Mac is where IT’s at

Posted on August 17, 2007 by Mike

As anyone who knows me (or has read this blog) knows, I am a Mac user and pretty serious fan. Some would go so far as say “fanboy” but I like to think that I am honest enough to see the warts, too.

Having said that, one thing that has been quite interesting to me is the adoption (conversion?) rate of OS X and Macintosh hardware in my department at work recently. I work in IT and in my “section” there are sixteen of us. When I first transferred in about two years ago I was one of only two Mac users (the department was only 11 then). As our department grew, OS X improved, and products like Parallels came about, Apple hardware started showing up. At this point, nine of thirteen laptops are MacBooks and as I write this, my manager is anxiously awaiting his MacBook (updating to ten of thirteen).

I work with a lot of smart people.

Traveller Alert!: Watch that roaming

Posted on August 10, 2007 by Mike

Late June, we had a wonderful vacation with a 7-day cruise to Alaska out of Seattle, Washington. Since I wanted to be able to download pictures from the camera, we brought our laptop along. Partly wanting to copy pictures back home (in case the laptop got stolen/damaged) and partly wanting to have Internet access in general, I decided to borrow one of the Verizon EVDO cards from work. It worked out quite well even though signal was quite variable even when in port.

Unfortunately, the last night of the cruise was in Victoria, B.C. Signal was strong so I was able to sync up our photo album and do a little surfing. Yesterday, I was asked by our admin if I used the card in Canada. Having just recently paid our AT&T cell bill, I had learned that data also has roaming charges just like voice so I asked “how bad is it?” Try $736.38. At $.02/k it adds up quick, don’t it?

She’s going to talk to our account rep and see if they would be willing to reduce the charge any. We’ll see. Worst case, it’s another glorious “live & learn” moment.

A whole rack-full of cool

Posted on August 8, 2007 by Mike

I don’t write about work too often and that’s usually because I’m not sure what crosses the line of sharing too much. Fortunately, I don’t have to worry about it if someone else makes things public first.

SCEA (my employer), started a public blog a little bit ago and a recent article talked about the upcoming title, Warhawk, and how many of their game servers are running on off-the-shelf PS3’s. While not directly by my effort (I don’t support online games) it has been really cool seeing the setup get installed in the data center that is all of 100 feet from where I sit.

Please read the article as it give some additional details and links to some more pictures. The ones they used are o.k. but I think they could have done better.

Behind The Curtain: The Warhawk Servers

Hello, my name is Mike, and I’m a spammer

Posted on August 4, 2007 by Mike

But wait. It’s not my fault. Really! I noticed this past Thursday that our Internet connection at home was a bit spotty. I looked at our provider‘s status page but didn’t see anything applicable. I figured that our router had gotten a little wonky which happens on occasion and resetting it did improve things. I also got quite a few bounced messages of spam. That, too, isn’t too uncommon as the sending address for spam messages are often forged so I do occasionally get bounces to spam message that I didn’t send.

Friday morning, I found that I had received thousands of bounces and that our connection was almost unusable again. I logged in from work and stopped the mail server to investigate further. It turns out, that not only was the sending address forged, someone was using my mail server to originate spam. Ugh!

I pulled out my Postfix book and was able to tighten up the sending restrictions to only allow valid sending addresses (it was previously allowing anything@peay.us). I then had to clean up the thousands of queued up messages before I could start up the mail server again.

It took the better part of the morning which I feel bad since I was at work. I suppose it counts as professional development, but I can’t help but feel a bit embarrassed that the personal mail server of a Systems Administrator was originating spam. At least it wasn’t an open relay. I do know better than that!

Joke of the day

Posted on August 1, 2007 by Mike

A good friend at work shared a very funny joke with me this morning:

It was autumn, and the Indians on the reservation asked their new chief if it was going to be a cold winter. Raised in the ways of the modern world, the chief had never been taught the old secrets and had no way of knowing whether the winter would be cold or mild. To be on the safe side, he advised the tribe to collect wood and be prepared for a cold winter. A few days later, as a practical afterthought, he called the National Weather Service and asked whether they were forecasting a cold winter. The meteorologist replied that, indeed, he thought the winter would be quite cold. The chief advised the tribe to stock even more wood.
A coupe of weeks later, the chief checked in again with the Weather Service. “Does it still look like a cold winter? asked the chief.
“It sure does,” replied the meteorologist. “It looks like a very cold winter.” The chief advised the tribe to gather up every scrap of wood they could find.
A couple of weeks later, the chief called the Weather Service again and asked how the winter was looking at that point. The meteorologist said, “We’re now forecasting that it will be the one of the coldest winters on record!”
“Really?” said the chief. “How can you be so sure?”
The meteorologist replied, “The Indians are collecting wood like crazy!”

