I had a migraine on Saturday that came up on me so fast. I was glad I didn’t go out. I ended up sleeping in the afternoon and trying to rest in the evening. I was still out of it on Sunday. I had migraines like that. I was just glad it was the weekend and I didn’t have to deal with work and being out of it. Because of that I didn’t do much this weekend.
Month: April 2006
Apple Has Got To Be Kidding!
I am a fan of the Mac, but sometimes really stupid engineering is really stupid engineering. So I have a Mac Mini (PowerPC G4) and I just got an intel Mac Mini to test dual booting and virtual machines. All was fine for the first 2 days until I had to unplug both of the mini’s to move them around on my desk. Little did I know I mixed up the power adapters. If I noticed at the time I would say who cares. Identical power adapters in identical computers. No problem, right? Not really. Turns out the power bricks for the intel & powerPC mini’s are physically identical, but the voltage is totally different. To add insult to injury the plug is identical so you can plug in the wrong plug to the wrong mini. What does that yield? A mini or two that won’t power on.
According to apples support website they put up a KB article about the difference in power supplies. They show the nice difference in the power supplies. It is a light grey wording on the side of a white device that physically look the same. Yeah everyone will notice that difference! They say it is hard to confuse the two. BS!!! COME ON APPLE. DEC back in the mid 90’s had this issue with laptops we had at my old company. You plug the wrong one in and it fries the computer. Why make 2 devices physically identical when it can cause harm to your equipment if you use the wrong one? According to the same KB article, they say: “While using the incorrect power adapter won’t hurt your Mac mini, it could cause unexpected behavior, most notably an inability to turn the computer on!” Can someone tell me how that is NOT hurting the computer? I cannot believe a computer company that tries to be so consumer oriented like Apple can screw something up like this?
Screwing the adapters up was a stupid mistake, but one that should been made impossible by good design. I haven’t done more troubleshooting, but I am told that you can get the machine to recover from this. I just haven’t worked on it long enough. I really don’t want to have to call the unit in.
I am still like Apple hardware, but in my book they just dropped down a peg or three.
Problem Resolution
We had a demo of some really cool problem resolution software today. It can watch what goes on throughout all the servers and clients and correlates a problem for you. It does way more than that, but it is a difficult concept to write about. I am sold, but we need to evaluate it a bit more before we can make a decision.
Work was normal otherwise. Well normal except for the circuit failure we had in our call center computer room Thursday and again this morning. I don’t know who is stupid enough to close the door on a computer room that feels like it is 110 degrees inside while a fan is at the door blowing hot air out of it? Long story. We had some HVAC issues that caused other power related issues. The power issues caused some problems on thursday with our IPCC system. It was resolved by a reboot, but it was fun for a bit while we troubleshooted the issue. Otherwise I have been able to catch up on the backlog of issues this week since my boss was out sick.
Dinner & Drinks
After work Jayson and I meet up with John at some dive bar on the west side by his office. I don’t mind dive places. Especially ones like this. It had a nice crowd and wasn’t too crowded. The best part was the happy hour till 8PM. We where able to get a round (including 2 mix drinks and beer) for $8. This is NYC and it was that cheap. By the second round and a nice tip the drinks where pretty strong.
After a few rounds we ended up in little italy for some good dinner. Jay and John got some cigars at this little place on Mulberry street. I was full and tired by the end of the late dinner so I passed on going out for more drinks at a nearby bar. It was a good night all in all.
People Actually Read This!
A funny thing happened when I was looking at this sites statistics. I found people finding my site from an unlikely source, VMware’s blog site. Looks like someone over there found my March 27th post about a P2V. I thought that was very cool. Especially since I don’t get tons of hits to the site. I think they have great products, and I don’t mind telling people about them. I will just as easily say really bad things about bad products. See previous posts for really bad rants! Knock on wood, that P2V I wrote about is still running perfect after several weeks. Allot of people where skeptical about the Windows server not performing properly after the conversion to a virtual machine. My group was confident, but it was a hard sell to some. Now the skeptics are glad we did the conversion, and don’t worry about the app anymore.
