General Rambling

VMware Fault Tolerance = RAID 1

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“Are you planning to use VMware Fault Tolerance when it’s released?” “Probably not,” I reply. “Why not? It looks really cool.” “Sure, if you don’t have stable hardware or a stable hosting environment. There are probably other scenarios that I haven’t thought of where it’ll help, though.” “What? No… it’ll be cool if you have an application crash or something.” “Wrong. Fault Tolerance is to VMs what RAID 1 is for data. Whatever happens on disk 0 happens on disk 1. So if you delete a bunch of files they disappear from both disks, and you still need to restore from backup. You only see benefits if one of the drives dies. Fault Tolerance keeps two VMs in sync that …

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Join This Guy

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Would you join this guy in a marketing company? Sure, English is probably his second language, but still.

…and it begins.

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I hope everybody has had a good Thanksgiving, if you’re in the U.S.A., or at least just a good weekend all around. Where I live Mother Nature didn’t waste much time getting winter under way, as captured while I was messing with my new lens. I should go find my shovel before the other 5.75″ of snow falls.

Knowing Enough

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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.

Appalachian Trail & Tennessee

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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. 🙂

Should vs. Does, again.

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Mark Callaghan over at High Availability MySQL made some comments about the wording in the MySQL documentation. All you readers of my blog will know why I find his comments interesting: MySQL documentation states that replicating from a 5.0 master to a 5.1 slave should work. This is very different from stating that it does work. That section of the manual should enter the 5.1 no-use case competition. Frankly, I hate the word “should.” To see it in vendor documentation like this is terrible, because it’s a weasel word. It puts the onus of testing and support on the end user, and gives the vendor a cop-out when it doesn’t work. “Well, we only said it should work, not that …

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No UW Band? What?!?

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It’s going to be a weird Wisconsin/Ohio State football game without the University of Wisconsin – Madison band, seeing as how they all got suspended: Leckrone suspended the band Friday night from performing in today’s home football game against Ohio State because he said the allegations were serious enough that they required immediate action… There will be no replacement act at tonight’s Badgers football game to fill the absence of the UW Marching Band. Of course, it’s the one football game a year I actually make it to. I’m not going to make any in-depth comments, except to say that the band has been rowdy and fun for decades, and if people don’t like it, well, all the members are …

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Continuous OS Releases

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Gentoo Linux Cancels Distribution: Instead, Gentoo developers said they are pushing a new model for their distribution — one that eschews the conventional release wisdom used by Red Hat, Novell, Debian and others. Instead of fixed releases, Gentoo is promoting its vision of a live, continuously updating distribution. In practice, that effort revolves around its weekly minimal images, which are then supplemented with customized installed packages. Continuous OS releases are an interesting idea. One of the annoying aspects of OSes is that every few years you have to go through a big upgrade cycle, as a vendor stops support for version X and forces you to version X+2. For my organization these upgrades haven’t been a problem because you can …

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The Matrix Creeping Towards Us

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I had a very Matrix-esque moment with my iPhone yesterday: “Hey, do you know what time sunrise is tomorrow?” “Not yet.” Still quite a ways from being able to download the know-how for flying a helicopter, though. Luckily Apple does let copious numbers of weather apps into the App Store, despite duplicating existing functionality.

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