Productivity
by Mike on Jan.11, 2010, under Cars, Computer Science, Life, the Universe and Everything
So in the past week I’ve been wicked productive, finished a few VMware Accreditations and got a bunch of work done on the web servers. The VMware training wasn’t bad, a little dry and some of it I ended up skipping and just taking the tests but I did learn some new stuff haha. I do like all the new vSphere offerings and the whole cloud mentality, even if some business find it to be very different from what they are used to since certain departments or lines of business in the company only own VM’s and not the underlying hardware all the time. I also like the new VDI offerings. VDI and remote connections have come a long way from the days of a burning green terminal connected to a mainframe. With the new protocols VMware is using now even video and other multimedia can be played back with little to no issue.
In other news, I’ve been working hard on the new Discount Pulls online catalog and quoting system so we can try and step up sales as well as working on another side project with a couple friends. Discount Pulls is looking great, I decided to use an existing open source e-Commerce solution called osCommerce. It’s quite a nice commerce engine that can be easily modified and tailored to your needs. I’ve done a bit of customization to it so it looks and works how we will need it since sales will not be directly processed through the site. I also found a nice site with some free templates that could be used with the site and picked a nice one out to use till it is worth revamping the looks of the site. Can’t wait to get it fully operational but that could still be a couple weeks away, tho I am about ready to build out the product database for the site.
So I spent the New Years holiday in Disney World with Amanda. That was just awesome. The parks were more then packed, some setting records for highest attendance to date but this didn’t stop us from having a great time on rides, shows and of course the Disney fireworks. Those fireworks were insane, and just beyond awesome. Anyway, I’ll let the picture do the talking about the trip, they new Disney: New Years 2010 album will be up in the photography section in the coming days. Would have had it up sooner but takes a while to work with over 400 pictures to build a nice gallery that really shows the trip and has a flow that follows our movements through the parks.
Lastly before I go, I would like to simply say that the RX-8 (who is hence forth named Zooey) is a blast to drive without power steering. Why no power steering you may ask, well lets just say that the Electric Power Steering harness may at times be susceptible to moisture damage and or corrosion. This has caused the rack to shutoff due to a perceived short in the harness so now I must go over the harness and test for shorts and clean all the connectors and seal them with di-electric gels. That being said, I still do like the feel of the raw un-adultered steering, well except when I’m sitting still then it can be a bit of a pain in the butt haha. I’ll update when I get it sorted out, may also post up a “how-to” on the forum side of the site.
Photography
by Mike on Jan.08, 2010, under Life, the Universe and Everything
I added a page that links to my Picasa Web Albums! Check it out, may be adding a simple banner ad to the top of the site as well, but nothing obtrusive. Anyway, that’s all for now.
Well I Switched Blog Engines
by Mike on Jan.06, 2010, under Life, the Universe and Everything
So I switched to WordPress from Serendipity and found that I couldn’t import my old posts so I just copied them out of the database server directly. I know they all have the same time stamp now but oh well, no big deal. So i feel that WordPress will make a nice engine to run my personal page from. I will be adding a forum as well so I can still cover projects online. Anyway, just a short update for now, have a lot todo to get this all together again.
I Haven’t Forgotten
by Mike on Jan.06, 2010, under Life, the Universe and Everything
So things have been quite busy for me lately, between work and the cars and travelling and training. So I about have my RX7 done, only a little more to go. I did find out my dad sent me the wrong springs for the rear so she sits too high lol. But I’ve got new springs on the way and I still need to get the brake lines and cables for the car. It is still nice to see her sitting on her own feet tho, and I even got to roll her out a few weekends ago so I could clean up the garage and all. So a few setbacks still but it’s coming together and in anycase we’ve hardly had the weather so far this summer to really take her out and have fun anyway. Especially since she has no air system in her, just a general outside vent otherwise it’s windows down and that doesn’t work to well in the rain. With that said I’m looking forward to having her back on the road and ready to go in August and be able to enjoy the tail of summer and then all of fall with her on the road. As far as the cars go I also was able to swap out the shocks in the RX-8 and what a difference that made, now I have only the swaybars to put in and she is all set for now till I finally give in to building up that motor.
