Brief blog items
Posted by gerirgaudi on December 29, 2009
The optimist thinks the glass is half full. The pessimist thinks the glass is half empty. The engineer knows the real truth: that the glass is twice as large as it should be for optimum utilization of resources.
Dale Andreatta, as quoted by Burkhard Bilger in the New Yorker December 21 issue’s essay Hearth Surgery .
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Posted by gerirgaudi on December 24, 2009
Posted in miniblog | Tagged: apple, en, exchange, mac | Leave a Comment »
Posted by gerirgaudi on December 2, 2009
When I nuked and paved the laptop, I cleaned up the virtual machine stable I had been hauling around for some time.
About two years ago I switched from Parallels (which had been working relatively well for me and was, for a while, the only option for the Mac) and went back to VMware (so that I could run VMs elsewhere if I needed to). Parallels 5 came out recently, and they had sent out an offer for a cheap update, so I decided to give them a try. I used their Virtual Machine Transporter to convert a Win7 beta VMware virtual machine, but Parallels ended up choking on it (it went into this loop where it wants to log the user in and out for the changes to the Shared Profile to take effect). I’m on the road, so I gave up quickly: I dislike getting beachballed into oblivion and having my laptop rendered into a hot molten pile of silicon (solid 100% CPU utilization). I uninstalled Parallels, wiped the virtual machine, installed VMware back and started the old VMware-based machine. For whatever reason, now VMware chokes on it too: the endless beachballing, CPU slaughtering… the works.
Sigh.
Posted in miniblog | Tagged: mac | Leave a Comment »
Posted by gerirgaudi on November 27, 2009
Things. Rocks.
Posted in macos, miniblog | Tagged: cultured code, en, iphone, mac, things | Leave a Comment »
Posted by gerirgaudi on November 18, 2009
Gawd…
That’s almost five minutes humanity won’t be able to get back. No Logo comes to mind. I love the bit when they all mumble (chant?) “Microsoft!” (about 1:50 into the video). I once had dinner at a crab restaurant (I think it was Joe’s Crab Shack) in Colorado Springs where the servers did a similar thing. I actually enjoyed it, primarily because I had a beer and some really good food in front of me, and it fit the moment. Not so much at the Microsoft store. Really. Unless they have a beer dispenser somewhere. And it event then…
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Posted by gerirgaudi on November 17, 2009
Go watch: Reconnoiter: a whirlwind tour. Any piece of software with a tagline like another product build from pain deserves your attention:
Posted in miniblog, sysadmin | Tagged: en, monitoring, sysadmin | Leave a Comment »
Posted by gerirgaudi on October 28, 2009
This landed on my spam folder this morning. I actually had to double check, because this one is actually polished style-wise: header, theme, language, grammar. Two things stood out: the wrong mailto address (blurred to protect the innocent) and the funky from address. SpamAssassin: thanks!
Update: News.com reports on this: Bank Trojan botnet targets Facebook users
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Posted by gerirgaudi on October 7, 2009
Back in July, I was lamenting that I missed Atlassian’s Stimulus Package. It’s back (thanks Brian!) and with a vengeance: their Starter “program” provides $10 licenses for full blown Atlassian awesomeness (JIRA, Confluence, Crowd, Bamboo, FishEye and GreenHopper), and you can also purchase support. Additionally, JIRA 4 is out.
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Posted by gerirgaudi on September 24, 2009
I have no idea how I came across this (the whole concept sort of turned my brain to mush momentarily):Ars Technica reports on some global homely Windows launch party event where folks host Windows 7 launch parties at their house (I picked the Ars article because they’re a talented crew, but there are many more out there). Like Dave Rosenberg, I’m still not sure about the “reality measurement” associated with all this, particularly given the introductory hosting video (there are others for each of the related fun activities proposed for the party). In the spirit of full disclosure, having recently read Naomi Klein’s No Logo, being a Mac/Solaris/Linux user, and failing to understand the logic behind the Windows so-called interface (yep, I have tried Windows 7 on a virtual machine) my perception is admittedly probably biased. Yet I cannot fathom the thought of pimping Windows on my friends and acquaintances, much less in the setting depicted in the videos (“hey, to wrap up, let’s burn a music CD!”). Redmond strikes again, and words escape me to describe the concept and execution.
Update: The Register captures the essence of the event: How to host your very own Windows 7 launch party. Favorite quote:
So you’ve got your trusty laptop warmed up with a fresh copy of Windows 7, decked the halls with balloons and streamers, and sent invitations to an exhaustively multicultural clutch of friends for a single night of red-hot OS release revelry.
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Posted by gerirgaudi on September 21, 2009
I’ve been a lite Dropbox user for some time (since I first read about them via Rands) and while I do use it more these days for more typical file sharing tasks, one of the most interesting uses I have for it has been that of sharing application state. Cloud and all, I am very much a desktop user, and while some of the applications I use do have cloudish counterparts, I find that have a tendency to enjoy my local apps far more than their cloud counterparts. Take ecto, a fantastic blog editor for the Mac. I find myself starting blog posts often, leaving them for “later” from time to time. Given I share time between my desktop and my laptop, it hasn’t always been easy to match available time slot with in-progress blogs.
Enter Dropbox: a simpe symlink from
~/Library/Application Support/ecto
to
../../DropBox/Shared/Library/Application Support/ecto3
and my wherever-whenever-ecto-blogging is a go (something that, by the way, did not work with iDisk, which seemingly failed to sync more ofthen than I was willing to accept). I suspect instant switching from one system to the other might probably confuse ecto, but I never do that anyway, and I can probably add some glue before the app starts to check on Dropbox’s status.
Posted in blog, miniblog | Tagged: blog, dropbox, ecto, en, mac | Leave a Comment »
