Search results in infrageeks

Why an iPad HD/Pro?

alphageek — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 19:41:01 GMT

Why an iPad HD?

The rumour mill has gone back into overdrive with the possibility of an iPad HD coming this september. To be specific an iPad 2 resolution doubled in both dimensions, transforming the 1024x768 screen to 2048x1536.

Why not just plain old HD?

There are a lot of industry pundits going on about the iPad moving to a traditional HD resolution (1920x1080), but we've already seen Apple's approach to handling this kind of issue with the iPhone 4.

Leaving aside the Retina display designation, the simplicity of doubling the resolution (or quadrupling for the math purists), the entire object of maintaining the aspect ratio is that the entire application library will keep working exactly as before, requiring absolutely no rewrites from the developers on day 1. Any screen objects that are drawn dynamically from objects (most notably text) will immediately be displayed at the full detail of the screen. Bitmaps can be updated later on to profit from the additional visual detail, but are not required on day 1. Not to mention that the SDK already knows how to handle this so developers have a proven roadmap to update their applications

Changing the aspect ratio means that all of the detailed design work done in existing applications will need to be revisited and updated in order to match the new resolution. Apple just isn't going to do this to their users or their developers.

Scaling to anything other than a whole number is just not going to work

Why not now?

As mentioned by John Gruber in the earlier link, there are few things that will pose issues: memory, the graphics card and battery life. 2048x1536 is an awful lot of pixels to drive, especially on a mobile device. Ensuring that the machine is capable of maintaining the fluidity of the user experience while handling the equivalent of a 30" desktop display is a non-trivial engineering feat. Adding in the fact that this needs to be done off a battery makes it even more difficult. Doing this at a cost that remains reasonable - I'm guessing about a $200 premium over the existing iPad 2 - adds to the challenge.

All of the above noted, if there's anyone with the necessary engineering experience and expertise right now, it's Apple.

Is it needed?

Apple is clearly doing just fine with the current iteration of the iPad and adding a new model doesn't seem to make any sense, especially given that the competition clearly has a way to go before they start representing any kind of threat to the iPad 2. An iPad 2 HD isn't going to grow the market any faster than the current one since it will be appealing to a higher-end niche market. Thought of the day - what if it ships with Final Cut Pro X for iPad?

But this is the opportunity to hammer another nail in the coffin of the competition with a model that nobody else will be able to touch. Currently Apple is the only player with the pockets deep enough to invest in volume production of this type of screen since they're the only ones that can pretty much guarantee the return on investment. This ties in nicely with Horace Dedius's observation in a recent podcast quoted by Phillip Elmer DeWitt over at Fortune

When tech journals to do their reviews of competing products and they come down the inevitable iPad comparison, there will always be that last reference to the fact that the iPad 2 HD is out there that represents the next level up. Even if it's more expensive, the simple fact that it exists will diminish the interest in other products.

Is it realistic to expect?

I really don't know. If I were asked is it possible, I'd say yes with the caveat that it would probably have to be about as thick as the original iPad if it's going to be able to maintain the same level of autonomy. But after that it's impossible to tell from the outside of Apple.

Two little things today...

alphageek — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 17:03:59 GMT

Lion on older systems

Just in case you were wondering about running Lion on any of your older machine, you can forget about it. On many previous system updates, you could do an end run around the issue by installing onto an external drive and then using that disk to boot the older system. Assuming of course that you were running the same processor technology.

But I just tried this out with a 15" MacBook Pro Core Duo (the model before the Core 2 Duo) and it gives me a simple grey screen with a barred circle. Which is a bit of a pain since that's the machine that runs OS X Server at the house and I'm very interested at seeing the new stuff in Lion Server once it hits the streets.

Nice iTunes trick

I tend use the iTunes DJ function constantly with the ability to do pseudo genius type stuff based on selecting different dynamic playlists and when I have nothing in particular in mind a simple playlist that selects songs rated 3 stars or more and that haven't been played in the last two months so that I avoid over repeating songs.

