Author Archives: Mike

About Mike

If you're reading this, you probably know me. If not, poke around and maybe you'll learn something.

Chumby: A clock-radio for the 21st century

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An old collegue of mine from Gryphon Software (the founder and the guy who hired me, in fact) IM’d me today with news he’s at a new venture. Chumby Industries is working on developing a new device which, in essence, is going to be a new generation of clock radio. It’s a small device with WiFi that can display content based on Flash widgets. Weather, horroscope, headlines, music, and, of course, the time.

They’re just getting started but they seem to have thought about all the options and are going down a good path. They are going to provide premium fee-based content but will also support custom and/or cummunity developed widgets. Unlike a Tivo, if you don’t want the service, it will still work but you’ll forego the content you’d get from the service.

Can’t wait to get home

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While attending WWDC has been fun and educational this week, I am certainly ready to get home.

Last night, I was able to spend time with my old friend Cary, who works for Apple, at the beer bash at the Apple campus. That was fun, I got a small tour of his building and his office. He has seven computers crammed in there, but somehow, it works.

Of course, with the current raised travel threat level the flight home may be fun. I’m going to check one of my bags (I normally try to do carry-on only) to make sure I can get everything home. I also decided to move my reservation to one that leaves 45 minutes later to make sure that any delays getting through security don’t cost me my flight home.

Well, that was a stupid move

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While killing some time between sessions at WWDC, I saw that my mother-in-law was online so I thought “Hey! what a good time to back up her data.” So took but a moment to start a rsync backup that I do of her user directory on her machine to my system at home. To keep things from getting out-of-hand with regards to space, I use the –delete option which removes any files not in the source directory.

Like all mistakes, they happen because you don’t pay attention and that is exactly what happened to me. I was in the wrong destination directory and was syncing the files to ‘.’ (the current directory) so it happily started deleting files that weren’t in the source. Unfortunately, I was in my home directory at the time. Once I realized, my mistake, I stopped it but not before it had deleted my mail repository, my website, and my blog (this one).

Fortunately, regardless of my horribly rookie mistake, I also back up my user directory two different ways every day. A few restores later and I had all but a few hours of email restored and the entire website and blog.

Good for me, I guess, but it shouldn’t have happened in the first place. Lesson learned, use explicit paths.

Virtualization firm Parallels updates software (my first Digg sumission)

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This is really no big deal, but I just submitted my first Digg story. It was no big deal, just an article on CNET regarding a new beta of Parallels‘ Virtual Workstation for OS X (a very good product which I’ve blogged about before).

At the bottom of the artical was a "Digg this" link which I did and it turns out it hadn’t been submitted yet. I revised the provided text a bit and clicked submit.

Does that make me cool? Probably not.

read more | digg story

O.K. is it just me or does Steve Jobs not look good?

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Yeah, yeah another WWDC post, but the truth is, I’m stuck in a hotel room alone all week so I get to catch up with my posting backlog. While watching this morning’s keynote I couldn’t help thinking that Steve Jobs was looking really thin. Sure, I was at the back of the rather large auditorium and he was just a speck from my naked eye, but there were two large projections over the middle of the crowd and he looked and acted off-the-mark. Having seen dozens of keynotes over the years, I also noticed that he
deferred to other presenters far more often (and for longer) then
anytime I can remember.

Two years ago, Steve Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer which was was caught early and removed with surgery and fortunately, he did not require either chemotherapy or radiation therapy. Technically, he should be in good shape. Maybe, he’s not? Perhapse there is nothing new here and it just looked funny on screen but I hope and pray that his health is good.

Did you see the keynote? Watch the first few minutes and tell me what you think?

New for Leopard: Time Machine

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In today’s keynote at WWDC, Steve Jobs presented 10 features in the upcoming OS X 10.5 Leopard. My favorite (and as an IT guy, the most important, IMHO) is Time Machine which works similarly to NetApp‘s snapshots but for a consumer desktop. The interface is quite cool, too. A little flashy, sure, but a good way to present something which can be difficult for some to conceptualize.

read more | digg story

This is work, right?

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I’ve been a Mac user since 1985 and have been in IT for about 14 years professionally. This week, I have the opporunity to attend Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference in San Francisco. While its primary audience is OS X developers, there is a fairly substantial IT track of sessions for the week covering all sorts of client, server, and storage needs. Among my many other responsibilites at work, I also am responsible for the OS X infrastructure, gathering the 150 or so OS X workstations in our campus into a managed group and attempt to provide the same enterprise-level management and support that is currently available with our Active Directory domain. As a result, many of the sessions are very apropos for our situation.

