General Rambling

Immortals

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It’s an interesting thing, this life. You’re born, you live, you die. And along the way there are certain epochs, milestones, that mark the journey. Early on you don’t remember these things, like learning to walk, or, just as crucial, going to the bathroom on your own. Sometimes you do remember them, like your first kiss, or holding your own offspring for the first time. Sometimes the events are obvious milestones, sometimes it takes years before you realize they were signs along the road. Sometimes these milestones are like the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden, though. As much as you know they’re a part of life you’d like to put them back, take a do-over, and go back …

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iPad vs. Netbook: Netbook FTW

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I’m glad to see the iPad is announced. It looks like an interesting device, not quite a notebook, not quite an iPhone. I, however, don’t see how it’s anything beyond a portal to give Apple more money. Please, if you see I’ve made an error here let me know in the comments. Thank you! 1. AT&T. Seriously, a “breakthrough” deal with AT&T is like being the fastest reader in remedial reading class. You’re still in remedial reading class. 2. No Flash. It’s astonishing how much stuff I watch in Flash on my laptop, and it being missing on this device is going to be a big hole. Lots of stuff is in YouTube, but not everything, and HTML5 isn’t going …

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Playing Mastermind With My RAM

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I have a Dell PowerEdge R610 in one of my VMware vSphere clusters that has been reporting memory errors. In fact, the machine wouldn’t boot, and the front panel suggested I reseat all the RAM. Okay… 0. Reseat all the RAM. Didn’t work, as expected. 1. Pull all twelve DIMMs out, put four back in. That worked, machine comes up. 2. Put four more DIMMs back. That worked, machine comes up. 3. Put last four DIMMs in. Machine doesn’t boot, same original error. 4. Pull last set of DIMMs out. Boot machine. Notice that BIOS is really old. Upgrade BIOS, thinking this is some stupid BIOS bug. Machine continues to boot. 5. Put last four DIMMs back in. New BIOS …

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Rain Forecasted, From The Cloud, On Your Desk

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“I’m filling out a survey. Can you tell me if we have a cloud?” “Yes, we do,” I reply. “We do?” “Absolutely.” “Really?” “Yeah, I’d know — I built it.” “You built it? No, I think the survey wants to know if we have a real cloud.” Well, thanks a lot. “We do have a real cloud, and it’s the same one I’m talking about. In fact, we have two clouds, in two different locations. They’d probably be best described as ‘private clouds.’” “Well, there isn’t an option for private clouds, so I’ll just say no.” ARGGGH. Ten minutes pass… “Hey, I’ve got another question. Do we use virtualization software?”

Y2K10, DECade, Blue Moons

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Dear people using the term “Y2K10,” Please realize it’s actually one character longer and significantly more confusing than just typing “2010.” Yes, yes, I know it’s not nearly as hip and cool, but I’m sure you will survive. You may even come to appreciate using these commonly-understood terms when you notice an increase in your readership, due to suddenly being understandable. Also, while we’re talking about years, please be aware that a new decade started on 1/1/2010, despite what you might have heard from people who don’t regularly remember that some numbering starts at zero. We may not have wanted, or remembered, them to be, but years 2000 to 2009 were actually ten (10) distinct years. Hence the ‘dec’ part …

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GoDaddy, SSL, and $13

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A GoDaddy representative left a comment on the post about ipsCA, saying: GoDaddy.com is happy to help ipsCA customers that have found themselves in a jam. For a limited time, our Standard SSLs are $12.99 with code sslqyh1w. Call 480-505-8877 or order online at http://bit.ly/91M3NV I’m not usually the kind of person to parrot an ad, especially one left on my site, but it’s actually a decent deal if you want a new, real SSL cert. Admittedly it’s not for their advanced certificates, but if you have a couple of ipsCA certs to replace it might work out just fine. Personally, I’ve been quite happy with GoDaddy as a domain registrar.

ipsCA: Getting What You Pay For

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So the SSL certification authority (CA) ipsCA is frantically sending out email because their root CA certificate will expire on 12/29/2009, and every customer of theirs needs to get a new certificate. This is a problem for my organization, because, being an educational institution we were able to get no-cost[0] SSL certs from them. Because they were no-cost we have a lot of these certificates for test & development systems, and are now scrambling to find what will break on December 29th. Once we find all the certificates there’s another complicating factor. We could just renew the certificates again, but the new ipsCA root certificate is not shipping as part of any browsers except Internet Explorer 8 (the next Firefox …

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It Belongs To Everybody

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You think that server in our data center is yours? The CIO paid for it. The logistics & purchasing team ordered it. The data center team installed it. The system administration team configured it and patch it. You installed the application on it. The monitoring guys watch it. The security team scans it. I think it’s safe to say it belongs to the whole organization, not you.

Student Edition of Vectorworks

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If you’re a student, or faculty/staff at an educational institution, and have need for CAD software you might check to see if you’re eligible for a free copy of Nemetschek Vectorworks. I don’t know much about it yet, but I’m hoping to use it for some of the lighting designs I do. Seems pretty powerful, in the 20 minutes I’ve been using it, and I know a number of people who use it for a lot of things.

Recover iPod & iPhone Serial Numbers from iTunes

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If you need your iPod or iPhone serial numbers, but haven’t written them down, iTunes keeps a list of devices it’s seen in a file called iPodDevices.xml. I found mine in: C:UsersmyusernameAppDataLocalApple ComputeriTunes I’m running Windows 7 and iTunes 9.0.2, so different versions might have different results. At the very least you can search your computer for iPodDevices.xml. Good luck!

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