One of the nice features about iTunes DJ is that in iTunes you can drop any other song into the DJ playlist. This ability is also available on the iOS Remote app which is really handy when the need for a song pops into my head I can quickly pop it to the top of the playlist. The neat part is that the iTunes DJ can also handle video files in the same manner.

So when we sit down to watch a couple of TV episodes that are in iTunes, I just add them using the Remote app, and as the song fades out, iTunes goes to full screen to play the selected video file. Once the video is over, it switches to full screen animation mode and seamlessly continues along with the music.

This is an awesome way to queue up an evening's worth of entertainment: pop in a couple of episodes of your favorite TV series into iTunes DJ, a couple of songs in between for the bathroom breaks

zfs auto-replicate script

alphageek — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 11:00:53 GMT

Here's a little script I put together to simplify my life dealing with ZFS replication.

Two complementary little scripts :

The idea was to have a simple one liner that would replicate a source filesystem to a remote filesystem with a minimum of options to deal with. It does not create any snapshots itself - you have to take them yourself - Time Slider or some other snapshot scheduling method that works for you.

The idea is that you should be able to pop the script into a cron job and leave it alone. It will create the destination filesystem if required and then keep it up to date.

The other thing this script doesn't do is delete any snapshots. It's up to you to define your own cleanup policy on the remote copy.

The other thing I did test out to verify is that you can use a temporary copy to move big data sets from one datacenter to another so that you're not sending terabytes across the WAN. Using the same script to send data from the master to a laptop or a portable ZFS NAS, you can then integrate it on a remote server and it will properly establish the links between the snapshots.

Comments welcome, feel free to use and modify it for your own environment, although I tried to make it as generically useful as possible. I'm more of a Perl hand than shell scripter so any recommendations for more elegant methods are definitely welcome and any other improvements that seem useful.

Update:

Added a check for the existence of the source filesystem since the errors that this situation produces are very unclear.

Update 25 jan 2010

Just tried running this on a non-root account under b130 (since the option of going straight to root and not creating a user account is no longer an option in the releases after 2008.11) and it fails out. trying to figure out the necessary rights and when pfexec needs to be used and checking for a source snapshot.

Further to this one, it turns out the problem is related to the obvious (in hindsight) issue of trying to replicate a filesystem that has no snapshots. I've added a check to verify that a snapshot exists before continuing through the script and added a pfexec prefix to the zfs commands. If you're running as root, this should not cause any problems, but if you're running as a user account (with the appropriate zfs privileges) this is required.

Corrected a problem with the grep syntax for matching snapshots from the source and destination.

Update 2 Mar 2011

This has been in my local copy for a while but I'm finally getting around to posting. When localhost is used as a destination, the copy recv command references the local instance of zfs rather than passing through ssh. This means that in the examples used for copying from one system to another, you don't need a separate server to accept the copy, you can simply attach some external disks, create a pool and do the copy locally.

I'm currently using this on 2009.06, Nexenta 3.0.4 and Solaris Express.

Update 22 april 2011

Removed the -d option from the recv command which seem to cause "invalid backup stream" errors when receiving incremental streams.

To Do:

Additional error handling for mismatched snapshots (last destination snap no longer exists on the source)

walk backwards through the remote snaps until a common snapshot is found
destroy non-matching remote snapshots
option in the service to permit a destroy operation
option to create the necessary commands and send them by mail instead of actually auto destroying snapshots

Source

Removed from the page as it was a pain to update with each version.

Virtual Snow Leopard Server! On non-Apple hardware?

alphageek — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 15:38:21 GMT

Whoah! This one slipped by my radar, but contains a very interesting tidbit that will join my two competing passions: Apple and Virtualization.

The article from virtualization.info has a list of leaked features from the next major release of vSphere (number 5 for those of you counting).

When the article first crossed my RSS feed, I didn't read all the way to the bottom, figuring that I'd wait for the beta program to start and then really dig in my teeth since I'm already good and busy with vSphere 4.1.

But one little line would have jumped out at me if I'd paid attention: support for Snow Leopard Server (SLS). This has been on my wish list for quite a while now since it will allow me to deploy virtual instances of the SLS. Technically, this doesn't present much of a challenge as there are a number of hacks that let you do this right now. But the kicker will be support from Apple and VMware as this certainly wouldn't be announced without the approval from Apple.