Additionally, we’re trying to get Apple hardware to a “first-class” status so that hardware can be purchased more easily. Not that it’s hard now. There is just some additional justification that you need to go through which could be avoided if it can be shown that Apple is indeed serious about the enterprise and is not just the consumer oriented “iPod company” that also makes other hardware. As an interesting aside, the IT department, which I am a member, is going to be getting quite a few MacBooks as they are just so gosh darn versitile for us geek-types. Mac OS and Unix all in one box and with the addition of Parallels (and soon VMware) Windows, Linux, or any other Intel OS is just too cool.

How much can a single click cost?

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My pride is hurt. Quite brused, in fact. You see, my family and I were headed over to a pool party/potluck for our church’s youth pastor who was leaving to work with The Navigators in Arizona. And I pressed the wrong button.

You’re probably confused. Perhaps I can explain. One of the features we really like about our house is the fact it has a rear detached garage and a driveway that goes down the side all the way to the street (like a good driveway should). Since we have dogs, we installed a gate shortly after we moved in at the end of 2001. Being practical and forward thinking, we realized that a manual gate while cheaper would get old really quick (e.g., pull up, get out, open the gate, pull through, get out, close the gate…) so decided to have it motorized. The installers did a really good job and even hooked up the mechanism to the middle button of our three buton garage door opener so that we didn’t have to worry about using two different remotes. Considering that two of the three buttons weren’t doing anything, it certainly made sense.

Flash forward to yesterday. I was pulling out of the garage having previously opened the gate and was backing down the driveway. Since I was clear of the garage I pressed the button to close the garage door. Moments later: **crunch** For a moment, I didn’t realize what happened and even when I got out and looked at the damage, I still wasn’t clear as how it happened. After I calmed down a moment, I realized that I must have hit the wrong button and the gate started closing right as I was approaching it.

It made contact exactly with the rear corner of the car at the edge of the gate. As a result, the turn signal/brake light was cracked, the rear bumber damaged, some small damage to the rear body, and 1 1/2″ steel frame along with two 5/8″ bars of the gate pushed in about a foot. To be honest, I probably couldn’t have done better if I tried.

The long and short is that only bad drivers that don’t pay attention have accidents like that. Me? I’m a good drive who considers himself quite careful and safe and would never have thought I would ever have an accident like that (by my hand at least).

We’re working on getting estimates for the car and gate. I’ll be lucky if I get off for less than $2000 for the both. We’ll see.

As a result, I’ve changed my driveway protocol. Open the door and gate, back out, stop, close the door and gate while stationary, and when completely closed, continue.

Ah, do I have to go back to work?

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I’m finishing up a week long vacation from work and to be honest, I have mixed emotions about going back. The primary event this week was taking the family (including my mother-in-law) to Kernville to go white-water rafting. Becky has always wanted to do it and since she got her eyes done in January, she didn’t have to worry about either loosing glasses or trying to enjoy it all blurry.

The trip was a blast and we’ve all decided that we will need to do it again. We may put it off a bit, though, so Brian will be old enough to go on a two or three-day outing.

A meeting is good, but at what cost?

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I had the occasion to make a business trip yesterday at the last minute. I don’t mind so much and, in fact, kinda like traveling. Becky, on the otherhand, is less comfortable with last minute changes so wasn’t overly enthusiastic. Oh, wait, did I mention changes? Well, you see, I was travelling with my manager and we had the same outgoing flight from San Diego at 7:14 AM. Unfortunately, it was cancelled along with another from the same airline headed to Chicago. Needless to say, there were quite a few people trying to find alternatives and after almost two hours of standing in line, I was able to get a seat on a later flight. My boss wasn’t as lucky and ended up buying a ticket on another airline to Oakland (I was flying into SFO).

The meeting happened and my boss and I were only about 60 and 30 minutes late, respectively.

That afternoon, we headed back to the airport to take the original return flight home only to find that the 6:32 PM flight was now leaving at 9:00. We tried briefly to get switched to an 8:00 flight, but didn’t want to stand in any more lines for only a one hour gain.

We boarded at 8:30 in advance of the pilots who arrived just before 9:00 (they were coming in from another airport). The plane took off about 9:30, landed at 11:00 and then I had to drive home.

From home back to home was 19 hours. All for a four hour meeting. Ugh.