The Lone Sysadmin

• YouTube – Jim Ray IPF M50 WR
  My coworker holds a world record in the bench press. Nice job Jim!
• New Terrain Layer in Google Maps
  Can’t wait until this makes it to my iPhone.
• TuneCore: 34 Stars
  Hey, go here, get 34 free songs from iTunes. Some good stuff, including the increasingly popular (and longtime favorite of mine) The Weepies.
• Fall Deer Density Map – WDNR
  Ahh yes, I didn’t shoot anything because of the low deer density. That’s it. Uh huh.

Popularity: 4% [?]

When I travel for more than a couple of days I sync my iPhone with my laptop. That way I have a backup copy of my data (photos and notes, mainly) as well as a way to freshen the music and movies a bit.

On my last trip I decided to sync my iPhone in the two hour layover I had in Denver. I had my laptop on one leg and my phone on the other. Once I’d started the transfer my phone promptly fell off my lap and pulled the USB cable out. I plugged it back in to continue but the damage was done. iTunes claimed my phone was mated to another iTunes library, and showed all the data as being the orange-colored “Other” data in the usage graph. It wouldn’t resync with the library, no matter what I told it to do.

“No problem,” I thought. “I’ll just restore the phone.”

I had never restored my iPhone on my laptop, so I didn’t have the firmware. There wasn’t free wireless, and if there had been the firmware is 160 MB, which is a lot for the sketchy connections I seem to get in airports. I ended up sleeping all the way home anyhow, but the moral of the story is:

If you sync your iPhone with your laptop make sure you have the firmware, either by downloading it or by doing a proactive restore.

If you do download the firmware you can shift-click (command-click on a Mac) the “Restore” button in iTunes to select the firmware file.

Popularity: 4% [?]

• Shocking Development: Taser Flying Saucer Drone on the Way
  “an unmanned ‘mini flying saucer’ that will be able to zap electric hell from above onto rioting crowds, malcontents and evildoers.” Sounds like a sysadmin tool to me. :-)
• Dana Milbank – Even Julia Roberts Didn’t Love Him Like That – washingtonpost.com
  I am a huge fan of Alice Peacock, and to see she played Congress… heh.
• Flooding estimates are off by 5 feet – Breaking News Updates New Orleans – Times-Picayune – NOLA.com
  Typical New Orleans… someday someone competent will take over down there, someone who knows a plus from a minus. NOT.

Popularity: 4% [?]

I love my iPhone. I really do. I just wish it had a few more features, like:

1. A “jog dial” like the old iPods.

Christopher Fahey sums this up nicely at graphpaper.com. Not that this is a democracy in any way, but consider this another vote.

2. The ability to stream to an Airport Express.

I have an Airport Express connected to my stereo. It’d be cool if I could stream to it wirelessly. Cables are so 1833.

3. The same iPod forward/pause/back controls in any orientation.

When I walk I often carry my iPhone horizontally in my hand (it switches to Cover Flow mode). I hate having to hold it vertically while I’m walking just to skip a song in a shuffle. That’s like walking and chewing gum for me, and it’s just annoying.

4. A different location for the play/pause button in Cover Flow mode.

The way I hold my iPhone while walking causes my little finger to hit the button all the time. Yeah yeah, I would like cheese with my whine.

5. The option for continuous playback of podcasts.

I listen to lots of short podcasts and it’d be nice to play them back to back without building another playlist.

6. .net, .org, and .edu as additional shortcuts if you hold .com down on the keyboard.

The precedent has been set, after all. Hold down certain letters, like ‘N’, and you get alternate letters. Why can’t we have this for .com?

7. A cache for maps and YouTube.

I don’t care so much about browser cache. I do care about map caching. I wish it would proactively grab the maps it needs to complete a trip to cut down on fetching delays later, especially since I usually program the route while I’m still on high-speed wireless. It would also be nice if it could cache some YouTube videos, since I generally show the same couple of videos to different people throughout a day.

8. The ability to sync the calendar with an HTTP iCal source.

Where I work we use the Oracle Collaboration Suite for calendaring, and a coworker wrote an iCal interface to it. Since iTunes only seems to want to work with Outlook I export my calendar as an iCal file, import it into Outlook, then sync. Every day. Ugh. I just want to point the calendar at the iCal source and know where I’m supposed to be.