All of the sudden I can run a CAL-free server with lots of really nice features, not the least of which are excellent support for iOS clients with the integrated calendaring, wiki, blog, podcasting etc., that can also leverage my existing Active Directory environment.

And of course as a VM I'll be able to profit from all of the advantages of vSphere.

Up until now, there hasn't been a single feature in vSphere 5 that has been sufficiently compelling to make me look forward to the new version (1Tb of RAM and 32 vCPUS ? Cool, but way outside of the scope of my projects).

Now I'm champing at the bit...

Not to mention imagining a few interesting things about the eventual support for Lion. One of the things that I've seen is that the remote screen sharing is no longer a direct attach to the physical screen à la classic VNC, but a session by session screen instance à la Terminal Server.

Can you say OS X VDI?

Things that make you go hmmmmm.

Asymco on the numbers

alphageek — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 13:17:03 GMT

If Asymco isn't already in your RSS feed, it should be.

His newest entry concerning the latest numbers from Gartner and IDC PC shipment numbers points out some interesting trends that are being completely ignored by the other analysts looking at the same numbers. It also has possibly the tallest chart I've seen on the web.

Views on this market depend entirely on how you (arbitrarily) decide to segment it. Are the new tablets "media tablets" or just the next logical evolution of portable computing and thus extremely personal "Personal Computers". And while we're at it, can we just be honest and say the iPad market?

The confusion in the analyst and pundit community over the Post-PC era seems to see everything in absolutes, whereas every shift in generation has been a layer added on top of the previous generation. Each era is not defined by the extinction of the previous one, but rather that the new one becomes the primary computing tool for the majority of users, while still reserving the previous generation for all of those tasks better suited to their characteristics.

This is why the flow from mainframes to minis to workstations to PC's to notebooks to tablets has relegated each of the previous generations to specific niches where they meet specific needs. They certainly haven't disappeared. IBM is still making mainframes to the tune of nearly $100B in 2010. PC's and notebooks will be with us for a long time to come. But the new growth is coming from the post-PC tablet that is accessible to the much larger public.

And stop calling them "media tablets". Personally, media consumption (defined as audio and video) is pretty far down the list of my uses for the iPad. My primary use cases (in no particular order) are as a:

reading device
writing device
document review device
task management device
email client
web browser
chat client
RSS reader
SSH client
VNC/RDP client
gaming device
remote control

Asymco on the numbers

alphageek — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 12:51:48 GMT

This is placeholder text for your new wiki page. Replace it with your own.

Odd ESX behavior with USB passthrough

alphageek — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 08:11:57 GMT

I ran across an interesting problem recently with the (relatively) new USB passthrough feature on some ESXi 4.1 and 4.1 Update 1 machines.

For some reason, I would get into a situation where I couldn't add any USB devices to any VMs. After digging around a bit it seems that you can produce this behavior by removing a USB device from a VM that is attached to an external hub. I was using an 8 port Trust hub that has two hubs internally. I've used the map/unmap function before with other systems without any difficulty, but in those cases, the USB peripheral was being connected directly to the ESX server rather than going through an external hub. As far as I can tell, the hub seems to be a contributing factor.

I would assign a USB device and then remove it. Immediately thereafter, it would claim that there were no USB devices available, even other devices that had not previously been assigned to a VM. Plugging in a new device made no difference and was not made available either.

When I went onto the command line, a "lsusb" would show me that all of the devices were in fact still seen by the ESX server. Disconnecting, reconnecting, restarting the server, restarting the usbarbitrator service made no difference. Once it got into this state it was impossible to map a USB device. Every time you go into Edit Settings > Add the USB Device option was greyed out.

Finally, a call to VMware support with some digging on their part revealed an internal tech note that recommended restarting the hostd service resets the state so that you can assign devices. There is a caveat though as ALL devices become available in the add USB device wizard, even devices that are currently mapped to VMs, so be careful to not double map a device.