In other news I’ve been spending a lot of time in Manhattan at Thomson Reuters for various training and soon to build a slew of Red Hat Linux servers. I had never really been to NYC or Manhattan before so I’ve been enjoying the heck out of it and getting to see the sights. I even took a trip up the Empire State Building which was amazing. I have found that peoples attitudes vary so much around that city, I have more then once felt like the people in the city had become so desensitized and closed to everything around them but then I find glimmers of hope and smiles and a passing ‘hello’ from people on the street. So my next trip looks to be on the 20th of this month (July) and I’m really looking forward to it.
Lastly I have also been working heavily on my Sun Training including having taken the Solaris Admin 1 course and will be taking the test very soon, hopefully before the Solaris Admin 2 course next month. The courses have been amazing fun and I do look forward to any and all upcoming ones that I will be taking. Now sadly Sun has messed up my partner login on there site and I’m still trying to get it resolved but to no avail, I get no response from email or anything regarding it. I am hoping to have this done before I take the test since I want everything to stay on one account and not spread across several.
Any way, I’ll try to keep up on posting and maybe get some pix of the car up and all. But for now, peace out.
Sun
by Mike on Jan.06, 2010, under Computer Science
So I was quite pleased with the announcement that IBM would not be buying Sun Microsystems. I deep down want them to stay as an independent company, but understand that times are tough. I have found that they have an amazing product lineup that includes some great innovative technology. I am currently working on my SCSA and SCNA as well as other smaller Sun certifications. So far I have covered many of the offerings they have on their web training portal. I have also begun working with the Java CAPS application framework. This is a pretty slick system them can pull together all the different information sources inside a company allowing for the reuse of old code to build new applications allowing for a smooth migration path.
Java CAPS uses several Sun offerings to interconnect between databases and other systems. It can then take this and allow new Java programs to integrate and offer new ways of working with old data. I’m currently working on a project that will use this system to interconnect several kinds of old databases and allow for a new way to process information across these sources and then serve up the information in a modern way; over the web, through email, or even over mobile connections. I will talk more on this as I proceed and will probably have several articles written up on my main page as well for others to reference.
Back Online!
by Mike on Jan.06, 2010, under Life, the Universe and Everything
It took a bit but I got everything back online now, as well as having finally put up a site for <a href=”http://www.otaku-wired.net”>Otaku-Wired</a>. I haven’t finished populating it yet so don’t look just yet. All the new servers are running well including the new MySQL dedicated server. Next up will be upgrades to my OpenSolaris server, I plan on updating it with 2 quad-core Xeons to replace the single little dual-core that is running it now. This should boost my stability and reliability. After all this is complete I’ll be able to start looking into a HA setup and in the future a DR setup.
In other news I have begun my trek down the bath for full Sun Certification. I am going through the storage side right now but I should be done that soon. The webinars are a little dry but I’m pulling through. I’m looking forward to the class time and learning about some of the more indepth features of Solaris. To continue my own learning on the side I’ve begun setting up to have a SunRay server running off the T2000 in the lab. As for other certifications, I am studying for Security+ and Network+ at the moment.
Wait there’s more. I have been making great progress with the RX-7 in the last few days and am shooting to have her on the road for May, I believe this shouldn’t be too ambitious and am working hard to meet it.
Lastly I have made some good strides with the BizBazaar and should be giving more updates on it soon as we work toward going public.
Thanks for reading, have a great day!!
WooHoo! New Servers Up!
by Mike on Jan.06, 2010, under Computer Science
Took some time but I got a block of 13 IP’s from Comcast and was able to bring a series of new OpenSolaris servers up and running.? The migration had a few hiccups but everything worked in the end.? I had to make good use of the Blastwave repositories to get things like Postfix and Courier-IMAP back up and running.? I now have everything neatly divided among different servers and VMs on one of three networks, my home LAN, the DMZ, and a little corp network I just brought online.? This has allowed me to have 2 separate web servers, a postfix mail server and a MySQL server.? Soon I will be bringing a few more servers online that are related to a project I’ve been doing with a few friends.? Wish I could say more about it but I can’t at this time, but the server structure I’ll be bringing online will allow for a robust web site featuring dynamically created pages using PHP and MySQL.? This is getting to be a fun project which I will have to document here.? I think I may even go over some of the issues and such that I had to overcome when I did the migration from the Ubuntu server that was handling everything to this abstracted model I’m using now.? But that will have to be at a later time, for now I must go.? Peace out.
