there and back again

Digitizing Film: Review

2010-11-02T13:34:00.004-05:00

This post is the second in a series of posts regarding using film scanning services, namely digmypics.com, for converting my old 35mm film negatives to digital prints.

Three business days after my negatives arrived, I received notice that the images were available for review. The review process was straightforward. I was presented with a page showing the 24 pictures I had submitted. Each could be reviewed using a magnifying glass feature and then, if desired, rejected from the final order. I removed 5 images from the set that were not relevant to the pictures that I wanted to keep and went ahead and placed the order. Digmypics will refund up to 10% of the price for pictures removed this way. After the credit was applied and the order paid, I was also given the option to upload my pictures to Picassa which I did. The upload finished in less time than it's taken me to write this post. Here is an example of one of the images scanned:

I am very pleased with the quality of the scan given what I can see from this JPG conversion. The raw TIFF file should give even more detail and be great to make digital prints from. I'll post some additional updates after I receive the full resolution TIFF files and have a chance to look at them in detail.

Digitizing Film: The beginning

2010-10-28T14:28:00.007-05:00

Before we made the switch to a digital camera, our household was an avid film user. And not the point and shoot variety, but we had a decent Canon Rebel 35mm and took a lot of pictures. We were very well known at our local development places after a while. I recall that we were very excited when the local Sam's Club began offering photo CDs of our memories. As I look back on them now, though, those digital versions of our film shots are woefully inadequate compared to what we would generate when we upgraded to the Canon Digital Rebel XT or even our now, newly purchased Rebel XTi. The digital versions were small and grainy, nothing like what I remember the prints looking like. On top of this, I had recently began thinking that it would be nice to have great digital copies of our wedding photos which are spectacular in our album. We were lucky enough to get the film negatives from our photographer and this seemed a great way to "back up" and preserve our photos. It didn't take long to put those two together and wonder, "How do photo development places handle digital copies of film now?"

Film is going bye-bye quickly and it didn't take long to realize that, even now, your one hour photo place still does not provide high resolution scans of film developing. Some online searching revealed a number of sites that provide this service with formats ranging from 7 megapixels and higher for a relatively reasonable price. In this series of posts, I will give a running commentary on my experiences in scanning our film negatives into digital prints.

To start, I chose digmypics.com as the first test for scanning. They are US based (some sites are overseas), had pricing comparable to other competitors, and were fairly well reviewed online. I went through all my film negatives, divided them up into groups including our wedding photos, important events (graduation, births, etc), and the rest. From the important events, I picked one set of 24 photos that included a few of our kids but mostly some shots of the opening of my gradeschool time capsule to use as an initial run. I wanted to see what kind of quality I would get from the service before sending them the really important pictures.

The online ordering process was straightforward as was arranging for my negatives to be send. I put them in a standard mailing envelope with some padding and some cardboard to prevent folding during transit. I mailed these on Monday. As today, Thursday, I have received the initial email that they have received my negatives and I will be monitoring the scanning process and posting updates as the pictures are made available

Archos 32 first impressions

2010-09-17T08:21:00.004-05:00

My son started saving his money during the summer after setting his sights on an iPod Touch. While we went through chore lists, used video game sales, and near mint Pokemon cards, I introduced him to an alternative I had come across, the Archos 32. He was interested mostly in the reduced price and as long as it had some games, he was in. Yesterday we received the unit and he couldn't wait to turn it on.

My impression of the device are overall positive. It is smaller than I thought being 3.2 inches compared to the 4.4 of an iPod touch. It seemed perfectly sized though for my son's smaller hands. The screen was responsive without having to do much double tapping or pushing harder to illicit a response. I did notice a bit of font "jagginess" when scrolling or even reading the screen. Maybe this is normal for Android devices, but that remains to be seen. The device itself was very responsive and seemed to have plenty of horsepower to do what was needed.

