Do Apple Powerbooks have a hibernate mode? I put my powerbook to “sleep” yesterday morning and ended up not using it till the train ride home last night at 10:30PM. It had run out of power while sleeping all that time. Not sure if the Powerbook is screwed up or if that is what is supposed to happen.
scott
The Many Uses Of An iPod
I am seriously thinking about using my iPod to shuttle data back and forth from home to work. It saves me from bringing a laptop home if I don’t want to one day. I need to see if my iPod that is setup to use a Mac will work as a hard drive if I plug it into a PC. I don’t think it will.
It would be cool to use it as a drive. I have about 2 gigs free, and if I filter what music I put on it, I can free up more room.
Treo 600 Rumors
So the new rumor is that the Treo 600 is going to be available for GSM this monday. that is what they said about it last monday, but hey I am sucked into the hype. They won’t be in people’s hands monday anyway. It will take days if not weeks to ship them out. That is what happened with the Treo 270.
Until it is released I am using my current Treo 270 all the time now. I am forwarding my Verizon phone calls to the Treo. I have not had many problems with reception. Sometimes I don’t get calls when I get good signal, but I am not sure how often that happens. I need to look into it.
Projects Going On
We are still working on our monitoring phone call system. The company that makes the software thinks they have an idea of what is wrong. I should have more information today. I always love buying stuff that just does not work!
I think I finally am motivated to look into Proxy server software. Too many things are going on that I say if we had a proxy server we could figure this out, or we could prevent this. It is a pain to know a tool will work, but you just don’t have the time to set it up.
I found a flaw in the Windows 2000 Pro VMWare image I am using. I built it when I was learning about VMWare so I made the partition size too small. When I try to download large files to it, I get out of disk space warnings. I need to build a new one today. Howard also is trying to get a Red Hat 9.0 VMWare image. I found one I did that works, but I need to see if I configured it properly.
I want to do a VMWare image of Free BSD 5.1 also. I am not sure what to call the OS installs in VMWare. I guess an “image” of a disk is a close enough description of what it is.
Halloween
I thought about dressing up in a costume for work today. Then I remembered that I was 29, and I never came up with original costumes when I was 19, so why start now. I am curious to see what my sister is doing for Morgan. Not sure what my plans are for tonight. I heard about a few parties, but I don’t know what my plans are. My cousin’s wanted me to travel to Jersey for their Halloween party but I don’t think I fit in with their married with multiple kid suburban family type friends they will have over.
Poker Was A Bust
We played poker tonight at Dan’s place. Gus, Molly, Miguel, Keith, Rajive, Daniel, Glenn, Dan and myself played. It was chaotic at first since Rajive, Keith, & Glenn never really played texas hold-um before.
I ended up loosing. I got ahead quick with a hand that I almost didn’t realize I won. Then I lost it all to Molly with a pair of 9’s. I knew I didn’t have a hand that could win very much but I went all in anyway hoping I had something better than her. I didn’t and I got out. I was only down 30 buck so it was no big deal. When I left Dan, Glenn, & Molly were left. Molly had a huge amount more money then glenn so I assume she was going to win. Dan had almost nothing left but was assured 3rd place.
I had a good time. Gus is planning on doing poker next week at his place. I am down for that again. As my friend sean once said about going to a casino and loosing money. “we go skying and pay $50 for a lift ticket. I am spending the same amount of money in the casino. It is the cost of entertainment for a day.” now that works when you loose $30 bucks after a couple of hours playing poker. It is not valid when you blow $500 in 30 minutes at a casino. Thankfully that has never happened to me! Sean has had his share of crazy wisdom.
Recomendations
I was backed into a corner to make a recommendation on a laptop to buy. My brother in law’s mom wanted one and she said she trusted my judgment and wanted me to decide for her. After 3 conversations where I said I don’t like to do that and I like to make suggestions only, she convinced me to take the plunge. That means this decision will come back to haunt me later. She is nice, and just want somethings that works. I recommended the Apple ibook 12″. It fits her requirements and I think it will be easier to use than a windows machine. I like mac’s now, but I would not normally recommend it to a windows person. I did for her since she used mac’s in the past and had good things to say about them.
Lets just hope that she is as happy with an iBook as I am with my Powerbook.
Upgrades Complete (Mostly)
I did my Mailflow upgrade. Keith and I also patched more than 50% of our servers. we will try to get a bunch more done after 12AM when the office officially closes for the day.
i ordered my extra data t-1 for our office finally. we will use it to send VOIP traffic over to our Kingston office. It should take 30 – 45 days to get it up and running.
We spec’ed out a design for our Biztallk deployment. We will be putting a new fulfillment system in place in the next few weeks. We will deploy Biztalk server, MSMQ, and some other neat products. I have concerns because MSMQ needs to be loaded on a domain controller in its 2.0 version that we will be using. We need to move quick so we picked servers to use that we have onsite already. I had to bump 2 other projects to get the gear but both of them are lower priority. We will just buy new gear and earmark it for those projects. We are pretty much standardized on Supermicro for our Windows servers. If I get these 2 new box’s that brings my total of supermicro box’s to 8 we have gotten in the past 6 months. I really like there serial ATA 1U servers. They make a dual xeon version of it that looks fantastic. All for under 3K. We still use compaq for our high end database box’s and anything we need that uses SCSI. We just got a ML380 2 weeks ago, but nothing beats several inexpensive servers that you can get for the price of 1 bigger box.
I also started relying more on ROBOCOPY utility from Microsoft. In addition to regular tape backups I am replicating using robocopy some specific data on some file server to have an online backup also. I also used it for my first web site deployment. We have a large (300 gig) site that I needed to setup on a 2nd server. One of our dev staff setup the IIS site and configured it, and I am robocoping the contents to the new box. if it works we will do it more frequently. We had a plan to do that over the summer, but other projects took precedence.
The Review
As with any company my company does annual reviews of each employee. My review was supposed to happen in early September. We started to do it and then it got delayed. 6+ weeks later it looks like it will finally be completed. I am not too worried about it, but anything like that gives you cause for the jitters. And that is all I will say on the matter. Some things are just not discussed openly.
Windows 2000 And 2003 Domains
I ran a test in our testing domain we call MIS. I took a new 2003 server and added it to the existing 2000 Active Directory Domain. I learned you have to run 2 tools for it to work correctly. I did it and everything seemed to work ok. This is in preparation for me to begin upgrading our existing 2000 domain with 2003 domain controllers. Since I don’t like upgrading OS’s I will probably demote a DC and rebuild it with 2003 server and then add it back to the domain. To not loose a DC during this transition I will probably take a old machine or a desktop even and use it as a backup DC while the real one is being reconditioned.
This is not a top priority project, and it is in no way a glamorous project, but it solves a bunch of issues we are having and positions us to use some new tools that are out there. I will write more about it as testing continues.
Kai is also beginning to look at SMS 2003 server. It is supposed to be launched officially in the next few weeks. We are trying to get a demo copy to see if we can get it to do what we need. No work has begun on that project yet.
I have a stack of hardware requests sitting on my desk for me when I get to work today. We need a few servers for one project, a router, and other misc. items. I need to get them approved today so I can get the ball rolling on getting this stuff.