Nice little switch for ESX

alphageek — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 11:27:20 GMT

I'm currently building a little self-contained two server appliance for a client and one of the things we were looking for was a small 8 port switch capable of handling trunked VLANs, and inexpensive enough that we could include two for redundancy.

After some poking around the interwebs, we ran across the SLM2008 from Cisco (!) which is perfect. Cheap here in France at around 85€ street price this is a great little switch that is perfectly capable of handling not only port level VLAN assignment, but also VLAN trunking. LACP and static aggregation are supported along with some basic QoS configuration possibilities as well.

It appears that this is actually an older Linksys model rebranded by Cisco, but somehow in the deal the price dropped along the way.

I highly recommend it for building a small ESX lab or just need a few ports with VLAN capabilities without jumping up into the high port counts and higher prices.

Something goofy with VDR

alphageek — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 11:41:33 GMT

There's something that's confused me with VMware Data Recovery that I'm wondering about. If you've ever watched the performance counters on the backup data stores assigned to VDR, one thing you notice right away is the very high level of ready IOps. Glancing at it quickly that doesn't seem to make any sense, since it's the destination for your backups, not the source.

Looking further at it, it appears that there is a high level of read operations of 4KB. Again, more than a little strange. The only thing that I can think of is that it's reading out the hash values of the dedup signatures, but even then it shouldn't be needing 4Kb, unless that's the minimum size on the filesystem.

If it's the hash values of deduplicated blocks, there's either something very inefficient in the VDR engine or my back of the envelope calculations are missing something.

Assuming two totally full 1Tb backup destinations, that works out to 2 147 483 648 KB (2*1024*1024*1024). Assuming 4KB blocks from the IO profile, there are 536 870 912 possible hash signatures to keep track of. Given a standard hash value of 128B, the entire hash table should only take up 65 536KB which fits easily into memory. By default VDR is configured with 2Gb of memory.

So that should negate my theory that it's going to disk to pull out hash values to compare against incoming new data.

Which brings me back to my original question - why in the world is VDR hitting the destination disks hard in random read IOps for small blocks? To the best of my knowledge, VDR uses a fixed block size for deduplication, unlike appliances like DataDomain which use variable block sizes.

The overall performance of VDR is dependent on having some fairly high performance disk storage which seems strange. This profile is completely understandable for when it's doing integrity checks and scanning the entire contents of the destination, but very strange activity for performing backups.

As long as you're aware of this, you can plan appropriately with reasonably high performance storage for use with VDR, but often the reflex is to go with high capacity, relatively slow disks for disk to disk backups which results in pretty horrible VDR performance.

Anyone know what this IO is doing?

Useful Ubuntu commands

alphageek — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 15:06:55 GMT

Keyboard layouts

Need to change the keyboard layout on your console shell? Very handy when moving virtual machines around between Macs and PCs where the international keyboard layouts aren't exactly the same. Especially useful when your passwords have extended characters (and they do have extended characters, right?)

sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

Restart your network after screwing around with the settings:

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

BIND, DNS Slaves and AppArmor

If you're setting up DNS servers (using bind9) with the latest Ubuntu Server (9.0.4) there's a small conflict with the apparmor security daemon that will block the reception of the transfer file on your DNS slave. You'll need to add the following line to /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.named.

/etc/bind/zones/** rw,

otherwise you'll get named permission denied while writing the temp file to this directory (assuming that's where you put your zone files). Just about this line is the entry /etc/bind/** r which limits named to read only access to everything in the bind directory.

You'll know if this is the problem if you see this kind of message in syslog :

Jun 11 08:48:46 dns02 named[3099]: dumping master file: /etc/bind/zones/tmp-0u4cI0G2Mo: open: permission denied

Jun 11 08:48:46 dns02 named[3099]: transfer of 'mydomain.com/IN' from 10.1.3.22#53: failed while receiving responses: permission denied

Jun 11 08:48:46 dns02 named[3099]: transfer of 'mydomain.com/IN' from 10.1.3.22#53: Transfer completed: 0 messages, 46 records, 0 bytes, 0.001 secs (0 bytes/sec)

Jun 11 08:48:46 dns02 kernel: [ 2987.563871] type=1503 audit(1244702926.974:8): operation="inode_create" requested_mask="a::" denied_mask="a::" fsuid=104 name="/etc/bind/zones/tmp-0u4cI0G2Mo" pid=3100 profile="/usr/sbin/named"

event.d, initctl inittab and managing processes

OK - this one drove me nuts. There's a ton of documentation on getting various applications and services to start up automatically under Linux, but the internet never forgets and as a result you will have to wade through a ton of stuff that has been deprecated. Specifically I was trying to get mgetty to start up automatically (yeah, I know it's 2011 and I happen to be playing with modems again).

