The Langleys Lately

Some people might think that I have a love/hate relationship with Microsoft, that’s only half true!

I have been muddling around with my network resources as of late, bought some new hardware and did some reorganizing to retire some tired old computers and improve the performance of my mail server, web server, media server, etc.

The main host of all this would be my new quad core intel Q6600 server with 4GB of RAM, 1.5TB of hard disk space, running Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. That last one may confuse the casual reader, but I have been running Media Center for a couple of years now and have a media center extender so we can view the many gigabytes of recorded TV in the living room without having to park a PC there. It really is the only real reason we have left to run any instance of Windows in our home. Now that reason is gone.

After resetting my extender and attempting to pair it with my new computer I was left redfaced! My out of warranty and unsupported extender refused to pair with my Media Center, I tried for about 2 hours, everything appeared to be working, connectivity was fine but it just refused to work.

grrr…

It seems that when life is the busiest, that is when you want to express what’s happening in your blog.  Likewise, when life is it’s busiest that’s when it’s hardest to find time to blog, then when things slow down you have nothing to write about.

I started a new (old?) job this week, one year less a day after the last (first) time I started with this company.  I didn’t really get much chance to breath, just jumped right in, not that I’m complaining about that, I prefer it that way.

My last entry talked about my trip to Seattle, and my nervousness for my favorite football team against their arch rivals.  Well the game wasn’t close, but I was!  To the sidelines that is!  What great seats to watch the Seahawks dispatch the St. Louis Rams 33-6.  A terrific weekend, and thank you to my wonderful friends who accommodated me in their home.

Hey, look – I’m a contributor.

Sean, you can customize the right and left sidebars with the Presentation/Widgets. Although it is fascinating to change your blog into Italian, maybe it isn’t really a necessary item on your sidebar!

Today I jetted off to Seattle for my annual Football Pilgrimage! I try to get at least one NFL football game in each year. This year the winless St. Louis Rams are the visitors. At 0-6 the Rams have not given many of their opponents much fight but the Seahawks last weekend lost badly at home to the previously winless New Orleans Saints and the Rams will be welcoming back from injury their starting pro bowl quarterback(Marc Bulger) and starting pro bowl running back(Steven Jackson). Their previously anemic offence will look pretty good this weekend. A tough challenge for the defense.
Ok, I’m nervous, my team has all the talent it needs but even with all their talent and ability, they might not actually be that good. But I’m a fan, so here’s hoping…
My football buddy, who houses me on my pilgrimage managed to get some pretty sweet tickets and regardless of how the home team does, I’m still gonna have fun.
Last year I drove out with a friend and his son, that was also a fun weekend, even though the Seahawks lost, as in addition to the game we took in a tour of the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field. I have been to that museum three times now and what a great place to visit, if your into that sort of thing (which I am).
GO SEAHAWKS!
Sean

The MacBook Pro (2.2 GHz, 15.4″) was kind of hard to find! I went to a number of retail outlets including the two main Mac dealers in town and found none. After I arrived home I went online and checked out one of the main distributors, all of their warehouses across Canada were out of stock with lot’s on order but it certainly appears to be a bit of a shortage.

Not to be completely discouraged, I started phoning different London Drugs outlets, I had already exhausted Futureshop and BestBuy. I found one store that had one, new in box! I love it, more to come!

Sean

I was able to transfer my web server to a virtual machine!

I backed up my database from my previous server and restored it the the mysql server in my Virtual machine.  After some configuration I was able to reload my web server and now it is running on a VM!  Cool!

It’s the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, and we had plans with another family here in Calgary. Unfortunately our get together was scuttled by a child’s cold, being early in the school year that is not a surprise. However, a few minutes after our dinner cancellation I decided to be wild, ROAD TRIP!

I have a good excuse, today, my father turns 64 which is a significant number to me being a bit of a geek, that is the last birthday anyone is likely to have that is a power of 2. So I grabbed a few things and drove from Calgary to Prince George BC. It is about 800kms and I completed the trip in just under 8 hours. It’s nice when the only stop you need is a tank of gas and if you can combine that with a bio break, that hearkens the heady days of early adolescence and the ROAD TRIP!