Been a While!!
by Mike on Jan.06, 2010, under Life, the Universe and Everything
Mindtouch Deki Wiki
by Mike on Jan.06, 2010, under Computer Science
I was recently given a project to setup a new collaboration tool to be used by both the engineering department and sales and after some lengthy reading about the difference between offering something as a SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) or a WOA (Web Oriented Architecture). In the end a SOA system would have been too costly to implement so I went with a WOA that works on the principles of REST. To this end I started scouring the web to see if there were any tools already available on the Internet that would fit the needs of the project and that is when I began thinking about using a wiki interface and seeing if I could make it do everything that is needed. This started me looking at many different wiki’s on the web and originally I was just going to use MediaWiki but then I came across Mindtouch and their Deki Wiki.
When I first started looking at Deki Wiki I wasn’t sure it would be the right fit, especially since it comes from a corporate entity unlike MediaWiki which is an open source project. But as I looked deeper into the features of Deki Wiki I began to see just how well it could suit our needs. It has a very intuitive layout and is easy to operate and setup. It is a free download off their site as either a ready to go VM or you can grab a tar ball of it and set it up on your favorite distro. I grabbed the VM since it’ll be running on one of our ESX servers anyway, it was a larger download but worth it in the end. From there I began playing with it and seeing just how well featured of a package it really is. I have to say I was impressed by it. The way it is setup to handle users and permissions is very nice, and it was point and click to personalize the wiki to the company here.
The biggest thing I was worried about was getting forms setup through the wiki. Originally I was thinking about doing everything thru PHP forms but in the end I found this to be a little more encumbering then I wanted. This prompted me to change tracks and look into setting up forms written in xhtml and then having them submit to a PHP script that would then handle the processing of the forms. This greatly simplified the implementation of the forms in the wiki and with some simple planning I was able to setup the PHP script to handle any and all form data that could ever be sent to it. Currently it just reformats the data in a simple text email and sends it out but I’m working on having it push the data into a SQL database that could then be accessed to view submitted forms.
I would also like to mention that the guys over at Mindtouch are very helpful and will send out an email inquiring how the install and setup went and if there is anything they can help you with. It has been a pleasure working with them and their product and so far everyone here also has enjoyed using it (maybe a little too much since I keep getting new forms to add to it).
<a href=”http://wiki.mindtouch.com/” title=”Mindtouch”>Mindtouch’s Home Page</a>
Solaris and Akorri
by Mike on Jan.06, 2010, under Computer Science
So I’ve been working with Solaris 10 update 5 for a few days now and I have to say it isn’t the most pleasant experience. I’ve done a few work arounds so that I can effectively use it as a desktop system and it’s things are smoothing out tho I will admit I still prefer Ubuntu for desktop and server when it comes to a *nix system.
In other news I went through some training with the Akorri BalancePoint health check system. It’s a nice product and tho it still has some maturing to do it can be a wonderful tool in a data center. It has all the usually monitoring abilities for servers and virtual appliances but what I think makes the product stand out is it’s ability to monitor storage devices. Now a drawback would be that it requires it’s own virtual appliance to run and in smaller setups it can become the largest consumer of resources. I should also note that for it to monitor Windows servers or desktops it will also require the setup up of a Windows proxy server (either virtual or physical) to relay information since it can not directly interface with the Windows machines. What is nice is that the setup and configuration of BalancePoint is very simple and straight forward.
BalancePoint also offers some great ways to view the collected data and it watches the traffic flow and drive mountings to build a topology map automatically. Thru this it is able to show you how your resources are being used and where any bottle necks are.
Overall the product is very helpful and I look forward to seeing how the product grows.
