again) with Ubuntu. I am just a GUI kind of guy and I like the functionallity of this OSX86 over the Ubuntu system for what I do. I spent maybe 14-18 hours working on getting my wireless card working on Ubuntu 9 where the brunt of my time on OSX86 was adding a flag to my com.apple.bootloader.plist file - which wasn't that much time. I do have to say that Ubuntu 9 lives up to the reviews and is an amazing piece of software and runs very very well with many great applications and features. Just - you need to be more of a jump in tech guy who loves command lines, wrappers and all the other things that come along with a pure linux system I guess.

For now tho - WOOT~! HACKINTOSH.

Gadets and Goods

I got a "xmas present" from work :) They're upgrading people to the newer blackberry 8300 curves at work and I got mine. It's nicer than I thought it would be and it plays video and music which is pretty cool too.

I had a cool idea to put some computers in the cafe at work so that we could give people internet and dvd/music while they are eating. Well I ended up getting a couple of the old iMacs together to put on the tables. I even got the speakers for them!
I also ordered up some cool keyboard mice combos from Logitech that are Bluetooth.
So I think it will be pretty cool to have in there for people eating their lunches or what not. There is no access to anything at all except the things I allowed so they should be %100 safe to leave in there.

Against All Odds

Man vs Netboot with a capital B.

It may appear the there has been a lot of 'Vs' going on in my life lately but that's only because I have been fighting some epic battles against myself. This one is no exception.

I've been trying to get a similar system to our PXE booting for Windows machines going at work for the Mac's. Netboot is built in to the OS X server and is relatively easy to setup. The issue is that it is offered on local subnets only. Our Network Guru (NG) was working with me to try and get the system to work across subnets with some router adjustments to allow for the BSDP process, I was trying to get the image put together and neither of us was having much luck at first.

NG got the network side running and was forwarding packets to my server but there was still no dice in the boot process. He captured some data of the boot process and watched traffic going between the two units. Much to my dismay he couldn't see anything wrong with the data going back and forth other than the fact that it simply stopped after a short time.

Well, I then worked on my end. I created new images from different machines and made sure that I had a solid creation process going on. No Hiccups there. I also tried removing my local switch from my test server, putting the server and client together on a switch within the network and putting them on a Dlink router completely isolated from the network. When this last environment did not produce a boot I came to the conclusion that it was not a network problem. I thought long and hard about what the issue could possibly be...

I checked the whole system over and over... I made a new image (again), I redid the configuration of the Netboot server (again) I also made sure that there were Netinstall and Netboot packages and that if I OPTION booted my Mac I could see an image available. Everything was pointing to A-Ok but still... I could not boot the image. It would see the server, start loading the image and then Kernel Panic. Everytime.

I worked on this late in to last night with no luck and again this morning. I finally decided to start at the most basic level. Making sure that I had not screwed this up in any way. That's when I saw it... In order to load the images, you need a specific set of folders setup in the /Library level.

/Library/NetBoot/NetBootSP0

My problem, and the only problem in getting those dang images to load... a Capital B.

I had written it out /Library/Netboot/NetBootSP0

I changed the B and tried again... Instant success. I'm glad I figured it out but I'm so annoyed that I was temporarily beaten by a lowercase letter.

Anyways, the final issue of booting this image across the 5 subnets I have and then to a whole other studio was still present. Bombich provided an answer to that in a simple little application. Now both studios can boot various install and NetBoot images from my server with ease. I am so Happy.

Now, after the baby comes ( 6 Days ) I can go back to work and see if I can get a dual boot system working on this.

I'll make sure to get a fresh bottle of Advil.

I am the excited.

I just found this awesome little application through the Apple Software site, called Screen Recycler. This app for Mac basically allows you to use any other Mac with a monitor attached as a second, third, forth or so on monitor for your own. Why buy another monitor when you can simply annex your neighbours computer!?

Awesome.

Second highest on my OMG that's sweet list was the application to allow you to use any (well almost any) application with your mac remote. There were two there but I think this one seemed to have the nicest interface. This one is called Mira.