Most of the forums and stuff will immediately point you to how to put an entry in inittab. And then you go looking inside /etc/ on your brand new Ubuntu Server 10 and it's not there. Then there are a few pages that explain how to write a little upstart script and to put it inside of /etc/event.d. Well that doesn't work either.

So what you need to do is to create your upstart script in the /etc/init directory and make sure that the name ends in .conf. So my simple little script of:

start on runlevel 2

start on runlevel 3

start on runlevel 4

start on runlevel 5

stop on shutdown

respawn

/sbin/mgetty ttyACM0

Is now living in a file called ttyACM0.conf in /etc/init. In order to get the script to load without rebooting, use:

sudo initctl reload-configuration

And to verify that it got loaded correctly

sudo initctl list | grep tty

OmniGraffle for the win!

alphageek — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 15:54:02 GMT

OK, I'll admit to being an unabashed fan of the OmniGroup and their software packages for a long time now. That is because they consistently deliver quality software that does exactly what I want, in a way that I find easy and effective to use. OmniGraffle has been my go-to diagram editor for a number of years now, but I've been on the fence now for a while considering OmniGraffle for the iPad.

Mobile toolkit

I've been able to move over much of my mobile document work to the iPad with a minimum of fuss with the following toolkit:

Simplenote
Markdown
DropBox

My last report (~25 pages) was written almost entirely on the iPad in Simplenote, with a few stopovers in Notational Velocity Alt while on the computer. Output to RTF and final formatting in Word (sigh).

Pictures?

But the missing piece has been the ability to do the diagrams to accompany the text. This part meant I had to reserve a chunk of time exclusively for the computer to use OmniGraffle.

So I bit the bullet and bought OmniGraffle for the iPad. It's an excellent rethink of the application for the touch UI. It's not as easy to fire through complex diagrams as on the computer due to the lack of precision of using fingers directly instead of a mouse, but it's certainly up to the task for straightforward network architectures and the like.

One of the coolest features is that it is integrated with the Graffletopia web site which has a nice collection of stencils so you can easily add in a variety of complex and professionally designed graphical elements - you're not limited to the built in templates. Here's a quick sample thrown together from the VMware stencil.

Jumping back and forth from the edit and manipulate modes takes some getting used to since there is no equivalent state change on the desktop version, but that comes fairly quickly.

The mobile workspace

Replacing a notebook computer with an iPad is something that takes some planning and an understanding of the limitations, but it is entirely possible to handle much of the day to day grind of communications, writing and diagramming with these tools. It's worth noting that there are a slew of DropBox capable text editors for each person's particular aesthetic, I just happen to like the ones noted here.

The biggest change with this addition is that I can seriously consider heading out the door in the morning with just the iPad and the iPhone. My bag is lighter, I'm not looking for a power outlet every time I turn around, and with a VPN connection and Screens, I still have access to my computer in a pinch.

Cost

Granted it's an expensive iPad application, but currently I have yet to find a serious competitor in the iPad store that lives up to the Omni quality standard.

Blast from the past

alphageek — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 19:33:15 GMT

I'm finally getting a little further along in my personal project to get better organized dealing with paper records, I'm trying Paperless from Mariner software which seems to be much nicer than most of the other apps I've tried so far (but any other recommendations are welcome).

So I was wading through the papers from a box pulled down out of the attic and ran across a folder of newspaper clippings including this gem:

How times have changed!

