My father and I took a vacation together to Washington D.C. last week. Lots of good food, beer, and cigars. I maintained a little photo blog of it here.
Translator
By N2H
Webninja
Like you care…
Why two servers?
So, I’m reading a blog post this morning by an ex-Apple employee talking about working in AppleCare support, and while most of it is just a rant, one part of it really spoke to me.
I’m going to be without my computer for a week?! It’s a business critical machine! I can’t be without it!…If something is important to you, you spend money to make it reliable. If you cannot make it reliable, then you make it redundant. It’s a life lesson more than a computer lesson.Not long ago we were talking to a client who was just planning a move to ESX and wanted to know how many host servers he would need for the number of machines that were being virtualized. We looked at what they currently had and how hard they were working and said “It will all run on one 4-way, so get two of them.” They seemed shocked that we would so blatantly recommend getting more hardware than they “needed”.
Why do people have such a hard time understanding the importance of backups and redundancy? It becomes even more important in the virtualization space where a single failure could mean losing 20 servers, not just one.
esXpress
Finally…we launched the official stable release of esXpress today. Go get it!
Qumana?
Hmm, just possibly, Qumana doesn’t suck.
Let’s see if this works right and I actually get a big scary image on the left.
Looks like we have a winner!
Testing MacJournal
This is a test of MacJournal to see if it doesn’t suck.
Nope…, it sucks for my uses. Doesn’t support upload of images except via FTP (and who would run FTP on a server connected to the Internet?), and doesn’t support downloading my previous posts.
Would somebody PLEASE make a decent blogging client for OSX, I don’t have the free time to write one myself.
Intel Macs + VMware?
About a month ago my desktop machine gave up the ghost and I broke down and bought a Mac for myself, the 20″ Intel-based iMac. Holy crap! This is a sweet machine. I’m a Linux fan-boy from way back, but there’s just no arguing with something that is this clean and tightly integrated but still gives me the command line access I crave.
Almost every application I use already exists on the Mac, or is easily compiled from the same sources I used under Linux. Except one..
VMware. My job is working with VMware products (mainly ESX), and there are NO VMware products for the Mac. Admittedly, I can work around the lack of VMware console by install vmware-console onto my ESX hosts and using ssh+X11 forwarding to get the display exported to my Mac, but the Linux version of esx-console sucks, I’d much prefer a native version of vmware-console that worked more like either the Windows version or the Linux version of gsx-console. Even better would be an OSX native version of VMware Server. I guess Workstation would be okay too, but I really prefer GSX/Server to WS so that I can run multiple VMs in the background and set up things like auto-boot of VMs when my machine starts up. Plus, I can use the GSX/Server Console to access ESX servers, I just can’t change their settings, but I always do that from the MUI or command line anyway. According to this page, it may be on the way, but who knows if/when it will be released.
This morning I ordered one of the new 17″ MacbookPro’s to replace my Alienware laptop luggable (which will be hitting eBay as soon as the Mac comes in).
TCF
I went to TCF this morning. TCF used to be a great place for finding old/rare/etc computers and parts, but not any more apparently. All that was there were ricer PCs and people trying to pawn off total crap, like old Gateways, for far too much. Every single computer I saw there you would have to pay me to haul away for you. Gee, I’m really glad I made that 2.5 hour drive…
Perl + iTunes
The stereo in my car can play mp3 CD’s and use the id3 info in the files to display the artist/title/etc. I decided to grab a bunch of mp3’s from my iTunes library and burn them to CD for listening on my long work commute. The CD played perfectly, but everything was showing up on the display as the file names, not the id3 info. A little research turned up that the stereo only supports id3v1 tags and iTunes only writes id3v2 tags. I found a few apps on the web that would batch fix my labels, but I couldn’t really bring myself to pay for something for such a potentially simple task. Perl to the rescue!
First, I had to install a perl module that my shiny new Mac didn’t come with (depends on fink):
fink install mp3-info-pm
Okay, now to write a quick script that can read the id3v2 tags and write the data as an id3v1 tag.
!/usr/bin/perl
addv1.pl to copy the id3v2 tag to the id3v1 data
use MP3::Info qw(:all); use Data::Dumper; usemp3utf8();
$v2tags = getmp3tag($ARGV[0],2); print “V2 Tags\n”; print Dumper($v2tags); print “Applying V1 Tags…\n”; setmp3tag($ARGV[0],$v2tags); $v1tags = get_mp3tag($ARGV[0],1); print “New Tags:\n”; print “V1:\n”; print Dumper($v1tags); Okay, so that works for one file, but I’ve got well over 2,000 mp3 files in my collection, so…
find ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music -type f -name '*.mp3' -exec ~/addv1.pl "{}" \;
Enjoy!
Update: Thanks to the admin over at macosxhints.com, I now know that from within iTunes you can just click Advanced->Convert ID3 Tags… Don’t I just feel like an idiot now. Leave it to a guy who made “The Switch” to OSX from Linux, not Windows, to find the hard way to do something.
esXpress
Okay, it’s blatant astroturfing, but I don’t care. The company I work for is about to release our new backup product for VMware ESX Server, and it is pretty bad-ass if I do say so myself.