The included racing game demonstration worked wonderfully with sharp, snappy graphics and play and great use of the accelerometer. What was a disappointment is the lack of the Google Marketplace. The included Appslib is fine and has a selection of programs to choose from but none seem near the polish of what is now appearing in the marketplace. I had no problem sideloading some apps, though including the SlideME alternative marketplace. Unfortunately, Angry Birds Lite failed to run (it would install and load but crash back to the desktop) which I thought would be a great test of the device. It seems my first order of business is going to be to figure out how to get the Google Marketplace to install like had been done on other versions of Archos devices.

The basic functions worked as expected with WiFi being easy to set up. I was able to easily synchronize his iTunes music playlist with the device using doubletwist. Music and video playback worked fine and the camera seemed to be acceptable. We should have more time to play with the multimedia this weekend as he's already asking about loading videos on it from our home library. It would have been nice if the device had included a MicroSD slot for additional expansion.

Overall, he is very pleased with it upon inital inspection. I'm happy with the purchase as well, but from a techie standpoint, the app selection and loading process is going to be a pain for the forseeable future unless the alternative app marketplaces start to show the same selection we see, but can't access, in the Google Marketplace.

I love it when a plan comes together

2010-06-15T08:49:00.003-05:00

Part of my plan for 2010 was to get more organized, both at work and in my personal life. We all have things we should be doing but have put aside for one reason or another. In my case, it's usually just laziness or a lack of motivation. Recently, I took the time to document the wiring of our server rack, something I had been meaning to do for a long time. As part of this, I was able to then go through the Netapp vSphere storage best practices and identify a few places where I hadn't implemented certain features, most notably, iSCSI multipathing. This came just after we had gone through Netapp upgrades to enable MPHA (multi-path high availability) on our FiberChannel connections.

Following this wonderful blog post on implementing iSCSI multipathing in vSphere and the best practices guide, I turned our single path failover NIC iSCSI connection into a multi-path round-robin load balanced one. You can see from the graph above when it was activated and the two NICs began to work in harmony. Since we currently only have one iSCSI LUN, the benefits are not great, but I will be adding a second one later today which should start to show the benefits of the configuration.

iTunes Home Sharing disaster (and the fix)

2010-05-10T08:40:00.003-05:00

My son got his first iPod this weekend. It was his opening line: "Hi. I got an iPod." I had loaded it with some songs synced to my iTunes and he was quite pleased with the entire thing, even enjoying the mini games that came with. I started our evening with the simple thought of installing iTunes, plugging in his iPod and using Home Sharing to sync music between our computers. So much for simple...

The iTunes installation worked well and connecting the iPod resulting it the slightly aggravating "You have to erase this iPod" message. After doing so, I enabled Home Sharing with my iTunes account only to find it didn't see any of our shared computers. Numerous google searches directed me to the Apple technote on troubleshooting Home Sharing which is surprisingly sparse on actual troubleshooting advice. When none of that worked, I struggled with authorizing, enabled, disabling, and trying to make sure all the computers could see each other. What I discovered then is that my two other computers could see this new installation just fine while the new installation knew nothing about the originals. Very strange indeed.

I also noted that the two ports required to be open by the Apple technote were owned by different processes. iTunes itself was using the 3689 port while the mDNSResponder was using the 5353 port. mDNSResponder is part of Bonjour, which is Apple's UPnP like service for discovering network services. This led me to recall that I had once had issues using Bonjour to connect to my shared printer from my Airport Express on this same computer. After further reading, I downloaded a slightly older version of Bonjour and uninstalled then reinstalled Bonjour. Lo and behold, it worked! iTunes was now seeing both computers and the Bonjour Printer Wizard also was now discovering the printer it could not find before.

So, if you're struggling with iTunes not seeing your Home Sharing computers in one or both directions, check your firewall settings, then your authorized accounts, but then consider installing an earlier version of Bonjour and see if that fixes your issues.

Spam? What spam?