A little context...

alphageek — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 05:46:11 GMT

Something jumped out at me when seeing the following chart over at the Silicon Valley Insider making the point that digital downloads aren't going to be sufficient to "save the music industry". This of course should be referring to the "recording and distribution industry" which is a very specific subset of the overall music industry.

What's missing here is a little bit of context which should point out the fact that this recording and distribution industry is merely an accident of history that occurred with the confluence of our ability to record audio to a physical device and the means to duplicate these recordings with reasonable and currently no loss of quality.

Prior to this we had the ability to record going back to the beginning of the 20th century, but lacked the technology to reproduce copies on a massive scale. This industrial capability came mid-century which leads into the data shown on the chart.

What's missing here is the overall context of music in general. I'm going to limit myself to another subset: music in the western world that still has some kind of current relevance. Obviously, humans have been making music for a lot longer than this, but just for fun let's look at the following (exceedingly reductionist) look at the impact of the music recording industry on the ability of people to create music.

(click to zoom in)

I'm willing to bet that the timeline of people producing and enjoying music is going to continue out wayyyy off into the future, but that the "business" of music based on the distribution of physical objects as a mass consumer market is going to disappear.

Music history students in the year 2100 will look back at this era as an interesting side note where a huge industry came into being and was replaced by other business models.

Making money in the Mobile economy

alphageek — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 09:49:22 GMT

An (as usual) interesting article from Tim Bray on making money in the mobile market. Then I tripped over John Gruber's note that highlights the odd juxtaposition that software is considered expensive at $10, but somehow an eBook at $8 is not.

This spun off a couple of ideas. First and foremost, are these two things really different in any appreciable manner today? I'm starting to think that ultimately, in many cases, they are the same thing, especially for apps with relatively little server-side dependencies.

I would argue that today both require a computer to create, both require a considerable investment in sunk time before they are ready for the market and they both require mastery of a language. The fact that the languages are different in form and function is largely irrelevant. Without a mastery of the English | French | German | ... language, writing a book that will sell is pretty much impossible.

Which brings me to the second thought. Putting these reflections up against the recent articles about Amanda Hocking who, like an Indie developer, created something and was able to publish it directly through electronic storefronts without going through a publisher just highlights the similarities.

Part of her success is due to the fact that she prices her books well below the prices set by books backed by traditional publishers. Her books are priced at $1-3 which means that they fall into the impulse buy range for an awful lot of people. Also at that price the fairness calculation comes into play. As a consumer I know intuitively that moving a Mb of data around should cost less than chopping down trees, turning them into pulp, transforming the pulp into paper, running this to a printing plant where someone has prepared the typesetting plates so that we can put ink onto the pages, run through a machine to chop up the paper and apply glue to the binding, put the books into boxes, and ship them hither and thither until it ends up on my doorstep from Amazon or my (rapidly disappearing) neighborhood bookstore.

The flip side of the volume pricing approach is that more people are more likely to buy, and less incentive to pirate.

As a side note on the pirating front, when I buy a brand new hardcover book you have to count that there are at least 3 "lost" sales built into that purchase per the hard line copyright advocates arguments since it will get passed around in my immediate family. But if the price was $3, and easily available to them, I'd just recommend that others buy it directly.

Scale and scope

Can anyone be a million dollar author or developer? Obviously not, as there are so many factors in play, from genetically imbued ability combined with experience and learning, to the roll of the dice in the fickle, ever changing marketplace.

But I think that all of the sudden there's the possibility that an awful lot more people are going to be able live directly off of the long tail in a decent fashion as there are now opportunities to publish directly, whether in the form of prose or compiled code. At the same time, it also means that there are many current jobs and professions that are becoming less and less relevant. The traditional role of the middleman as a distributor to multiple points of sale is pretty much pointless when the product can be encapsulated in a collection of bits.

There will still be a role to play in marketing and promotion as with the current glut of material available, obscurity is possibly the number one hurdle to overcome.

One good example on the obscurity front is that every time I sit down with friends and colleagues with iPads, there's a quick review of anything new and interesting that we've found and it's just amazing how many things we each find through our own sources that don't show up on the radar of the other.

