Mac Mini

People Actually Read This!

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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!

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We Can See You!

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Today I went out and bought some iSight camera’s to test out. I have said it before, but I will say it again. Most of the time I can say I play with toys for a living and I won’t be lying. One of the business managers wanted a video camera solution so people in one of our offices can see what others are doing in another office, and vice versa. The theory is to bridge the gap between the offices by seeing a small glimpse of what goes on in each location. I thought it was a really cool idea. After looking at several options I came to believe that the iSight cameras were the best bet. Several wireless network cameras were several hundred dollars each. Plus the computers and monitors we would need to show the other offices camera on, the cost got to great. With iSight we can get a computer (Mac Mini) a monitor and the iSight camera and that is all.

To test the setup I got 2 camera’s. Jayson and I plugged them into our Powerbooks and we took them for a spin. The picture looked good in full screen mode on my 19″ LCD. Jay took it a step further and plugged his Powerbook and iSight into the 42″ Plasma we have in the office and went full screen. It looked good enough that we can use 23″ LCD TV’s for this project. The picture in general looked really good. Granted we were on the same LAN, but we have decent bandwidth between both offices so it should work fine.

What is even cooler is we were able to use the video chat functions of Jabber, and not even use AIM. After showing that we can use these iSight cameras for the solution I went out and looked to get the computers. At first I was going to get the really cheap $499 mini’s but then I realized we need the wifi for one setup, and maybe need it for the other one as well. It was worth the extra $100 to have it ready if needed. I love that this stuff just worked. I plugged in the camera and the software immediately said there was an update ready for download. I clicked ok to download it, and in less than 2 minutes and one OK click later I was chatting via video. Not bad for an OS that has less than 5% of the market!

Now that we know the cameras will work for this solution I now want them to use for day to day video conferencing between the people in my department in my office and the other one! That would be really nice!