2010-04-28T19:29:00.004-05:00

Today I was writing up what I hope will be a semi-regular email to the users of the company I work for detailing some new developments we had completed in the IT department. I wanted to include a little interesting statistic at the end so I logged into our Postini account to see how much mail we were processing monthly and how much spam we were blocking. No big surprise, we were running at about 80% of our inbound mail being blocked as spam. This is actually below some of the statistics showing as much as 95% of all email being blocked. The impressive statistic was that one mailbox accounted for 25% of all of our email while still having 93% of its mail blocked.

All of this made me think about the fact that I pretty much never see a spam message reach my inbox on Gmail or my work account as a result of these services. Google does it for me for free. For as easy as it is to block and as much spam as is being sent, how is it even profitable these days to send spam? There must be a significant number of people still, to this day, not using a high quality spam fighting service. By the way, if you happen to be in the market for one, head over to Purity Networks and take them up on their free user offer. This is a great alternative to services like Postini for your business.

Along these lines, I still cringe when I see people change their email because they changed ISPs. Since the advent of Gmail and the like, why does anyone continue to use substandard email or change their email more than once making a move to an ISP independent service? Google apps has even made it beyond simple to set up your own custom domain riding on their systems. Maybe it is just a lack of knowledge that keeps people tied to their ISP email. What do you think?

Enjoying a spring day

2010-04-27T09:02:00.001-05:00

Enjoying a spring day, originally uploaded by kkuphal.

With spring in the air, here's a little photographic interlude to brighten your day.

Wirelessly enable your Samsung HDTV or Bluray player for cheap

2010-04-26T12:00:00.006-05:00

So a little while ago, woot.com had their deal of the day as this great Bluray player that also handles Netflix, Blockbuster, Pandora, and Youtube. Even though I haven't upgraded to an HDTV yet, it seemed better to spend the money on this rather than a regular DVD player since mine was acting up. Once it arrived, I realized I had to connect it to the network in order to test out the Netflix service and compare it to my Roku and Wii Netflix experiences. I noticed the port on the back labelled Wireless Adapter.

I just happen to have a Wireless USB adapter upstairs connected to my infrequently used Dell Studio 19 mounted on the wall in front of my elliptical trainer. I grabbed it from the back, plugged it in, and saw it immediately prompt for the wireless network to connnect to. After configuring it and testing the service, I ordered a replacement stick (different brand) and waited for it to arrive. Well, it did, and as soon as I plugged it into the player, it did nothing. Plugging it in to the Studio revealed that it work (with drivers) but still nothing on the player.

After doing a little research, I found that Samsung only supports/recommends/offers their own brand of wireless USB adapter for their Bluray players and televisions.

So how did my USB stick work?

Turns out, the USB adapter that I have, which is an Encore ENUWI-N must have the identical chipset to the much more expensive Samsung branded adapter that is for sale at Amazon, etc. Now, I also believe there is an ENUWI-N3 adapter for sale that may not have the same chipset based on what I've been able to find online. If you're looking to get a wireless USB adapter for your Samsung device, get yourself an ENUWI-N and save a little money.

For you techies, it is likely that this device is based on the RT2870 chipset so you may be able to find other devices with the same chipset that work just as well.

Backup Exec vs. the NDMP agent

2009-04-27T10:44:00.004-05:00

Once again I find myself slapping my forehead over the behavior of Backup Exec. In this episode, we find our intrepid administrator transitioning his NetApp Filer backups from traditional backups of CIFS shares to NDMP backup to a tape library attached directly to the filer. All appears well as the tape library is registered and shows up properly in the Backup Exec devices screen.

Flash forward to the weekend. All backups of the CIFS shares using non-NDMP methods fail. No NDMP backups have been configured. What could be the problem?

The problem appears to be that the Backup Exec agent and the NDMP agent share a port. Probably something within the bowels of the Backup Exec agent that it really is the bastard spawn of NDMP. However, what this means is that once you turn on NDMP on your NetApp filer, you can no longer do normal backups of CIFS shares from that filer!