OS X Server is dead, long live Lion

alphageek — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 11:23:31 GMT

Holy cr*p!!!

It appears that Lion will integrate OS X Server features in the standard version. Obviously, this will need to be explored to see exactly which of the server apps are included and maintained, but this is a huge deal.

OS X Server at $999 was an interesting offer that went head to head with Windows Server Standard Edition from a price perspective. Then the price dropped to $499 which was a really interesting offer when you look at the value of the integrated software like the integrated LDAP directory, mail server, dns server, web server, wiki, streaming server, etc.

Granted, many of these services are based on Open Source projects that you can install for free on a Linux server, but the simple UI makes managing them considerably easier for non-technical folks. Getting an SSL secured LDAP server running on Linux is a trying task for the uninitiated.

But some are unique like the wiki/blog/podcasting platforms and really are good value adds. In fact that's what running this site.

Then there are the new bits coming down the pipe that definitely warrant investigation like the new Profile Manager which appears to be a iOS device management tool for small to medium scale deployments.

Virtual Servers?

The other complementary question that needs to be asked is how does this change the policy on virtual instances of OS X? The current rule is that you're allowed to run OS X Server as a virtual machine on Apple hardware. But now that the server is bundled with the regular version, will the rule permit any OS X instance to be virtualized? Or only instances that have the optional server bits installed?

And maybe, just maybe, the ability to virtualize on non-Apple hardware? Since they no longer offer a rack mount server model, they're not going to be cannibalizing any of their existing product lines.

Part of my curiosity stems from the fact that Virtual Desktop Infrastructure projects are starting to get a little more traction this year, which would be really very interesting option to change from the current Windows only approach for most systems. This also ties in nicely with the fact that despite Apple's recent advances in the enterprise, desktops and portable computers will remain predominantly Wintel as in most cases they have a very hard time justifying the price differential (despite clear evidence that the build quality is far beyond what you get from your cheap $500 portable machine).

This is where some of Lion bleed-over from iOS like the application full screen mode, larger button targets, etc. would be perfectly adapted for using an iPad as a thin client where the mapping of trackpad gestures could be passed through directly. iPhoto is an excellent example of an desktop application that could be very efficiently run from an iPad as a thin client. The full screen mode looks and feels much like an iOS app. The buttons are larger and well adapted. I can do this today via VNC and it just feels right - all that's missing is the API to pass along native gestures to the remote screen.

Thunderbolt?

alphageek — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 13:39:05 GMT

That's just goofy. Light Peak was fine.

But you can't argue with the performance and convenience it's going to bring to computing. I find it interesting that they're leveraging the Mini DisplayPort form factor. I'm guessing this means that future monitors will have Thunderbolt (sigh) daisy chaining so you can plug into the monitor and all of the connected peripherals will be linked in automatically.

This vindicates a number of predictions I made with some colleagues last fall that Apple would skip over the USB 3.0 wave in preference for Light Peak with external adaptors for connecting USB 3.0, eSATA etc.

Now I'm waiting to see about a MacBook Air with this included. It would appear that the 13" MacBook Pro is going to be the same weight, which makes it considerably less interesting. Update: but a Core i5? Hmmm.

I wonder what other kinds of disruption this will bring. If the cost per port is anywhere the originally planned pricing, this could provide an interesting alternative for storage systems to replace SAS, FC and 10GbE.

But seriously, Thunderbolt?

Airport Extreme 7.5.2 issues

alphageek — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 16:17:51 GMT

Just a tip in case anyone else runs into this very strange bug I'm running across with the latest Airport Extreme firmware update.

My configuration includes my DSL router connected to an Airport Extreme Base Station (GbE) which is set up with 802.11n (5Ghz only) to avoid the pollution in the 2.4 Ghz range. I have my original Airport Extreme (100Mbps) set up to extend the 11n network. My Mac Mini is connected via ethernet to the second AEBS.

The strangeness started after applying the 7.5.2 upgrade where the Mini would simply stop all network traffic at random delays, but without any trace at all in the logs. Rebooting the AEBS and disconnecting and reconnecting the ethernet cable had absolutely no effect.