Also Awesome.

Third highest is iRAPP. Now this is sweetness in a dmg. iRAPP allows you to use your mac from a PC. It runs your Mac fully, access all programs, all files and folders even have you system bar at the top of your XP session. Plus using it multiple users can use the same Mac or you can make your Mac a terminal server. How hot is this? and it's shareware. BOOYASHAKA!!

Lastly is this application called Passenger which allows non administrative persons (such as a help desk or what not) to add user accounts and do password creation with your OS X server without having to access the server. It's a nice utility I look forward to handing out at work.

So if you are on a Mac and are not familiar with this stuff, I would suggest checking it out.

Advancements

Today my second server became a link aggregated 2GB/s network unit. It joins the first and is now the second server in EA using this connection type. So far my users are only achieving 70mb/s on the primary unit so I think they have some overhead.

RAM on the other hand might need to be increased as now that they can use so many other things [ Like streaming video ] they are using a lot more RAM on the unit. 3GBs out of 4 were being used most of today so I may have to order more.

I asked today for a new training class from both the infrastructure manager and from the COO of my studio. I figure that two chances are better than one. The only problem with this is that I *JUST* realized the course is in Calgary and NOT Vancouver as I originally stated. BLARG!

So now I either have to see if I can be sent to Calgary for 5 days or wait about until Vancouver decides to host the class. [ Which won't be until next year now ]

Well we'll see where I end up. ** I just talked to Kate and she doesn't want me going so close to her due date so I guess I wait till next quarter**

I also talked with my network guy today about the traffic that would occur if I added an Xgrid system to my work. Seems that it would be ok and if I can get the servers I want then he can even make them all 2GB/s to improve the connection speeds. Now I just need to see if he'll do it to a couple of users too.

I sometimes wonder if I am too demanding.

I will create a monster

So. I now have two, count em, two Apple Xserves at work. I'm shooting for another 3.

Why you might ask? Especially if you work with me.... The answer is simple. Solidify my position make myself invaluable and then threaten to quit and ask for a raise. MUHAHAHAAHAAA

No really, I am just anticipating that with Pro Tools 7.4 coming and supporting the ability to have nodes like Logic Pro does right now that we will need some processing power that can be stored in the server room and listed as mission critical.

I have recently created a small node farm for the Music Audio guys and they are loving having it. Infrastructure at EAC however deemed it NON mission critical due to the fact that it is running from desktop machines. No fail-over, no rack mount, no need to worry about it seems to be their view. Well now I am stepping this up a notch or two.



That's how I want to roll. It's really the only way to do it. Have them all be 8core 3.0Ghz machines with 4gb RAM each. An 80gb and a 500gb drive to do generates and like WHOA Robert is your mother's brother.

Now the only thing standing between me and it is..... Money. Well that and convincing Charles and Marcel. Those should be interesting sells too. However when you look at how pretty, functional and stylish the above is... you can't help wanting to purchase when you look at what I currently am working with...

4 G5's in a network closet is hardly how I would like to be supporting a group of audio specialists.

Do androids dream humans? Do Humans dream technology?

Ok so officially I have become too invested with this whole server course. I have had nothing but Server implementation dreams since we got back from Seattle. I keep having this warm and fuzzy feelings when I awake from them too. That's usually followed by this feeling of wtf is wrong with me? I've felt this urge to go to work the last few days aswell. To check on it, to make sure everything is OK, to start implementing my changes... I mean really is my mind so devoid of 'normal' activity that the nerdiness has run it over?

I bet I was smiling in my sleep thinking about configuring Open Directory and Print services on systems.

I'm going to file this one in /users/shared/oddasfuck

21 years of computing: Zero Advances in Productivy

A must read for anyone who needs the latest and greatest computer.

People just won't believe me.

Now for the techno part

Here is some really cool stuff I was looking at today.



and if you haven't seen this already it's pretty cool too.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/04/16/intel_catwalks_concept_pc/