YouTube – Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard using the Wii Remote Pretty cool. I might have to get myself a Wii Remote. The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: We’ve prepared a tutorial for eWeek hacks I hate bloggers and journalists who just lift press releases as content on their own sites. Same goes for documentation. A lot of this is going on in the virtualization community lately.
Fake Steve Jobs (Daniel Lyons) takes on Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at eWeek for lifting press releases and claiming the text as his own. I think this is an important thing to keep in mind. Plagiarism is stealing, and if bloggers want to be treated as journalists they have to adhere to the ethical standards of the community. I don’t know how many times I saw the official VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 announcement reposted this week in various forms on various blogs. It just makes me think that folks doing that sort of thing need to be careful about their attributions. I am definitely not accusing anybody of plagiarism[0], just reminding folks to be mindful that reposting other’s work, even a …
Amateur Time Hackers Play With Atomic Clocks at Home Lifehacker – Still on the fence about Windows Vista? I am not on the fence about Vista. It still sucks. I’m going to try Windows Server 2008 on my desktops in January. If it isn’t any better I’m going back to XP or switching to Macs. Good: Amazon Sends “Best Customer Service E-mail I’ve Ever Received” LOL. This is what happens when humans respond and not customer service drones. All parties won, in their own ways. (via Seth Godin) Shibboleth – Doris Salcedo – Art – New York Times Neat art, but what a bunch of whiny pansies who can’t handle an obstacle. How do these people manage to walk down …
CD-ROMs are so 1988, and we forgot about ESX 2.5 upgrade tarballs decades ago. As such, you’ll want to grab the freshly-minted “Upgrade package from ESX Server 3.0.x to ESX Server 3.5,” unzip it on a web server somewhere, and upgrade all your ESX 3.0 Servers with: esxupdate -r http://your.web.server.com/3.5.0-64607 update That’s what all the cool kids are doing, anyhow. (It also looks like a great way to fix those ESX Servers you built with the sorta-almost-released ESX 3.5 from a week ago. Not that anybody did that. Nope.)
By default the VMware RCLI virtual appliance uses DHCP to configure its Ethernet interface. If you don’t want it to use DHCP you can change it fairly simply. There are two ways to do it: 1. Put it on a DHCP-capable subnet, let it DHCP an IP, then go to that hostname with a web browser and change the network settings through the web interface. 2. Change the settings manually. To do that, log in to the RCLI appliance as root with the password you set on the first boot. Use vi to edit /etc/network/interfaces. If you are not familiar with the UNIX editor ‘vi’ you might want to take a few minutes and go through a short tutorial. A …
Things I like so far in the ESX 3.5/VC 2.5, based on the upgrade I just did to my test servers: Round-robin multipath support. NTP configuration via VirtualCenter. Virtual machine MAC address configuration via VirtualCenter. Growing disk files via VirtualCenter. Paravirtualization options, even though it’ll probably be decades before any OS I run takes advantage of it.[0] The fact that you can VMotion between ESX 3.0 and 3.5 so the upgrade process looks almost brainless.[1] The one thing that annoys me so far is the option to “Check and Upgrade VMware Tools at Power-up.” On the surface it looks cool, but on my Red Hat Enterprise Linux VMs the upgrade process leaves a non-functional network stack. At least with Windows …
If you install the VMware RCLI under Windows and are getting libxml2-related errors, log out and log back in so the environment variable changes from the install take effect. I was getting errors similar to: Can’t load ‘C:/Program Files/VMware/VMware VI Remote CLI/Perl/site/lib/auto/XML/LibXML/Common/Common.dll’ for module XML::LibXML::Common: load_file:The specified module could not be found at C:/Program Files/VMware/VMware VI Remote CLI/Perl/lib/DynaLoader.pm line 230. with corresponding dialog boxes about libxml2.dll.
Systems that collect data need a one to one mapping between data entered and its meaning. Truthfully, this is most common for data NOT entered. I’ve seen a lot of systems where a field which is not relevant is left blank. How do you know which ones were left blank intentionally and which ones were accidental? If you’re going to bother collecting data why not be as specific as possible? Use units. Number of CPUs? Did you mean sockets or cores? Amount of RAM? Disk size? Is that in MB, GB, or TB? “N/A” is a perfectly acceptable answer, too, if everybody knows what it means.
A friend of mine manages the directory services for a large academic institution. He was telling me today about a lot of the bogus information his team has to sort out. Their directory aggregates information from payroll systems, student data systems, and a few other sources. Occasionally, but more frequently than they’d like, someone substitutes words like “NONE” or “NOTPRESENT” or even a single ‘.’ for missing information. This happens often with foreign students, and until they show up for class there is no good way to get the missing data. When these people get assigned a username by my friend’s system they get none, notpresent2, rdnone, or something equally ridiculous (sometimes just a single number, like ‘4’). Eventually these …
TheMishMash.com: 9 Telltale Signs You’re Probably an A-hole Somewhat NSFW. Top 10 Craziest Star Wars Tattoos – The Force in the Flesh “One of the most common questions we’re asked is, ‘Have you ever seen any Jar Jar tattoos?’ And the answer is yes. Yes we have. And it’s by far the toughest tattoo anyone could ever get.”