Once it had lost the connection it was gone. Other than a reboot, the only method for reactivating the network was to disable and enable the ethernet interface, either via the Network Preferences control panel or :

sudo ifconfig en0 down;sudo ifconfig en0 up

I ran around in circles trying to find the culprit, initially thinking that it was a conflict with something on the Mini. The network reset trick works nicely, but then drops out after a random amount of time between 30 seconds and 15 minutes. Downgrading the two airports (always the remote one first!) back to 7.4.2 and everything has come back to normal.

Kudos to Apple for building in an easy method for changing firmware versions! And a wrist slap for not spotting this problem since it's really hard to debug given that there's nothing in any of the logs anywhere... Granted it's a bit of an edge case, but I see more and more people extending their networks by reusing older base stations as remote relays (assuming that's part of the issue).

Update here

Stupid simple iPad wall mount

alphageek — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 15:48:04 GMT

I haven't run across this idea anywhere else so I'm throwing it out there.

All you need to do is pull down the calendar you have on the wall next to your desk, grab a simple wire hanger out of the closet, fold the case over the hang and hang on the wall hook. I'm using the standard Apple case, but I imagine this will work with any folding case as long as the weight is within the capacity of whatever hook you have on the wall. In this case, a standard picture hook that was already in the wall.

Granted it's not much on elegance, but if you have any kind of wall hook you where you hang a suit jacket this becomes a simple zero investment method to put the iPad up at eye level. Plus you can grab it and go without switching cases or anything.

Airport 7.5.2 issues update

alphageek — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 09:27:31 GMT

It looks like I have the problem narrowed down at bit here with the problems with the latest Airport update. It would appear that the problem is specific to the combination of the 7.5.2 firmware and the ethernet controller of the older Mac Mini (seen as Macmini2,1 in the System Profiler).

I can happily run my MacBook Pro with the ethernet connection just fine, and the MacBook Air via the USB-Ethernet adaptor without any problems. Which has led me to my current stop-gap solution. I disabled the built-in ethernet on the Mac Mini and plugged in the USB-Ethernet adaptor between the Mini and the Airport Extreme and it's been working just fine. Not an ideal solution since this makes the CPU work harder for handling network communications but at least it works for the moment. But it does clearly isolate the pieces that aren't playing well together.

And to top it all off, the Airport Extreme running as the router gave up the ghost last week, so I replaced it with a new Dual Band model which has simplified and stabilized the rest of the wireless network. Before, I had to use one of the older 11g Airport Express to publish a 2,4 Ghz 11g network for the iPhones in the house, and now everything goes through the router. With the added benefit that the newer MIMO antenna design in the Dual-Band model gives much better coverage on both the 2,4 and 5Ghz bands.

Another shout-out to the software designers for the Airport Admin utility as I had exported the configuration from the old router (if you do any custom configuration like port mapping or DHCP reservations, don't forget to do this) and I just plugged in the new router, imported the configuration and tweaked the new dual-band networking options and everything was back to normal with a minimum of effort. This is the same thing I do with "real" networking systems, but instead of having to tftp a configuration file to the router, it was just a matter of selecting the exported configuration.

Analyst view of the world

alphageek — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 15:40:00 GMT

I love stuff like this - it demonstrates just how disconnected the analyst community can be from the people that are actually out purchasing things. This one comes regarding the iPhone 4 launch and the associated availability issues.

“Consumers, questioning Apple’s supply chain management capability, have started looking for alternative devices." says Tina Teng at iSuppli

Uhhh - no, I doubt seriously that consumers are questioning Apple's supply chain management capability. Consumers are going to buy something that they've decided that they want and may be upset that there isn't one available to buy. In which case they are going to make a decision to either wait or buy something else and buy nothing at all. The consumer doesn't give a flying f**k about the supply chain, they only care about the net impact on their personal choices. Investors on the other hand are interested since these issues will place a ceiling on how many iPhones can be made and therefore sold. But investors and consumers are not interchangeable definitions.

Now she does go on to say that consumers are not satisfied with regards to the current response to reported reception issues with the iPhone 4, but that has absolutely nothing to do with supply chain management.