Another toy for my wish list

Posted on July 13, 2007 by Mike

Since I’ve spent all my saved pennies on my most recent “toy” I’ll have to refrain from getting this at least for now. This would be a great addition to my desk at work and I’m sure there are many who would visit just for a quick solo. There are also plenty of opportunities for a well-placed rim-shot, too.

Click on the image to the right to go to ThinkGeek. They even have a movie showing it in use.

Update:When I was young, I visited my grandparents house and discovered a drum set in the garage that used to be my uncle’s. In the process of making a play for them, my uncle got a renewed interest in the hobby and decided to dust them off for himself. I remember being disappointed but I can’t hold it against him. My parents saw this post and decided to order the Finger Drums for me which showed up last Friday. They’re in my office at work. Not the same as a full set, but the do take up a lot less space. Thanks Mom & Dad!

So, would 1,000 pictures be 1,000,000 words?

Posted on July 1, 2007 by Mike

My family and I just got back today from a 3-day vacation to Seattle, WA and a 7-day cruise on the Sun Princess to Ketchikan, Juneau, and Skagway Alaska as well as Victoria, B.C. It was a blast and we all enjoyed practically every moment. I took just shy of 1,000 pictures and I hope you forgive me for not trying to equal them in this post. To attempt to do the trip justice, I’ll upload them over the next few days to my gallery. Fortunately, my work gives us not only the 4^th but the 5^th off this week and since working Friday after two days off would be just plain silly, I’m taking Friday off as well.

Update: I was finally able to get some of the highlights up in the gallery.

Very sexy storage option

Posted on June 20, 2007 by Mike

Even if you’re not in I.T. I’m sure you realize that having all your important data on a single drive is risky and the way data has a tendency to grow, you never have enough storage.

I recently found out about Drobo which is being touted as the world’s first storage robot. Kinda silly tag line, but the demo is extremely impressive. It’s a four disk enclosure that connects to your system (Windows or Mac) via USB and provides a very flexible and resilient storage volume for all your data. It doesn’t come with any drives but they will accept any SATA drive of any size and will automatically grow the volume and replicate the data while the system still runs. If a drive fails, just pull it out and replace it with one of equal or more size and it will rebuild the array and grow the volume, if possible.

If you watch the demo movie, you’ll get a much better idea of how it works. The downside is that the unit is $499 with no drives. I’ll have to think about it, but may have to start saving pennies.

Professional conferences are a necessary evil

Posted on May 11, 2007 by Mike

I’ve always been torn on the idea of attending professional conferences. I usually lean towards not going as I figure I can get any information that I need from various forms of documentation or from well crafted searches on Google so the effort and expense are not worth it.

In practice, though, I have been glad that I attended any conference that I’ve been to. It really is school. Sure, if you just have the book, you can get the information you need, but it isn’t the same as sitting and focusing on presentations to be exposed to things you wouldn’t bother with or sometimes even think about.

This conference that I’m at now is a good example. I technically knew what I needed before arriving, but having different ideas shared will make me a better administrator.

Can the PS3 save humanity?

Posted on March 26, 2007 by Mike

Folding@Home PS3 screenshot O.k. that title is a bit over the top, though it is interesting and possible with recent developments. Stanford University has since 2000 been sponsoring a distributed processing project called Folding@Home who’s goal is “to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases.” A recent update to the firmware of the Playstation 3 added a Folding@Home client which has been optimized to take advantage of the multi-core cell processor present in the console. Since that processor was designed for extreme math performance, it was a smart idea to make use of it.

The results are impressive. When I looked this morning at the OS Stats page, the PS3 represented only 16% of the active CPUs but have produced 65% of the recent output. It takes about 63 PS3 (and their 7-8 cores) to produce a TFLOP (teraflop) of computing power compared to 1048 Windows-based PCs to produce the same results.

I look forward to seeing the long-term benefits from all of the additional power.

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