It's just incredible to me that time and time again, I come across absolutely insane things that Backup Exec does. Why in the world would turning on NDMP on a filer *have* to require that Backup Exec now refuses to talk to the filer except via NDMP. Obviously this is some bug (one can hope) but upgrading to 12.5 from 11d isn't on my roadmap right now as that opens an entirely new can of worms.

Well, NDMP is now off until my new library license arrives along with my new stock of LTO4 tapes. Apparently it's all or nothing for NDMP and the filer.

Cubs, Cats, and the Friendly Confines

2009-04-22T10:31:00.005-05:00

It almost goes without saying that your first visit to Wrigley Field in a skybox will be a memorable one. The sense of prestige as you are granted access to the upper hallway. The heated accommodations on a cold night. The seemingly endless supply of food. The kind attentiveness of the staff as they take care of you, very much unlike most other ballpark experiences.

But no one really expects that you'll see a cat being herded across the field by a member of security.

It was almost a little disappointing because the cat, in a very un-cat-like way, promptly marched across the outfield and was escorted from the playing field. I was really hoping for a chase more akin to a drunken fan streaking and dodging security. Luckily the Cubs provided enough excitement to last the evening.

I couldn't have asked for a better night. The rain gave way to just a cold April evening that start with being able to go on the field and take some pictures and ended with a Cubs win. All in all, not a bad way to spend a Tuesday night.

Published my first photograph today

2009-03-06T15:11:00.002-06:00

Indoor fireworks
Originally uploaded by oblik

Well, today is a banner day. This morning I received an email via Flickr from StrictlyFX asking if they could use a picture I took at a Chicago Wolves game on their website. They provide the pyrotechnics for the wolves.

I released the photo to them and it's now on their website showcasing their work. You can see it on their sports page by clicking the photos in the bottom right corner (click on the eyes, that's mine). It is photo number 6.

Pretty exciting for a total amateur like me.

2008 McDonald's Kids Triathlon

2008-08-28T13:40:00.001-05:00

Here's the video we took of Alex at the Kids Triathlon this past weekend. Be sure to click the link on the page to view in high quality.

What a day this has been

2008-08-24T00:51:00.002-05:00

Triathlon Mosaic
Originally uploaded by oblik

Today is one of the days that will forever stand out in my memory.

Three years ago, we were "graduating" my son, Alex, from his physical and occupational therapy, just prior to entering Kindergarten, for some developmental issues he had centering around sensory integration dysfunction and the effects it had on his motor skills.

Today, we stood by and cheered as he completed the 2008 Kids Triathlon in Chicago. These two days could not be more stark in their contrast or uplifting in the pride that I felt for Alex today.

This picture is just a snapshot of our day. You can see more in this slideshow

Today was a good day

The key to the cache

2008-08-17T16:13:00.002-05:00

The key to the cache
Originally uploaded by oblik

This weekend I took the kids on a geocaching expedition to a local park. It is actually only about 1/4 mile from our house and we walk there with the kids often. I had no idea such a cache existed so close.

For those unfamiliar, geocaching is just the "sport" of finding hidden caches or objects marked online with their GPS coordinates. This seems quite popular by the number of caches in my area as well as their frequency of discovery.

This particular cache took us almost an hour of total time to get to, find, and return from. It was well hidden (rated 1.5 of 5 on a difficulty level). My GPS isn't the greatest so perhaps its accuracy hindered us a bit but it took some searching in the trees to eventually discover the location.

In this case, the clue had told us not to yank on the cache but to find the key (pictured above). The cache was actually attached to a wire held taut by this key. Once released, the cache was easy to dislodge. We wrote our names on the enclosed slip of paper and put it back for others to find.

I'm planning another expedition this weekend for a second local cache that appears to have a "travel bug" in it that is uniquely coded and can be recorded on the website as it travels around the world. I'm excited to find it and possibly put it into another cache 30 miles away close to my workplace.

When backups aren't really backups

2008-08-14T11:49:00.005-05:00

When is your backup not a backup? Apparently when you use BackupExec to back up data replicated using DFS-R.