The reference on the VMNT Blog got me wondering why in recent months after I changed the site’s URL why am I still having allot less page views than in the past. I used to have 5 times as many hits with the old domain name. I gave google a while to spider me and still no change. Kind of weird. I don’t mind that much since I write this stuff more as a journal than for recognition. In many ways I go out of my way for anonymity!
In other Virtual news for me I have Parallel’s Beta 4 installed on a brand new Intel Core Duo Mini at work. So far that VM product looks great. I can’t wait for a final version to come out. Anything to let me run Windows on my Mac without rebooting. I am still holding out hope that VMware will make a Workstation product, and maybe a management console for GSX & ESX server. Until then I think I will get by on Parallel’s, but one can dream for the future!
Technorati Tags: esx server, mac, mac mini, virtual machines, vmware
Creative Problem Solving With VMware Player
Recently we had to deal with a rare request (or rare for where I work). We had a user who has a legitimate request for wanting linux on his desktop computer. The problem is for now we are a Windows XP desktop shop. Several systems staff have Linux or Mac’s but that is kind of unique since they are systems. The user in question wanted to try an odd flavor of linux as either a dual boot or a second desktop computer. This poses two issues for us. One, we have no security standard for end users to have linux. Secondly the flavor of linux he wanted to use was not what we currently use at all.
The solution for me seemed very obvious. Give the user VMware Player, and get them a pre-built Virtual Machine of Red Hat Enterprise Workstation (the linux desktop OS that we use internally). This way we don’t need to have a rouge desktop out there different than everything else we deploy to users. Also if there is a problem we can remove the VM and start from scratch quickly.
The user was not so keen on this idea since they wanted linux as their primary OS. We where solving an individual problem they had in the confines of our standards using VMware Player. So far things are working out just fine. The major issue I have is that the user is resourceful, and he may just go out to the VMNT site and download other pre-built VM’s that we have not authorized. I wonder if there is a way to limit what VM’s can run on a machines VMware Player?
Our long term intentions are to deploy all new desktop and laptop computers with the VMware Player already installed so if we need to do something like this again, we just send the user the VM and off they go. It is amazing how after a few years of using this software, we keep coming up with new ways of leveraging it in our organization. And since player is free, we didn’t even need to buy extra copies of VMware Workstation.
Technorati Tags: red hat enterprise WS, red hat, rhel, virtual machines, vmware, vmware player
Parallels Beta 3
In the week since I first wrote about it Parallels Workstation for the Mac is now on beta3. So far it is shaping up to be a great product. I can’t wait for it to be gold and have the ability to use USB devices. I will wait until a final version before I start making Virtual Machines like I did with VMware workstation, but once it does go gold I will be making a bunch of the most widely used OS’s that I use so I can have them on my Mac. Very cool.
Technorati Tags: beta, intel, mac, parallels, virtual machines
Passover Night 1
Spent the night with my parents, sister, brother in law, his family, and my niece. We had dinner at my brother in law’s sisters apartment. It was nice. It was also nice that it was really close to my apartment. I wasn’t very hungry, and that was OK since I am not a big passover (or any other Jewish holiday food) food fan. I had a late lunch at like 3-4PM so I had very little. I didn’t even eat dessert.
Sad to say I was on my Blackberry a decent chunk of time at dinner getting updates from Jayson about a possible issue at work. Unfortunately the problem I thought was solved may not be. Not sure yet, but that is all I can say.
Technorati Tags: passover
Rangers Vs. Islanders
My friend rich called me this afternoon and wanted to know if I could goto the Rangers vs. Islanders game at the garden tonight. Not to pass up tickets for hockey I decided to go. The tickets being free was an added bonus. The seats where amazing. They where his companies season tickets. they had 4 seats and only the 2 of us. We sat in the second row of the upper area of the first level if that makes any sense?
The Islanders won, and it was actually a good game. The third period was a nail bitter. I had a great time. I wish I was able to go to games more often.