Cool, maybe I am young…

A civic election is on the horizon in Calgary, where the incumbent mayor is a shoe-in to win because none of his opponents have a name that will be recognized at the ballot box, and a complacent population that could not be bothered to do it’s homework. Mayor Dave Bronconier won his first term in 2001 when the previous Mayor decided to retire. With three terms on city council, a failed attempt to win a federal seat in Ottawa, and a boatload of campaign donations behind him, Mr. Bronconier managed to squeak out a win against his nearest competitor by the narrowest of margins, mostly because people recognized his name. His campaign message was extremely well crafted politically, yet it contained no substance whatsoever. He literally bought (or his contributors bought) his way into the mayors office. I remember watching an all candidate town hall question period during the 2001 campaign and Mr. Bronconier wisely chose not to show up. Why risk being cornered on an issue but some unknown candidate?

His slogans at the time read something like this (though not literally):

I’m Dave Bronconier, and I’m for (insert some fluffy comment here like better transportation, better health care, or fuzzy kittens) … and you!

It made me think that all the naive Calgarians were saying

Wow! I’m second on his list, what a nice guy! I should vote for him!

Even more remarkable is that Mr. Bronconier is a Liberal in a conservative stronghold city. He ran for the federal Liberal party and lost by a landslide in Calgary West to his Reform Party opponent. However, the media in Calgary loves him so much that they nickname him Bronco, he is constantly giving them a story. Now largely because of the media, not only does he have a known name, but he has a known alias. What do you think that is worth in politics? Bronco’s bargaining style is to make hostile statements in the eagerly awaiting media to attempt bully other levels of government into giving into his demands. It usually ends up with our Mayor spewing insults to his Provincial counterparts while those he spews at say very little, maybe because it would just end up in childish circular insults. It is utterly remarkable that he succeeds but with no coordinated opposition, there seems to be no way to stop him. Makes me wonder what the city counselors are doing on the sideline? And what about Calgary’s mostly conservative citizens? The economy in this city is just too good and it’s citizens are just not annoyed enough at this behavior to take notice of any alternative.

It leaves me with this question: How would an honest, qualified, and hard working individual raise the kind of money required to put their name on par with the mayor and generate any sort of interest? Maybe some very wealthy individual could spend their own money to put their name out there, but chances are any honest person with enough money of their own is too busy with their business ventures.

As it is, I think Mr. Bronconier has “The Name“!

Sean

There are so many ways in which various geeks of various sorts can find themselves in states of geek euphoria.  Historically, the main path is having a house full of computers doing different things.  A file server, media server, web server, mail server, vpn server, plus his and hers… the list goes on.

In the last few months, I have begun to enjoy the world of virtualization.   As I am typing this message, I am compiling a web server in a virtual Gentoo machine, all while listening to “The Cars: Greatest Hits” on my iTunes.  Everything runs smooth if you have the right kind of hardware too, which is where this post is going next.

What is the right kind of hardware?  A computer that can handle multiple threads, has lots of memory, and supports virtualization in hardware are all ideal.  For that I chose the quad core, 2.4Ghz Intel Q6600 processor, put it in an Asus P5K motherboard and loaded it up with 4GB of memory.  My Host OS, Windows Media Center Edition 2005 (based on 32 bit Windows XP) only recognizes  3.25GB and with some tweaks I can get it to see 3.5GB.  Unfortunately, the less than 4GB max memory is just a limitation of the Host OS, I don’t have the confidence in Windows Vista’s 64 bit options.

The cpu is a great buy, just for yuks I changed the front side bus settings on it and ran it through a CPU stability test at 3.0GHZ, it ran flawlessly!

So with this box, my goal is to transplant/amalgamate the following into a single PC:

• media server from my old Athlon XP 2500+ sitting in my utility room, using the Windows MCE Host OS;
• mail server in a dedicated Gentoo virtual machine;
• web server in another dedicated Gentoo vm;
• vpn server (again) in another dedicated Gentoo vm; and
• file server… nah, the geek in me wants to keep using a NAS!

All this above can easily be run on a single box with enough horsepower to run games, or watch video!

Does reducing the number of computers in your house sound counter to geek euphoria?  On the surface it might, but I am increasing the number 0f computing machines, and any geek can see why I think that is cool!

But wait… There is more…

Another euphoric concept of virualization is that a vm is portable.  You can create a vm on one hardware platform and run it on another.  This means that future upgrades will require very little work to migrate over.  Furthermore, by creating on base capability vm,  you can clone it and add the features required for that vm without starting from scratch each time.

My product of choice right now is VMware 6.0, though I have not tried the product from Parallels and I hear that they are rather comparable.

Over time, there will be more to come on this one!

Cheers,

Sean