My latest conundrum is that I have data that was replicated to a backup server using DFS-R, Microsoft's replication technology that comes as part of Windows Server 2003. DFS-R isn't the key component to this story, just that the data was part of a DFS tree and being replicated for backups. DFS is another Microsoft technology used to make mapping drives easier in an enterprise. In either case, these are fairly common things to find in a Windows shop.

Enter BackupExec. Since their 10d product (around hotfix 31) and continuing with their 11d and 12d disk backup products, any DFS data has to be backed up using a third Microsoft technology, Volume Shadow Services. This feature simply allows files and applications to be "snapshotted" or backed up while "hot", or during normal operations without impacting the live data. It is very useful. Well, we used it and backed up our data this way as it was required.

Only we had issues with the DFS replication and decided to transition to other methods to copy our file server local to the backup server. In that process we removed the DFS-R configuration, as expected, but now I need to restore some data from those previous backups only, I can't.

Huh?

Apparently BackupExec requires that you restore shadow copied DFS data to the exact same replication group it originally came from.

Huh?

So the scenario is that if you're using DFS and BackupExec you can never, ever...ever change your DFS replication groups because they are needed for restorations, even 2, 3, say 5 years down the line. And you know what their recommended fix is?

Restore your entire domain (user accounts, DFS configuration, email, whatever) back to before the change and then restore the data.

Huh?

So the recommended recovery option for old DFSR data (let's say...a spreadsheet) is to restore my entire company domain back in time?

Unbelievable

Needless to say, I'm opening a support ticket with Symantec but I'm not expecting much in the way of results. Meanwhile, I'm going to see if Arcserve can import my tape catalogs and restore my data to something less drastic than a previous version of my entire domain. If that fails, it looks like we're going to be building a time machine in a set of servers just to have them around to do restores.

Huh?

BTW, the general recommendation in the community is either back up the files through the back door using a file share, avoiding the shadow copy service, or turn off DFS replication during the backup so BackupExec doesn't think it is DFS data anymore.

Huh?

Update: After a somewhat heated discussion with Symantec on this issue, their senior technician had suggested we try running the restore with all DFS services turned off. I wasn't expecting much from this suggestion but sure enough, the restore was successful.

Now if only that had been mentioned in the technote. And the solution in the technote was the initial response from tech support and not until I complained excessively about this did they try to provide another workaround. Good thing I did, or else I still think I'd be left scratching my head over this "feature".

When good blogging goes bad...

2008-08-06T11:53:00.003-05:00

The Senior Director of Marketing at Citrix for XenServer, Roger Klorese recently posted on his blog taking fire at competitor VMware for their hypervisor not running in 32MB of memory as claimed only VMware doesn't make that claim. The problem then shifts to how big a hole Roger can dig himself while casting a harsh light on his company.

read more | digg story

This is the kind of thing in this world of "Web 2.0" that really blows me away. Here you have someone who is supposed to be a face to the world for a software product. In one post, he manages to cast a shadow on the product he is in fact trying to market by not being able to let go of an argument. Instead of admitting a misunderstanding of the facts, he continues on for comment after comment trying to defend his position to the death.

The fact of the matter is, I don't know anyone technical who understands that VMware ESX 3i operates in 32MB of memory. The entire idea is ludicrous and then to attempt to discredit VMware for some claims that it hasn't made is even more so. It may not be the biggest feature of the product but it was noteworthy at the time that they removed a large chunk of the OS in order to make it installable in more places and remove potential security holes that existed in the products included in the Linux client.

Keep going Roger, you'll hit China soon.

In the presence of history

2008-07-31T13:25:00.002-05:00

Sandberg
Originally uploaded by oblik

Just a quick note with this picture that I took this week. Pictured is Ryne Sandberg of Cubs fame back in the friendly confines of Wrigley FIeld. This time he was coaching third base for the Peoria Chiefs, the Single-A ball club associated with the Chicago Cubs.

This was certainly a historic night that I was excited to be a part of. The only real down to the evening was that we were all ready and lined up behind the center field wall for a rare opportunity to run the bases at Wrigley when the heavens opened and the rains came down suspending the game with a 6-6 tie. What a missed opportunity.

