Does anybody else think we’re living in Atlas Shrugged? When can I get bailed out? I’ve made several bad decisions in my life and I’d like to be compensated for them. And by “compensated” I mean “massively compensated, like dump trucks full of cash.” After all, why should I be responsible for my own actions and decisions? If I were Honda or Toyota I’d be getting my lawyers ready to sue a lot of people.
jwz – Apple 0wns j00 This HDCP crap on laptops sucks. Nice job, Apple, making it impossible to play video on nearly every projector on Earth. Foreclosure | Stuck In Customs Great shot. The Risks Digest Volume 25: Issue 44 "In the November 2008 issue of *BoatU.S.* magazine, there's a reference to a new GPS satellite being switched on. It uses the identifier "PRN 32", which causes some […] Northstar GPS units to become confused and shut down." This smells like a fixed-sized, 32-element array. Dear programmers, stop doing that.
Update: Symantec has altered their support documentation so that VMotion isn’t unsupported anymore. That’s a good move. As you read the rest of this post keep that in mind. I second the vinternals commentary on Symantec. The security software vendor joins the ranks of the clueless with their wonderful support document: Question/Issue: Is ESX server VMotion supported with SAV and SEP? Solution: Symantec does not support ESX server VMotion at this time. Vendors are shameless. They charge you a ton for support, then they’ll do whatever they can to point the finger at somebody else when you call. It’s one thing to put a disclaimer in for performance issues. Virtualization sometimes exposes weird performance issues, and if it’s a performance …
ATT-ab9791303777839bd9f2b524bc8e98b8.jpg – (37signals) "All I want in life sometimes is for AT&T to say, 'Sarah, you have accumulated so many unused minutes and texts that your next bill is free, since we realize ‘rollover’ means nothing to you. Have a nice day.' Me, too. My phone bill looks surprisingly like hers. I hate talking on the phone. jwz – parking haiku LOL. Fire hydrant – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia "Class AA hydrants (>1500gpm) should have their nozzle caps and bonnet colored light blue." I knew the new paint on the hydrant outside my house was related to flow, but I didn't realize how much. 1500 GPM is a lot. Modeling Compound | Play-Doh | Walgreens "Molded results vary depending on …
Give Up and Use Tables Nice. I use tables for the limited web design I still do. CSS is nice in a lot of ways but simple is good, and tables are certainly simple.
It continues to amaze me how many system administrators don’t use the layers of abstraction available to them, via tools like DNS, or even just naming a service. Example #1: a web site with a blog, where the blog is at /wordpress instead of /blog. What happens in five years when you have 50,000 readers and want to switch to another software package? Do you really want to maintain clumsy redirects from /wordpress/feed/ for the rest of your natural life? Don’t name your service after the software brand name or manufacturer, name it after what the service is. It’s a blog, not WordPress. It’s the payroll system, not Kronos. Example #2: naming a server “payroll.company.com” because it runs the payroll …
Seth Godin has an interesting anecdote in his post yesterday: [Interesting side alley: I was talking to a friend yesterday and encouraged her to speak at an upcoming conference. She said, “No way. I don’t know enough.” I explained that volunteering to speak was the best way to be sure that she’d end up knowing enough by the time she was through.] I agree completely — the best way to learn something is to teach it. Not only does it force you to be prepared, but the questions you’ll get from the audience are often more enlightening than anything you’d ever read.
Playing catch-up, and some shameless self-promotion: if you didn’t catch Bridget Botelho’s article on live VM migration between Intel and AMD, you should. Plus, she quoted me quite a bit. Cool! Because AMD was late to release its quad-core processor, Barcelona, Intel has dominated the hardware market with their Xeon quad-core CPUs. “As such, AMD basically locked themselves out of the virtualization market, because there wasn’t any cross-compatibility, and everybody who built a virtual environment did so with Intel CPUs,” Plankers said. I’ve never been a big fan of AMD hardware because every time I try using it I’ve been bitten by some problem. Large page table support was hosed on the Athlons I had, making Linux installs hard. I …
There are several mentions of this out in the blogosphere, plus it was talked about openly at VMworld by VMware staff in presentations and labs. It’s worth mentioning again because people don’t seem to be catching on: Future versions of VMware ESX/ESXi will only run on 64-bit-capable CPUs. You will still be able to run 32-bit guest OSes, but the ESX console OS will only work on CPUs capable of Intel VT & EM64T. This is a big deal for two reasons: 1. Dell doesn’t let you enable VT on anything but the PowerEdge 6850, and all ninth-generation servers (x9xx) and beyond. There are a lot of Dell PowerEdge 1850/2850s out there that will still be in use over the …
For those of you wondering where I’ve been, well, I’ve been taking a lot of vacation lately. It’s been great to get out of the office for a few weeks. I spent some time in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, five days of hiking on the Appalachian Trail, and some time in middle Tennessee and Nashville visiting Jack Daniels, seeing the Titans/Packer game, and visiting historic Civil War sites like Franklin, TN. Some of my photos are below for you folks to enjoy while I get my act together here. 🙂