9. An LED flashlight.

Since people call cell phones and PDAs “$500 flashlights” anyhow why not make the Apple logo light up as both a flash for the camera and as a flashlight?

Popularity: 5% [?]

• The Blogger’s Guide to SEO – by Aaron & Giovanna Wall : SEO Book.com
• The Yogi Berra School of Persuasive Writing | Copyblogger
  I love Yogi Berra quotes, and Copyblogger turns them into good lessons about writing.
• Getting Great Battery Life
  “Modern Li-ion batteries love to be charged often. They don’t like being fully discharged. This is completely opposite from older style batteries.” – I’m going to have to change my ways.
• How to demo software – Joel on Software
  Good advice on demoing software, including room setup (the note about the height of the ceiling is important).
• Make the business case for storage virtualization
  It is hard to justify storage virtualization when the prices for it are so high, and with VMware making it irrelevant.
• The hack of the year – Security – Technology – smh.com.au
  Yes, even with the Tor network you shouldn’t assume anything.
• Everything I Know About Presentations, I Learned in Theatre School
  “Respect the Narrative Arc. Every good story has a beginning, middle and end. The beginning promises the audience something, the middle threatens to take that promise away, and the end pays off on the promise.”
• Presentation Zen: You can learn a lot from “a child”
  “The beginner’s mind, or the child’s mind, is really just about seeing things as they are.” – I see myself losing my beginner’s mind about a lot of things, and I wonder how I can get that back.
• Disappearing Gmail messages baffle users | IDGNS | News | November 14, 2007 | By Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service
  Again, you get what you pay for. This is one of the things that scares me about massive organizational outsourcing to free services.
• How to Find and Fix 10 Real Security Threats on Your Virtual Servers – CIO.com – Business Technology Leadership
  Not really how to find or fix anything, but a list of things you should think about with regard to virtualization security.
• JkDefrag v3.29
  Finally, a decent & free defragmenter for Windows.
• Is Twitter Down?
  Heh.
• jcole’s weblog » On efficiently geo-referencing IPs with MaxMind GeoIP and MySQL GIS
• Seth’s Blog: Eye tracking rules
• An Entirely Other Day – Wide vs. Deep
  Managers must be wide, techs must be deep. Learning this is tricky. Doing it is even harder.
• Pigeon Point Lighthouse on Flickr – Photo Sharing!
  Awesome photo on the one night per year they use the original five-wick oil lamp and Fresnel lens.
• YouTube – Battle at Kruger
  A herd of water buffalo vs. a pride of lions vs. two crocodiles. Long but cool, a buffalo throws a lion into the air at some point.
• Run Your Company From The Heart « FoundRead
  My friend Chuck writing about what happened to his company when a customer of his hired all his developers away from him.
• Home Power Magazine: Solar | Wind | Hydro | Design | Build
  I am trying to figure out how I can make my home more energy efficient, and with a siding project next year I think I am going to take the opportunity to make my south-facing exterior wall a thermal storage wall.

Popularity: 5% [?]

I hope everybody had a wonderful week last week, holidays or not. I was off doing my yearly tramping around in the Wisconsin woods looking for deer[0]. And eating. It seems like I spent Wednesday through Sunday eating. Ugh.

The nice thing about sitting in the woods waiting for animals to show up is a lot of time to think. Once I’m through with the 1000 messages in my INBOX and voice mail[1] I have a whole bunch of new stuff to write about. It is sort of strange to think about computers when you’re in the middle of a national forest, but nature has long been a muse for artists, philosophers, and soldiers. Why can’t it do the same for an IT guy? :-)

[0] Don’t worry, they’re safe with me around.

[1] A lot of it is automated mail, but despite that if you emailed me or called me I’ll get back to you in the next three days.

Popularity: 6% [?]

I just submitted a quote to a client for some work they want done. They didn’t like the numbers, though. Too high. Now they’re talking about having someone in-house do the work “because it’s free.”

Staff time isn’t free. It just might look free, depending on where you sit. If a different budget pays the salaries it’s easy to forget that staff have an hourly cost just like a consultant. Those costs are covered already, though, so it isn’t an additional expense, and therefore “free.” I might be able to complete something in two hours where in-house staff would take twenty, but I’m an additional expense.

*sigh*

Popularity: 4% [?]

• Wii Guitar Hero III Outputting Mono Sound | Game | Life from Wired.com
  Sounds like someone needs a new test in their test suite.

Popularity: 6% [?]