But the kids had fun as evidenced here and I hope it is something they can look back on and say "We were there"

Hot under the collar

2008-07-30T11:33:00.004-05:00

It all started a week or so ago when I was minding my own business watching TV and my wife and I heard a sharp bang in the room. Since our daughter's room is directly above the living room, we thought she may have fallen out of bed but no blood curdling screams followed. I bravely went up to investigate anyway but found nothing amiss. Chalking it up to "something", we returned to our show.

Cut to this week

My MythTV system has been acting very strange lately. I had recently taken the plunge and upgraded the system to the latest development code while my wife was out of town for a week. This all seemed to go well with minor issues but lately things had been getting out of hand. Major studdering during HD shows, even lockups while the kids watched cartoons. Very unusual. The system had always run hot so I blew the dust out of the heatsink (pictured above). Still it got worse. So I did some reading on the proper way to apply thermal paste to find that it does
not involve spreading it on like butter. So, figuring that this was a heat issue, I ordered some new Antec Arctic Silver and waited.

Cut to last night

I opened up the box to reseat the heatsink and CPU and what do I find?

The bracket that holds the heatsink on the CPU was broken off and the heatsink was barely even sitting on the CPU.

Remember that bang?

Hmmm....

A little paste (properly applied) and now the CPU appears cool as a cucumber. Of course, I had to scavenge pieces from my son's computer to fix this promptly so a quick trip to eBay and a new plastic bracket is on the way to the house. I'm sure he'll understand...

Mr. Flamingo, sir

2008-06-27T11:28:00.001-05:00

Fancy Flamingo
Originally uploaded by oblik

Our church youth mission trip came up with an interesting fundraiser idea where they land a flock of flamingos in your yard. They "sell" various levels of insurance to either ensure they leave quickly or perhaps don't land at all. Once landed, you "buy" cleanup and direct the flock to another member of the congregation. Since my wife is staff, we were unable to purchase insurance and last night they landed. I think this guy is their leader.

I (heart) Virtualization

2008-06-25T00:20:00.002-05:00

I use it everyday in my job and it provides a wealth of opportunities for our business, but tonight I found one more reason to love it at home. After my last project of removing the hard disk from my MythTV frontend, I still have an issue of migrating my backend system to CentOS. A blind upgrade is a scary prospect on a fully working system so I'm loathe to just stick the disk in and see what happens.

Enter VirtualBox

The free virtualization software from Sun. In no time at all I had installed that old noisy 10GB hard disk into an external USB case, attached it to my PC, and allocated the drive to the virtual machine and booted to the CentOS installation DVD. With this I can test an upgrade from Fedora Core 6 to CentOS 5 on a system that is reasonably similar to my backend and see if there are any major issues. If something goes horribly wrong, no harm done and none of this testing required any hardware on my part other than the drive itself.

I'll report back later on how the upgrade goes...

Family Camping

2008-06-23T00:22:00.002-05:00

Family Camping [P]
Originally uploaded by oblik

Had a great time camping this weekend. It was nice to get away with friends and simply relax. God blessed us with rain only in the wee hours of the morning despite the weather reports predicting otherwise. I was also glad to get out with the camera and snapped a couple nice pictures (see more at the Flickr link on the right) including this 10 second exposure that I tweaked a bit from the RAW shot before uploading.

Well, that was easy...

2008-06-20T10:03:00.003-05:00

I finished my "quiet the living room" project. It was actually alot easier than I expected. As I noted before, my goal was to remove the somewhat noisy hard disk from my home theater PC and replace it with a silent compact flash card. I ended up choosing the Ridata 8GB 233x CF card as my drive. It seemed to get good reviews and I was impressed that the company took the time to respond to people's problems on the newegg.com website.

