General Rambling

VMware vs. Xen vs. Microsoft

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A comment made: Yeah, sure, your costs might drop, but you really think their Linux support will be better than VMware’s support? VMWare’s support is horrible enough, and they don’t make a competing product. I’ve actually had really good experiences with VMware support. The only bad part about it has been that they are learning about their products just as we are. Take support for our EMC CLARiiON CX700s. We were having horrible I/O performance, and the solution for it, after lots of back & forth with VMware support, ended up being found by me in a pair of slides from VMworld. The compelling reason to continue using VMware VirtualCenter and ESX Server products is that in 3.0, which I …

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Self Conscious

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“The best thing I ever read on a toilet wall was at Gabe’s Oasis in Iowa City. It [read] ‘Your mom swims out to meet troop ships‘” – Neko Case, from her web site. I’ve heard from two of you now that your news readers caught my inadvertent del.icio.us bookmarking of that page with obscure sexual terms. You were wondering if I’d nuked that post. Yes. I was feeling self-conscious, but you know, I’ll make you a deal. I think stuff like that is funny, and I bookmarked it without thinking, which shows you that I’m getting used to del.icio.us as part of my life. Like, who the hell comes up with those terms? I’d love to use some of …

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Little Stuff

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I’ve been pretty burnt out lately. Lots of stuff going on and very little of me to go around. And I think I’m getting sick. When I get this way I start feeling like a worthless piece of crap because I can’t get anything done. This is what Joel Spolsky was talking about in his “Fire and Motion” post. Like he says, the trick is just getting started, on something. So I started on little stuff. I upgraded our Tasks Pro installation to version 1.6.2. The latest version will check an IMAP or POP3 mailbox. Our copy of Tasks Pro has its own VMware virtual Red Hat box so it was painless to install an IMAP server, get sendmail listening, …

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The Customer is Always Idiotic

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“Hey Bob, can you talk to a customer about upgrading his backup client?” We run Tivoli Storage Manager for a backup system, and we resell the service to customers. We are in the midst of upgrading to TSM 5.3, and we just informed all the customers that they need to be running a recent client. Recent, to us, means versions 5.2 or 5.3, which represent the last five years of TSM development. IBM doesn’t support older versions of the clients, so to ensure that we can resolve any problems that crop up we ask that people upgrade from time to time. Most of our customers just have us upgrade their clients for them as part of our contracts with them. …

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Dell Firmware Updates

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For posterity, if your Dell firmware updater keeps telling you: An Update Package is already running. Wait until it is complete before proceeding with another update. it’s /var/lock/.spsetup.

Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme

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The Strollers production of Frank McGuinness’ “Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme” opened last Thursday. Two seats shy of sold out. I remembered to look for reviews today, and I found Michael James writing about it in the Capital Times. Two comments from me: 1. Mr. James, I think you missed part two, where all the soldiers were meeting each other. 2. It’s just a little cigarette smoke, not mustard gas. For those of you not in the Madison area, Madison banned smoking in bars last year, and since then it’s been an inquisition against anybody who smokes. I like smoking cigars, so I fall in this category. Did you know that the mere sight of smoke …

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Sucking Down

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Guy Kawasaki just blogged about “Sucking Down.” My friends and I have always referred to it as the “high friends in low places” theory. The most productive relationships you can have are often with the people at the bottom of the totem pole. There are two things that I do along these lines that usually get me whatever it is I need. First, making the other person smile is killer. Even if you can’t make them smile, taking 10 seconds at the beginning of a conversation to ensure that they don’t think you’re another bozo is key. I often do it with self-deprecation. Apparently no real bozos ever admit to being a bozo, so I just claim that I suck: …

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Omea: Day One

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So I’ve spent more time playing with Omea. I love some of the details, like the setting to mark an item read once it’s been displayed for 2 seconds. I don’t know how many times I’ll errantly click something, or scroll through, and not having things marked as “read” is nice. The use of favicon.ico is nice, too — it helps me visually sort the blogs. Plus the app looks nice. Vyacheslav Lukianov from JetBrains posted a comment here yesterday, which I think is really cool. It’s now obvious to me that they’re watching to see what people think of Omea, so I thought it fair to follow up with my impressions after the first 24 hours. I was going …

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RSS Bandit vs. Omea

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My RSS feed reading has waned recently, half due to time, half due to the BS I have had to put up with in RSS Bandit. Basically, all the FeedBurner feeds get mixed up constantly, and it’s really freaking annoying. And it’s being pawned off as some problem with proxies and such, all of which I’m not subject to. It also doesn’t retry a feed when there is an error, so if I don’t check it I might not retrieve news for a while if there was a problem with a feed. A colleague of mine just switched to JetBrains Omea, and after looking at it for about a minute I grabbed it myself. I think it’s going to be …

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