Once I got the drive, I was pleased to find that my card reader that I had installed in the machine that used a USB connection was supported quite well as a boot device. I had also decided to change from Fedora Core to CentOS as my operating system. This was done mostly because Fedora is a quickly moving target of releases and updates while CentOS goes through less transformations. Since I don't update the OS of the PC often, this fit better in my plans. Other than that, they are nearly identical, having both stemmed from the venerable RedHat distribution.

Installing the OS was simple and I was again pleased to find that the 233x CF card performed nearly as well as my aging 10GB hard disk. With the OS installed, getting the drivers and applications reinstalled was simple (I've done it so many times now it's old hat). We watched two nights of So You Think You Can Dance in HD on it now, and haven't had any problems. The only question now is whether I can turn down the CPU fan any to reduce that noise. Maybe with less heat in the case from the drive that might work.

All in all, not a bad $40 upgrade. The only issue is that sometimes on boot, the drive isn't recognized or has some kind of error. I think this is due to the aforementioned USB reader not being initialized quick enough during the boot. I will probably end up buying a CF to IDE adapter so that the flash drive appears like a normal hard disk to the OS. This should eliminate that issue or at least remove that as a possibility and point me towards other possible causes.

Things I'm working on

2008-06-10T08:59:00.003-05:00

It seems in my tech life that I always have some little project I'm working on. My last was a Linux router/firewall/proxy server to use to manage the Internet access at home for the kids. It seemed to work rather well except for one day it freaked out and just quit connecting to my AT&T DSL. Ultimately, AT&T provides a decent set of parental control software that lets me manage not only websites but instant messaging contacts that ended being a better system for me than the Squid access lists. So much for the Linux router project. The hardware now sits in the basement waiting for a new lease on life.

So now I'm searching for my next project.

I have this long standing idea of making a digital picture frame out of an old laptop. The idea lingers but my motivation fades. So instead, I've decided to convert my MythTV (read: homebuilt Tivo) system attached to our TV to boot from a flash drive. I've become obsessed lately with the noise coming from the unit so I'm looking to drop the hard drive from it and boot from the silent flash memory.

We'll see how that goes as the memory should arrive later this week...

Breaking up with Google App Engine

2008-04-26T01:13:00.003-05:00

Sorry Google. It's you, not me.

Perhaps I'm not the target developer for Google App Engine but it seemed like it. I run hsxworld.com, a little community site built around the Hollywood Stock Exchange Game. It pretty much runs itself on a webhost with a database but lately my backend software, PHPnuke, is aging.

Along comes Google, with their new fangled App Engine that seems a perfect fit. Dump the stock data plus other stuff into it, build a few functions to return some data, and I have a nice scalable engine to host the data on. I even had some fun learning Python for the first time as well as exploring some AJAX. Even better, I could even design it so that other community sites could grab the data AJAX style and maybe give a little back.

What I found quickly was that the BigTable database engine behind it was either not well suited to what I was doing or I was doing things all wrong. I even went so far as to really AJAXize my code to fire off many transactions instead of large monolithic queries. Nothing seemed to help. Simply queries like finding 20 or 30 records from a 300-400 row table took longer than they should. More optimizing, and I was able to get it reasonable (see here) but yet the backend logs still complained that I was using too much CPU.

Too much CPU on a 30 row query? Egad.

So, I'm breaking up with Google App Engine. I'll just have to either upgrade my PHPnuke or abandon it for some straight PHP+MySQL.

Subway is trying to make me fat

2008-04-21T13:51:00.004-05:00

Case in point: Subway has what seems like a great promotion running. $5 footlongs. Sounds nice, doesn't it? At Subway though, the Double Stacked 6" sandwiches have just as much meaty goodness as the footlongs. So check this:

6" Double Chicken Teriyaki: 480 calories, 7g fat, 100mg Cholesterol, 65g carbs
Footlong Chicken Teriyaki: 750 calories, 10g fat, 100mg Cholesterol, 118g carbs

And they cost the same. $4.38 here for the double, ~$5 for the promotional footlong. I'm sure it is even worse because I use the Italian Herb and Cheese bread rather than the regular Wheat or Italian.

Don't be fooled!